“The Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
So, God has made this final new creature—a man—much more intimately than all the rest. He has made him in His image in a way nothing else in all of creation was so designed (and though the woman was created differently and separately, she was equally made in His image). When you have created something so carefully as this, the first thing you do with it conveys an awful lot about what you made it for. That’s what we see here.
“And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)
This morning we wrestled a bit with the question of why God would have put a tree in the garden of Eden and then immediately told us not to eat from it. I let you in then on a secret about that question: The most honest answer is, “I don’t know.” But, I don’t know isn’t very satisfying and I did promise you two answers.
“And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Did you ever have one of those experiences where someone told you not to do something and immediately it was the only thing in the world you wanted to do? Maybe your parent told you not to touch something and it was like your hand was suddenly magnetized to it. Maybe a boss told you something was entirely off limits and you immediately started looking for ways to figure out how to do it. This seems like it’s a natural reaction. So, why on earth did God put a tree in the garden and tell us not to eat from it?
In part five of our series, Finding Meaning, we look at one last place we often go to fill this lingering void in our lives: Wealth. Money is a tempting source of meaning because it can make so many things happen that seem to be on our behalf, but if contentment is the thing we are seeking in having it, we are going to come up empty. Contentment has another source. Keep reading to find out what that is.
The Problem with Wealth
Have you ever felt like the system
is rigged in favor of the wealthy and at the expense of the not-so-wealthy? The odds are that unless you happen to feel
like you’re part of the “wealthy”—that ubiquitous class of people who are
imprecisely defined as folks whose net worth number has a couple more zeros
than yours does and who serve as a convenient villain for all kinds of
occasions—you’ve probably felt like this before. As fair and impartial as our system is
supposed to be, having money has its advantages. And the more money you have, the more you are
able to tap into those advantages. We
defer to wealthy people in ways we don’t similarly defer to not-as-wealthy
people. Humans have always done
that. We have always assumed that people
who have lots of money have managed to get that money for some reason and
whatever that reason is, if we haven’t been able to get lots of money
ourselves, it must mean they’re better than us in some way. We can try and deny that all we want, but
that’s how pretty much every human culture has always worked. It just is.
“Then the Lord God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
The story of creation has attracted its fair share of attention over the years…probably more than that actually. Most of the focus is on how to understand what the “days” mean and whether we should understand them literally, figuratively, or in some other way. There’s certainly a time and a place for those discussions, and they aren’t without significance importance, but I don’t want to go there in this post. Instead, for just a minute, let’s set aside the technicalities and look at the beauty of what was happening here.
The Nexus 