It's all good

The more emotionally unsettled I feel, the further back in time I go in my bible reading. Driven by a deep restlessness within that refuses to be calmed by my willpower alone, I seek refuge in the stories in Genesis…stories that speak of how things began, of God’s intentions in a world unmarred by sin, of His dealings with men and women who experienced Him personally and directly, unmediated by the priesthood and even before the Word was written down.

So one afternoon, I opened the bible at Genesis 1 and started reading. My mind and heart felt like it was formless and void, and I longed to feel the Spirit breathe order into my thoughts and emotions.

As I read Genesis 1 and 2, I began to take note of the sequence with which God created all things. First, He created light and separated it from the darkness. “So the evening and the morning were the first day.” (1:5) Time came into being.

Then, God separated the heavens from the waters, and the seas from the land. Thus, space was created. (1:7-10).

It struck me that first, God created time and space, the very things that define our finiteness and creaturehood. We live in time. We cannot change our past and know our future. We live life in the present, in 24-hour segments.

And we live in space. I can only be in one place at one time. In choosing to be at any one place, I cannot be anywhere else.

“And God saw that it was good (v10)”

Time is good. Space is good. God said so. First, He created the boundaries that would define our finiteness. Only after that did He create living things to multiply and reproduce within those boundaries. Every living creature was to experience its existence within the limits of time and space. God declared all this good.

I long for the grace to truly see and experience that the constraints of time and space are good, really good. The boundaries of our existence were put there by God, before sin came into the world. God said it was good. When I experience time and space as limitations, as obstacles, as an infringement, I am the one who has judged wrongly. My perspective is warped, and I need help to see rightly.

When God created man, something else was put in place. “The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed” (Gen 2:8).

Something hit me as I read the above: God did not create man and then let him wander freely amongst the other creatures. He made a garden and placed man within this specially created space. Just for man, God created boundaries within boundaries. This was intentional space, the place marked out by God carefully. This was sacred space, the place where God Himself would be found. This was intimate space, where God would come and meet with man everyday.

There and then, in the heat of another stuffy Timorese afternoon as I sat in the library, something hit me with force. Timor is the garden that God has specially created for me. Here are my boundaries within boundaries. Here is where God will be found. Here is where God will meet me. Here is where I will dwell in peace.

I have to learn, and re-learn this lesson ever so often. Like the words of a hymn, my heart is "prone to wander...prone to leave the Lord I love". Instead of staying within my garden, my gaze wanders beyond the secure boundaries He's placed me in, and I start wishing to be somewhere else, doing something else, with someone else....

One of the most tragic legacy of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is that fallen man pronounces judgment on what is good and evil apart from God. We exalt our judgment above His. Good is now spoken of as evil, and evil treated as good. We see this everywhere we look. Some of its manifestations are obvious and reocognizable, like when purity and chastity are mocked, and promiscuity is considered “freedom”.

I believe that all of us are plagued by the same disorder deep down, this inability to judge rightly, as God does. Perhaps our entire Christian life is a pilgrimage back to the garden, the special place where we walk so closely with God, and truly believe that what He says is good, is really good.