stewards – Dancing In The Kingdom

Re-envisioning our given environment

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 3 – Dancing in the Kingdom– Chapter 18 – Entering the Dance

Re-envisioning our given environment

[Bible references: Genesis 1-2]

“An important distinction exists between the concepts of nature and creation. There is no concept of nature in the Old Testament. Nature, derived from the Greek worldview, is by scientific definition a self-sustaining system replete with its own internal laws. Creation, a biblical-theological concept, recognizes that creation is not self-sustaining but is continually dependent on the presence of God.” ^[1]

In Genesis we explored how God had fashioned the cosmos to be a temple, a place where he would meet with his image-bearing creatures. This cosmos, and in particular, this world that we live in, ultimately belongs to him, for he built it with materials that he provided.

It was his intention, though, to not only share this temple with us, but to give us responsibilities within it. We know the story of how we rebelled against the responsibilities he gave us, and we know of the outpouring of patient love which he has endured and continues to endure as he works out his plan to restore our relationship with him. He still intends the cosmos to be his temple where he meets with us.

The theme of the temple began in the first chapters of the Bible with the temple dedication, the temple sanctuary in the Garden of Eden, and the charge he gave to his image-bearers to be the stewards of his temple and to fill the earth, expanding the sanctuary, the place he meets with us, to fill the entire earth.

The temple theme concludes in the last chapters of the Bible, revealing our intended destination, not just a primeval garden, but a garden with a city. It’s a city he built, for we, in and of ourselves, cannot build a city where there are no tears of sorrow, where there is no rebellion, where we can experience the entire fulness of shalom.

We don’t know when that time will come, but we do know the responsibility he gave us from the beginning, to be the stewards of what he has given us, to nurture, sustain, care for, and protect the world he provided.

^[1] Bukus, Russell A. “The Stewardship of Creation” The Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University, 2002 www.baylor.edu/ifl/christianreflection/CreationarticleButkus.pdf

Observe

Read Genesis 1:26-30; 2:1-15. How do we best take care of the space Yahweh provided for us, with his intentions for its flourishing and with our role as stewards of this space?

Not yet, but Already

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 3 – Dancing in the Kingdom– Chapter 17 – Finding our place

Not Yet, But Already

[Bible references: Matthew 6; John 15:1-17; 1 Corinthians 3; Revelation 21-22]

Sincere prayer has a habit of changing us. When we commune with God as a friend, we learn his business and desire to join in His work; the work of God calling people to Himself in love and bringing them healing. We also know His desire to restore the earth so that is rejoined to heaven, making the whole earth a temple, a place where he will be with all His people. When He came the first time, He began that work of restoration and when He comes again, He will complete it. In the meantime, He has left us here as His stewards. There are some things that only He can do, but that does not mean there is nothing for us to do. In this time where He has not yet returned, He has already begun a work that He invites us to join with Him, calling people to Him and restoring the earth, bringing healing, wholeness, and hope to the world.

The gifts He has given us can not only be used to serve and build up those already within the church community, but as Christ’s ambassadors, we can bring tangible signs of love and hope into the world around us, to show God’s love and care that He has for not only the smallest things in our lives but for all of creation. As we live in the world as it now is, we can bring the love of God into our relationships, our vocations, our hobbies, etc. Our efforts will be incomplete because Christ has not yet returned. But the work that we do now can demonstrate the hope and confidence that we have because Christ has already come.

There is a call for those who can carry a prophetic message, going and preaching the gospel to those outside the church. For those who do that work, they need to remember that when Jesus called us to go the fields that are “white unto harvest,” he implied that some preparation had been done beforehand, the crops were already planted, fertilized, weeded, and supplied with sun and water. Much work had been done and therefore the crops were ready for harvesting. While not all of us have the gift of evangelism or prophecy, we should be open to what we are called to do.

Observe

Read Matthew 6. How are giving, prayer and generosity linked?

Discipline of Generosity

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 3 – Dancing in the Kingdom– Chapter 15 – Reforming our Souls

Discipline of Generosity

[Bible references: Psalm 24:1; Proverbs 11:24-25; Ecclesiastes 5:10-20; Matthew 6:1-4, 24; Luke 12:13-21; 2 Corinthians 9:6-15]

If we have entered the discipline of simplicity to order our lives and stewardship,

and if we have entered the discipline of gratitude to order our attitudes,

and if we have entered the discipline of fasting to order our needs

and if we have entered the discipline of lament to order our desires

then we are in a place enter into the discipline of generosity.

The spirit of generosity is helped by all the previous disciplines. They open us up to recognizing God’s generosity in our life so that we can extend His generosity to others. To move from the spirit of generosity to the discipline of generosity we must move from giving from out of the overflow of what we received to looking for ways to give that may stretch us. If we are confident about God’s provision for us, then we will be free to give from a feeling of abundance rather than scarcity.

One of the ways to begin is with the tithe, 10% of our income. That kind of giving normally requires us to have discipline with some of our other expenditures. If 10% seems too much, you can start lower but look for ways to increase over time. If 10% is not a stretch, then you may consider increasing from there. The goal of the discipline of generosity is to move us from “merely” giving from the overflow of what we received to looking for ways to give that may stretch us.

The principle of the tithe does not apply only to our money, but to our time and talents (spiritual gifts) as well. The point to remember is that God provides all we have, and our discipline is to give back out of what he has already given as an appreciation of all He has provided, and an acknowledgement of our dependence on Him.

Generosity is about more than just giving. It’s about our attitudes towards our possessions. Do our possessions reduce our priorities for God? Do we think that we own our possessions or that God owns them, and we are only stewards? Does our security come from our possessions or from God? By removing trust from the possessions we have and instead placing our trust in God, we will be more able to freely share what God has given.

Reflect

What keeps you from seeking to stretch your faith in God’s provision?

Observe

Read Ecclesiastes 5:10-20. How can wealth be meaningless?

Our relationships

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 3 – Dancing in the Kingdom– Chapter 14 – Remembering our creation

Our Relationships

[Bible references: 1 Peter 4:7-11]

All of these activities are done in context of our relation to God, to each other, and to our land. God has created us in His image, in the image of a triune God in which Father, Son and Holy Spirit exist as three persons united into one. Within that framework, God created us as male and female, each created as creatures made in God’s image yet different from and interdependent upon each other. When God made a woman for Adam, He specified that the woman would be an ‘ezer kegnedo,’^[1] a strength corresponding to him. God created us from the dust of the earth, so although we are stewards of the earth, we are also dependent on the earth. In the earth, God has provided for us the resources we need to do our tasks. In all these relationships, God has intended that we are to live in unity with Him, with one another and with our environment.

Over time, our unity in all these areas got more complicated as our numbers grew. We needed to create organizations which necessarily became more complex as our societies grew and as our collective impact on the earth became more substantial. We needed extra discipline to maintain our relationship with God. We also needed to develop more skills in diplomacy, administration, and hospitality as we deal with more and different people. We needed to pay closer attention to the effects of our culture on the earth and its creatures to minimize the damage from so many people using our physical resources.

All of our work, our stewardship, is intended to have a direction, to bring maturity, fruitfulness, and growth to God’s work. The work we were charged to begin in the Garden of Eden was designed to end in the filling and subduing of the earth, in the cultivation of the whole earth where heaven and earth overlap so that work and worship are the same thing.^[2]

^[1] God’s Word to Women. “Ezer Kenegdo” God’s Word to Women godswordtowomen.org/ezerkenegdo.htm; Francois, Mark Steven. “(Ezer Kenegdo) in Genesis 2:18” Between the Perfect and the Doomed markfrancois.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/%D7%A2%D6%B5%D7%96%D6%B6%D7%A8-%D7%9B%D6%B0%D6%BC%D7%A0%D6%B6%D7%92%D6%B0%D7%93%D6%B4%D6%BC%D7%95%D6%B9-ezer-kenegdo-in-genesis-218/

^[2] Huber, Dave. “Avodah Word Study” EFCA Today Summer 2012 www.efcatoday.org/story/avodah-word-study

Observe

Read 1 Peter 4:7-11. What are we charged to do?

Future of the faith

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 2 – The Kingdom Revealed – Chapter 12 – Launching the church

Future of the faith

[Bible references: Isaiah 65:17-25; 66:22-24; Luke 20:34-362 Corinthians 5:1-10; 2 Peter 3:10-15; Revelation 21:1-8]

As mentioned in the previous section, the war against evil has been won. Christ has won the battle over sin and death. We need to keep our minds fixed on that when the battles rage around us. We need to remember that we are the side of the victor and not get defensive – our God is not small! We need to remember that the forces of evil have reigned since the fall and so, when Jesus came in the flesh, it was the forces of good that have intruded on the forces of evil, not the other way around.

With the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Kingdom of God has entered onto the earth and Jesus continues to bring the Kingdom of God on earth through his church. Unfortunately, we need to wait until Jesus returns before he completely restores the Kingdom of God. But He will restore it!

One of the in-between time confusions centers around what happens in the day that Christ returns. In this time, when Christians die, we are not automatically resurrected, instead we leave earth to go to heaven to be with the Lord. But that is not our last destination! When Christ returns, He will unite heaven with earth, and it is then that we will then receive our resurrected bodies so that we can live on that new earth.

One of the other confusions around what happens what is the relation between the old earth and the new earth. The language in 2 Peter 3:10 can make it seem that the old earth will simply be annihilated and replaced with the new earth. However, that would seem to conflict with Acts 3:21 where God is said to “restore all things.”

“The times of the restitution of all things – The noun rendered restitution … does not elsewhere occur in the New Testament. The verb from which it is derived occurs eight times. It means properly “to restore a thing to its former situation,” as restoring a “strained” or “dislocated” limb to its former soundness. Hence, it is used to restore, or to heal, in the New Testament …”^{^[1]}

It so happens that “all but one of the oldest and most reliable Greek manuscripts do not have the final words “will be burned up” but instead have “will be found, …”^[2] and that would be more in line with Acts 3:21.[3] What has been the more common rendering of “burning up the earth” has caused some to not care about our current earth, but if the earth is to be transformed rather than destroyed then we might, as the stewards of the earth, pay more attention to taking care of the earth.

^[1] Biblehub “Acts 3:21” Biblehub biblehub.com/acts/3-21.htm

^[2] Wolters, Albert M. “Creation Regained: Biblical Bases for a Reformational Worldview” William B. Eerdmans Publishing 1985, 2005. (Location 568 of 1582)

[3] Bible.org “A Brief Note on a Textual Problem in 2 Peter 3:10” the meaning of the term is virtually the equivalent of “will be disclosed,” “will be manifested.” Thus, the force of the clause would be that “the earth and the works [done by men] in it will be stripped bare [before God].” BAGD suggests a slight modification of this: be found as a “result of judicial investigation” (s.v. εὑρίσκω, p. 325. 2), citing Acts 13:28; 23:9; John 18:38; 19:4, 6; and Barnabas 21:6 as approximate parallels. Danker2 suggested a parallel between 2 Pet 3:10 and Ps Sol 17:10 (“Faithful is the Lord in all his judgments which he executes on the earth”; the link here is conceptual, though in v. 8 εὑρίσκω is used of the exposure of men’s sins before God). We might add that the unusualness of the expression is certainly in keeping with Peter’s style throughout this little book. Hence, what looks to be suspect because of its abnormalities, upon closer inspection is actually in keeping with the author’s stylistic idiosyncrasies. The meaning of the text then, is apparently that all but the earth and men’s works will be destroyed. Everything will be removed so that humanity will stand naked before God.

Observe

Read 1 Peter 3:10-15. What should our attitude be because we know that the new heavens and earth will be happening?

Reflecting God’s paradoxes

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 3 – The image-bearers

Reflecting God’s paradoxes

[Bible references: Genesis 1:26-32; 2:4-7,15-25; Matthew 22:36-40; John 15:8-11; Romans 8:20-21; Galatians 5:22-23]

It was into this good universe that God prepared beforehand that God created creatures to bear his image. Good creatures, image-bearers, who were given the task of taking care of the good creation that God blessed them with – and God declared his creation to be very good. The image-bearing creatures were created in the complex image of God – the one God who was a community within Himself, the God who was immensely creative, the God who was generous and loving beyond imagination, the God who is sovereign over the universe, the God who is above all things.

There was a danger in God creating image-bearers. To make creatures that were lovers – just as He was a lover – meant giving these image-bearers the freedom to choose whom or what to love. Since we are created as lovers, we are compelled to love, so when we choose to not love one thing or one person it is only because we have chosen to love someone or something else. Because God’s image-bearers were the capstone of creation, their option to love something more than God risked an awful catastrophe, a catastrophe that could affect the entirety of creation itself. The good creation, all of it, would become not so good.

And so it was, after creation was prepared for God’s image-bearers, those creatures who were created in the image of the loving God were given instructions to be stewards of the world God had made. Everything was good, and the first human couple had free access to the provisions in the garden prepared for them. Only one restriction was placed before them, a restriction not meant to deprive them of anything good but meant to provide the opportunity to test their love, by testing their obedience to the one who created them.

We all now know that those creatures failed their test, and we daily experience the consequences of that failure. We also daily experience our own incapacity to restore holiness on our own efforts, our own inability to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and our own inability to fully love God or to fully love our neighbors as ourselves.

The mystery of who we are has to worked out between all the goodness we are endowed with as creatures who bear the image of God and all the evil we are encumbered with as creatures who innately rebel against that same God. Traces of heaven and hell run through each of us and are manifested in our everyday lives. The tongues we praise God with also curse our neighbor. The selflessness we display to others is corrupted by the selfish desires that emerge from the same heart.

Observe

Read Genesis 1:28; 2:15. What tasks did God provide for the humans?

Dancing through the pain

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 1 – Prelude

Dancing through the pain

[Bible references: Luke 17:20-21; Hebrews 12; Revelation 21:1-3; 22:1-5]

Right now, it might seem hard to see images of the Dance of God’s Kingdom. We look at the news and wonder where things are headed to. Sometimes we look at our own lives and wonder … If there is a God where is God? What’s His plan for the world – for the church – for us? Then we pick up a book called the Holy Bible and read the stories and wonder how they all fit together. Then we look at the church – well, churches, there are so many of them – and wonder why it’s so complicated and messy and wonder if anybody’s got it right. And, what about me, my story, my mess? How do I fit into it all that?

But hints of God’s activity with His people are there to be found. God has been working through and intervening in the lives of many people that have been dancing the Kingdom Dance through the years, bringing hope and healing to the world. Their stories can be found in the Bible and in the rest of history^[1] and sometimes even inserted into the news of the day, in the middle of all the stories of our brokenness.

I dance because it makes me happy! My experience is that when I dance, I can express something from my heart to God that cannot be expressed in words. Dancing is a point of contact with God for me. It gives me an experience of God as the origin of creativity and beauty … “I dance because I want to spread a message of love, joy, hope and faith to the world … Among the dimensions added by the dance expression itself is the meta-message that there is room for the whole human being and life in its fullness in a Christian religious setting. Dance can teach children and adults a body-embracing way of living, believing and being in God’s world. One participant says that through dance in general, “we want to communicate heaven to people down here, the message of salvation, our freedom in God, the joy in God, and the joy of dancing with fellow Christians.” … Through dance these Christian dancers experience and practice their religion in a bodily way. This means that their spirituality takes an embodied form and that dance for them is not only a bodily practice, but also a spiritual one.[2]

Dancing seems to be a human attribute, not necessarily linked to just Christianity[3], it is a gift from God that can be used in the manner expressed here; to be a human means of expressing our God-given joy through our bodies. While dancing can be done alone, when done in community it can help to bind participants together. Joy and community are part of God’s purpose for us. We are tasked as God’s image-bearers to be his representatives and stewards. But our tasks are not to be burdensome but rather they are meant to be joyful. If you will, our tasks are meant to be a joyful dance we do with each other and with our Creator.

For us to dance the Kingdom Dance we don’t have everything figured out, He does. We don’t even have to worry about the results of the dance because the results are not dependent on us but on Him, who is working through us. As much as we have messed things up and will continue to do so, He will ultimately restore us and the rest of creation, making us all into what He had intended from the beginning.

Among all the creatures that God created, we are uniquely made, even if we are not the physical center of the universe as some people may have thought at one time. Through the pursuit of science, we now have instruments that make it very clear that we are not physically at the center of everything, not that we can prove anyway. We are only specks on a small planet spinning around a star in an apparently random solar system in an apparently random galaxy in a universe we cannot even see the edges of. Although we don’t know where the center is, the universe seems to have been created with us in mind. The properties of the universe, the physical constants, the atomic structures, were all created such that it would support our existence.^[4] Interestingly, although we are creatures made of the stuff of the universe, not only can we study and reflect on the properties of that stuff, but we can also study and reflect on and even reflect the one who created us.

In the meantime, we do not know when He will return, and we find ourselves in the middle, in-between those two times, between the beginning of the restoration of God’s kingdom on earth and the time when it will be fully accomplished. In this in-between time, sometimes we see some signs of God’s restoration – and sometimes we can’t – and it’s hard to figure out what God is doing, especially when there are times that He seems to be absent. In those times, we need to call upon our faith to hold onto the hope that God is still working out His plans. We need to recall all the times that we did see Him at work, and then we also need to remember that getting to the end of the plans that He intends for us may require some pain on our part just as it required pain on His part. And like Him, our pain will be ultimately overwhelmed with the glory that will be revealed.

Our ultimate destination is not a mere returning to the way we started out, but to the full flourishing of our potential, where God will establish a kingdom of image-bearers released to display God’s character and reflect His glory.

“And salvation only does what it’s meant to do when those who have been saved, are being saved, and will one day fully be saved realize that they are saved not as souls but as wholes and not for themselves alone but for what God now longs to do through them. The point is this. When God saves people in this life, by working through his Spirit to bring them to faith and by leading them to follow Jesus in discipleship, prayer, holiness, hope, and love, such people are designed—it isn’t too strong a word—to be a sign and foretaste of what God wants to do for the entire cosmos. What’s more, such people are not just to be a sign and foretaste of that ultimate salvation; they are to be part of the means by which God makes this happen in both the present and the future. That is what Paul insists on when he says that the whole creation is waiting with eager longing not just for its own redemption, its liberation from corruption and decay, but for God’s children to be revealed.” ^{^[5]}

With that in mind, we can not only wait and hope. We can participate with God in bringing His kingdom to earth and bringing a taste of healing and hope into a broken world that desperately needs it.

“Within the biblical story, the Christian discovers a constant call for justice on behalf of the weak and forgotten. In the biblical tradition, justice is an aspect of God’s shalom, a notion that carries with it the idea of completeness, soundness, well-being, and prosperity, and includes every aspect of life – personal, relational, and national.”^{^[6]}

The suffering and pain in the world can be overwhelming, challenging our ability to maintain hope and persist in our effort as we try to bring shalom. That challenge forces us to focus on the taste of shalom that God has given to us knowing that it is just a foretaste of the fullness of the shalom that awaits us in the fully restored earth.

^[1] See Appendix G – The contributions of the Church for some examples

[2] Schurr, Hildegunn Marie T. “Dancing Towards Personal and Spiritual Growth” Nordic Journal of Dance – volume 3, 2012 (pp. 31-40)

[3] La Mothe, Kimerer. “The dancing species: how moving together in time helps make us human” Aeon aeon.co/ideas/the-dancing-species-how-moving-together-in-time-helps-make-us-huma n

^[4] Slezak, Michael. “The human universe: Was the cosmos made for us?” New Scientist, 29 April 2015. www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630190-400-the-human-universe-was-the-cosmos-made-for-us

^[5] Wright, N.T. Surprised by Hope, Rethinking Heaven, The Resurrection and the Mission of the Church. Harper Collins 2008. Kindle Edition

^[6] Katongole, Emmanuel. Rice, Chris. “Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing,” Intervarsity Press, 2009 (p. 72)

Reflect

Think about how the universe seems designed for us, our capacity to think about and explore it and then think about our capacity to reflect on the One who created it all. What does that suggest to you about what God has intended for us?

Observe

Read Hebrews 12. What does this passage say about how we should be living now?

A brief account

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 1 – Prelude

A brief account

[Bible references: Acts 17:22-31]

The following is an Extremely Brief Account of the Very Long Story.

There was, and is, and will be, a complex person we call God, who exists as three people that we have come to know as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God decided that he wanted to expand the love that was shared between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To that end, he created an entire universe so that on one of its planets he could create an abundance of living creatures.

On that planet, he created special creatures, humans, who were made in his image such that they could love him in the way that he loved them. This universe then, would be a form of temple, a place where God can meet with his people. The garden he placed them in was where the dimensions of heaven and earth overlapped. The garden was a place where God’s good and beautiful kingdom of heaven was fully present.

Of course, these humans were not duplicate spiritual beings who were gods themselves, but physical creatures who had enough of God’s characteristics so that they could love in the way God loved. But love is a voluntary thing that we must choose to do, we cannot love unless we have the option to not love.

God placed his first people in a garden and gave them an assignment. They were to be his representatives, priests if you will, in this garden. They were to take care of it as His representatives, His stewards in the garden. Their long-term task was to multiply and fill the earth so that the whole earth would become the place where God could meet with all his people. The entire earth was intended to be filled with God’s abundant provision for his people who would then take care of what God provided, and all the while giving and receiving and sharing the love which God would freely bestow. In this way, the kingdom of heaven would overlap with the entire kingdom of earth and God would freely mingle with his people.

The option to love or not love was provided by a test of trust. There was in the garden a tree whose fruit not only looked appealing but promised to provide the gift of all knowledge if one ate it. The humans were told to trust God and not eat the fruit of that tree. Eating that fruit would not only provide certain knowledge but would also provide death.

The results of that test are now apparent all around us. Death comes to us not only in the form of physical death, the separation of our souls from physical life, but also in the form of spiritual death, the lack of love which separates us from each other and from God. Fortunately, our current situation is not our destiny – and that is what the rest of the story is about.

God intended that death would not merely be a penalty for not trusting (or loving) but would also be the very mechanism by which he would restore us to himself. From the descendants of the first people, God separated out a family through which he would bring blessing to the entire world. Through that family that a nation would be raised and through that nation the eternal God would choose a family to accomplish the inconceivable. In that chosen family, the eternal God would cause himself to be conceived within the womb of a woman who would then give birth to a being who was both fully God and fully human. He would then be raised as a human and eventually would suffer death by execution as a human and then be resurrected as a human.

In that resurrected human body, the eternal God would return to heaven, but before doing so, he invited us, in essence, to represent Him on earth by becoming part of his body on earth. By trusting him and accepting his Spirit, we could join with him in His death and resurrection by dying to our own self-interests and uniting with his loving interests.

He then promised to return to us again in bodily form, at which time the kingdoms of heaven and earth will again overlap. Heaven will be rejoined to earth to fulfill the intention God had from the beginning. But meanwhile, in this time between His incarnation and His eventual return, we are still called to be stewards of our currently broken world, bringing slivers of the light and hope of heaven into a world now very dark with evil and suffering and pain.

Observe

Read Acts 17:22-31. How could we use Paul’s gospel message to people we speak to today?

Reflecting God’s Paradoxes

Dancing in the Kingdom – Table of Contents

Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom, Chapter 3 – The Image-bearers

[Bible references: Genesis 1:26-32; 2:4-7,15-25; Matthew 22:36-40; John 15:8-11; Romans 8:20-21; Galatians 5:22-23]

Understanding the character of God, can help us understand what he has intended for creatures that are made in his image. Image-bearing creatures are not gods or duplicates of God, but they are imbued with the character of the God that made them. In this chapter we will explore some of the ways God intends for us to reflect his image. In later chapters, we will expound on those characteristics in more detail.

It was into this good universe that God prepared beforehand that God created creatures to bear his image. Good creatures, image-bearers, who were given the task of taking care of the good creation that God blessed them with – and God declared it to be very good. The image-bearing creatures were created in the complex image of God – the one God who was a community within Himself, the God who was immensely creative, the God who was generous and loving beyond imagination, the God who is sovereign over the universe, the God who is above all things.

There was a danger in God creating image-bearers. To make creatures that were lovers – just as He was a lover – meant giving these image-bearers the freedom to choose whom or what to love. We are unable to choose to not love but only who or what to love. Because God’s image-bearers were the capstone of creation, the option to another love than God, risked an awful catastrophe, a catastrophe that could affect the entirety of creation itself. The good creation, all of it, would become not so good.

And so it was, after creation was prepared for God’s image-bearers, those creatures who were created in the image of the loving God were given instructions to be stewards of the world God had made. Everything was good, and the first human couple had free access to the provisions in garden prepared for them. Only one restriction was placed before them, a restriction not meant to deprive them of anything good but meant to provide the opportunity to test their love, by testing their obedience to the one who created them.

We all now know that those creatures failed their test, and we daily experience the consequences of that failure. We also daily experience our own incapacity to restore holiness on our own efforts, our inability to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and our inability to fully love God or to fully love our neighbors as ourselves.

Reflect

How is love dangerous?

Observe

Read Genesis 1:28; 2:15. What tasks did God provide for the humans?