Boundaries

We have begun a New Year. It is no longer 2022 but 2023. That is a boundary. The Bible says that boundaries are a God given gift to be respected. A classic verse on the subject is Proverbs 22:28:
Do not remove the ancient landmark that your fathers have set.
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What is that about? It means that in ancient Israel farmers marked the boundaries of their lands (allotted by God through Moses) by large stones or piles of stones. A greedy neighbour could sneakily move those stones over time and enlarge his land at the expense of his neighbour.

The world is filled with myriads of boundaries at God’s design. Because God designed them they are good and not to be understood in a negative way as many might see words like ‘division.’ They are good and we’d do well to respect them. Some boundaries like those at Creation are fixed and immoveable: day and night, land and sea, etc. Other boundaries are moveable. Yet it is only in our pride that we seek to move what God has fixed. This is because in our desire to be as God (Gen 3:5) we don’t respect God or others but move those stones to our own advantage. (Even the Creator-creature distinction is a boundary, Ro 1:25. We can’t actually move it but we try!). How we respond to God’s boundaries can be appropriate and inappropriate, good and evil.  All sins and troubles, particularly of the inter-personal kind, stem from, in pride, breaking God’s boundaries.

Considering just some of the good God-given boundaries that we find in the Bible:

• Between families, or parents and their children’s families, Gen 2:24- Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
  • Family (both parents and grown children) are a wonderful gift. We should always love to spend time with them. However, it is God’s design that when a child is married there is a new family unit created. It is to be respected. Too many of our relational problems today come from children not letting go of the umbilical cord and learning to live in independence with their spouse or parents not relinquishing the umbilical cord and failing to respect the new family unit’s independence.
• Between neighbours, Prov 25:17- Let your foot be seldom in your neighbour’s house, lest he have his fill of you and hate you.
  • A good neighbour is a gift. But discretion teaches us when it is appropriate to visit (invited, to bring back a garbage bin that blew away, etc) and when it is not (in the middle of the night when there is no fire). It also teaches us what frequency is appropriate (probably not three times a day) and how we visit (e.g. stopping at the front gate on your way to work or always coming round the back door).
• Between a spouse and someone who is not your spouse, Ex 20:14- Do not commit adultery.
  • God’s boundary is that the marriage union is special. Husbands and wives share intimacy together in many ways that is not to be shared with another. To push into a marriage to obtain what is not yours is theft, it is breaking a boundary.

When these boundaries are respected, of course, there will be healthy life-giving relationships between parents-children, neighbours and spouses and other couples.

Perhaps with this in mind you might now see more boundaries in Scripture and identify them in the world around us.

May we repent of boundary breaking, seek the boundary Maker for forgiveness, and find the Holy Spirit’s renewing power to respect the boundaries that God has established for our good.