Boundaries

“When you arrive in the land the Lord your God is giving you as your special possession, you must never steal anyone’s land by moving the boundary markers your ancestors set up to mark their property.  Deuteronomy 19:14 NLT                                                                                                                               

One of the features of the pagan understanding of reality is that there are no boundaries. Everything that exists is continuous with everything else. The divine, the human, and nature are all part of each other. Whatever is done in one realm occurs in one way or another in the other two. That understanding prevails today, even when we think that we have done away with the divine. So the television show speaks of “non-human animals” saying quite forcefully that we are all animals.

This speaks to the epidemic of “shop-lifting,” a euphemistic way of talking about robbery. Retail stores now count their losses from theft in the billions of dollars. There is no boundary between your stuff and mine. If I want it, it is mine.

In the same way there is no boundary around sexual behavior. The current upset over the Epstein files is very ironic. We have known for a long time that for people who can afford them sexual orgies are almost a norm, but now the situation has come out from under the rock where it had been hiding in plain sight, and suddenly people who have known about it all the time are shocked. They should not be. No boundaries.

What has happened? We have abandoned the Biblical world view which tells us that there is a boundary between us and God and thus that there are boundaries in his world. This is what the 10 Commandments are all about. There are boundaries marking out the way you treat God, and in the same ways there are boundaries marking out how you treat others: their physical life, their sexual life, their property, their reputation, and their stuff in general. When we observe the boundaries for the love of God, we can live together without hurting one another.

There is a story that in India they were having to hire “watchers” to make sure the bus drivers didn’t steal the fares. But then they had to hire “watchers” to watch the watchers. When it began to appear that they needed to hire a third level of watchers, someone said, “Why don’t we just hire Christian bus drivers?”  Boundaries. Are you and I joyfully living within the boundaries, or are we moving them to suit ourselves?