We have a catch phrase that’s caught on from some teaching we heard several years ago: you’re not a human doing, you’re a human being. I often don’t find play-on-words humorous, but I’m amused by this one because of it’s insinuations.
If any of you have been following my Facebook statuses, you’ll notice that I’ve been processing through Anthony Chapman’s “New Covenant” teaching series (you can find these teachings on his Web site at http://www.rockchurch.org.uk). Now as a disclaimer, I’m still processing a lot of this, but it’s quite a fun discussion regardless of its outcome. Whatever my conclusions come out to be, I haven’t been this challenged or inspired to consider the foundations of my faith…maybe ever in my life. The principles included in these teachings will literally change everything if I embrace it. It scares me and excites me all at the same time.
Let me see if I can talk a little more specifically for you. Let’s go back to Genesis for a second and consider a few fundamentals.
Two trees: The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
The trees were easily accessible, abundant in fruit, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was the only forbidden tree in the entire garden.
Why would God have wanted to protect us from the Knowledge of Good and Evil?
We were allowed to eat of the Tree of Life liberally! God made that tree available, plentiful and accessible as well.
To answer that question, let’s look at the course of humanity. Right and wrong, good and evil have dominated our definition of “righteousness”. In fact, I wonder if you can even conceive of a metric to measure “righteousness” without it. Why? Because we know good and evil. But before there was knowledge, there was a command: do not eat.
Adam knew eating of the tree was wrong, but did not measure that because of a rule (one could argue he didn’t have a “knowledge of good and evil”). What he DID have was relationship. Eating was not “breaking the rules” inducing guilt, shame, need for repentance, etc. Eating was breaking relationship…because that’s all Adam and Eve knew up until that point.
So what?
So if we live by our illegitimally-seized knowledge of good and evil instead of by our gift of relationship, do we really live in truth and do we really live according to the best? In short, do we live “right” because the rules say so, because it keeps us from punishment, because it makes us feel “good”, or because it’s what we’re “supposed” to do?
Or do we live “right” because we are in relationship and because it brings “life” (remember, that tree was always available)?
Starting with that tip of the dominoes, everything that follows changes perspective. The questions that then get raised include: how does God, then, respond to our sin? Is He “disappointed” in us the way we are “disappointed” in ourselves? How does this “relationship” work then? What does God want from us? Why did He bother creating us in the first place? etc. etc. etc.
Pondering a whole lot of questions. In the mean time, 200 World Racers show up in Georgia a week from Saturday to prepare for their adventure beginning January 2011. Pray for our team as we get final preparations together for our biggest training camp ever!
