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Key events in today’s reading:

• Creation (Genesis 1:1-2:3)
• Creation of Adam and Eve (Genesis 2:4-25)
• The Fall of Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:1-24)
• Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood (Genesis 6:1-8:22)
• The Call of Abraham (Genesis 12:1-8)

Verse that stood out: Genesis 2:16-17 “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”

When we read the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, my mind tends to gravitate towards the one prohibition that was given. Do not eat from this tree. Perhaps it is a sign of my own sinfulness. Show me where the line is and I want to cross it. Tell me not to push a certain button and I want to push it.

It is easy to think that the Bible’s story is primarily about prohibitions, but it isn’t. There was after all not prohibitions, but a single prohibition. No, the story is at first a story of endless permission. God grants to Adam and Eve the permission to eat from all the trees but that one. We focus on the one, when our focus was meant to be on the endless other possitilities.

Because of sin, there will be other prohibitions in the book we are about to read together. It will be helpful to remember that God’s main goal isn’t to limit us but to free us. Every time God gives life, he gives life that is wide, abundant, and free.

No, God doesn’t give life without boundaries. That’s because there is no such thing as a life without boundaries. Let your cells burst forth from their boundaries and you die. It’s the same for us when we transgress the boundaries God sets.

The boundaries God places on us are actually minimal. The permissions almost endless. Life is not about the one tree from which we cannot eat, but about the endless ones from which we can. Freedom is found not in violating the “Thou Shalt Nots” of the Bible, but rather in leaning into all the glorious “Thou shalts.”

We can eat from all the other trees. We can know one another. We can work and play and worship. We can learn and grow and thrive. We can love God and one another.

Christianity, at its best, is not a list of prohibitions. Instead, it involves embracing the abundant life that Christ longs to give to those who enter into a relationship with him. Like all relationships, our relationship with Christ has some boundaries, but those boundaries are there to make way for the boundless permissions.

I love how G. K. Chesterton once put it, “The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”