One day, while I was walking Tank… okay, one of the many times per day that I walk Tank, we decided to see how far down a certain street went.  We were used to finding roads that ended in other roads.  We have even found the occasional dead end and gone down to see what was so terrible that they just stopped making street.  We had never encountered a dead end like this.

The Boundary at the end of The Road.

This street terminated in a wall with bars and a gate.  It used to go through into another neighborhood but something happened.  You see, I live in a neighborhood that has gone through a lot of transition.  It had been THE neighborhood at one point many years ago.  It was so good and affluent that other neighborhoods built on to it because they wanted to be like it.  As with all big ups, my neighborhood experienced a down. People built cheap housing and property values dropped, so did the quality of the inhabitants.  Things got so bad, they let me live there.

A neighborhood to the north of ours which had been very happy to be attached to us at first, started to feel some reluctance at the association.  Cars were coming out of our neighborhood at high speeds, at all hours, stereos blaring vulgarities at ungodly volumes, often with law enforcement in pursuit.  Actually it was not much of a surprise that people didn’t want that spilling over onto the streets where they lived.  So, at the end of this street, they built a wall.

This was no ordinary wall, though.  They made it pretty.  They also put in a gate with a combination lock – the purpose being to not totally exclude communication between the two neighborhoods.  Anyone who had business going from one community to the other could gain access by means of the gate.  It was a way to close off the bad, but still allow the good.  It was a boundary.

Mastery of boundaries is the secret to most successful lives.  They are the only way to protect things worth protecting while still allowing us access to the rest of the world.  The Temple in Jerusalem had VERY clear boundaries, because there were VERY big consequences for violating those boundaries.

Should we, as Christians have boundaries? Yes.

…oh, more, sorry.

Remember that Boundaries are designed to keep certain things from influencing us while occasionally allowing us to influence them.  As Christians, we are called to influence the world, but not allow it to influence us.  As parents, you are called to influence your children and to keep them from being influenced by harmful things.  As a spouse, I’m called to have a positive influence on my marriage, while diligently defending the boundaries so as to refuse admittance to anything destructive.

So how should we use boundaries?    God always uses boundaries to protect one or both parties.  In the Garden of Eden, God had only one boundary and it was around the one thing that would destroy the relationship between God and man.  When that boundary was crossed, a ton of others went up.  You ever wonder about the whole “don’t eat pork” dietary thing for the Jews?  A lot of the laws concerning diet would have seemed crazy to other people of the day.  They tended to forbid the easiest practices and put restrictions on how much could be harvested and then they had rules about giving the best of your harvest to God.  The “no pork” thing is a prime example of this. Pigs are actually a lot easier to raise than most of the clean animals.  All of the communities around Israel would raise them, eat them and run them through the streets which meant that those communities would be entirely unclean for a Jew to live in.  In other words, part of the reason for those restrictions was so the Jews would have to stay among their own people and have faith that God would provide for them since it looked like He had taken away a lot of the easiest practices of the day.

Think about the Temple.  The different courts surrounding the Temple were there  for so many reasons.  They kept people from entering places they were not allowed and thus from incurring wrath.  For instance, the court of the Gentiles kept the gentiles from getting mixed in with the assembly.  This would make the assembly unclean and could get the gentile judged by God for the infiltration, or be subjected to judgment meant only for Jews, because the gentile was not where he was supposed to be.

The courts kept the Temple services from becoming disorganized by limiting the areas people could move into.

The courts also protected people.  One of the many reasons there was a Court of the Women was because even in those days, men’s hands were untrustworthy things.  Remember that in a lot of the surrounding cultures, female participation at their temples could be limited to prostitution or birthing children for sacrifice.

We need to use boundaries in these same ways.  We need to protect the vulnerable areas of our lives.  We need to take care to keep things that need to be separated from being thrown together (sacred from common, intimate from public, this isn’t a klan meeting).  We also need to remember that when we have to put someone outside a boundary, that we also make a way for them to come back and clear guidelines for how that would happen.  The example God gives us is that when we were placed out of the point of intimacy with Him, there was only one way back but it would be through a sacrifice that none of us were worthy to give.  So He also provided that sacrifice in the form of His son and made Him the narrow gate by which we could return to the Father.  At the death of Jesus, the boundary that most closely surrounded the presence of God – a curtain as thick as a phone book – was ripped from the top to the bottom.  This boundary protected our sinful selves from entering into the presence of a righteous God and being destroyed in the transaction.  God wants no boundaries between us and was apparently as ready for this boundary to go as we were.
That’s pretty good to know.  Also a great example to follow.