Crossing the Line

Lines have a variety of usages in our lives. They are painted as stripes on highways to establish driving lanes. Sometimes they are laid out as lines of demarcation to establish boundaries. Lines sometimes have a prohibitive purpose to keep people out of an area. Clearly, lines can be very beneficial to us when they are properly used and respected.

Properly understood, the Bible is a book where lines are drawn for the good of mankind and to achieve God's holy purposes. If you view the Bible as nothing more than a litany of do's and don'ts, you have missed the purpose of the do's and don'ts. They are written to establish lanes for life, needed prohibitions and guidelines that will help us navigate our way through life.

Lines can be blurred, destroyed, debated, ignored and crossed but never without consequences. We should be very careful about altering the lines that God has drawn. Even the lines of a responsible government and society are important and shouldn't be routinely ignored.

Crossing lines can be very dangerous and before you decide to cross any line, consider the potential consequences. Consider the line between anger and hatred. Anger is a very human emotion. I seriously doubt if anyone can say, "I have never been angry." We know that Jesus felt the emotion of anger. We see it in the scripture when He drove the moneychangers out of the temple. They had turned God's house of prayer into a den of thieves. Jesus did not cross the line from anger to hatred. In fact, I believe that Jesus loves those He drove from the temple.

In my own life and in our society today, many have crossed the line between anger and hatred. I crossed the line to hate people who bullied me, deliberately embarrassed me and made me the object of cruel jokes designed for their own laughter. Our world is full of angry people who are full of hatred toward other people, circumstances, experiences and a world in general which they perceive to be unfair and pitted against them. Many of these people do not stop at crossing the line between anger and hatred. They take things a step further and cross the line from hatred to violence. This crossing of the lines is playing out in the shootings and other forms of violence that is plaguing our society today.

Is there any solution to the disastrous consequences of crossing lines? There is, and we need look no further than the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve crossed the line between obedience and disobedience when they partook of the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The solution that God offered for their crossing the line was not removing all the consequences of their decision. Adam and Eve died just as God warned them when He told them not to partake of the forbidden fruit. Though they suffered the consequence of physical death, God provided a redemptive hope for Adam and Eve and all of us who have "crossed the line." In Genesis 3:15 God said that the seed of the serpent would bruise the heel of the seed of the woman and the seed of the woman would bruise the head of the seed of the serpent. Jesus, the virgin born Son of God, is the Seed of the woman. Though Satan has bruised our heel many times, Jesus has already defeated the serpent through redeeming us from our sins, including all the times we have cross the line.

Lines are very valuable. They can serve us well. Thank God for the path of redemption that God has provided for the human race who long ago crossed the line.

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