The story is familiar, even if a person doesn’t happen to be a Christian.

There was nothing at all, except for God in the beginning. And then in the beginning, God created…

Everything else. Ex nihilo. Everything from nothing at all. God spoke it all into existence, all of creation born from his divine creativity, including human beings. These first human beings, placed in a perfect garden, free from any of the marks of guilt and shame so pervasive in us today, in perfect fellowship with each other and with Him.

Harmony. Peace. Productivity. Simplicity. All was very good.

But then came the snake. The temptation. The great fall, and that perfect creation was turned upside down.

Again, a familiar story. But I wonder if we might for a moment just zoom out a bit, and not focus on the kind of fruit or the specific nature of the temptation or even the immediate and far-reaching effects of that choice. When you zoom out a bit, here are a few bullet points about the situation:

• There is a loving Creator who knows what is right and best.
• There are created human beings who, though made in the image of that Creator, are far inferior in knowledge, wisdom, and power.
• In His love and in His authority, God gave His creation limits.
• The rebellion, then, was a refusal to trust in those limits and follow them.

Those four bullet points provide a number of friction points with modern society. There is, of course, the issue of a Creator at all. Despite the clear evidence of design threaded throughout creation, it’s certainly not a given that there is a Creator to begin with. And if there is a Creator, there are plenty who would argue with the character of that Creator. If you begin with a fundamental questioning of the Word of God, which is meant primarily to reveal to us who God is and what He is like, then we are left to imagine the nature and character of this Creator on our own.

And then there’s the friction point of limits.

The reason, I think, we get rubbed the wrong way when it comes to the subject of limitations is because we tend to see any limitation as bad. As wrong. As something to move passed and overcome.

We think of limits like this in the technological arena. Technology continues to evolve at an incredibly rapid pace; we are knowing things and doing things that even ten years ago would have been unfathomable. And because we are capable, we do these things. Create these things. Incorporate these things. We do so without much regard to whether or not we should. Limits are disregarded.

We think negatively of limits when it comes to our own dreams and aspirations. We live in the land of opportunity, after all, and any “limits” we have are simply obstacles to overcome. Our heroes are the men and women who look at perceived limits and don’t flinch, but instead by their own courage, intelligence, and gumption soar by them.

Gender? Sexuality? Appropriateness? Language? The way we treat one another? Increasingly, none of these issues have any limits to them. Looking around, it’s fairly safe to say that we are a people who hate limits.

But before we judge the world around us harshly, let’s turn the tables on ourselves because this disdain for limits is in our own hearts, too. We are the people who work passed our limits. Who refuse to take days off. Who only sleep when we have to. Who have an insane inability to say “no” to another project or opportunity even though we are already stretched too thin. Who enroll our children in program after program, no matter what the cost to our family or their own spiritual development. We, too, hate limits, and our inability to recognize and abide by our own limitations is one of the most subtle, but pervasive forms of rebellion against our Creator.

We are still there, in the garden, failing to believe that we are limited creatures, and failing to trust God enough to know that limits are for our good. And here is yet one more thing from which we must be rescued. And here is yet one more thing that the message of the gospel rescues us from.

The gospel reminds us that God, who has no limits, does indeed love us. So much, in fact, that Jesus died for us. And that through Jesus, we can be reconciled to God and find our perfect acceptance and validation in Him. This is really the only way that we can live within our limits, isn’t it? Isn’t it when we don’t have the compulsive need to prove our own worth and validate our own existence through our work or our kids or our own achievements? We can accept the limitations God has given to us only when we also accept the limitless love He has also given us in Christ.