Boundaries…

When my mother and stepfather married, she made it very clear that she did not believe in divorce, but she did believe in justifiable homicide if he ever cheated on her. One day, she was cleaning a pistol, and it accidentally went off, putting a bullet hole in the ceiling. She looked at my startled stepfather and, without missing a beat, said, “You remember I told you I didn’t believe in divorce, but I believe in justifiable homicide. Consider that your warning shot.”  She was defining a boundary.

When I was in high school, my curfew was midnight. I learned to calculate distance, speed, and time at stoplights to make it home on time. One night, I lost track of time (it is none of your business why), and I got home at 12:30. My mother was waiting. I was grounded for two weeks. My mother was enforcing a boundary. She said it was for my own good. Try explaining that to your girlfriend.

In college, I did not do the best job of keeping track of my bank balance. Imagine my shock when one day I got a letter informing me a check had been rejected for insufficient funds. The bank was reminding me there was a boundary and they were not going to make an exception for me.

My first batch of heifers I grew out were delivered from our ranch in Florida. They were a feisty bunch. I kept them penned for a few days with plenty of food and hay. After four days, I let them out. They stampeded out of the pens, ran through a four-strand electrified fence, and halted only when they reached a woven-wire fence with an electric strand attached. That fence defined a boundary.

I have been stopped for speeding more than once in my life. Usually, the trooper asks for my driver’s license and registration and then asks me the question, “Mr. Smith, do you know why I pulled you over?”  I know the truth, and he knows the truth. My standard reply is something like, “Officer, I know I was speeding. I assume that’s why.”  The trooper usually nods, then tells me my actual speed and the speed limit. He is reminding me there is a boundary and I was flying past it.

When people read the Bible, they are often confused by all the rules and laws in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. People remark the rules are boring. I get it. I once was a librarian in a law firm. I had to make corrections to books filled with laws and cases. It was easily one of the most tedious jobs I ever had.

Why did God want all those rules in the Bible? The laws of the Old Testament are there to show the people of God boundaries. They came from being slaves. The Egyptians set the boundaries and made the laws. God is now teaching them his laws, his ways. When you read the laws of the Old Testament this way, you realize how much his people needed to learn. The Ten Commandments are a morality code. We take it for granted that everyone knows not to steal, kill, or tell lies. They don’t. God had to define morality and boundaries for them. They didn’t know what was healthy to eat and what wasn’t. God had to define some foods as clean and some as unclean. Apparently, they didn’t even know basic sexual morality, like “Don’t have sex with a parent (yuck!)” or “Don’t have sex with animals (double yuck!).”  God defined the boundaries for them.

Of course, whenever a boundary is set, some people want to ignore it, and some people take it too far. By the time of Jesus, the religious leaders had made up new boundaries to protect the boundaries. Jesus said, “I’ve not come to abolish the law but to fulfill the law.”  Jesus was doing a boundary reset. What matters, he said, is living in the Kingdom of God. This meant loving other people like Jesus loves them. It meant surrendering your will to your Heavenly Father. It meant following Jesus wherever he leads. Jesus gave us a radical new way of understanding boundaries. But they are still boundaries.

We seem to be living in an era when people do not respect boundaries anymore. Russia ignores the Ukrainian boundary. Hamas and Israel ignore each other’s boundaries. On social media, people feel the freedom to attack someone (crossing a boundary) without trying to understand the person they are attacking. Some even do it in the name of Jesus. This certainly crosses the boundary Jesus gave us of loving one another.

Boundaries are there for a reason. God gives us boundaries so our souls can grow and thrive. Don’t envy people who ignore the boundaries. They have a way of winding up in the ditch. When you encounter one of God’s boundaries, know it is there for a reason, and that reason is he loves you and wants the best for you.