God was not being stingy when he put something this powerful within a walled garden. Without those guards the power of sex turns the garden into a wasteland. We see the evidence of that clearly around us.

Ours is an age marked by loneliness, despair, barrenness; Generations turned in on themselves and consuming themselves.

When humans arrogantly believe that they can reject as irrelevant a part of God’s created order, the result can only be chaos, confusion, and ultimately judgment. God created them (and us!) male and female. We must respect and live in harmony with the way God created us if we wish to flourish under his blessing.

Wisdom is what we gain when we know God’s standards, love God’s standards, and understand the situation around us well enough to apply God’s standards.

Wisdom is what we aim for as we mature spiritually, and the aim of wisdom is to apply our knowledge of God and his word to everything.

e replace ‘love your neighbour’ with ‘be nice to your neighbour’ and then, when the process is complete, we end up working his ruin.

We end up hating him instead.

‘Be nice to your neighbour’ is an imposter. It is the biblical command cut open, scraped clean, and filled with vice.

Because of His defeat of His enemies, Christ inherits the earth as His possession (Psalm 2:2, 7-9). Christ’s enthronement as the world’s royal heir guarantees that the whole earth will become the Promised Land – the place of safety, prosperity, and rest for God’s people. When we trust in Christ and follow His example in faith, we become co-heirs with Him

The ideal of the ‘Personal-Relationship’ paradigm has, in fact, come to conjure in our imaginations something more akin to young romantic love than anything else. Young love, that time of heady passions; when obligation and duty seem to come like a grey shawl to squash spontaneity, when emotions come-in and go-out like the tides, and when history and wisdom have not tempered the affections into real friendship.

God is love, that is true if we mean it the way John meant it. But is God love above all other things? Is our intuitive understanding of love to become the guiding metaphor in our exploration of God's character? One that every other metaphor must bow before?

The Temple rest acquired at the Day of Atonement, however, was only temporary and symbolic. Like Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, so also God’s people are expelled from God’s resting place as the Temple is levelled to the ground.

God, however, does not abandon his people forever.

And most of all, let us look to Christ; who took on the medium of human flesh to reveal God. Something that has scandalised the sensibilities of pagan philosophers ever since, and yet that God did anyway.

In the previous post, we examined the rest motif as it pertains to the weekly Sabbath. In this post, we will move to the second way in which the rest motif appears in the Old Testament: Promised Land rest. In Scripture, the concept of rest is not merely temporal but also spatial. In the creation narrative, God gives Adam and Eve not only the Sabbath Day, but also the Garden of Eden. Thus, rest is not only a time, but also a place.

The only good boast of God’s people has always been that we know him, that he is with us. Our only boast has been that through the blood of Christ we draw near to him each week. We hear him tell us in his word what he is like, what he loves, what he hates. We come together around his table and eat with him. And then, that we go out into the world as servants of the him, refusing to take the names of false gods on our lips.

Knowing God ought to be our only true boast.

“And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.”

The glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. And those waters will even slosh over Cyprus.

The reason we started St. Barnabas Bible School (SBBS) is to help the Church of Christ live for this hope; to help fill the church with the knowledge of God's multi-faceted glory, even if only in small measure.