Following our recent sermon on creaturely limits and longing for God’s rest, the following question was asked…

“Is there a distinction between limits God has given us as works of his creation and limits that arise from a fallen world (eg sickness)”

To distinguish between the two is critical. Our creaturely limits and our toil/suffering are not the same thing even though our experience of them often seems to coincide. Our creaturely limits are good, and yet “fallen” life outside the garden compromises our experience of their essential goodness. How can we distinguish between the good of creaturely limits and the suffering of a fallen world?

LIMITS are those good aspects of our creaturely dependence upon God and one another that are part of God’s good design as creatures. In Genesis, our creaturely limits are reflected in…

• our being made in God’s image (not being free to invent ourselves),

• Man’s dependence upon Woman to fulfil humanity’s vocation,

• our dependence upon God’s breath to become living beings (rather than the dust of the earth)

• our need to access the “Tree of Life” to avoid being overwhelmed by our mortality,

• our needing God to create and bring rest to the material world for us (as evidenced in his planting the garden for us).

To acknowledge these limits testifies to God’s goodness as our sustainer & provider. They define the kind, or mode, of intimacy that God had always intended for us to enjoy with him.

On the other hand, SUFFERING/TOIL are not essential aspects of what it means to be a creature. Our creaturely limitations have only become burdened by grief and difficulty since leaving the garden (Genesis 3). We were never designed to flourish in autonomy from our maker. Sickness, difficulty in birthing and raising children, the toil of growing food in the cursed ground, our vulnerability to the serpent etc. - none of these strictly result from our creaturely LIMITATIONS but rather from our banishment from the garden.

At least some of the creaturely limits noted above endure into the resurrection and the new creation described in Revelation 21-22. However, these limitations will no longer frustrate or burden us with suffering, as we’ll have regained access to the Tree of Life, and The River of the Water of Life (God’s Spirit) will be the power that animates our creaturely existence with immortal life.

When we do experience pain and difficulty in association with our limitations, the right response is twofold. Firstly, we should grieve and lament that something God created good has been subjected to such frustrating difficulty. God did not ever intend that our creaturely limits should be the site of any difficulty for us. Secondly, it is perfectly right for us to cry out in hope (as the Psalmist and Jesus himself did) that God would set our creaturely limits free from their present groaning and bondage, and bring them into the full glory that Jesus’ own resurrected and ascended bodily humanity presently enjoys. Then our creaturely limits will testify to the intimacy we enjoy with God, not of any shortcoming to be despised.