Boundaries have never been more unpopular.This is the age where they want to erase the line between male and female, a mother and the baby inside of her, parents and children. Drawing a line invites hostility these days. So yes, it’s unpopular, but there’s a bigger and more important issue at hand.Can anything we create actually survive without boundaries?Start a marriage, and immediately there are boundaries around it. Start a business, and you need a budget, a mission, and a clear distinction between company money and personal money. Start a nonprofit, and eventually you have to learn to say, “That’s a worthy cause, but it isn’t what we do.”Write a song, and it has a beginning and an ending.Take a photograph, and it has a frame.Plant a garden, and eventually you discover why people build fences.Whenever we create something valuable, we soon face a question:How do we protect this thing so it can survive long enough to become what it was created to be?And that’s when we notice something on the first page of the Bible.God creates. We give him a lot of glory for the things that he creates, from sun, moon, and stars to the tears of a baby, but we seldom think about perhaps his greatest gift to creation, and that is structure—Boundaries.God enters into a swirl of chaos in order to bring life out of all that mess, and He does it by drawing lines.Creation Begins With DistinctionGenesis 1 describes the primordial earth as tohu va-vohu—usually translated “formless and void.” It means that the thing has no boundary, no structure like just an endless oozing goo, and because it has no boundary, it also has no meaning, identity or purpose.Something with potential is there: darkness, water, the deep. But it isn’t yet in an ordered, inhabitable state.Then God speaks.“Let there be light.”Notice what happens next:“God separated the light from the darkness.”The Hebrew verb is badal—to separate, divide, distinguish.God creates light, then establishes a distinction.Light is not darkness. Darkness is not light.This is this.That is that.And the pattern continues.Waters above and waters below. Sea and dry land. Plants and animals according to their kinds. Day and night. Seasons and years. Eventually, male and female.Creation produces distinct things with distinct identities. Distinct things need identifying names and labels. Sun, moon, God, human, male and female.And once something has an identity, that identity becomes something worth protecting.The Sea Needs a ShoreThe sea gives us a beautiful picture of this.Genesis begins with water everywhere. But God doesn’t destroy the water. He gives it limits.Job 38 pictures God saying to the sea:“Thus far shall you come, and no farther.”And once the water is bounded, dry land appears.Now plants can grow. Animals can live. Humans can build and cultivate.The boundary doesn’t destroy the sea or the land. It allows both to exist with their distinctiveness intact.Our Body Has a BoundaryYour own body works this way. All of our bodies have a lot going on. We have lungs, heart, and large and small intestines, but around all of it is our skin.Your skin is a boundary. Without it, you’d puddle up and die.But your skin doesn’t prevent you from interacting with the world. You touch through it. Feel through it. It is your interface by which you can engage other created things in the world.A healthy boundary allows you to interact with something else without ceasing to be yourself versus entering the membrane of another and being absorbed.That’s a very different way to think about boundaries. Most people just think of them as restrictions.Gray GooThere’s an old thought experiment from nanotechnology called the “grey goo” problem.Imagine microscopic self-replicating machines that consume the material around them to make more copies of themselves.Eventually everything gets converted into more of the same thing.Trees. Animals. Buildings. Ecosystems. All dissolved as building material for a spreading nanobot grey goo until there is nothing else in the world.Whether that scenario is technologically realistic isn’t the point. (And I really, really hope not.) But it’s a clear illustration of why boundaries are so important in creation.Distinction in DiversityLook at a rainforest. Trees, insects, birds, fungi, water, soil, predators, prey—thousands of different organisms interacting while remaining distinct.The bee can have a relationship with the flower precisely because the bee isn’t the flower.Grey goo moves the other direction.Difference disappears.Everything becomes everything else: Parent-child, sacred-secular, man and woman—all one thing on a sliding scale.This is not the message of the Bible. Genesis 1 recognizes increasing distinction, complexity, relationship and life.The God of Creation makes differences matter. We don’t need a world where everyone wears gray flannel and speaks Esperanto. Spices must remain distinct. Cultures ...
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