Boundaries

There are hundreds of miles of old stone walls bordering farms and running through overgrown fields in New England. Glaciers buried field stones eons ago, only to have them resurface during deforestation and farming in Colonial days. As the fields were cleared for wood and farming, these frost-heaved stones were used to establish boundaries which are now hidden or lost and in disrepair from neglect as fields turn back into forests.

Property lines have always been considered sacred here. They delineate ownership but can also be restrictive and confining. Roy Rogers, King of the cowboys, shared that sentiment when he sang “Don’t Fence Me In” as did Ronald Regan in his famous speech at the Berlin Wall telling “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Robert Frost lamented the separation boundaries create. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” he wrote in his poem “Mending Wall.”

All societies have barriers dividing their peoples. Economic disparity, social status, political rivalries, education, prejudices, injustices, and even religious ideologies set up divisions and rivalries. Scripture warns us that God hates pride, those hostile walls of arrogance and self righteous opinions and behaviors which divide and inflict pain and damage.

We also know there are moral boundaries which when breached injure others as well as ourselves. Honest self-measurement against the moral law verifies that we fall short of holiness and oppose who God created us to be. We are morally weak and naturally inclined to sin, and no human effort can make us just and truly righteous. That creates a wall of separation between ourselves and holy God.

However, Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross for our sinfulness destroyed the power of unhealthy, unholy walls separating us from God. Whether Jew, Gentile, male, female, bond or free, the only potential obstacle to peace with God is whether or not we choose to believe. We are all on equal footing at the cross where we are restored through our faith in Christ.

“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)