The First Principle of Life

Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden to Eden to cultivate it and keep it.  Genesis 2:15

Put – There are two fundamentally different views of life’s purpose, but they are hidden in the same methodology.  Because the process needed to reach these goals looks identical, it is easy to adopt the right method but have the wrong purpose.  To complicate things, the pervasive culture, in and out of the church, often focuses on the method, not the goal.  The result is mass confusion.  The solution is getting the first thing right.  And for that, we need to go back to the Garden.

Why did God put Man in the garden?  Wait!  Before you answer, consider this question:  Whose garden is it?  Ah, it’s God’s garden, isn’t it.  Man had absolutely no hand in creating the garden.  It was there, under God’s ownership, before Man came on the scene.  So, now that we have established who owns those assets, let’s answer the “why” question.  Why did God put the Man in His garden? 

The Hebrew verb for “put” is revealing.  It’s the first word in the sentence.  It has the place of emphasis.  The exclamation point does not go with “cultivate” or “keep.”  It goes with “put”.  The verb is laqach.  Used nearly 1000 times in the Old Testament, it is usually translated “take.”  But we must immediately distinguish our idea of “take” from the implications of this Hebrew verb.  First, laqach does not necessary imply force.  We think of “take” as an aggressive action, but this is not so in Hebrew.  Secondly, and most importantly, laqach emphasizes the initiating responsibility of the subject, not the result for the object.  What this means in our verse is that the action is all about God’s initiative, not about the results for the Man. 

Here is the first principle of life.  God initiates.  Man is fundamentally a responsive being.  God puts Man into the garden for the express purpose of responding to God’s desires. 

How does this change our view of life’s purpose?  Let’s look at just one aspect: profit.  If I recognize that my first responsibility is to respond to the initiative of God, then my efforts to achieve profit will always be about furthering God’s agenda, not mine.  The purpose of profit is the furtherance of the Kingdom.  At no point will my profit goal ever be about my desires, needs or opportunities.  Why?  Because God is the owner of the garden and He put me there for His reasons, not mine.

My method for achieving success might look exactly like the method used by those whose goal is self-accumulation, but the first principle will be entirely different.  As a result, the distribution of profit will be entirely different – not just a little bit different (as in the tithe), but entirely different because I will act in response to God’s initiative.  Shema – listen and obey.

What’s in your wallet – His assets or your profit?