The Reorder

“Some remove the landmarks,  . . .” Job 24:2

Landmarks – There is a great economic battle raging in the world.  It is not the battle between capitalism and socialism, although the media would like you to believe it is.  It is not the battle between personal liberty and state control.  That is simply another angle of the same capitalism-socialism debate.  Our society has been so radically reorganized by the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and the evangelical awakening that we simply take for granted a world where the pursuit of happiness is a right, where private property ownership is fundamental to civilization and where everyman should have his own castle.

But this preoccupation with individualism has not always been the case, not in history and certainly not in the biblical perspective.

It took men like Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations) to propose that self-interest was a universal force of nature.[1] It took Darwin to convince the intelligentsia that progress was a function of evolving self-control.  It took John Wesley and Dwight L. Moody to persuade believers that personal salvation was the essence of the gospel.  And it took the Great Awakening to provide religion with a reason to leave affairs of the world in the hands of pagans.  But the biblical viewpoint is not found in any of these social-political movements.  The great battle that rages across the world is the battle between God’s order and Man’s reorder.

“Some remove the gevulah.”  The Hebrew word describes a fixed boundary stone, a landmark that designates territorial ownership.  There are strict requirements concerning these stones.  They were not to be moved (Deuteronomy 19:14 and Proverbs 22:28).  At the end of the Jubilee year, all land passed back to the original allocation of ownership.  From the first verse of Genesis to the end of Torah instructions for living, God orders the world.  He orders everything about the world including the ways people interact with His creation and with each other.  When someone moves the gevulah, he is not simply moving a property marker.  He is reordering God’s world.  And reordering God’s world without consulting His plan has serious consequences.

God’s order provides for the welfare of all.  Man’s reorder adjusts the world for the benefit of some.  God’s order treats the family as a unit where parents and children grow in spiritual insight as they share in the projects of life together.  Fathers are as involved in child rearing and child training as mothers.  Mothers are an essential and integral part of the business of life and the economics of the family (cf. Proverbs 31).  What was true of communal dependence for millennia has virtually passed into oblivion as Man reorders the world in terms of task rather than relationship.  The demise of women as vital economic contributors is a result of the separation of work from reward.  Once we found our satisfaction in accomplishing life together.  Now we leave home to go to the workplace to earn reward so we can return home to convert reward into substitutes for community fulfillment.

Nancy Pearcey catalogues the evangelical contribution to this reordering disaster.  Its movement from communities of faith to personal experiences of salvation simply followed the cultural transition from integrated units to isolated individuals.  Its abdication of the salt and light obligations within every arena of culture left the Church impotent.  The boundary stones could be moved indiscriminately once the Church left the field of play.

But God’s order will prevail.  It may take breaking the pots in order to restore the design, but so be it.  Everything about the Bible proclaims God’s patience and His judgment.  The acceptable day of the Lord is followed by the day of His wrath.  He will allow desecration of His boundaries for only so long.  Look around you.  Have the stones moved?  Have you allowed them to move without protest?  Have you helped to carry them?  Let us return to the order God designed in the world.  May we be the salt and light we are asked to be, before we lose our savor and the dark closes in.

Topical Index:  landmark, boundary, order, Job 24:2

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