Good Morning.
“Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it.” (Genesis 2:15)
It is interesting to see how these commands to “tend and keep” (work and guard) the garden are applied in other situations subsequent to the fall of man. For instance, consider what happened when Nehemiah and his countrymen were rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, after returning from Babylon. The Bible tells us that they worked with a tool in one hand and a weapon in the other (Nehemiah 4:17).
In other words, they were working and guarding, just as Adam was instructed to do. It was during this process that an inhabitant of the land, Sanballat, initiated a conversation with them, wanting to know if he and his people might be of assistance. Each time he tried this, Nehemiah refused to come outside of the walls because he knew of Sanballat’s true intention:
Our adversaries said, “They will neither know nor see anything, till we come into their midst and kill them and cause the work to cease.” (Nehemiah 4:11)
And so, again, we see the enemy’s preferred tactic: get into the midst of God’s people and disrupt what God is doing from within. That is exactly why the tares, under the cover of darkness, were sown in the midst of the wheat (Mt 13). It was not so that the wheat and tares could coexist, as some in this culture would have us believe, but that the tares might gain a foothold and begin the process of stealing, killing and destroying. The lesson for us is, while we’re working, we can’t stop guarding.
Blessings and Shalom,
Bill
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