He Permits

Nobody Preaches This Verse

We go straight past it.

We run to the next verse, to the tree He said no about, and we build the whole thing there. But before God said one word about a restriction, He said this, and He said it out loud so no man would have to guess. Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat.

Freely Eat

In the Hebrew the word is doubled there, eating you shall eat.

A verb set beside itself, and there is no daylight in how I hear it. Not you are permitted to eat, not you may have some. Eat and eat and eat, and that last part is me saying it out, not a third word in the Hebrew. And look what it is spoken over, every tree of the garden.

And look what was standing there when He said it.

Pleasant to the sight and good for food. And read the rest of that verse, because it names two trees standing in there as well, and one of them He is about to hold back. So not every tree in that garden was handed to him. But look at how much was.

He Said It Out Loud

Here is what I want you to see, and it is the kindness of God in it.

He did not put a man down in the middle of a garden and leave him standing there wondering which trees he was allowed to eat from.

Adam did not have to work it out. He did not have to guess, or feel his way, or wait and see whether he would get in trouble for reaching. God told him, the permission was spoken, and it was spoken first.

That is not a small thing. A man can stand in a full orchard and not touch a thing, if he does not know whose orchard it is.

Watch His Method

And let me say what I am doing with these four before I do it. I am setting them in the order they appear in the book. Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are two accounts and Scripture does not lay these out as one running sequence, and the blessing in the first one is spoken over them, both of them, before the woman is made in the second. So the order is the order on the page and I am the one calling it anything more.

Our verse is the second of them, and you have it at the top.

Blessed, permitted, restricted, and then He says what is still missing. That is the order they sit in. Calling it a method, and calling it His way of working, is mine.

I have opened that one tree in Beware of Covetousness, and what I say there is mine and not Genesis. Genesis 3 gives me what she saw in the tree, that it was good for food, and pleasant to the eyes, and to be desired to make one wise. What I hear underneath it is this. We do not covet the fruit, we covet the right to decide.

The Anointing and the Leave to Use It

This is where it came home to me. And it is mine, so let me say that before I say it. Genesis says nothing about an anointing, and nothing about using one.

The blessing is the anointing, the permission is the leave to use it.

They are two different things. And here is what I have watched, and it is what I have seen and not something Scripture tells me. A good many people only ever have the first. They know God put something in them, they can feel it, and they spend years standing still because nobody ever told them they were allowed.

God did not do that to Adam. There is a blessing on the page, and there is a permission on the page, and the permission is out loud. And I take Him to be the same with us, though that part is me reading Him and not the verse.

So if He has put something in you, hear the second half of the way I am reading it. Do not confuse having something from God with having leave to use it however you choose. In Adam’s case, the blessing was on the page and the permission was on the page too.

But Permission Has a Boundary

And I have to say the other side of it, because verse 17 comes right behind.

The permission was wide, and it had a line. One tree out of a whole garden.

And we have seen that line crossed, and not only in a garden. Somebody can have a place God really gave them, and because they know it is theirs, walk into another place that was never given to them.

Korah was not a nobody. He was a Levite, and the verse says God had separated him and brought him near, and given him the work of the tabernacle. So the place was already his. And he reached for the priesthood, which was never given to him.

And I am the one setting that beside the garden, because Numbers does not send me there. A whole tabernacle of service handed over, and he reached for the one thing that was not his. That is what I hear in it. Uzziah did the same, and here is the verse for it.

God had helped him marvelously and he was strong. And the two things I said just then, that the incense belonged to the priests and that he came out a leper, are further down the same chapter, so let me put them up.

It is not for you. That is what the priests said to his face, and the leprosy stayed on him to the day he died.

It Was Bigger Than the Office

Now here is why God deals with this so severely, and it is not what we think.

Korah reaching for the priesthood was not only about Aaron. It was about the One who put Aaron there. And it was about the One who put Korah where Korah was, because Moses said it plainly, is it a small thing to you that God separated you and brought you near.

So he disregarded the hand twice over. On Aaron’s placing, and on his own.

And I hear the same thing said to Samuel, though it is a different day and a different trouble, Israel asking for a king rather than a man reaching for a priesthood. I am the one setting them side by side.

And I see something similar in the sabbath, and look at what Moses has just said before the story.

Despised the word of the LORD. And then read what comes next in that same chapter.

Sticks. And Numbers does not stop and tell me that verses 30 and 31 are explaining this particular man, so I will not say they are. But I cannot miss where the account sits. Moses has just spoken about despising the word of the LORD, and then the chapter gives me a man found stepping over a boundary God had set. And here is what I see in the stepping over, and it is mine. The setting of the boundary did not count enough to stop him.

And here is what I take from Korah and Uzziah, and it is mine, because two men is not a rule. The person standing in the place is not the one being pushed away. The hand that put them there is. So the boundary is not God being stingy.

The Line Is Where the Hand Shows

He gave a whole garden and drew one line. And here is what I take that line to be, and it is mine. It was the mark of who set the garden there. And take the line away, and I could walk about in it as though nobody owned it.

A blessing. A permission, out loud, over the garden. And one line drawn, so a man would always know Whose garden he was standing in. There is more yes in that verse than there is no.