God Has A Good Reason

As a teacher of a group of grade sixers who are halfway between little kid and almost adult,  I often have to discipline my students.  I don't enjoy doing it, but it's part of the job, and necessary if I am going to do my main job: which is to give lessons and help them learn the skills and knowledge they will need to survive in our complex world, and to make it to high school. 

Having to do the sometimes unpleasant job of discipline has given me a new perspective on authority and rules. As a teenager and young adult, I often thought rules were put into place just to ruin my fun. I wasn't a big rule-breaker, but sometimes those  little rules just seemed petty. Like, don't go out the fire escape. Why did it really matter? Or take off your school clothes when you're going to play outside. 

But now as a teacher, I understand rules a lot better. Rules help run the classroom, so everyone can function together. Some of them, like don't sharpen your pencil sharpener when the teacher is talking, might seem to slow you down, but it is extremely hard to talk or listen to a math lesson with the drone of the pencil sharpener going off in the middle of it. 

Some kids, when spoken to about the rules, seem to always point at another student who did something worse. But that really is not relevant because they also broke the rules. 

I understand better now that rules are there to help out all the student learn and do their best. The rules help create a safe and motivating atmosphere for all students and the teacher. 

And this does help me understand God's rules better, too. Just like a teacher has to take all of her students in to account, so does God take all of the earth's peoples in mind when he gives us directions. 

When he told Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree, he knew the knowledge of good and evil would be devastating for humankind. To Eve, it may have seemed like a petty little rule, but the consequences were devastating. 

So do we need to trust God today, that He has a good reason for all his directions. 

But the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in that day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.

Genesis 2:16, 17

A picture of my classroom without any students