Guard Your Garden: Leadership and the Responsibility to Protect

I recently started reading From Eden to Egypt by Alex Duke. It gives an overview of Genesis, and I highly recommend it.

In one chapter, Duke discusses Genesis 3 and notes that Adam was passive. He stood beside Eve as she took the fruit and ate and failed to obey God’s command to take dominion over the garden. Duke argues that, had Adam been faithfully exercising dominion—i.e. patrolling the garden diligently and setting its affairs in right order—the serpent should never have even reached the tree to seduce Eve. But, because of a possible complacency on Adam’s part, he allowed a stranger to enter the domain which was his God-given responsibility.

As I read and reflected on Duke’s point, I began to think about God’s wider call to men who hold God-ordained offices of leadership—elders, husbands, and fathers—to guard their gardens.

We see this pattern throughout Scripture. Here are three examples of God calling his leaders to guard their gardens.

We see this same pattern early in Scripture when God instructs Moses to appoint guardians for his holy place.

These verses show how seriously God regards the protection of what is holy. No outsider may enter what God has set apart.

The passage that immediately comes to mind when I think about passive guardians is 2 Samuel 11. David, like Adam, became passive, and his passivity led to disobedience. The text says: “In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel” (v. 1). Instead of going out with the army, David stayed home. While his men defended the kingdom, he enjoyed the comfort of his palace. Then he crossed into another man’s garden—a man who was helping protect his own—and became the outsider himself. David did not merely enter that garden; he violated it. In his story, we see passivity leading to disobedience and the failure to guard what God had entrusted to him.

The next passage that came to mind as I read about Adam was Acts 20.

Paul calls the Ephesian elders to him to give final instructions before they see him no more. He tells them to guard God’s garden, the church. In vv. 28–30, Paul instructs the elders:

Paul’s warning is sobering; it is not a question of whether wolves will come, but when. Outsiders will try to infiltrate the church and, even from within, some elders will rise up and deceive the members.

Paul reminds the elders that they must protect God’s church, which he purchased at an infinite cost (John 10:11, 14, 15). God wants his garden guarded from outsiders. As elders, we have been given the responsibility to protect what God has entrusted to us.

So, what gardens has God entrusted to us to protect?

First, God has given us his church—his bride—to protect. We must take him at his word when he says the church must remain holy. As men in the church, we must grow in doctrine and holiness so that we can protect his garden. We must be alert to false teachers, discerning about unconverted people who want to join the church, and willing to keep one another accountable in the face of sin.

Second, God has also given us wives and children, or future families, as gardens to protect. We must take him at his word when he instructs us to wash our wives with the word (Ephesians 5:26–27) and to raise our children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4). We need to know our families well. We must quickly recognise wrong attitudes and identify the tools—such as screens, movies, or music—that may intrude.

We are called to deal with the outsider before he or she enters our gardens. Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong (1 Corinthians 16:13).