Paul urges us to not be conformed to the world, but rather to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. To do that, it is vital to go back in Scripture to see how things once were, so that we will have perspective on our own day. A little fish born and raised in muddy water is unaware of the mud. How the perspective changes for those who read of times when waters ran clear....
Read
Gen. 4. How can you reach
all the way to God? Toss your inadequacies? Bridge the distance? That was the driver
that caused Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit because the promise was
that eating would make them like God, knowing good and evil. That is the driver for many failed strategies early in Genesis for people to reach to God. Now, Adam and Eve have children and the issue
is still the same. Cain and Abel would
like to make it all the way to God, to close the distance. But some things have changed even since Adam and Eve.
First, do not fail to notice
that the environment has changed—and this is true for us as well as for these
new children. We share the new environment. Adam and Eve were in
Paradise, in the Garden of Eden, in an environment that was at all times
pleasant and fulfilling. But as
punishment, they are cast out of the Garden into a new environment. The designation for this new home is
ambiguously described as “east of Eden.”
If you think about it, that means that God is thought of as being to the
west, and so to move eastward is to move away from God instead of toward
God. Btw, if you look at the holy temple
in Jerusalem, it was built with the most holy place—the very section of the temple
where God was said to keep His presence—that part was to the west and so as a
person left the temple, they would go out to the east and away from God. And I say that because as we continue to read
Genesis, anytime someone goes east, it indicates a move away from God.
Now the reason why the first
sinners are banished from the Garden is because there is another tree located
there—the tree of life. And to eat of
that fruit would break the final barrier that now existed between God and His human
image-bearers. If Adam and Eve ate from
the tree of life, they would become immortal like God. Now, immortality is a reasonable and
worthwhile desire. It is something that
we should want, and it is something that God obviously longs to give us. But not simply by eating fruit--not any longer! We have sinned against God, and immortality
can never again be had that easily again.
There are lessons to learn and deficiencies to overcome if we ever want
to go all the way to God.
So the new environment, east
of Eden, is a place of mortality. It is
a place where people live and die. And yet another difference began with Adam and Eve. Not only is the new environment a place of
mortality, it is a place where sin has invaded to epidemic proportions. Can you imagine how easy it would be to avoid
sin if you lived in a sin-free environment like Eden?
- Just think how easy it would be to tell the truth in a world where none of the people around you ever told lies!
- Just think how easy it would be to remain sexually pure in a world where everyone was sexually pure! Imagine if the only people having sexual relations were married, and they only related sexually with their own (opposite-gender) spouses!
- Just think how easy it would be to obey God in a world where obeying God was the normal thing for people to do!
But
that is not the environment we live in, is it?
One of the strongest arguments against drinking alcohol it has to be consumed
in a sinful environment. Not only is
alcohol a substance to impairs sound judgment and moral thinking, its effects
are made worse because our environment is so corrupt. I want to share with you a quote from Jim
McGuiggan:
What
produces alcoholism? Loneliness and
alcohol. Rejection and alcohol. Illness and alcohol. Financial stress and alcohol. Marital troubles and alcohol. Parent-child crises and alcohol. These, and a hundred more ills of society,
combined with alcoholic beverages produce slavery to liquor. The
liquor industry doesn’t have its stills in heaven where all are safe from
devouring pressures. [The liquor
industry] performs here on earth where the people of this nation brawl and
agonize with a thousand inequalities, gross injustices, humiliation, shame and
despair. It comes at people already
weakened by grinding poverty, or worse, a deep sense of inner futility….
That is already the
environment in which Cain murders his brother, Abel. Mom and Dad (Adam and Eve) had already sinned, and by this time
had probably sinned in more ways than just eating forbidden fruit. The children had probably seen their parents
sinning. They may already have a history of sin themselves. And now as they pursue their
own desire to draw near to Almighty God, there are more sinful strategies close
at hand than the one pursued by the parents.
Both boys offer their
sacrifices to God, but only Abel pleases God and gets His favor. Abel offered a blood sacrifice; while Cain
who was a farmer offered a sacrifice of agricultural produce. And it is not that God likes meat rather than
vegetables, because later He calls for both kinds of sacrificial
offerings when the sacrificial system of Israel's religion was fully developed. Hebrews 11:4 places Abel at
the very top of a catalog of people who might be called heroes of faith. It says, “By faith Abel offered unto God a
more excellent sacrifice to God.” That
means that Abel’s heart was more true toward his relationship with God. The overtures of his heart were more sincere and well-intentioned and fervent. And
therefore, says the writer of Hebrews, “even though he is dead, he still speaks
through his faith.” He is speaking to
us, if we have the ears to listen.
So why did Cain choose to
murder Abel. God had seen his
unhappiness written all over his face, warned Cain that sin was crouching at
his door like a coiled-up lion, ready to pounce and kill and devour him. And God made it clear that Cain, if he were
to survive that encounter with sin, would have to master it with total effort. So it looks like Cain thought the best way to
do that was simply to eliminate the competition. He took his brother to a remote field, rose
up against him, and killed his brother—the first recorded murder in human
history, and the first death recorded in Scripture.
Obviously, this was a failed
strategy. Like his parents before Him,
Cain finds himself once more standing before God. Where God had said to father Adam, “Where are
you?” now God asks his oldest and now only son, “Where is your brother?” Cain has been exposed as the first in a long
line of people who seem to think that as long as they are religious, they can
treat other people as badly as they want.
What was he thinking—that God would say, “Oh, I see you’ve murdered your
brother, but no big deal because you’re the guy who brought me all those lovely
vegetables last week, aren’t you?” Think
here of the religious people, one a priest and the other a Levite, who passed
by a severely injured man because they were on their way to worship at the
temple. Think of religious who will pray
to God to help people in need, but are too stingy to give them from their own
supply. All through the Bible, the
message is that anyone who fails to love the people who are visible will never
find success in loving God who is invisible.
If you really want to connect with God, you can’t just be religious; you
have to love people. . Many of them will sin against you (they have been impacted by the new environment), but your
challenge is to love them anyway.
Notice that God’s punishment
of Cain is stronger than what his father received. Adam would be forced to work the hard ground in
pain and sweat, only to watch it yield nothing but thorns and thistles. But Cain loses the farm. He is cast out as a man without a home,
without a livelihood, to wander about like a refugee, seeking a place to call
his own, but always moved on from one place to another. This might not frighten us, but it filled the ancients with dread. We are happily mobile, and leave our place to land in another distant place in the prosperity we call America. But imagine being uprooted and dropped into the third-world--with its deprivations, and lawlessness, and threats to survival. And would anyone like to guess in which
direction Cain goes? Well, of course, he
goes eastward and settles in the land of Nod (which means the “land of wandering”).
Finally, if you want to get
to God, you had better take notice of something that God values above anything
else, but something that people seem to regard with unbelievable
cheapness. Listen to this story from FOX
News:
A 12–year-old
boy was tortured and killed along with 11 other Christians weeks ago in Syria,
in the latest heart-wrenching account of ISIS’ cruel brutality to trickle out
of the black-clad jihadist army’s isolated caliphate. Word of the murders, which occurred outside
of Aleppo, came from a colleague of the boy’s father, a local ministry leader
who works with the Christian Aid Mission, a non-profit organization assisting
persecuted Christians overseas. ISIS militants cut off the boy’s fingertips,
severely beat him and the others before crucifying them, according to the
colleague. “All were badly brutalized
and then crucified,” he told the Christian Aid Mission in a conversation
recounted to FoxNews.com. “They were left on their crosses for two days. No one
was allowed to remove them.” Eight other
ministry team members, including two women who were publicly raped, were
beheaded, according to Christian Aid Mission.
The eight were offered the choice of converting to Islam, but refused to
renounce Christ. They prayed as they
knelt before the Islamic State militants, according to the ministry leader, who
spoke with relatives and villagers while visiting the site. "Villagers said some were praying in the
name of Jesus, others said some were praying the Lord's Prayer, and others said
some of them lifted their heads to commend their spirits to Jesus," the
ministry director told Christian Aid Mission. "One of the women looked up
and seemed to be almost smiling as she said, 'Jesus!'"
Have
you figured it out—what does God value that people regard as cheap? I’ll give you another hint. Whatever it is, it goes really cheap at
Planned Parenthood, where millions of American babies were killed in pure
innocence, just as Abel was and with at least as much innocence. The same
cheapness shows in Chicago where the murders this year alone are over 400. And this from the AP: A baby girl was thrown from a
sixth-floor window of a NYC apartment building to her death on Thursday,
witnesses and police said, making her the third child killed that way in the
city in three months.
God
values life. Life is His gift, and
people must regard that gift as something cheap given the way they are so quick
to murder others and to trash the gift that God has given others. God told Cain that the
ground on which Abel’s blood was spilt had a gaping mouth to swallow up that
blood—not to hide it, but to cry out to God--to blab out loud the dark secret of the murder.
God knows every life that has been taken by every murderer who ever
lived and God will avenge those whose lives have been taken and whose blood has
poured to the ground. But this sequel to
the failure of Adam and Eve also ends on a note of God’s’ grace. The first episode ended with man and women in shame, hiding behind fig leaves. God in His grace covered them with skins. Cain now fears that he will become a target of
murder as a consequence of murder, but God prevents this by placing a
protective mark (not a mark of stigma) upon Cain. That mark
will ward off dangerous people and will reserve for God to judge and punish the sin of Cain.
It seems that three primary lessons come to us:
- We should recognize the spiritual dynamics of the environment that we were born into. Sin crouches at our door also. Its desire is for us; but we must master it.
- We should recognize that religion that connects us to God, but has a disconnect from people, will never succeed in reaching all the way to God. We are our brother's keeper.
- We should recognize life as God's most precious gift and we should never take part in stealing that gift from another person.
No comments:
Post a Comment