(January 2)
(2021)
The story of Cain and Abel demonstrates the beginning of what has come to be known as the cycle of violence. Cain gets angry and kills Abel, and a few sentences later his descendent Lamech brags about how he is even more violent than Cain. I think this kind of thing is what the Bible means when it later says that the sins of the fathers are visited on the seventh generation. Violence begets violence. Racism begets racism. Selfishness begets selfishness, and so on. But the opposite can also be true. Seth’s descendent Enoch is described as having “walked with God”. It seems that children learn more by your example than your words.
Additional thoughts, added January 2022:
Genesis 4
I’ve heard quite a lot of speculation as to why God preferred Abel’s sacrifice to Cain’s, not to mention where the people Cain feared would kill him might come from, or where he got his wife. But what strikes me most about this story is that the first murder was committed in the name of religion. Cain and Abel had different ideas about how to please God, and Cain couldn’t stand it when he thought God liked his brother’s sacrifice best.
I will also point out that God didn’t sentence Cain to capital punishment for the premeditated murder of Abel. In fact, the “mark of Cain” was meant to protect him from those who wanted vengeance for Abel’s death. I won’t get into prison reform here, but I think about it.
God loved both Cain and Abel. The problem came from Cain’s response to that love. “If you do well, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must master it.”
Cain had a choice. He chose unwisely. May we learn from his story to make better choices.
Genesis 5-6
“The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.”
In the flood story, God doesn’t decide to pull the plug on the human experiment because he is angry. He does it because he is sad to the depths of his being. The good world he created with such love and care is being destroyed by the selfish actions of the humans he designed to take care of it. Humanity is terminally ill, suffering with a self-inflected disease I like to call the MyWay virus.
Remember this (secular) song? To me it gives a little window into what God is feeling. “In the year 8510, God will shake his mighty head. He’ll either say I’m pleased where man has been, or tear it down and start again”.
Genesis 6-8
“Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God,”
What was it about Noah that made him a good guy? The key, I think, is that he “walked faithfully with God”. By his actions in building the ark, he showed that he took seriously the responsibility with which Adam was first tasked: to care for rather than selfishly abuse God’s creation. He took care to include every species on the ark, not just the ones that had value to him. I can only assume his value system extended to the human species as well. There’s a strong correlation between how one treats animals and people.
Noah wasn’t perfect. One of the first things we are told he did after leaving the ark was to get drunk enough to pass out. I can’t say that I blame him for self-medicating, given what he had experienced. I always found that detail interesting, given that the Baptist church in which I grew up treated the sale and use of beverage alcohol as an unpardonable sin.
To be honest, I can trace the origins of my lifelong passion for studying the Bible for myself, rather than blindly accepting what some authority figure tells me it means, to the cognitive dissonance I experienced about this teaching. My parents enjoyed their evening happy hours, and they were pretty good people. Not perfect, but good people.
“Blameless among the people of his time”. That one requires some thinking about too. People are products of their culture, and we shouldn’t judge them by the standards of our time and place. I can only imagine what future cultures, or someone from another planet, might have to say about us.
(2023)
Today, as I read the story of Cain, the horrrific murders of the college students in Idaho dominates the news. As a result of the diligent efforts of law enforcement, a suspect has been arrested. Reporters trying to answer the question “why” are interviewing everybody who might provide a clue and unfortunately, much is being made of the suspect’s perceived neurodivergence.
Neurodivergence is no more the cause of or an excuse for murder than jealousy, anger, resentment, past bullying or abuse, or anything else. The real problem is what the Bible calls sin: acting on the infantile assumption that one is the center of the universe and deserves to have whatever one wants whenever one wants it, regardless of its impact on others.
As God told Cain, “Sin is crouching at the door. It desires to consume you, but you must master it.” Cain’s jealousy of his brother and his anger at God’s apparent favoritism for Abel were not the cause of his actions, nor were they mitigating factors. Because Cain failed to master sin, it consumed him, just as God had warned.
“Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is greater than I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.” Although God spared Cain from the death penalty, Cain lost everything else he feared: his livelihood, his family, and the presence of God.
Sin is still crouching at the door, threatening to consume us, and we still are advised to master it.
(2024)
“Thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him.“
Enoch’s lifespan was short, compared to that of his ancestors and his son, who lived to be 900+. Yet he was one of the only two characters in the Bible who was taken directly into the presence of God without the messy, unpleasant dying part. It would seem that long life is not necessarily an indicator of one’s spiritual condition.
I think of this more and more as I grow older and see more and more of my friends and contemporaries leaving this plane of existence, and even more so since my PV diagnosis. It is not the length of our days on this earth, but what we do with them that counts.
“We’re all stories in the end. Make yours a good one, eh?”
joantheexpatriatebaptist 