Total Depravity

Cain thought it might be okay in the sight of God to murder him, that is his fear, death. God further cursed the ground so that it would not yield its "strength" to him and He also sentenced Cain to be a fugitive and wanderer (of course he paid no attention to that second thing, he settled in the land of Nod). His only concern was that someone would kill him if they found him. He had no concern for his brother's life but a great deal for his own.

When Jesus spoke of murder, he said if you hate your brother it is as if you murdered him. His standards are incredibly high regarding sin, so high in fact that I can't even pretend to be righteous. I get from his words about lust and murder that he has a very different definition of holiness, one I can't ever attain. I can more or less restrain conduct but there have been many times when I realized my only hope of righteousness is a lobotomy because my mind seems to have a life of its own.

We carry around all our anger and our thoughts about people and then we become like Cain, paranoid that other people are probably just like us, filled with the same garbage and it will be directed towards us. Cain needed to be a fugitive and wanderer, he was a guy unfit to live with other people (I don't where those other people come from by the way). His attitude got passed down to his descendants, culminating in the arrogant boast of the thoroughly obnoxious Lamech at the end of chapter 4. Attitude isn't DNA, it has to be deliberately passed down. Self-centered, now that is DNA.

I Can't Get No Satisfaction

Why is it I am never satisfied? If I lived in a vacuum apart from other people and things maybe I could pull off satisfaction, but as it is, I see other people who have something I want or something I think I lack, and envy creeps into my life and re-orients it entirely. The new orientation of my thoughts is to get whatever that thing is, however I can get it. It orients both my actions and my prayers towards that aim. If I were honest with you, I could probably name a dozen things I would like to have right now, I could make a wish list like a kid at Christmas and make the case why all of them were important to my ministry.

Augustine said centuries ago, "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you." Has anything changed about human nature since he said that? My heart longs for rest, but not as much as it longs for stuff most of the time. It doesn't have to be material stuff either, it can even be spiritual or psychological stuff, it can even be stuff for my kids like success in what they are doing, solid friends, trust from others... Rest is hard to come by because of my restless heart.

I don't generally begrudge others having the things I want, at least not at the level Cain did. I don't have a problem with them having it, I just want it too. Right now in my life I am more or less satisfied on my own behalf so I want for others. It bugs me that people who love God and desire to serve Him suffer financially and so my prayers are filled with requests on their behalf. Is there any hope of true rest in this world? From Genesis 3 on, we have been people who want that one other thing we think will satisfy us.

Cain and Peter

What do those two guys have in common? When God asked Cain where his brother Abel was, Cain's flip reply was, "Am I my brother's keeper?" It is amazing how quickly sin becomes acceptable. His parents hid from God over the eating of the fruit because they knew that He knew. Cain makes no attempt to hide himself after fratricide. When God asked his parents a question they were more naive, betraying their sin by their answer, "I was afraid because I was naked..." They had been naked with God before and unashamed, they had no sense of vulnerability in their nakedness but now something had changed, naked suddenly felt vulnerable. Cain has none of that, he more or less assumes that God either doesn't know what he has done or that it wasn't that big a deal. His attitude is incredibly arrogant.

Peter too denied he was his brother's keeper. When Jesus needed a friend, Peter threw him under the bus to save his own skin. His testimony wouldn't have made any difference in the eventual outcome so he didn't commit murder by his actions, but his denial was a serious betrayal of a friend. Because Jesus had prophesied this in advance, and given the sign of the cock crowing, Peter couldn't hide from the sin. He knew that Jesus knew.

When Peter wrote his epistle, he uses a form similar to what God told Cain, "...sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it." Peter told his disciples, "Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith..." Peter had been told roughly the same thing by Jesus, that satan desired to sift him like wheat. Both Cain and Peter were men who received grace, unmerited favor, both had done terrible things and both lived to tell about God's grace, but Peter actually did tell about it while Cain thanked his lucky stars and not God and went on doing his own thing.

Angry with God

I know what Lieutenant Dan felt like in Forrest Gump, clinging to the mast of the boat in the midst of a ferocious storm, shaking his fist at God, shouting "Come get me." It is the same thing Cain was dealing with when God asked why Cain was angry? He knew the answer to that question, Cain was disappointed with God. Life wasn't going the way it was supposed to. He offered sacrifice and yet God blessed his brother's sacrifice and the whole business seemed to be Cain's idea and he was, after all, the first born.

I spent much of my twenties running from the Lord and at 32 had an experience that led me back to Him. I was successful in my business life and offered Him all I had, but it seems He had no regard for my offering. In fact, He refused to bless it at all, because of the dishonesty of my business partner, the whole thing cratered in just a couple of months after I offered it to the Lord. I was left with nothing at all. I spent three years alternating between loving God and being angry with Him.

I thought my offering was pretty good, a successful business. It was all I could see that I had to offer. I offered it, though, with the idea that He would bless it so that I could give more money for the Kingdom and along the way I could live as a Christian in a thoroughly un-Christian environment. As our president would say, I, like Cain, misunderestimated God. He only wanted the best I had to offer, my life, not my success.

Cain, Abel, Jesus and Relativism

From the start it has mattered to God how we worship. Spirit and truth requires both and Cain didn't get it. Worship generally reveals what we think about God and Cain's worship indicates that he thought just any old worship would do, Abel's reveals he wanted to give God his best, because he knew that God had given him His best. An attitude of gratitude is important in worship.

Jesus offered Himself as the perfect sacrifice, an act of worship and love dying on a cross. We are called to be living sacrifices, dying to self, rising to life in Him, taking up our own cross and following Him. The journey is the laying down of life and taking up the cross, the destination is heaven after our death and Christ-likeness before then. We know we won't attain that level of perfection in this life but we are called to move in that particular direction.

Relativism says that the particulars don't matter, all roads lead to God and all are equally desirable, so we should just choose whatever works for us. That was Cain's problem. It was always a temptation to God's people throughout the OT and it is a temptation today as well. John 14 says that God hasn't changed His mind about how many ways are right. That only feels judgmental because we are accustomed to choices. It is actually just simple, He gives us one way and all we have to do is that one thing. Why is that so controversial?

Relationships II

Relationships are the thing that suffered most in the Fall. It took one generation to move from betrayal and finger-pointing to fratricide. Why do we expect relationships to be right when we aren't? The blame game is never ending, we make decisions and when things don't turn out the way we intended, we blame others.

Cain decided to bring some stuff to offer to God for thanks. He got this attitude from his mom who said when he was born, "With the help of God I have gotten a man." With the help of God? Did you make yourself such that you could produce offspring? Abel's attitude towards what he produced and therefore what he offered to God was different, he "brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions." Cain's offering wasn't acceptable, God wants our best not the rest, and his reaction was to murder his brother.

Jesus says that when we speak ill of our brothers and sisters we commit murder (Matt 5.22). We need to get rid of the malice and envy in our lives in order that sin doesn't become our master. The seed of bitterness is difficult to deal with if it isn't removed early in the game. I have made some bad decisions and paid a price for them and it was a tough thing to get rid of that bitter root of blame. I don't want to go there again.

Relationships

The other great curse of the Fall relates to relationships. They had already taken a hit before the Lord announced his curse to the woman, the man and woman were hiding themselves in shame from God and one another. Not a good start down the relationship path to introduce degrees of separation.

After the Fall, the woman first gets word that relationships are going to be even more strained. The words God uses are the same as in Genesis 4 when He warns Cain after his sacrifice has been found unacceptable, words about desire and rule or mastery. There, desire clearly relates to temptation to sin and we should conclude here that this punishment of God relates to her action to introduce temptation. Mastery or rule means domination over something.

What does that have to do with life today in marriage and other relationships? Jesus broke the curse but we still have to deal with the reality that the law came to Adam whose responsibility then was to teach his wife. There is something there about male headship, but not in the sense of dominion. The way we love our wives is guided not by dominion but by loving them as Christ loves the church and gave himself for her. If we were better at that we would have fewer arguments about headship.

Original intent

So if God needed to curse in order to make it difficult for them to get their daily bread, does it logically follow that before that everything was blessed. If we look at that word, we see that it means something like endowed with the ability to do as intended or commanded. In other words, when He said be fruitful and multiply, the conditions had to be right, they had to be able to do just that. This curse on the ground isn't that it won't do what it was intended to do, but that creation would fight against the man's efforts rather than fully cooperate.

When Jesus curses the fig tree that isn't bearing fruit out of season in Matthew 21 does that mean that the original intent was that this tree would bear fruit at all times? It wasn't cooperating with the divine will. What does that have to say about our lives?

This cursing of the ground and the petition in the Lord's Prayer, "Give us this day our daily bread" seem related. While the curse of difficulty may be painful to us, the fact that we receive our daily bread is itself a blessing of mercy to us. How do we pray for those who hunger and how do we fit into God's economy of provision?

Responses to deconstructionism

Did God really say...? is the first question in the Bible, before that everything was fiat and imperative and then obedience. Beginning here, a new way of thinking enters the picture. It seems that this is now the only acceptable way. It is easier (post Genesis 11) to play that game, because now we have the additional element of language in the equation and the problem of the original languages and translation and transmission is introduced. Can you really know what God has said or meant?

When they were placed in the garden there was one prohibition but other than that, complete freedom. Not only complete freedom but also everything truly working together for good, no impediments, no difficulties. Eve's initial response to the temptation though shows us another side of human nature, the tendency to legalism. Not only should she not eat of the tree, "neither shall you touch it."

In uncertainty we tend to go one of these two ways, license or legalism. Either can be a destructive response. Religion tends to grow out of the soil of legalism or vice versa. Religion likes rules. Tolerance, a religion of its own, tends to embrace license. How do you deal with uncertainty?

Deconstructing Creation

Deconstructionism is essentially taking a text or an idea and tearing it apart and proving that its meaning is limited in time and space. Because it denies that there is true "meaning" it is notoriously difficult to define.

Creation, it seems, is a purely altruistic act on the part of God. He created a beautiful tableau out of formlessness and void and then brought that tableau into being by imbuing it with life. A deconstructionist would say that once He put us here and gave us dominion, everything has been a will to power and dominion, but what did God mean by dominion? The fact that he circumscribed anything as bad would be taken as further proof that from the beginning this was all about power. I would argue that any being great enough to create all this has the right to circumscribe its use and the terms of life.

Deconstructionism of this sort, rebellion against the intent of the author of life, isn't a new phenomenon. It is as old as Genesis 3 when Satan posed the first postmodern question, "Did God really say..."

Harder because of sin

Our lives are harder than they should be and the truth is that this is due to sin, others sin, our sin, just sin generally. Genesis tells us that it doesn't have to be this way, Jesus tells us that it won't always be this way. In fact, He says it can be better now but we should get over the idea that it is going to be perfect now.

The Beatitudes tell us how to live in a broken world, change our values. Blessed are the poor in spirit, mourners, the meek, the persecuted and the slandered? There isn't a single secular book that embraces that worldview. We are like John Mayer, we're waiting on the world to change. The Bible tells us it won't change for the better. The Bible is a fatalistic book when it comes to human nature.

What the Bible isn't is fatalistic with respect to humans. It tells us right up front that sin is a human problem and it only gets worse. In fact, it got so bad one time that God completely gave up on humanity and wiped it out and started all over again, but not entirely from scratch, like sourdough bread, a little of the old starter was saved. Human nature remained, sin and all. The Holy Spirit is God's plan for a better world now, changing us from the inside out, so that we can be salt and light, and point to that better world by our lives.

Consequences and Punishment

Do we really understand the difference between consequences and punishment? It must have been easier for Adam and Eve to understand that difference. Think about it, before sin entered the picture everything they did was blessed. Everything cooperated perfectly to produce as intended and there was nothing difficult about life. God had said they would die if they ate and then they didn't, but life got hard.

They had been given only the plants of the field to eat and now the ground was cursed and only by the sweat of his face would they be able to eat. It would still provide for them but it wouldn't be without effort on their part, the natural order of things would now be fighting against them. Opposition was introduced into the mix. Where things formerly worked together cooperatively now there would be difficulty.

When I see hard times in my life I get mad. First I blame other stuff or people, just like Adam and Eve. Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. When I realize that I am responsible for my own actions I then spend time working out what a fair punishment is when I can read right here in the beginning of the book that disobedience/sin, has a death penalty, period, end of sentence. Fair punishment isn't a Christan concept, it is a human concept. What we experience as difficulty in life is the consequence of sin, sometimes our own sin but generally the difficulty of life is the price for living at all. It should make us long for another world, the one the creator intended.

What if Adam said "No"

He was with her and he took and ate. What stopped him from saying "No, God really did say we would surely die." What the Lord said to him was, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree..." Adam had a problem, the first voice he ever heard, the voice of his creator, said one thing and Adam listened to the voice of the only "other" that existed, another created being, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, how stupid can you be!

I do it all the time, it is called sin. Eve can at least claim some level of deception, she hadn't heard God give the commandment, but Adam has no excuse. Certainly someone like me, raised in church, been to seminary, read the Bible who knows how many times, had the experience of being called by God, should know enough to keep me on the straight and narrow and never make a mistake, but I am like Paul, I desire to do what is right but have not the ability to do it. I need help to even want to do the right, much less to actually do it.

The bigger problem is that I spend way too much time listening to voices that bombard me all day every day and way too little time listening for God's voice. It requires too much of me, it requires me to actively listen and the other voices allow me to be more passive. Inertia is a powerful force in our lives. It takes determination to even hear God, must less obey. The cross is meant to break the hold of inertia over our lives.

In Sickness and in Health

I have been sick for a couple of days and to be honest I am a terrible sick person. I don't like to take medicine to treat symptoms, I don't understand why we don't treat the illness instead of the symptom. If they would put me in a hotel room with popsicles, Coca-Cola and some chicken noodle soup, turn on the TV to ESPN or old movies and leave me alone until I am well it would be best for everyone concerned.

Sickness wasn't part of the plan either. The thing we call the fall in Genesis 3 brought all this mess into play. The only thing good about being sick is that I spend more time praying than I normally do, most of it repetition for relief, but sometimes in there I can do a little bit of reflection. It generally takes me half a day to say, "OK, I am flat out and not going anywhere or doing anything so what do You want to talk about?"

Every time this happens (which is rarely) I am reminded how much time I spend being busy instead of being available, to God, to my family, to my parish... I realize that first day back when I try and do too much that those days spent apart from busy-ness are truly important and that into that time God has spoken and blessed me. Hearing his voice and responding to it rather than all the other voices that speak to us is critical. (see Genesis 3.17)

Fortunate Son

What God said was that if they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they would "surely die." What He didn't say was they would die from eating of that fruit or in that moment they would die. They had to fulfill their original design and purpose, procreating and beginning the work of filling the earth with more of their kind. For that reason, the animal(s) had to die for clothing. Innocence was lost and death became a reality to be dealt with in the earth.

It says something profound that God still was counting on the "human experiment" that the next step after sin wasn't to put the first two to death and really do a do-over with another pair. It would have been the simplest thing to do but we were made in His own image, which He is reluctant to destroy, we weren't made for destruction. Grace is the concept on which all human life rests from that moment forward.

I know in my own life I chose to follow my own path for a very long time in spite of knowing what God had planned. I had come to the belief that there was no way back to that path and still wake up each day thankful that I have a place in His kingdom at all, much less leading a church, I don't deserve it and God's grace is always amazing.

Do-overs

That is more or less what Jesus tells Nicodemus in John 3, you have to have a do-over. We call that being born again. For Nicodemus it meant that what was done to him 8 days after his birth wasn't good enough, he needed to be "born from above." In our tradition we baptize infants, but we baptize them into the household of faith, not into faith itself. Essentially their birth brings them into one family and in baptism we as the faith community adopt the child into our family and pledge to make sure that the child receives all the instruction we can give her. Our goal is to raise the child in the faith once delivered.

I wish that when we baptize infants they were good to go as far as salvation and eternal life are concerned, but I know the truth is that sin will have to be dealt with in their lives just like in mine, and if they don't turn to Jesus as the solution for that sin then I could pour buckets of water on them and it won't be enough.

We can't live in denial over sin. I wonder if Adam ever completely owned his sin? In Genesis 3 he deflected blame to "the woman you gave me." I hate that he says that because it is too often the way I think about my own life. I can make some excuses and I can envision scenarios where I could live a perfect life, completely devoted to God. Trouble is that I know that the reality is I am what I am and that's all that I am, just like Popeye. I need the do-over of rebirth from above if I am ever going to make any progress.

Better back in the day

Isn't that really the message of the first couple of chapters of the Book? If it is truly God's story then don't we have to read it from God's perspective? If we do, then we can see this as His looking back at the beginning of creation and saying I took a mess and made it something wonderful, something I was proud of, and then I created some people in my own image who were supposed to love it and care for it and do the work of filling all the empty space with others like themselves who would make the whole thing hum.

We could read the first sentence in the Bible as "In the beginning I made everything perfect." Everything was at it should be, the atmosphere cooperated and did what I told it to do, the seas obeyed me and retreated to their boundaries, the mountains rose up, the creatures did what they were told, the earth brought forth what I wanted and then I created something truly wonderful and gave it a couple of commands, be fruitful and multiply and stay away from one tree and as soon as the opportunity arose, they disobeyed me and nothing has been as good since that day.

I wish sometimes I could have a conversation with God and just ask the question, "When you created me, what did you want me to be?" I think He would say I was asking the wrong question, the question is who did I want you to be. I tend to think in wrong categories that way. God is more interested in who we are than what we are and He is always ready to work with us on that. I want to go back to the beginning and become who He hoped I would be, is that possible? Can we get a do-over?

Genesis

I have been studying the book of Genesis with a group of guys for the last 2+ years and it has shaped my faith and the way I read the rest of the Bible in some amazing ways. There are certain aspects of that book that have truly captivated my imagination. That book has much to say about the way things are on a macro level. It tells us why things aren't as we think they should be right in the very beginning of the book.

The first two chapters tell us that when it was created there was a way things were supposed to be, a world where the big concepts we all believe in are valid. We can wrestle with why truth, honesty, fairness and all the rest of those big ideas we have in common aren't realities in our world but at the end of the day, we have to come back to the problem of why, when we have a shared set of values these aren't the way of the world.

I can only come at this from the perspective of a believer, I believe God created all that is and all that was and that His judgment was, at the completion of His work, very good, that is, as it should be. There was nothing remotely random about creation and the notions we have about the way things should be were built into the system at the start. We are the problem in the system. There is much talk today about human based corruption of the system around the issue of global warming or climate change or whatever the preferred term du jour may be, but the truth is that all the problems in the world come down to a human problem called sin, which has degraded all life on the planet including our own.

The good news is that God has a solution for the problem, a solution planned from the beginning, but it requires eventually a new creation, one we can't spoil.

The Wisdom of Jesus

What wisdom does it take to get yourself a death sentence? It seems a ridiculous proposition but it actually required a great deal of wisdom. Everyone else had a plan for Jesus and it required great wisdom to follow God's plan instead. Sometimes it required Him to confront and confuse and other times it required Him to withdraw. Sometimes it required Him to do miraculous signs and other times to refuse to do the same thing.

In all this, the wisdom was in doing what His Father commanded rather than what people wanted or commanded. Can we learn anything from that? We have become obsessed with availability in our times, we have no time for solitude and reflection. Our lives are so busy listening to demands of others that we have no time to listen to God speaking to us. I am perhaps more guilty of this than anyone I know. The tyranny of the urgent with mobile phones and email seems to rule my life and I spend less time in prayer and study than I should.

In Mark's Gospel, in the first chapter, Jesus sets the tone for this life. After an all-night healing session he arose early in the morning and went to a desolate place to be alone in prayer. Many times in the Gospels Jesus does this either alone or with the three disciples closest to Him, Peter and James and John. It is important for us to have those times when we get away from all the noise and demands for our time and attention and be alone with the Lord in a desolate place if we will live as wise people rather than as puppets.

Can wisdom be possessed?

I like books, I buy them all the time, but it never occurs to me to go to a library and check one out. I would have to give it back and then if I liked it I would just buy it anyway, so what's the use? If anyone could become wise or possess great wisdom simply by reading books that contain wisdom, I would be a wise man indeed, but I'm not. Why is that?

I don't think wisdom can be possessed in the same way that I own books and it is far easier to write wise things and to think wise things than it is to live with wisdom. Wisdom comes from abiding in the Lord, it comes from doing what Paul says, to pray without ceasing, the way of abiding. He is the source of wisdom and I can't truly possess it. It is like the electric supply to my house, I get to enjoy its benefits so long as I am connected to it but if not, I am in the dark.

As the circumstances of my life change, my need for wisdom changes. New challenges come up all the time with job, family and relationships and I find that I can't always go back to what I have done before or some concept I have learned or read. Repeating "serenity now" doesn't work for example. (See Seinfeld)

I see Jesus living wisely and it is primarily because He didn't reduce people or situations to formulas, "Here is a blind man, this is what you do." He treated every situation as unique and was always able to answer wisely when confronted. I know He was God but there are certain things He laid down to become man and in that He knew better than we ever seem to know that if He was going to be man He better stay plugged into the source of wisdom if He was going to get safely to His destiny, the cross. Strange destination and it seems even stranger to think it required wisdom to get there, but think about the alternative destinations proposed for him by others and what was accomplished at the cross and you will see what I mean.