Cain--Not a Good Start to the Human Race: Why We Need To Be Born Again

It is remarkable, in a negative sense, that the very first person born of a woman, born of human parents, turned out to be the murderer of his own brother. I never really thought about that until rather recently. That, Cain's evil action, is a horrible way to begin this new species which God created to be His temple and His very spouse. I don't think we usually give this fact much thought; but I find it shocking. I think there is much to understand and learn from the fact that he, the very first one down the shoot of this great, new model, turned out so badly.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, Saint John refers to Cain as the son of the devil. I think he is speaking in more than a metaphorical sense. According to my understanding of the first chapters of Genesis, both the idea and the person of Cain was conceived based on what the serpent gave to the woman: both the information of how to have children together with his attitude of distrust in God. In a true, non-physical, way, the serpent is the father of Cain. All that the evil one seeks to do is destroy what God holds dear; he has nothing but disdain and total and complete hatred for all things human for we were made to be God's spouse. The serpent is the perfect archetypical murderer who Jesus called the father of lies and a murderer from the beginning. It is no wonder he assisted in the conception of a murderer.

Cain's physical father doesn't get off all that well either. Since, as the head of the family, he allowed it to follow a path God commanded them not to go down, since he allowed it to seek after life in distrust of God who made them, since he turned his back on his Creator and Lord and turned and trusted in the wisdom of the serpent, since he led his family to a deep spiritual adultery with his true spouse, God, the man, Adam, was a murderer for he spiritually and in many ways physically murdered himself and his family, the entire human race with his fall from grace. Both of Cain's fathers were murderers. I don't believe that that reality forced him to become a murderer; it simply makes it more understandable.

God did not give up on Cain either before he murdered his brother or after he did so. God reached out to him and tried to bring him back; Cain chose another way, his own way of self-glorification. He refused to be a temple of God and instead chose to build monuments to himself. He and his family sought to make a name for themselves; they sought to make their own truth; they sought to make their own life; they sought to make their own rules and their own morality; they sought to make their own fulfillment and heaven; they sought anything except God and put everything else in His place; they cut themselves off from the tree of life, from trusting in God the source of life, and so they built a culture of death...and died.

Saint John reduces the world down to a decision each of us makes between joining the children of God or the children of the devil: "Little children, let no one deceive you. He who does right is righteous, as he is righteous. He who commits sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil" 1 John 3:7-8.

The work of the devil was to steal the spouse of God; he did that and held humanity under his cruel bondage with seemingly no hope for survival. Children were supposed to come to us virginally having God as the father of the child (not in any sexual way, but as a gift from above). Because of the Fall, all children come from man and are not children of God. The way grace works is that it comes from God; by generation on our own, humans are incapable of handing on grace. What is called Original Sin is not some added on punishment God thought up but a natural consequence of how reality works: humans have no natural power to pass on grace, which is God's life. God has to pass on God's life; He does have us share in the passing on of grace to others, but grace comes from Him. The work of God, then, is to restore humanity back to grace and make us His children and spouse once more.

So the Fall created the condition we call Original Sin for due to the Fall, everyone is born a son of man. No one is born a son of God. Because of the Fall, all children come about through sexual relations and are children of men and in some sense children of the devil. This is why Jesus teaches that we need to be born from above, born again, born of God. Our first birth was a birth into the bondage of sin and satan, and our inheritance is only what our hating father, satan, wants to give us. God provides us a way to be born again so that we can actually become His children. That Way is His Son Jesus who allows us to die with Him in His crucifixion and so rise with Him in His resurrection to become a new creation.

Without God we are self-consumed seekers of our own life and glory, and the fruit of such soil and of such a tree is what we are in ourselves, lifeless dust and death. With God we are self-sacrificing lovers who seek to please our True Spouse, The Living God, and bear abundant and life-giving fruit for the healing of the nations. Without God we make ourselves a worthless object, and we make everyone else around us merely an object for our use and pleasure to be disposed of when we are through. With God we lose ourselves, become His spouse, re-personalize everyone around us and inspire them to live life abundantly as the companion of the Living God; we inspire them to realize the true dignity that he and every human person has as a precious vessel made to be the abode of God, the God who lays down His life for love of His beloved. God makes us imitators of Himself, a self-sacrificing lover who gives life to the world. How awesome is our calling.

Thanks for reading and for your prayers.
Copyright 2007.

Wife Stealing

I ended yesterday saying I would say a word about wife stealing. Wife stealing is a particular form of adultery, there being other forms of adultery. The theme of wife stealing comes up rather often, especially in the first half of the book of Genesis. I think this rather common theme has its origin in the Fall, and, as I see it, whatever happened at the Fall is repeated throughout history. The die was cast at the Fall, and all the problems we have today and all the problems people have had throughout history, have their source and origin in the Fall. If we clearly understand the Fall, we can more clearly understand ourselves, others and history, not to mention all that Jesus did and how He heals us today. Jesus is the precise antidote to our precise problems.

When the man and the woman disobey the singular prohibition from God and trust in the wisdom of the serpent and have sexual relations in order to have a child, they forsake God and cling to the evil one. It is a form of spiritual adultery. This theme is repeated many times throughout Scripture with the image of Israel playing the harlot after other gods. From the man and the woman's perspective, they were unfaithful to their true spouse, God, and are adulterers. From the serpent's perspective, he is a wife stealer. Man was made to be the spouse of God, but satan enters the picture and entices him away from God. The serpent deceives the man and woman into trusting him and his wisdom, and so he captures the heart of the spouse of God and takes her away with himself.

The primal spouse-stealer is satan. The end result of the Fall is that God has lost His bride. The rest of salvation history is God's work to get her back, to redeem her from her oppressive, murderous master. God goes so far as to die for us in order to win us back to Himself. Satan's goal is to keep us united to himself, cut off from God, and without hope of eternal life with God in heaven; he simply wants to destroy us. God wants us to be fully alive and happy with Him and all the angels and saints without end.

I will save giving examples of spouse-stealing for now; the point I want to make about it beyond what I have already written is that spouse-stealing as adultery is tantamount to murder. I believe that much of the Bible is written in a parallel format known as chiasm; the most important points of a chiasm are located in the middle or heart. The format is something like: A, B, C, D, E, E', D', C', B', A', with E and E' being the heart of the argument. What is at the heart of the Ten Commandments, position five and six? They are not to murder and not to commit adultery. They are the heart of the Ten Commandments, and represent exactly what was most wrong with the Fall: our first parents committed adultery in relation to God, and they, in a real sense, murdered the human race.

In many respects, murder and adultery were basically the same thing in the mind of the Jews, and rightly so. The laws of the Old Testament consider the two sins as being very similar receiving the same sort of punishment. To a certain extent, they are two sides of the same coin. And this mentality toward these two deadly sins is precisely the same as the Ten Commandments themselves since they are in the fifth and sixth position. Adultery and murder go hand in hand (a good example from the Bible is, of course, the story of David and Bathsheba), and so today these two sins have been running rampant and virtually unchecked. This is remarkably so when considering fornication as a form of adultery and abortion as the murder of the unborn. We are a society of fornicators, adulterers, and murderers (even if we ourselves have not had an abortion, so many have participated in this grave sin by supporting and defending it as a so-called right).

I'll continue these thoughts another time.

Thanks for reading.
Copyright 2007.