“Fiona!” To come back! Where are you? I went to the can, and when I came back, you were gone!
A shirtless young man with unruly hair emerged from the trees and crossed the old railroad bridge, now a jogging path above the clear waters of the South Fork, while I remained rooted to the spot. I loved picnicking and swimming here, before the tents started popping up. Still shouting, no longer out of anger or worry, I couldn’t tell, the man crossed the bridge and disappeared into the woods.
A slightly less scruffy guy, with a prosthesis, stopped his bike on the bridge. “Everything will be fine,” he assured me hoarsely. “She’s his girlfriend. I also lived in these woods, but I was never a meth addict. He had lost his leg in a forklift accident, he explained, and had taken a while to get back on track. These woods were within walking distance of a food bank so were a great place to camp.
“Sin awaits you”
What does the book of Genesis say about “modern” problems like drug addiction, tent camps, and broken families? The second half of the book tells the story of the gypsy caravan clan that became Israel, and features incest, polygamy, sibling rivalry, sex for mandrakes, and mass murder. But the first violent crime, Genesis 4 informs us, took place between brothers, after which the killer was banished to the bush. God had warned Cain:
“Sin lies in wait for you. You must master it, otherwise it will master you.
For some, “master” is a trigger word, evoking chattel slavery of the 19th century. But Adam and Eve had been given joint control of Nature, as we have seen. God gave humanity a task to accomplish and desired “mastery” even after eating the “forbidden fruit.” Without self-control, even if we gain the world, we lose our soul, and perhaps the shirts we wear and those of our loved ones.
Control is clearly slipping out of the hands of this generation.
A thousand people live in the storm sewers beneath the city of Las Vegas. They are sometimes called “Mole People”, although the term can also refer to those who live in the subways or other post-apocalyptic holes of New York City. In total, about half a million Americans are camped in the streets, under bridges or in the woods: drug addicts, the mentally ill, those who have no one to welcome them.
Jesus echoed the Creator by bringing order to chaos.
In some ways, tens of millions of children have suffered an even greater fall than Cain and Abel, having lost a father or mother to divorce. These children are more vulnerable to a range of social ills: drug addiction, dropping out of school, early pregnancies, suicide. Today, even the fundamental biological notions concerning men and women escape us.
“Don’t we just need God’s grace? Shouldn’t we emphasize “being filled with the Spirit,” as Paul said, instead of “strive” after “works”? Some Christians talk as if prayer miraculously eliminates all the “sin” centers in our brain (lust, addiction, laziness, despair, pride). Being “born again,” we no longer need “good works” to please the Lord.
But in the same passage, Paul tells his correspondents: “Do not get drunk with wine.” I suspect he would have also warned his followers about meth, fentanyl, and weed. He knew how difficult it is to overcome addictions: “Oh wretch that I am! Who can free me from this body of sin and death?
Mastery brings freedom, not slavery
God told Cain to control himself. “Master” here implies freedom, not slavery. A “master craftsman” skillfully shapes beauty, like a creator created in the image of God. Even non-Christians are capable of remarkable feats of self-control. Medical missionary and scientist Paul Brand was amazed by the Hindus’ ability to control pain. While China was plagued by opium addiction in the early 20th century, addiction is now much rarer in East Asia than in post-Christian America.
GK Chesterton compared Christianity to a lion tamer. The Gospel places in one cage many powerful ideas which, if detached from the bonds of Christian teaching as a whole, wreak havoc. The danger of “grace without works” is that it can encourage a culture to lose its sense of shame and public disincentives. Cain lived in a society without prisons, without walls, without truancy officers or school suspensions.
So he killed his brother. When asked where Abel was, he replied, “I don’t know.” (Perhaps honestly mystified by human death.) Then he asked a question that might have received an excellent answer, if only he had stopped to listen:
“Am I my brother’s keeper?
Yes, Jesus will answer later, you are. This is why you were put on Earth: maintain the gardensand love your Creator and your neighbor created in His image, even if you are a West Bank Palestinian (“Samaritan”) who encounters a beaten and bloodied Jewish victim of terrorism on the side of the road.
Glimmers of divine grace
But God is also your guardian. So he put a “mark of Cain” on you. It was an act of mercy, to protect you from reprisals. Of course, this brand could also serve as “social reinforcement.” Ancient American literature tells the story of a woman who committed adultery and had to wear a “scarlet letter” on her clothing.
Such “shame” shocks us today. But the Puritans might be even more horrified by the fact that millions of their descendants barely knew their father. And among the drug addicts crossing our bridges, the young men in gangs and the women on welfare, many were raised by single mothers.
Jesus saved a woman caught in the act of adultery by publicly shaming those who planned to stone her to death. Then he said to him, “Go and sin no more.” » He didn’t promise a miraculous change of inclinations (although that sometimes happens), or provisions in case she got by on the bed money. But he left a saving mark in his heart: “This man protected me from a painful public death. Now he is calling me to change the way I live.
Jesus thus protected this woman from retaliation (as God protected Cain), from DV and from raising a child alone. He also protected his children from the many disadvantages and dangers of being raised in a single-family home.
Sin lies in wait for us. “Stigma,” “shame,” and other forms of social pressure have acquired negative connotations and can be cruel. But at best, they help quell bad impulses. Divine grace often comes from others, who motivate us.
The Second Adam was more than Tom Bombadil, who could not be mastered by the Ring of Power, or Gandalf, who feared its mastery. Jesus demonstrated universal mastery in part to help us “take control” as well.
Jesus and his disciples were walking by a lake, not a river, when he encountered a man possessed by a “legion” of demons. The man’s shirt was also off and his hair was messy. He scared people and lived alone.
Jesus performed a miracle for this man.
Jesus brings order to chaos
Skeptics often view miracles as arbitrary and senseless acts, as if God himself were undisciplined, carelessly throwing his own rules aside, without rhyme or reason. But “God is not a God of disorder,” Paul says. If people are running around naked, drooling, or barking like dogs, such “signs” and “wonders” are not from the Holy Spirit. “The minds of the prophets are subject to the control of the prophets. »
And because all spirits were subject to Jesus, he freed the fool from those who haunted him. The villagers came and found him “dressed and sane”. (Whereas, like the disciples of Jim Jones, demons walked into a herd of pigs and committed mass revolutionary suicide, winning the Devil’s Darwin Prize.)
Genesis says that the world began “formless and void.” Then God separated light from darkness – the mastered elements, before calling us to master ourselves and our world.
Jesus echoed the Creator by bringing order to chaos. Like a farmer or a fisherman, he multiplied food for the hungry. Like a doctor, he restored order to bodies. As a teacher, he organized minds toward the truth. When political intriguers asked, “Should we stone this adulterous woman?” or “Should we pay taxes to Caesar?” Jesus revealed mastery by combining mercy and justice, rule and freedom, in words that reorganized society: “He who is without sin, cast the first stone!” » “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. »
Without the Master, we are like sheep without a shepherd
But Jesus first controlled himself by fasting in the desert. When latter-day Cains shouted “Crucify!” » as the Second Abel, Jesus did not call upon a legion of angels to save Himself. His restraint was also a miracle of self-control. His disciple Peter told Christians to “make every effort” to acquire knowledge, and to that, “add self-control,” making self-discipline a program at least as rigorous as obtaining, say , a “master’s degree” in marine biology. .
Addiction to drugs and screens, homelessness and violence are only the most obvious signs that after leaving our Master, we have become like sheep without a shepherd.
We need loving social pressure, as well as God’s grace, to regain control. Women from across the mountains spoke in church last Sunday about how they were freed from their addictions at a Teen Challenge center. “God is always creating,” as I once heard someone say near a volcano in Hawaii. He creates through us, as we practice the self-control that Cain neglected.
But Cain and Abel were not only brothers. They also represented feuding tribes: “the farmer and the cowherd,” as Rogers and Hammerstein would say. Next we’ll see what Genesis has to say to the Red States, the Blue States, and other feuding tribes.
David Marshall, educator and writer, holds a doctorate in Christian thought and Chinese tradition. His most recent book is The Case of Aslan: Evidence for Jesus in the Land of Narnia.