About a week ago I was reading Genesis 4. I had the same issues with it that I've had for the last several years. The question I invariably ask about this passage is "How was Cain supposed to know that his sacrifice wasn't going to be acceptable to God?" I've heard several pastors and professors explain why Cain would have known.
God would have told Adam and he would have, in turn, taught his children Cain and Abel.
God was known so much more intimately at that point, they would have known.
Well, we don't know exactly how they would have know, but we know that God is just. Judging without informing would not be just, so they must have somehow known.
I hate all of these reasons. None of them even come close to assuaging my (or maybe all of ours) fear that we are somehow doing it all wrong and God is angry at us and we don't know why, because he simply didn't tell us. Maybe, we think, that's why he hasn't healed my loved one of an incurable disease. That must be why, we think, we still can't find our "calling" in life, why the neon sign hasn't shown up for us when all our friends seem to see theirs.
Perhaps though, this all just exposes a deeper desire, a unacknowledged part of our worldview. We want to understand God. And we don't want to have to trust him. If there had been just a couple verses about how he told Adam what kinds of sacrifices were acceptable, then no one would question this. We want to use our own minds to conclude that God was, in fact, just. Which is ridiculous idea when you really think about it because God is the supreme judge. So even if we disagreed with the judgement, we'd still be wrong.
But I digress. We don't really want to trust God, because we are afraid of it. It feels far to uncertain. We want him to fit into the box we've constructed for him. And in some ways he does. He reveals himself to us in the ways we will recognize. In the West we want to reason our way from A to B to C to D of God's movement and choices and evaluate each of them against our standards for how we think God should work. If something doesn't fit our understanding of God, then it must not have been God. But then I come across passages like Genesis 4, and I can't argue that clearly God does this. But it doesn't fit my expectations of God.
How often do we really stop to consider that maybe we don't completely understand who God is and how he moves? What about speaking in tongues? And supernatural healing? And women in ministry? And what about evil in the world? Where is God in the awful moments like rape and murder?
No matter how much I read from theologians and pastors and the Christian community, nothing ever fully answers these questions.
I think it's good to try to answer them, to examine the bible in order to understand who God is and how he moves. But we must never hold so closely to our understanding of God that we don't accept the way he is revealing himself to us now, the way that he wants to speak to your heart, to my heart.
No comments:
Post a Comment