Thursday, July 27, 2017

Was Cain Jealous?

It is impossible to know what Cain was thinking about himself and his brother Abel as they were about to bring their offerings. Many note the jealousy and envy that appear from his actions later in the episode. Part of me wonders whether or not he saw himself as the seed of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent. He was, after all, the first son, and Eve's elation at his birth suggests a kind of hope that this might have been the case.

He took to himself his father Adam's vocation, which is suggestive in this direction. Perhaps in his approach to God through the offerings of the fruit of the ground He saw himself as poised to re-enter the garden cloaked in his father's vestments to do battle with the serpent?

God's response to Cain and his offering was an indication that he was not the one (whether or not my conjecture accurately reflects the meaning of the text). Abel's, however, was accepted, because he showed through his offering that he waited for another through whom man would be called back to the Garden of Eden.

Perhaps this was another reason why Cain was so angry. Delusions of grandeur?


God's Grace in Unexpected Ways

Adam and Eve were promised divinity and with it the freedom to shape their own destiny and order their own lives. The serpent told them that upon eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would not die (Gen 3:4), but, in a moment of dreadful irony, he said they would be like God (Gen 3:5). It took no time at all for them to realize that they had heeded the wrong voice, and followed the wrong counsel. The emptiness of the serpent’s words were put on full display as the man and the woman sought to cover their nakedness with the leaves of a fig tree (Gen 3:7). Hearing the sound of the Lord, they discovered to their dismay that He had come to His garden. The words which they had so quickly dismissed now loomed large once again: “in the day you eat from it, you will die.” If the serpent had lied about them becoming gods, then what would that mean for his bold and convincing declaration that they would not die? The only thing that remained for them was a fearful expectation of judgment. 

The Garden of Eden was a place abundant in beauty and full of rich provision which God created to be a place in which He might openly meet and freely fellowship with Adam and Eve (Gen 2:4-25), but now the man and the woman retreated into the shadows and foliage of the paradisal garden in a vain effort to use paradise to obscure themselves from the presence of the Lord (Gen 3:8). He sought them, found them, and then proceeded to query them. However, the death that they thought would attend the presence of God did not come, or, at least, it did not come in the way that they perhaps imagined, or the way in which the divine threat suggested. It came to them in a way heretofore unimagined in the form of tunics of skin with which God had clothed them (Gen 3:21) to prepare them to endure the life of exile from the Garden of Eden (Gen 3:22-24) that would soon befall them. God clothed them in the skins of an animal whose life had been exchanged for theirs. Cloaked in this reminder of both their transgression and the hope of restoration and renewal, God exiled them from the Garden of Eden so that they might live. With this the tragedy of a paradise lost is ameliorated to some degree by a promise of restoration through a seed who would come to undo the horror wrought by the serpent (Gen 3:15).