Monday, April 16, 2018
So now we
can tell who are children of God and who are children of the devil. Anyone who does not live righteously and does
not love other believers does not belong to God. This is the message you have heard from the
beginning: We should love one another. We must not be like Cain, who belonged to the
evil one and killed his brother. And why
did he kill him? Because Cain had been
doing what was evil, and his brother had been doing what was righteous. So don’t be surprised, dear brothers and
sisters, if the world hates you. If
we love our brothers and sisters who are believers, it proves that we have
passed from death to life. But a person
who has no love is still dead. Anyone
who hates another brother or sister is really a murderer at heart. And you know that murderers don’t have eternal
life within them. We know what real love
is because Jesus gave up his life for us. So we also ought to give up our lives for our
brothers and sisters. 1 John 3:10-16(NLT)
Of course John was
not telling us anything new here; actions have always spoken much louder than
words. The Apostle was making a less
than subtle point that you can know what’s in a person’s heart by that person’s
actions. For instance, it doesn’t do
much good for someone who has just clobbered me with a rock to tell me he loves
me as a brother. His actions have already
spoken, so his words are more a cover-up tactic, so I will not retalliate. At the least it is mumbled platitudes to
aswage the clobberer’s guilt!
The fact that Cain
dwells
in all of us is a troubling reality. We
hear so much these days of violence:
school shootings, murders, bombings, hi-jacked airliners, cars driven
into crowds, drug-trafficking, slavery, nerve gas, nuclear arsenals, threats…it
is Cain who walks our streets in the 21st century. And the heart of
Cain is not sick with mental imbalance; it is sick with the absence of love.
John says that
Cain’s motive in killing his brother was a matter of lacking love. His anger grew because Cain was evil,
refusing to act like he was created – in the image of God. Seeing the actions of his brother, Abel, and
his obedience towards God, stoked that anger like water on a grease fire.
We are thousands
of years removed from that first murder, but we have taken this practice to
levels of heinousness which would probably make even Cain turn over in his
grave. It is so commonplace to hear on
the nightly news of another shooting that we hardly blink. We read in news accounts of not only the
killing, but desecrating of bodies and multiple murder killing sprees. Children are the most innocent of
victims. Men and women casually, sociopathically,
rid themselves of unwanted fetal tissue (more accurately, aborting and killing
a living soul), and they call it family planning.
In the name of
peace we build bigger, more powerfully-destructive killing devices, and go to
war, dropping bombs with such regularity it is amazing anyone in any government
on earth can keep a straight face when announcing a so-called peace
initiative.
However, aside
from the brutality of physical murder, there is its symbiotic twin, the
emotional destruction of hope in another human soul. The Cain in us begins young. With social media tools in hand, children
bully and isolate themselves from not only authority, but any kind of accountability. It is typical to see Cain rising in a
two-year old who strikes his playmate when she steals his rubber ducky. But, left unchecked, this anger grows on
through youth and adulthood. The results
are not pretty!
But there is
light. The Apostle said real
love is what Jesus showed us on the cross. He gave up an eternal existance of perfection
to take our sinful Cain ways to an altar of sacrifice. At Calvary Jesus took the hate of the world
to hell, and made Heaven a possibility for anyone who will trust him. Jesus took Abel’s place.
For You Today
Obedience to God’s
will and ways always makes you a brother to Abel. Cain doesn’t like being reminded of his evil
by Abel’s goodness. If you will follow
Jesus today, get used to living on that edge, loving Cain; it’s not
comfortable, but it’s the only way to deal with the Cain in you!
No comments:
Post a Comment