The Cain in Us

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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 21^st 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!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day.

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[1] Title Image:  Courtesy of Pixabay.com

After the Anger is Done

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Wednesday, March 30, 2016

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And “don’t sin by letting anger control you.” Don’t let the sun go down while you are still angry,  

Ephesians 4:26^(NLT)

It’s hard….really hard to make sense of the immensity of anger we have seen played out on the world stage in recent years.  There seems to be no end in sight to the news cycles of suicide bombings, terrorist outbursts and hostage situations.  Of late, I pause before turning on the TV to catch the morning news, wondering if I really want to know.  And I turn it on anyway – anxiously wanting to know if another poor deluded soul has pulled the trigger on his detonator.

Growing up in the 1950’s the tempest of World War II and Korea were fading, but the practice drills of hiding under your school desk in the event of a Communist nuclear attack, and the looming specter of Vietnam, ensured you could never quite feel safe.

In the last three decades anger, and its accompanying violence, has moved into schoolyards, market places and seemingly never-ending rounds of blood-splatter on the nightly news.  And, as if watching the results of anger isn’t bad enough when displayed on our 60” TV screens, the current political debate features mirror images of anger and hatred with a kind of “civil terrorism” as Republicans and Democrats pick each other apart.

It’s Cain and Abel without end.

And this leaves me wondering – what happens after the anger?  Really – what happens after the anger is completely spent, and the violence has wreaked its vengeance, and jihad has toppled the Great Satan? 

What then?  To what end will we have come?  And is it really an end?

The theological answer of course, is “no” – it’s not an end, because every act of violence must have its accounting before God.  Nothing is really over until God has spoken.

No amount of killing one another is ever enough to completely satisfy human anger, lust, or greed, whether it is done on the battlefield, or in the board room.  And anger’s backwash of Occupy Wall Street, or Main Street, or blowing-up the train station is just anger on a higher scale of madness.  We are simply playing-out once again the days of Noah, where every person does what he or she wants.

Humankind has not learned much since the fiasco in the Garden of Eden; despite our Smartphones and space exploration, we are still rather inept at getting it, that God isn’t pleased with our anger and selfish ways.  To put it in the words of those highly-revered social commentators of the 1960’s, Sonny and Cher Bono, the beat goes on. 

And the person who has not learned to control his own anger runs the risk of adding to the beat never stopping:

Control your temper, for anger labels you a fool.  Ecclesiastes 7:9^(NLT)

The fact is we cannot do anything about other people’s anger, or their actions.  We can, however, trust in God and not be demoralized by what we see in a culture that is headed for destruction.

And we can love. 

Jesus said it in so many ways, but the one that speaks strongest to me this morning is this:

But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.  1 John 4:8^(NLT)

And this:

“Don’t be afraid of those who want to kill your body; they cannot touch your soul.                 Matthew 10:28a^(NLT)

For You Today

Does the crisis news of the day make you angry?  Don’t let the sun go down on it; confront that anger – let God make your heart glad and peaceful.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road today…and have a blessed day!

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[1] Title Image:  By Andrew A. Shenouda from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (It's the Holy Week!), via Wikimedia Commons