And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him. – Ephesians 6:9

Today’s Scripture Reading (March 3, 2018): Ephesians 6

Warren Jeffs, the President of the Fundamentalist Church of the Jesus Christ and the Latter-Day Saints and who is currently serving a prison sentence of life plus twenty years as a result of his conviction for child sexual assault, holds some terrifying beliefs beyond his abhorrent sexual practice. One of these beliefs is that “Cain was cursed with black skin and he is the father of the Negro people. He has great power, can appear and disappear. He is used by the devil, as a mortal man, to do great evils.” The comment somehow sounds more like a plot line from the Fox Television show “Lucifer” than a theological statement from someone who is supposed to have studied the Bible. This comment about Cain is an extension of Jeff’s belief that “the black race is the people through which the devil has always been able to bring evil unto the earth.”

Logically, there are gaping holes in Jeffs’s statement of belief concerning the origin of the races. Maybe one of the most obvious is that, if we are to accept the biblical timeline as it is presented in the Bible, then there is no reason for descendants of Cain to be still alive on the earth. Cain himself, according to Jeffs’s theory of the power given to this son of Adam, might have been able to survive the flood. But his descendants would not have survived, unless of course, Jeffs is arguing that Cain continues to have sex with white women, the female descendants of Noah, producing black offspring. All of this seems to stretch of the imagination beyond the bounds of reason, even a biblical reason that allows for a spiritual existence.

But maybe the bigger issue with Jeffs’s racially charged statements are found in statements regarding the equality of all people that are presented in the Bible and especially in the Christian Testament. I suspect that Jeffs might argue that Black people might be excluded from this statement of Paul, and others like it, but the push-back is that Jewish thought only conceived of two races, the Jews and then all of the rest of us, regardless of color. By Jewish law, Jews were not supposed to enslave their own people, so the proper use of the term “slave” would strictly indicate the “non-Jewish” races, which would include darker skinned people. Paul argues that our master as slaves is the same as the master of our slave owner and that since we share the same Master, there is equality – nothing should divide us.

God did place a mark on Cain, protecting his life so that he would have to live out his days on earth remembering the sin that he had committed against his brother Abel. But the curse was God’s, and there is no evidence that this curse had anything to do with Satan, or with Cain being used by Satan. And if the story of the Great Deluge (Flood) is true, and the story is repeated in several different cultures as we would expect if the story was true, then all of Cain’s descendants have long been swept from the face of the earth. All of us, regardless of color, according to the Bible, are descendants of Seth, and Noah. And we serve one Master. We are equal and, under God, we are united. There can be no difference.    

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Philippians 1