Today’s
Scripture Reading (February 22, 2012): Genesis 4
There seems to be a natural escalation to life. What once was enough,
doesn’t seem to be enough anymore. Records are set and then need to be broken.
The standard is lifted. It is the story of the most of our household
conveniences. Originally they were billed as time savers. Could you imagine a
device that could suck up the dirt instead of making you sweep it up? A room
could be cleaned in a portion of the time it would take to sweep it. And the
advertising was correct, except that our standard for what we considered to be
clean began to change. In the end, we started to spend more time vacuuming our
houses than we would have ever spent sweeping. It is a repeated phenomenon of
the age.
But maybe a more radical change is that what was once considered bad
changes over time to be something good. And that is exactly what has happened
to Lamech. Cain was found guilty of killing his brother Abel. His punishment
was that he was made a wanderer, roaming from place to place. But it was a
punishment that Cain thought was more than he could bear. God makes Cain’s life
more valuable than anyone else’s, protecting him to live out his sentence and
remember what he had done. Cain’s pain became real, and permanent.
Now, as we jump ahead a few generations and we meet Lamech. Lamech
commits the same crime as Cain, he is guilty of murder. But unlike Cain, he
professes that he had a reason to kill – he had been insulted. And then he
makes a claim for himself – one that had previously only used by God for Cain.
Lamech seems to take the curse of God and use it as a blessing for his own life
- and he multiplies it by ten. But now, what had been a mark of shame given to
Cain by God had become a bragging point brought on Lamech by himself.
Everything had changed. I think that he women that gathered on the lawn of the
University discussing Eve (See yesterday’s blog on Genesis 3:6) would have
approved.
That kind of change can happen whenever we stop seeing this world the way
that God sees it. The punishment of Cain was punishment only because Cain
respected the heart of God – and he wanted to please God. By the time of
Lamech, all had changed. Lamech didn’t care what it was on God’s heart.
Seeing the world with the heart of God can lead us into pain, because
God feels pain when he looks at this world. But the pain is worth it, and puts
us in a position to make the change in this world that God wants to see, and to
avoid a repeat of the sin (there is no record of Cain ever murdering anyone
again.) Even Cain had a chance to do good as he wandered around the earth,
because he was sensitive to God’s heart. That was a place that Lamech would never
find.
Tomorrow’s
Scripture Reading: Genesis 5
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