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
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