life and rebellion: a tale of two mothers

I’ve been studying the early chapters of Genesis rather extensively as part of my BibleProject class over the last couple of months. It may seem like an odd place to find foreshadowings of the Christmas story, but not if you’re a Bible nerd. After all, everything begins at the beginning.

This verse, in particular, has been making me think:

Now the man had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain, and she said, “I have gotten a manchild with [the help of] the Lord.”
- Genesis 4:1

One reason I’ve been dwelling on this verse so much is just the obvious translational liberties that have been taken with it—well-intended, but still risky. The bracketed words, “the help of,” do not exist in the Hebrew; they’re added by the translators in an effort to make the sentence make more sense to us. And the word “manchild” is actually just the ordinary Hebrew word for “man.” No reference to a child.

So let’s read it without those alterations:

Now the man had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain, and she said, “I have gotten a man with the Lord.”

The verb phrase have gotten is related to the same word used of God to denote His status as the source, Creator, and possessor of all things. And the word with, while it could mean with the Lord’s help as the translators have suggested, can also just mean in proximity to the Lord—or similar to what the Lord has done.

So there’s at least one alternative way of understanding Eve’s words: “I have made a man, just like God.” She whose name means “life” may have read a bit too much of her own press and believed that she really could create life, just like Yahweh.

Whether Eve saw Cain as a gift she acquired with the Lord’s help or as a boastworthy achievement that fulfilled her deep-seated longing to be “like God” (Genesis 3:5), we can make one educated guess: She was hopeful that this man would fulfill the words of the serpent’s curse and deliver the death-blow to the sin and deception she had welcomed into Paradise.

The Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you more than all cattle, and more than every beast of the field; on your belly you will go, and dust you will eat all the days of your life; and I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel.”
- Genesis 3:14-15

Could Cain be that victorious seed? Could Eve’s ill-advised grasp for power and wisdom on her own terms be reversed, and righteousness restored to God’s image-bearers?

No.

Instead, the man Eve created—the son of her fallen flesh—became the father of hatred, jealousy, and murder on the earth. Although his parents were the ones who fell, Cain himself is the first human to draw his first breath in a fallen state. When he raises his hand to kill his brother Abel, he kills all the remaining goodness in his life as well—his identity, his work, his relationships within his family—and is separated forever from the face of the Lord.

Eve goes on to bear more children and receive them with greater humility (Genesis 4:25), but the serpent lives on—and with him, thousands of years of brutality and bloodshed, jealousy and murder, hatred and division.

Until another young woman, whose name paradoxically derives from the word for “rebellion,” meets a being from the spiritual realm.

And the angel [Gabriel] said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and give birth to a son, and you shall name Him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David; and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and His kingdom will have no end.” But Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; for that reason also the holy Child will be called the Son of God.” … And Mary said, “Behold, the Lord’s bond-servant; may it be done to me according to your word.”
- Luke 1:30-35, 38a

Eve “created” a man through the flesh. Mary submitted herself as a vessel for the Son of Man through divine conception.

Eve thought her son would make her like God. Mary’s Son would be God Incarnate.

Eve hoped her son would rescue her from the consequences of her sin. Mary’s Son would wipe out the sins of all humanity.

Eve’s son became the father of murder and the instrument of the first human death. Mary’s Son became the Resurrection and the Life.

Eve’s son was the first in a long, long line of disappointments who never overcame the wiles of the serpent—but Mary’s Son was the One who, though wounded in the battle, finally crushed him.

And Mary said:

“My soul exalts the Lord,
And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.
For He has had regard for the humble state of His bond-servant;
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed.
For the Mighty One has done great things for me;
And holy is His name.
And His mercy is to generation after generation
Toward those who fear Him.
He has done mighty deeds with His arm;
He has scattered those who were proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones,
And has exalted those who were humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
And sent the rich away empty-handed.
He has given help to His servant Israel,
In remembrance of His mercy,
Just as He spoke to our fathers,
To Abraham and his descendants forever.”

- Luke 1:46-55

The woman named Life became the mother of death. The woman named Rebellion became the mother of salvation.

Where history would look back on Eve as one accursed, Mary knew from before Jesus was even born that she would be remembered as blessed among women, for she was considered worthy to bear and raise her own Savior—and not through any doing of her own, only surrender to the work of the Lord.

on coping with the Bible

I’ve just started the “Introduction to the Hebrew Bible” course from the BibleProject (it’s completely free, and extremely high quality in both content and production, if you are interested in taking it!), and I decided that as a verbal/written processor, my best bet for retaining what I learn in the course will be to write something about it as often as I can. So here’s a scribbling of thoughts from Session 1, titled, “What on earth is the Hebrew Bible?”

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I’ve been talking to an old friend and longtime spiritual mentor about various theological and Biblical questions lately, and one idea that he raised—and I keep thinking about—is that so much of pastoral ministry can often be spent “undoing” what adults were taught about God, Jesus, and/or the Bible as children. Wouldn’t it be amazing if that were not the case? What would it look like to teach children who God is and how to handle His Word in a way that wouldn’t need to be deconstructed later?

Tim Mackie echoed the sentiment in Session 1 of the class and I liked the way he put it: Christian children’s media is often the clearest revelation of the “coping strategies” we use to deal with our discomfort around the hard parts of the Bible. We rewrite Old Testament narratives as hero-villain stories or moralistic tales, or we turn the Bible into a theological encyclopedia, or we use it to proof-text doctrines we’ve already decided are correct, or we cherrypick the inspirational bits to put on calendars and coffee mugs—all to avoid dealing with the actual text as a whole.

Why? Because the text as a whole is incredibly complex, uncomfortable, difficult, and often not safe for work. Why would God choose to reveal Himself through a Bible like that?

But He does. And when we don’t accept that—and Him—on His terms, we inadvertently produce a lot of Christians who know Bible stories, understand morality, and can bend any passage into a personal application, but who don’t know God or understand His purpose for humanity.

Let me speak for myself: By all the typical metrics, I had the ideal upbringing to produce a Biblically-literate, faithful Christian adult. My parents are both born again, our family attended church very regularly and was extensively involved in church ministry, I went to Sunday school and AWANA every week from toddlerhood on, and I even chose to go to Bible school for a year after high school. I do not remember a time before I started following Jesus. And for all of this, I am so grateful (though still probably not half as grateful as I should be, since we all tend to take our upbringings for granted as “normal,” having known no different).

At the same time, I can look back and admit, with some embarrassment, that there were/are still some enormous gaps in my true knowledge of who God is and what He has done. Being able to pass the test isn’t always the same as understanding the material.

For example, four or five years ago I went through a dark and difficult period of time involving a lot of fear, loss, and grief. In that shadowy valley, I discovered for the first time that I had been leaning on the heresy of “prosperity theology”—and I didn’t even realize it until it gave way! I would have sworn up and down that I didn’t subscribe to any kind of prosperity doctrine, but the truth was, I had internalized years of learning Bible stories as moral tales, ultimately leading me to subconsciously believe that if I was a good enough Christian, God would protect me from pain.

The catastrophic loss of that core belief, even though it was one I had never formally acknowledged, utterly rocked my relationship with God for a time.

The good news is, I do see strides being made toward the creation of better Bible resources for children. Clara has a book that attempts to encompass the story of the Bible in a short, easy-to-grasp form, which is something I don’t remember having at her age—although it skips straight from the exodus to Bethlehem, which leaves out a whole lot of material that it would seem God considers important. Kevin DeYoung’s “The Biggest Story” Bible Storybook is thorough, beautifully illustrated, and fun to read, if a bit episodic in nature. I haven’t yet read his other book, The Biggest Story: How the Snake Crusher Brings Us Back to the Garden, but I’m hoping to give that one a try soon.

And as I contemplate the Herculean task of trying to teach my own child about God and the Bible, I can see why it’s so difficult. Kids are rather black-and-white thinkers, and it’s hard to imagine trying to teach them nuanced concepts that even adults struggle with. Even with all the caveats and disclaimers and shades of gray in the world, we tend to categorize information in pretty simple mental boxes—agree/disagree, safe/unsafe, good/bad, right/wrong.

The longer I study the Bible, the more inadequate those dichotomies seem. A mammoth collection of ancient, divinely-inspired texts that reveals a peephole view of God’s incomprehensible nature and His plan to rescue Creation just doesn’t fit into something as banal as “good/bad.”

And maybe that’s what it takes: Time, and repetitive, fearless exposure to the whole Bible. A ruthless rejection of the coping strategies we use to keep ourselves comfortable with (and protected from) the Word of God.

We all have to face the hard parts eventually. What if, instead of trying to turn the Bible into a safe book, we made our homes and churches into places that are safe to confront potentially threatening questions?

choice

Freedom of choice.

These are words I hear a lot. In this country, we think of liberty as the freedom to choose just about anything: our vocation, our spouse, our gender, our politicians and leaders, our family makeup, the course of our lives. From innocuous choices like the food we choose to eat or the clothes we choose to wear all the way to something as heavy as the fate we choose for our unborn children, it often feels like the single highest value that all Americans still share—as divided as we are on the particulars—is freedom of personal choice. Whatever side you’re arguing of whatever issue, chances are, the core of your perspective is shaped primarily by a concern for the freedom of someone in the scenario to exercise their freewill.

And, of course, I believe that our prioritization of personal autonomy is a good thing that has made our nation great. But the more heavily “freedom of choice” colors every single headline and issue, the more convinced I am that a society which values choice above all is an empty one. In the words of the Preacher, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2b).

Paradoxically, it’s the death of Queen Elizabeth II—not any particular event in my own nation—which has brought this to a head for me. David French wrote a poignant piece this week on how decidedly apolitical she was; in it, he quoted another tribute to Her Majesty written by Andrew Sullivan, which I will also quote here:

[Queen Elizabeth] was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human—for the rest of her life.

Our American media, pop culture, and borderline-obsessiveness with all things monarchy (particularly the British crown) would have us believe that a king or queen is some kind of all-powerful but mostly-benevolent dictator, who enjoys all the best that wealth and fame can offer. We tell fairy tales about princes who can summon every woman in the kingdom and pick a wife from among them like he’s shopping at the grocery store. Consciously or not, we often paint our mental pictures of monarchs as a blend of all the most desirable colors: someone who is beloved, famous, rich, and both free and able to do whatever they want with it all.

But we know that’s not the story of Queen Elizabeth II.

In fact, it would appear that the longest-reigning royal of the United Kingdom had very little freedom of choice in her position at all.

She didn’t choose to be born into the House of Windsor; God made that decision for her. For that matter, she had no say in the fact that her father’s elder brother King Edward VIII had no children, which could have precluded her from ever acceding to the throne. She was not even given an opinion on when she would take up the highest role in the land, and I’m sure that if she had been, she would have chosen to spend more years with her father—not take his place at the young age of 26.

And once she did take up that role? It required her “to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human—for the rest of her life.”

In other words, she had to set aside her personal interests, opinions, passions, and freedoms in order to fulfill the high duty of being more symbol than soul. Sure, she had the resources and the platform we so idolize, but—if she were to care about her people more than herself—she had no freedom whatsoever with how she chose to use it.

We don’t remember her for her hot takes or her activism or her flaunting of power, but for her steadiness and service across seven decades of tumultuous history.

Of course, not every ruler—not even most rulers—have reflected the same kind of sacred self-denial. I just finished reading through the book of I Kings, and was struck by the following passages:

 Jeroboam said to himself, “The kingdom might now return to the house of David. If these people regularly go to offer sacrifices in the Lord’s temple in Jerusalem, the heart of these people will return to their lord, King Rehoboam of Judah. They will kill me and go back to the king of Judah.” So the king sought advice.

Then he made two golden calves, and he said to the people, “Going to Jerusalem is too difficult for you. Israel, here are your gods who brought you up from the land of Egypt.” He set up one in Bethel, and put the other in Dan. This led to sin; the people walked in procession before one of the calves all the way to Dan.

- I Kings 12:26-30

Even after this, Jeroboam did not repent of his evil way but again made priests for the high places from the ranks of the people. He ordained whoever so desired it, and they became priests of the high places. This was the sin that caused the house of Jeroboam to be cut off and obliterated from the face of the earth.

- I Kings 13:33-34

Earlier in I Kings, we learn that Jeroboam was not destined to be king over Israel by right of birth; he actually worked his way up in the ranks of King Solomon’s officials and then rebelled against the king (see 1 Kings 11). When God officially appointed Jeroboam as Solomon’s successor over the ten northern tribes, He gave the soon-to-be king a key choice:

I will appoint you, and you will reign as king over all you want, and you will be king over Israel. After that, if you obey all I command you, walk in my ways, and do what is right in my sight in order to keep my statutes and my commands as my servant David did, I will be with you. I will build you a lasting dynasty just as I built for David, and I will give you Israel.

- I Kings 11:37-38

From these three passages we can piece together the stakes of the decision God placed before Jeroboam.

• Option 1: Obey God as King, and Jeroboam and his kingdom would enjoy the blessings of God’s presence and a lasting dynasty.

• Option 2: Set up self as king, and Jeroboam and his dynasty would be obliterated from the face of the earth.

Clinging to power, afraid of losing his grip on the kingdom, Jeroboam commissioned carved images to represent Yahweh and directed his subjects to sacrifice in places other than the Temple where God’s presence dwelt. Wielding his position as ruler, he did away with God’s strict requirement for only Levites to serve Him, and gave anyone who desired it the right to become a priest. Jeroboam chose Option 2 and damned his family and his nation to bear the consequences of his sin.

Perhaps choice is not the highest good we have been led to believe it is. Perhaps true greatness is revealed when someone sets aside their rights in favor of doing what is right. After all, having the right to do wrong will never make doing wrong right.

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We are born.

We are born male or female.

We are born to a set of parents and, often, siblings.

We are born in a location on the globe.

In these things, we have no input. They are what they are. We can kick and scream until we collapse from exhaustion but they will never, ever change. We don’t get to choose.

Sometimes, we are born with sexual propensities we didn’t choose, and the choice now before us is whether we will bear the responsibility of living in opposition to them.

Sometimes, we conceive a child we didn’t choose, and the choice now before us is whether we will bear the responsibility to care well for that child anyway.

Sometimes, we even find ourselves in circumstances we did choose—a marriage, perhaps—but at a level of difficulty we didn’t sign up for, and the choice now before us is whether we will persevere when it would be within our rights to give up.

The freedom to choose is a wonderful thing, but the denial of that freedom in favor of righteousness is far better. We don’t reach our highest potential by continuously reaching for the next thing our eyes and hearts desire, but by disciplining our minds and bodies to prioritize what is good over what feels good.

For Queen Elizabeth II, a commitment to duty superseded her personal desires and ambitions and opinions; for King Jeroboam, an addiction to power superseded his opportunity to steward Israel with God’s blessing. One chose what was good, and one chose what merely felt good. Each is remembered accordingly.

Likewise, Eve plucked a beautiful fruit off a beautiful tree and with it, banished the entire human race from God’s presence (Genesis 3:6, 24). That was her choice, and God gave her the freewill to make it.

But the Son of God Himself relinquished all His rights and was obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross (Philippians 2:8)—and when He bowed His head and gave up His Spirit, He gave us all the right to become children of God (John 1:12).

We may hate the way God created us, or that He created us at all. We may despise Him for having the audacity to tell us what is good and what is evil. But until we give up our liberty to live in whatever sin we choose—until we let go of being our own rulers and submit to the rightful authority of our Author—we will not know true freedom, only the counterfeit version that kills people and families and nations.