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Gen. 4
Most everybody is familiar with the story of Cain and Abel. I got to wondering this morning, though, what the purpose of this story in the Bible is. Not wanting to get bogged down in the details and the multitude of questions they bring up, I went for the 30,000 foot view. One son’s path, though his body remained alive, led to separation from God and increasing death and destruction. Note his great, great grandson’s comment, “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, Then Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” (Gen. 4:24). That’s a seventy times increase over five generations. As for Abel, though he died in the body, new life came in his place. This started an opposing path to that of Cain. We see this at the end of the chapter, after Seth had his son, Enosh. “Then men began to call upon the name of the LORD.
Thus, the 30,000 foot view here in Genesis 4 shows me the same two paths that I see throughout God’s word. One path leads away from God to death and destruction. The other leads to God. We know that it is through Seth, the new life God gave in place of Abel, that God provided new life for all of us through the merciful gift of His Son.
Matt. 4
Satan’s third temptation was a clear lure into sin. Worshiping anyone other than God is a very black and white thing. What about the other two temptations, though? What would it hurt if Jesus turned a stone into bread so He could eat or trusted God to rescue Him when He jumped? Whipping up a loaf of stone bread seems especially harmless. Except that it clearly wasn’t. Why?
The most obvious answer I come up with is that Satan’s temptations appealed to pride. “If you are the son of God…” prove yourself! But Jesus didn’t come to serve Himself. How could He lay His life down for others if He was busy salvaging His pride with every challenge to His authority? Obeying God’s word, even in humiliating circumstances, is far more important than protecting our pride. Another answer I come up with is that Satan’s temptations appealed to the desires of the flesh. It’s obviously not wrong to eat, but for Jesus to use His power as God to meet His own human needs and desires would be serving His flesh above God. Whether serving the flesh in a practical way, like creating His own bread, or just to show off, like hurling Himself off a pinnacle, He would still have been putting Himself first.
So what I see is that twice Satan tempted Jesus to worship Himself and once to worship Satan. Because Jesus was as fully human in nature as He was God, both would have been equally wrong. As Paul pointed out about Jesus, “…although He existed in the form of God, [He] did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped.” (Phil. 2:6). Therefore, Jesus wasn’t only righteous because He was God. He was also fully righteous as a human. I think that’s important because that’s what made Him an appropriate and acceptable sacrifice for unrighteous humanity.
Ezra 4
I finally figured out who these “enemies of Judah and Benjamin”, who offered to help rebuild the temple were. There is a story in 2 Kings 17 that tells what happened in the land of Israel after Assyria took them captive. At that time, the king of Assyria brought people in from several foreign nations and settled them in Samaria.
That effort didn’t go so well at first, as the people fell prey to lions. They determined the problem to be that they weren’t properly serving the ‘god’ of the land. So they brought back one of the exiled priests to teach them how to fear the LORD. To those people, however, the LORD was just one more ‘god’ they had to appease in order for them to live peacefully in a world they did not understand. Thus, “They feared the LORD and served their own gods according to the custom of the nations from among whom they had been carried away into exile.” (2 Kings 17:33).
This explains why Zerubbabel and the other leaders responded to their request by saying, “You have nothing in common with us in building a house to our God” (from Ez. 4:3). Though those people claimed to know and serve God, they did not serve Him with whole hearts. This, too, is a problem that has and will always exist. There will always be people posing as members of God’s family who aren’t. It is important that we learn to discern who such people are so that we don’t yoke up with those who don’t truly follow God. Like Zerubbabel, we need to keep God’s temple holy rather than taking the easy way out.