Heroes of the Faith - Abel

The Hebrews 11 Heroes of the Faith – Abel

Please read Genesis 4 and Hebrews 11 to join in the discussion.

For the past few months, Abel has intrigued me. In a world of sin and depravity, it is much more interesting to try to understand the motivations of good and noble-minded characters, than to adopt the world’s allure to dictators, murderers, and perverts. Righteousness is rarer than evil, therefore far more intriguing.

One might wonder why Adam and Eve’s first son, Cain, would have a rebellious attitude and the second son, Abel, would have a righteous attitude. On the other hand, considering the first couple’s fall from perfection in Eden, I should question how they were lucky enough to get one son who did please God!

One of my rules in study is to do many close readings of a text before trying to figure out interpretation and application. Just absorb the story, and observe the characters, setting, and incidents. From all of that, it is good to take notes of things I see in the text, some obvious, some more subtle. For our purposes here, read both texts in Genesis 4 and Hebrews 11, but save discussion of the Hebrews passage for later.

Here are some things I have noted from Genesis 4:1-7.

· Adam had a healthy (sexual) relationship with his wife.

· Eve recognized her son was a gift from God.

· And again, she had Abel.

· Cain - a worker of the ground; Abel – a keeper of sheep.

· They both brought offerings to God.

· God deemed (v. 4&5) Abel’s offering good, but “for Cain and his offering he had no regard.”

· So Cain was very angry.

· His anger controlled everything about him, “his face fell”.

· In v. 6 God confronts Cain for his anger, and tells him if he does well he will be accepted [lit. “a lifting up of your face”]

· “if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door” v. 7

· “its [sin] desire is to rule over you, but you must rule over it”

· there is no explicit reason given for God’s lack of regard for Cain’s offering.

Also, notice the emergence of a theme that runs throughout Scripture: God favors the younger son. Could this have accounted for some of Cain’s rebellion? Did he perhaps feel deserving of favor by his birth order?

I am going to stop here, at Genesis 4:7, and invite you to comment and share your observations about this text.

A Fresh Start...

Greetings Sisters:

Please forgive the long absence. I started this blog in May of 2010, since then many changes in my life have occurred. One year ago I never would have imagined or wanted many of those blindsides, yet God's providence is so wise and good. I am compelled to talk about the blessings God sent in the unlikely form of Acute Myeloid Leukemia last October.

I was rushed from our small town hospital, which took good care of me, but was not equipped to treat AML, to a team of specialists at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. For a month I immersed myself in Scripture and prayer while my loving husband listened to everything doctors told us and did his own research on-line at my bedside. Todd waited on me, prayed with me, advocated for me, dealt with the children three hours away back home, and made successive trips to bring them for visits and take them back for school. Our oldest daughter who had been out of the house on her own for a couple of years, came rushing to my bedside, and many friends, family, and neighbors were prayerful and supportive. I will never forget the wonderful visits from friends and letters and emails from so many in the body of Christ who reached out to me during the several months of treatment. My kids were well feed by folks who brought many meals over to us, including gift cards etc. A couple of gal friends took our younger two out for their birthdays and did things for them I couldn't do. I will never forget the ladies who prayed with me in the hospital and sang worship songs that I could only listen to and cry through, I was so frail.

I could not say this if it weren't for the miraculous work of God and his Holy Spirit in my life: I am thankful for Leukemia. It was a blessing to face the strong possibility of death. Nothing of the trite, vain, silly, sinful, carnal, selfish, and temporary seems important in the face of death. And because of Jesus and his atonement on the cross and the faith he placed in my heart many years ago, I was able to hear the doctor's diagnosis and know that God is bigger than blood cancer.

"Ah, Lord God! Nothing is too hard for you! It is you who have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you!" [Jeremiah 32:17]

But there is another aspect to this. God showed me from Scripture that the goal of my prayers should not be mere physical healing, but that he would be seen in all the sickness, even unto death. The greatest and biggest battle is not to survive AML, but to survive my self. To make little of myself, even in sickness, and to make much of Jesus Christ.

We don't have to figure out why we are suffering. I take great comfort in the fact that the Bible is full of people who have suffered ultimately because God wants their suffering to point people to Jesus. Not only as healer, but as the One who is worthy of our love and worship no matter our health or circumstances. This is a radically biblical way to think. It is unnatural. It can only be embraced and achieved by immersing oneself in God's word.

While in the hospital, two of my daughters helped me write out Bible verses and tape them up on the walls and the door of my room. People from church also sent me verses written or printed out. Of course, my family and I hoped and prayed for healing. We were trusting God to use the medical experts and the amazing nurses and staff at the hospital to heal me. But truth be told, I was just as concerned about the spiritual healing of all those around us, even family, who would either be indifferent, repelled by, or drawn to the Bible verses taped up everywhere. Never in my life have I had such a mission field and so much time to devote to it. I was also humbled by the incredibly loving and bold ministrations I received from many nurses who immediately identified themselves as believers and even prayed over me while drawing blood or administering chemo. One wonderful technician saw the dozens of verses and started confessing her lost faith. The word of God drew her in and made her realize how much she was missing in her life since she had walked away from Christ.

I am blessed and thankful to be in remission since March. I have monthly lab work done and sent to the doctor. Leukemia remission is a matter of time. The longer the remission the better.

Our family moved to the Atlanta area where we began as young marrieds and we love it here. We easily found a new church and got registered for the new school and are still getting settled. But I will always live as in remission. Physically and spiritually. I trust that whatever God decides for me, my children, my husband, our family, our country, will be good. He doesn't just know the future, he ordains it.

I must continue to grow in my understanding of Christ, enjoy bringing glory to God, and obey his Scriptures. Humanly speaking there are many responsibilities. But my focus is less on trying to figure out what God is doing than on worshipping the God who is always worthy of all my praise. My aim is less to seek after God for a blessing than to simply seek Him for himself. And I find that my desire increases to be dominated by his Word the more I read and study.

We are in a war for the glory of God, my sisters. God will have his way. He doesn't need my assistance to bring about his will and desire. But our role as believers is to be a part of his glory by enjoying God, to be satisfied in Christ. It is a fight to find one's satisfaction in Christ when we can't physically see him and when the world is hurling its enticing lies and temptations at our faces.

This blog and my books are my war effort to edify other women so that we will understand from Scripture our battle orders, our calling as women who are uniquely designed to bring glory to God. There are uniquely feminine ways we women bring glory to God in all seasons of our lives. "The Lord gives the word; the women who announce the news are a great host..." [Psalm 68:11-12] Let us edify each other to be women of God by learning about God's whispers of grace in the lives of his holy women of the past. They still speak to us today.

Redeeming Our Bible Heroes

I think it is fitting for my first post to cite Sarah, the wife of Abraham. She was a resilient beauty who has been battered around by many people, mostly other women.

For most of my Christian walk, I had mixed feelings about Sarah. Much of the conflict was due to the way Sarah is maligned by those who are unfriendly to the whole concept of submission. Biblical submission, that is.

Along with my mixed feelings about Sarah, I had similar ambivalences about Peter’s teaching to women: “Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives- when they see your respectful and pure conduct.” I Peter 3:1

Many of the folks who do not like wifely submission in marriage; feminists, and liberal leaning Christians, revise her character and role to that of Abraham’s pawn. It gives one a jolt to realize that revisionism is not just a feature of public school social studies classes. Revising heroes of the faith is rampant in evangelical circles and churches today.

It has become part of the dumbing down of the evangelical believer. I think this goes a long way in explaining why Bible reading and believing Christian women can be conflicted when the Apostle Peter says, “Let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious. For this is how the holy women of the past used to adorn themselves, by submitting to their husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord. And you are her daughters if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening." 1 Peter 3:1-7

It is very clear from Scripture that the Apostles Paul and Peter believed in the principle of complementary roles in marriage. The man is to be the primary spiritual leader in the home and the church. Marriage itself is a metaphor for the church. Wives are to be submissive to their husbands, and prohibited from leading over men in the church and home. ( I Timothy 2:1-15) Men, whether they feel up to the challenge or not, are called to be the spiritual leaders.

The Apostle Paul said: “As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak.” [I Corinthians 14:33&34] I suspect Paul's admonition was to the men, who were strangely enough, prone to abandoning leadership to women. Our culture bears many similarities to that of ancient Rome.

To me, Paul’s words suggest that things could be very different, but are not and should not be for very good reasons. It is so important not to abandon foundation!

What do you as a woman think about the Apostle Paul, great missionary, theologian, pioneer of the early Christian church saying this? What I think many in the debate about gender roles overlook, is that Paul was simply explaining how leadership is decided and why. His communities of believers had a vision for godly masculine leadership, and needed occasional briefings on the foundational reasons. They, like us, knew that women are very capable of multiple roles. They, like us, included women as full participants in the Body of Christ. And they, like us, knew that there was an order and wisdom to things (foundation) that might sometimes become overlooked or taken for granted in a zeal for spiritual gifts, or power, or equality. Those Corinthian believers were told by Paul, Creation, and Scripture that the men remain the primary leaders of the church of Christ.

Yet, this mandate is offensive to people who do not agree with Paul, or Peter, or Scripture as a whole. There are entire methods of interpretation designed to arrive at conclusions other than what Biblical authors intended. Many seminaries and scholars have revisited the liberalism of old that influences or even motivates much of the “Evangelical Feminism”, or Egalitarianism. Therefore, it follows that less than well-informed believers, listening to pop-oriented sermons, become less biblically discerning. If we like and respect a pastor, author, or speaker, we adopt their view and interpretation of the holy men and women of the past. One may recall the jist of the story, the names of the characters, and some conventional application of it. However, the bottom line and fuller meaning of the text of Scripture will often be lost to a man-centered interpretation. Sadly, the compelling work of God in the lives of Bible heroes and their passion for God’s glory gets lost as well. But the revision of their lives continues to develop.

It has been said that the best commentary on the Bible is the Bible. This is most strikingly true in the case of Hebrews 11, known as the hall of faith. The unknown human author of Hebrews commends faith by outlining the history of God’s faithfulness to his people since the time of Abel. Each of the 15 people named, two are women, are cited as examples of faithfulness. Yet some of those examples are a bit unsettling when viewed through a revised, man-centered lens. These witnesses of the faith were not politically correct. Some were baffling or infuriating to our sensibilities. One was a living, breathing reality show! Nevertheless, God used them all to point to his grace and his chosen people’s perseverance.

I want to know the men and women of Scripture as God’s Word portrays them to us, showing us his work in their lives. In order to be challenged and inspired, we should be diligent in our efforts to understand them, their lives and contexts, and the issues their lives raise. We should definitely want to know what God says first hand to begin to apprehend his purposes.

In much the same way I have approached holy women of the past in my first book, I would like to study the lives of the Hebrews 11 saints. I invite you to join me here! There are fifteen named: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets. In the following posts we will go back to Genesis 4 to review the text that tells of the first martyr: Abel.