“Cosmic Homelessness”: Cain, the Pattern of Exile & Grace

The theme of “exile” permeates the Biblical story.

What is exile?

To be exiled is to be cast out, driven away, a wander, alone.

The pattern is set, of course, with Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden of Eden.

But that same theme is reenacted over and over again, beginning immediately with Adam and Eve’s eldest son Cain in Genesis 4:12-17:

Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. 

And the LORD said, “What have you done? … You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.”

Cain said to the LORD, “My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”

Then the LORD said to him, “Not so! If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.”

And the LORD put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him.

Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. 

However you interpret the “primeval” chapters of Genesis 1-11—literal or parabolic—the meaning is the same: the world, as the title of Cornelius Plantinga Jr.’s book reads, is “not the way it’s supposed to be.”

We are not at home.

Tim Keller puts it like this,

The Bible says that we have been wandering as spiritual exiles ever since. That is, we have been living in a world that no longer fits our deepest longings.

It is no coincidence that story after story contains the pattern of exile.

The message of the Bible is that the human race is a band of exiles trying to come home (The Prodigal God, 96-98). 

There is, however, a strange grace haunting both stories:

God’s grace to Adam and Eve took the form of sewing them clothes because they felt they needed them.

God’s grace to Cain takes the form of guaranteeing him protection because he feels he needs it (John Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone: Part One, 75). 

This grace (of course) ought to surprise us. Shock us, in fact.

In the midst of his sentencing—where guilt is beyond question—the Judge (though just) suddenly suspends the gavel, descends the bench, and (like a father) meets His defendants’ deepest needs.

To the first: “I will clothe you.”

To the second: “I will protect you.”

It is almost as if God cannot help himself.

Moreover, this grace is a pointer—a road sign of sorts—not only toward God’s gracious character itself but of the ultimate grace found in Jesus.

“He came,” as Keller explains, “to bring the human race Home. … He took upon himself the full curse of human rebellion, cosmic homelessness, so that we could be welcomed into our true home” (101-102).

The “True Meaning” of God: Divinity Defined

This summer I’ll be teaching two rounds of PHL204: Philosophy of Religion.

The first question we address is (quite naturally):

Is there a God? 

In other words...

Should people believe in God? Is there “sufficient intellectual warrant (i.e., epistemic justification)” for faith?

Ironically, this is a question the Old and New Testaments ignore.

Scripture offers no defense for belief in God (or at least very little, especially in the way most philosophical systems address it).

All it offers is an assumption: “In the beginning, God…”

From that, the rest of God’s story--and with His, the world’s as well as our own--unfolds.

The second question, however, (which follows logically from the first) is a different matter altogether.

Who is God? 

Upon this, the entire Bible, and in particular Philippians 2:5-11, turns:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who,

though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,

but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant,

being born in the likeness of men.

And being found in human form,

he humbled himself

by becoming obedient to the point of death,

even death on a cross.

Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. 

God, as N. T. Wright puts it in his commentary on Philippians, is (by his own self-defining nature and actions)...

The “God of self-giving love”:

Only when we grasp [the Greco-Roman view of “heroic leaders” like Alexander the Great and emperor Augustus] do we see just how deeply subversive, how utterly counter-cultural, was Paul’s gospel message concerning Jesus of Nazareth, whose resurrection had declared him to be Israel’s Messiah and the world’s true Lord.

[T]he eternal son of God, the one who became human in and as Jesus of Nazareth, regarded his equality with God as committing him to the course he took: of becoming human, of becoming Israel’s anointed representative of dying under the weight of the world’s evil.

This is what it meant to be equal with God.

As you look at the incarnate son of God dying on the cross the most powerful thought you should think is: this is the true meaning of who God is.

He is the God of self-giving love (101-103). 

So yes, God is sovereign.

Yes, He is powerful.

He is great. He is mighty. He is omnipotent. He is supreme.

And yes, three times over the angels declare in Isaiah 6:3, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory.”

But over and above both His sovereignty and His holiness (or perhaps we should say, “in, through, and as the perfect expression of” these attributes)... God is love.

This is the defining predicate--the grand substantive claim--not only of 1 John 4:8 but of God’s cumulative self-disclosure.

God is not, however, love in the abstract.

He is not merely emotional love nor psychological love.

God is not the “feeling” of love (though this is certainly part of that claim).

God is love in action. He is love personified and embodied

He is love incarnate: love with flesh, blood, and bones.

And even this--“the true meaning of who God is”--is not left up to our imaginations.

The true meaning of God--the true meaning of His love--is a crucified Jew, resurrected.

Here is sovereignty, power, greatness, might, omnipotence, supremacy, and holiness.

Here is divinity defined.

Sin, Forgiveness and Confession

Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way

Praying with David, who knew a good deal about sin, we soon learn that the remedy for sin is not the extermination of sin, not long training in not-sinning, not a rigorous program conditioning us in a pavlovian revulsion to sin. The only effective remedy for sin is the forgiveness of sin—and only God can forgive sin. If we refuse to deal with God, we are left dealing with sin by means of punishment or moral education or concocting some strategy of denial. None seem to make much of dent in the sin business. No. The way, the only way, is to get in on God’s forgiveness. And we do that by confession (91).

Confession is a way out of the puny, self-deceiving, mulish contrivances we attempt in order to manage sin on our own. Confession is entrance into the vast world of forgiveness, encompassed with God’s deliverance and steadfast love (92).

An Immersion in [Imperfect] Humanity

Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way

There is not the slightest effort given in the biblical story to make David admirable in any moral or spiritual sense. And yet there is the assumption in all of this that flawed and faithless and failed as he is, he is representative—not a warning against be behavior but a witness, inadvertent as it was, to the normalcy, yes, the inevitability of imperfection (82).

The life of David is a labyrinth of ambiguities, not unlike our own. What we admire about David does not cancel out what we abhor, and what we abhor does not cancel out what we admire. David is not a model for imitation; David is not a candidate for a pedestal. The David story is an immersion in humanity, no different from the humanity conditioned by our culture and flawed by our sins. The story of David is a not a story of what God wants us to be but a story of God working with the raw material of our lives as he finds us. David’s story is told with so much detail so that we will have spread out before us exactly what goes on in a thoroughly lived human life in which God is shaping a life of salvation (88).

God is Christlike

Michael Frost and Alan Hirsh, The Shaping of Things to Come

[I]n light of the New Testament, the remarkable truth is not so much that Jesus is Godlike, but that God is actually Christlike. (God is Christlike and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all). In the light of the New Testament revelation all who would wish to know who God is and what he is like, need look no further than the person of Jesus (John 1:18, 14:9). From now on, all true perspectives of God must pass through the very particular lens of the man called Jesus of Nazareth. To say this more technically, all theology must now be understood through Christology. . . . From our perspective as human beings Jesus becomes the reference point for all genuine knowing, all true loving, and all authentic following of God (37).

“he prefers partnership to mere accomplishment”

Michael Frost and Alan Hirsh, The Shaping of Things to Come

There’s a riddle in the Talmud that goes like this, “If God intended man to live by bread, why didn’t he create a bread tree?” And the answer is that, in fact, God could have created a tree that produced crusty loaves of bread, but he prefers to offer us a grain and invite us to buy a field and plant the seed. He prefers that we till the soil while he sends the rain. He prefers that we harvest the crop while he sends sunshine. He prefers that we grind the grain and knead it and bake it while he gives us air in our lungs and strength in our arms. Why? Because he would rather we become partners with him in creation.

Of course, God could simply supply our every need and solve our every problem. But our God invites us into a creative partnership with him. . . . We suppose he could have converted the whole world by now, but he prefers partnership to mere accomplishment (159).

Aaron Orendorff

It is striking and admittedly a bit jarring to entertain the thought that God “prefers partnership to mere accomplishment.” My basic orientation towards the two is exactly the opposite. I see partnership as the means and accomplishment and the ends. In other words, I regard accomplishment as the point and operate as if the real business of life was about “getting something done.” God, on the other hand, appears to think quite differently about the matter. The real business of life is partnership itself. Relationships are ends (not means) and “getting something done” is in many ways little more than a clever and handy excuse to partner.

Why?

Because God is interested in people, not projects. Real people demand real relationships. By inviting humanity into the process of creation and recreation—by making us agents of his kingdom’s coming—God is deliberately forfeiting productivity for the sake of process. He is saying (on purpose), “Yes, I’ll get less done and it’ll get done slower and there’ll be a lot more pain in the getting, but that’s the way I want to go. I want to go the way of people.”

In a similar way, we must begin to see our own relationships as ends in and of themselves. We love because we’ve been loved and because loving is good (morally and existentially), not because loving gets us somewhere. How would our approach to work, school, family, ministry and life all change if we adopted the same attitude as God? How would our approach to people be different if they themselves were what we were after and not what they might do for us?

Two Sides to Pride

The Valley of Vision, “Shortcomings”

My sin is to look on my faults and be discouraged,
or to look on my good and be puffed up (85).

Aaron Orendorff

There are two sides to the sin called pride. On the one hand, there is blatant and overt pride: the belief that we are fundamentally “better than.” This sort of pride is easily identified; it is pride as we know it; pride in its most recognizable form; scarlet letter pride with an emblazoned, capital “P” painted across its chest.

But there is another form of pride that is much more subtle, much more insidious. While overt pride flourishes in the light, its underside hides in the dark. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous tellingly calls this sin “pride in reverse.” Not that it is the opposite of pride (i.e., un-pride), but rather that it is pride run off in another direction. The motive and power are still the same, but its shape is different.

Reverse-pride wallows. It revels in self-pity. It moans of embarrassment and shame. Reverse-pride often feels like justice—particularly if we’re in the wrong or if we’ve legitimately messed-up—but it does nothing to bring us closer to God or other people. Reverse-pride is built on the assumption that I am the center of the world, that if I fail, the world will fail (or at least the small part of the world I’m desperately trying to rule and control).

Humility (that which is legitimately “un-pride”) begins not by degrading or devaluing ourselves, but by recognizing who we actually are: we are not God. God is God and the world (even our petty corner of it) is His, not ours. Humility aims to forget itself by refocusing its attention on God as God. It delights to see God made much of (whether through us or not). Humility brings freedom from the crushing self-centered weight of both success (“better than”) and failure.

Plagues, Imaginations and the Freedom of Salvation

Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (pg. 162-3)

Each of the ten plagues were an elaborate exorcism, a casting out of the demons, that freed the imaginations of the Hebrews from domination by evil so that they were free to hear and follow their Savior and worship God “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). When Moses began his work with his Hebrew brothers and sisters, their spirits were “broken” (Exod. 6:9) and the only “truth” they had access to was this huge Egyptian lie. But Egypt and Pharaoh were not the “real world.” They were the real world defaced, desecrated, demonized. . . . The exorcising drama of the ten plagues freed the Hebrews from this Egyptian way of understanding reality, clearing the mind to accept God’s revelation reality, energizing their spirits to live in the world of salvation. The intent was that by the time they left Egypt, they would not only be physically free from evil oppression but mentally free of the evil imagination that had crushed the life out of them for so long. The ten plagues would cleanse the “doors of perception” so that Israel could see life in a totally different way—the unreality of Egypt exposed; the untruth of Egypt laid bare—and would set them free to live in a different life when they got out of Egypt, free to live the freedom of salvation.

“. . . the God who wills to be known.”

Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God

YHWH presents himself as the God who wills to be known. This self-communicating drive is involved in everything God does in creation, revelation, salvation and judgment. Human beings therefore are summoned to know YHWH as God, on the clear assumption that they can know him and that God wills that they should know him. . . . Accordingly, making God known is part of the mission of those who are called to participate in the mission of the God who wills to be known (74).

In the New Testament this divine will to be universally known is now focused on Jesus. It will be through Jesus that God will be known to the nations. And in knowing Jesus, they will know the living God. Jesus, in other words, fulfilled the mission of the God of Israel. Or to put it the other way round: the God of Israel, whose declared mission was to make himself known to the nations through Israel, now wills to be known to the nations through the Messiah, the one who embodies Israel in his own person and fulfills the mission of Israel to the nations. . . . Jesus is not merely the agent through whom the knowledge of God is communicated (as any messenger might be). He is himself the very content of the communication. Where Jesus is preached, the very glory of God shines through (122-3).