Part 4: INHERITED MEMORIES
Every morning we put feed out in dishes for parrots that gather in our garden. Every day they come down from the mountains to us for food and then they fly off to their way of life lived outside our garden.
They build nests and rear their young in the mountains and they return to us with their brood to be fed each day. The young learn to know us and accept what we provide.
My children were like that. They loved to go ‘home’ to hear stories from their grandparents and then they would return to where they lived.
So it was with the first children born outside the Garden. The two eldest boys were told how their parents were made in the image of God. Then the parents believed an opposing source who said it was all a lie, Genesis 3:11-24, and they did the unthinkable.
Cain, the eldest boy, decided he could restore paradise without sacrifice. As a statement of his beliefs, he made an offering of the wonderful crops of fruits and grains he had grown.
Abel, the second son, accepted that his parents had broken the Royal law but that, by faith, he would be saved through grace as they were. One day, another, ‘made in the image of God,’ would die in their place to restore their lives to ‘the image of God.’
He offered a sacrificed life, Genesis 4:4, as a statement of belief and Cain was angry with him. So angry, he killed him.
Cain determined to earn approval through his works, ‘but every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin; and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death,’ James 1:14,15.
Still the weather was benign and still Cain, relying on environmental good works, despised that ‘the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord,’ Romans 6:23.
My prayer is that you will have faith in the sacrifice of the Son of God to restore you, because ‘without faith it is impossible to please him,’ Hebrews 11:6.
Part 5: FOUNTAINS OF THE DEEP
Genealogies are an interesting statement of how belief is handed down from family to family. After Abel was killed, the next brother, Seth, took on the faith of his dead brother.
His genealogy comes down to the time of Noah where they are known as ‘the sons of God.’ It is the title of everyone who believes that the law of God is just and that the grace of God is through the sacrifice God has provided, 1st John 3:1-5.
The genealogy of Cain runs concurrently with Seth’s and just several generations later, a descendant of Cain’s was the first to break God’s law of marriage and take two wives, Genesis 4:18.
God uses marriage throughout the Bible to illustrate God’s relationship with his people and how relationship with him is damaged as in marriage when marriage is compromised.
In the time of Noah, in contrast to Seth’s line known as ‘the sons of God,’ Cain’s line is referred to as ‘the daughters of men.’ ‘The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair,’ and married them. Genesis 6:2,4. Apostasy became reality followed by world-wide corruption and violence, Genesis 6:11.
Only Noah ‘found grace in the eyes of the Lord,’ verse 8, and only Noah believed rain and flood were coming. And only Noah and his family were preserved.
Not only did it rain, ‘the fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven’ poured forth storm, water, volcano and earthquake. The surface of the earth erupted and the heavens poured forth their anger that the sacrifice for broken law was rejected. The grace of God was spurned.
As the Lord would say many years later, ‘But your wrongdoing has upset nature’s order,’ Jeremiah 5:25, REB, or, as Isaiah said ‘The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.’ Isaiah 24:5, KJV.
The heavy hand of disbelief in the Lord’s way of dealing with sin, changed weather patterns and today we have storms, floods, droughts, fires, earthquakes and volcanoes.
Elizabeth Price
(To access the entire “Weather” mini-series, please click here.)