Who is Cain's Father? Part Two
This study is not intended for children, the immature adult or casual seeker. I recommend that you read this entire study and consider the sum of the evidence before rejecting it on some point of initial disagreement.
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mp3 Audio DownloadThe Lord God addresses the woman
Now, let's consider the Lord God's address to the woman.
Does this suggest the "light snack" (oral ingestion of literal fruit) version or a "sex orgy" version? Right. Keep a tally on this. The paucity of checkmarks in the "light snack" column will begin to look rather conspicuous.
Eve had not yet borne children so this consequence can't relate to a prior birthing experience, yet, in keeping with the "tooth for a tooth" judicial model it could, and, really, MUST relate to a conception. In fact, the NASB version I offered really fails us here, as does the popular NIV. The KJV rendering is much, much better, but let me offer the Young's Literal Translation, which is even better yet.
If there's one verse that should speak to you about the nature of the sin in the Garden, this might be it. "Multiplying I multiply thy sorrow and thy conception." Conception. Multiplying thy conception. Does more need to be said here?
With some further consideration, relative to the sentence of pain in childbirth we may infer that she had experienced pleasure in conceiving. Relative to the desire for her husband we may consider this as correction for an offence relating to the woman's desire for one who was not her husband. Finally, pertaining to her husband ruling over her we may consider this as correction for an offence relating to the woman ruling over her husband.
Yes. I hear you. There's a lot to think about. Once you understand the usage of figurative language and the potential pregnancy models you can put two and two together to come up with a likely scenario for what happened in the Garden. When you begin to reconsider the consequences of the sin many things come to light that were formerly hidden in the shadows.
While it's true that the serpent would like to keep the truth hidden, you have to attribute the fact of its concealment to the Lord God Himself, who could have presented the matter clearly in plain language, and surely would have, if such a thing had served His purposes. This treasure you're seeing uncovered is hidden behind figurative language, and yet, beyond even that, veiled from the eyes of individuals who come to look but fail to see because the Lord who holds the keys has denied them access. If you now see, if your eyes are opened, thank the Lord and give Him the praise that's due Him, my dear friend. The truth being revealed here is a treasure that's so valuable it requires special measures of protection.
The Lord God addresses the man
Now, let's consider the Lord God's address to the man.
Notice how there are two issues taken up with Adam. One involves the eating from the tree but the first pertains to his relationship with his wife. Let's pause right here for a moment.
Here's where a study of what happened in the Garden necessarily becomes sexist. It's already racist, dealing with the paternity of Cain as different from Abel or Seth, which is the most fundamental branching of the races of men. The matter of you or I being racist and sexist is really not in question. We are racist and sexist. Denial of this basic fact of life is just silliness. The real question is whether or not we are rightly racist and rightly sexist.
Our Creator is racist. He created man and the divisions of race are according to his design. He has divided mankind as it exists right now into two primary racial categories; those who are descended from Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham, and those who are not. When the Sovereign God sent his only begotten son, He sent him to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Is that racist? Of course! Is it wrong for Him to be racist and to do as He does? While most would answer in the affirmative, let's not presume to be morally superior to our Creator as the foolish and wicked so readily do. As He is racist, so are those who are in Him, who are as He is, rightly racist. You can follow a similar argument about being rightly sexist.
The Other Sin in the Garden
While what happened with the serpent is the main topic of interest the other sinful behavior in the Garden is still worthy of our attention here, and perhaps just as controversial in nature.
The sinful behaviors all relate to disobedience but, more exactly, to rebellion against His authority and order as established in creation. What I will present here will be handily rejected by most, struggled with by some and, perhaps, accepted by a few. Quite likely, some of you men and women will be entertaining murderous thoughts towards me. Such is the supernatural dynamic that swirls around the truth of this subject. There's nothing causal here. We're dealing with big truth, high value, heavily protected. No joke. This is not the "battle of the sexes," which by the way, both parties lost miserably.
If it seems like two separate elements are suggested in verse 17, that would be because there are two. What the Lord God took up with the man by saying, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife" He had just taken up with the woman by telling her, "he will rule over you." The better YLT version reads as a correction and reminder: "and he doth rule over thee." We may infer that, earlier in the Garden the woman had ruled over her husband. It takes two to tango. No woman can effectively rule over a man without his consent. Adam's consent to being ruled over by the woman is implied in the Lord God's response, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife." Are you following me? The word for "listened" can also be translated "hearkened" or "obeyed." What we can infer from this is that, while in the Garden and probably relative to the engagement scenario with the serpent tree, Eve sinned in her relationship with her husband. She disregarded the order of authority that had been established by the Lord God.
We don't find explicit commands about this relationship in the immediate context of Genesis 2 as given either to the man or to the woman, yet, somehow we know that whatever the Lord God used as the standard for judgment was adequately justified. Our lack of information here isn't unlike how we can see in the narrative that the woman knew commands had been given regarding the tree of knowledge of good and evil yet we're not informed about how she came by this knowledge.
We can understand from Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 11 that knowledge about God was imparted to or imprinted into mankind in the process of creation. Because of this, creation may be held accountable for understanding it.
I don't know whether Adam and Eve were told "in so many words" about what was expected from them in their relationship with each other but we should be confident they were without excuse when the Lord addressed their disregard for His authority and His appointment of authority in the Garden.
We learn from the very explicit language of 1 Corinthians 11 that the appointment of authority regarding man and woman was established in the order of creation.
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7 For a man ought not to have his head covered, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man. 8 For man does not originate from woman, but woman from man; 9 for indeed man was not created for the woman's sake, but woman for the man's sake. 10 Therefore the woman ought to have symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels.
The passage continues, offering further insight.
Man and woman depend upon other, and both surely depend upon the ultimate origin, God. While this keeps the matter in perspective, it should be obvious that it does nothing to alter the authority structure that had been established very succinctly in verse 3.
The hierarchy of headship authority established in creation is such that man is the head of a woman. The Lord God needs no one's permission to do what He wills because He is sovereign. He needs make no excuses about it either because He is just, righteous and holy.
Woman should no more rule over man than over his head, Christ, or Christ's head, God. When Eve ruled over her husband it was a sinful act and justice was meted out accordingly. We can see from the commands given to women in this present age that the order established in creation has not been overturned.
Is that sexist? Of course it is! This order can't be considered as something of a curse that being in Christ somehow reverses. It's plain from 1 Corinthians 11 that the order of headship was established by the Creator according to His purposes in creation and not as a consequence of sin. If you find yourself feeling offended at this you might consider whether you are even now under the same influence as the woman in the Garden of Eden. I write this with love for you, knowing the Creator's love for you, dear brothers and sisters.
The woman sinned by ruling over her husband, and the man sinned by hearkening to the voice of his wife. Should he have pretended he couldn't hear her? Should he have refused to listen to anything she said? That wouldn't allow for the woman to be much of a helper, would it? He should not have allowed her will to dominate his. Her sin was active, and his sin was passive. She ruled over him and he let her. This is the same way the subject is presented in 1 Timothy 2, which is a command that relates to you and I.
A woman teaching or exercising authority over a man rules over him. The writer, Paul, wrote here with full authority. If he does not allow it is because the Lord does not allow. What Paul does not allow, other men should not allow, following his example. What this means to me as a man is what applied to Adam in the Garden. Men, do not allow a woman to rule over a man. There's a lot of consideration that should be given this clear directive. This does not imply that men should rule over women with heavy-handed oppression. This matter of what it does and doesn't mean, given the treatment of the subject in the Garden, is worthy of our best effort to "get it right" in the brief season that remains for us.
I'll close here with a wonderfully instructive passage from 1 Peter 3.
Men, women, have courage, trusting in the Lord to bring His Life to those who honor His way! May this be a blessing to you as you seek to please the Bridegroom who will shortly come for His holy Bride.
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I'm going to address the eating from the tree in this main thread and take up the relationship between the man and woman in the side panel.
Why would the Lord curse the ground because of Adam? As I stated earlier, I'm going to be frank about what the Lord revealed to me. While engaging with the serpent tree in the Garden, Adam was stimulated to orgasm through anal intercourse and his semen was subsequently spilled on the ground. If the woman's eating of the tree resulted in pregnancy, the man's eating of the tree must be of a like kind. The curse upon the ground was because of Adam. Could this judgment be for any reason other than that it was on the ground that the man spilled his seed? If cursing the ground because of Adam fits some non-sex orgy version of what happened in the garden, I'm just not seeing it.
Let's keep reading.
Oh. Now we finally see something in the context that looks like the "chewing and swallowing" kind of eating. Could this support the "light snack" version of the sinful deeds in the Garden? Hmmmmmm - kind of, but really, no. Not when you consider the "sex orgy" version. The curse effects the ground's productivity, its fruitfulness. "It shall grow for you" must reflect whatever it was Adam did for or to the ground. That the earth would grow thorns and thistles for Adam reveals how his "fertilizer" was not good for the ground. In contrast, it would have been very good when "used as directed," to raise up children with his wife to make the Lord God a happy grandpa!
Most of us have accepted, or perhaps merely tried to accept the traditions of men, which are in truth the doctrines of demons. The serpent does not want anyone to know the great secrets that expose his evil agenda. His agents within and without the church have done just what they have been appointed to do. I had long been deceived. Now, not so much. Praise the Lord for his mercy and abundant grace!
Let's keep reading. Here's the final verse where the consequences of the sin in the Garden are pronounced.
We see the sentence of death appointed for this flesh body of man. Adam lived 930 years, dying within the span of a single day of a thousand year duration. This consequence was in accordance with the warning given in Genesis 2:17 that "in the day that you eat from it you will surely die." I believe the "sweat of your face" implies something about the activity in the Garden where, once again, the "sex orgy" kind of eating has to be the version of choice over the "light snack" version.
The next verse is another one of those that, all by itself, is rather convincing of the "adult" version.
Why would Adam do this while still in the Garden, when he had not yet apparently even "known" his wife? She is recognized as the mother of all living before they are expelled from the Garden and before Adam "knows" her, which we don't read about until the next chapter. If you want to think Adam was speaking "prophetically" about something that had not yet happened, or perhaps offer an explanation about the text being out of sequence, I suppose you are free to do so. However, no theological dance steps are necessary if you simply accept what the weight of evidence suggests. The "mother of all living" had already conceived Cain and very likely one or possibly even more twin sisters. Call it another clue. Unless the man ate some bad fruit that had hallucinogenic properties and everybody else was kind of going along with the same funky trip, the conclusion that seems rather obvious is that the particular kind of eating that was done in the Garden led to Eve becoming a mother.
Lucifer's plan (the King of Babylon in Isaiah 14) is to be like the most High God. He wants to receive the worship of all creation for himself. What has been made in the Lord God's image he wants to remake in his own. His agenda is a complete substitution agenda - himself for the most High God, his antichrist, only begotten son of god, for the Messiah, only begotten son of God. He works to substitute his antiBride of antiMashiach for the Bride of HaMashiach, and his body of worshipers for the body of true worshipers. His primary "sex orgy" agenda is to hijack the lineage of the Lord God by reforming Adamic man in his own image. This plan found early success in the conception and bringing forth of the first natural born man in the earth, Cain.
It was not quite the level of success he had in mind to achieve, however. While the serpent's seed was permitted to live, the Lord God intervened by atoning for man's sin and barring him from the tree of life, and by limiting the serpent's activity and influence. Adam and Eve were not permanently bent to worship the serpent and reject the Lord God. They were permitted to and even commanded to be fruitful and multiply, repopulating the earth with progeny having the pedigree of those created in the Lord God's image. The woman was taken from man, so her DNA must have been his with whatever differences the Creator saw fit to provide, knowing all things.
Beyond the Garden Scene
Now, it's only reasonable to assume that if consuming some kind of edible fruit was the act that led to such great consequence we might expect to see some hint of it woven into the biblical record. When I consider biblical history up to the present, I see the "sex orgy" theme repeating in significant contexts and a "light snack" theme, however magical the "apple," nowhere.
The Flood of Noah's Day - An Echo of Eden
With the flood of Noah's day, the Lord God dramatically intervened with a population control solution to a very serious problem. The problem was that the "sex orgy" Garden scene was playing out again but on a larger scale. In the Garden, the angelic serpent being saw Adam's woman and lusted after her. He had his way with her, conceiving offspring, and things went badly. The Lord God intervened, protecting His own seed to ensure that they would repopulate the earth for another season. In Noah's day, angelic beings chose to become like the serpent tree, who saw Adam's women and lusted after them. These sons of god had their way with them, conceiving offspring, and things went badly. The Lord God intervened, protecting His own seed to ensure that they would repopulate the earth for another season. Read Genesis 6 again and see if it isn't so.
Let's take a close look at verses 1 and 2 of Genesis 6.
Wait - what? Daughters were born to men? Oh, I get it, It's a figure of speech. :) Am I being silly? Well, ok, but my point is that it's a good practice to acknowledge when figures are being used because they are used purposefully in the scriptures. They should give us pause to consider what's being called to our attention. When we follow through in this context we discover the Hebrew text making the point that the daughters taken for wives are of the stock of Adam and Eve, pedigreed, if you will. This made them fair, beautiful, and particularly attractive to the sons of god, the angels who left their former estate according to Jude. These sons of god are also referred to as "Watchers," according to Enoch.
You see, the word for "men" in the Hebrew of verse 1 is singular and appears with the article, so "men" is more accurately, "the Adam." (See Bullinger's Companion Bible notes or his Appendix 14.) So, when men began to multiply, the offspring in view are specifically "the Adam" kind. Yes, in contrast to the serpent kind, of the Cain branch. Why would the "the Adam" be explicitly identified if there was no alternate kind? When verse 1 declares that daughters were born to "them," it points to Adam and Eve. In verse 2, the word "men" is as in verse 1, so the daughters of men are the daughters of "the Adam."
The sons of god preferred the daughters of Adam and Eve over the daughters of Cain, who were already the corrupted seed of the serpent.
Cain was the son of the serpent. If not, none of this activity that led to the judgment of the flood has any precedent and we see no logical continuity in this development of the biblical narrative of history.
If you consider what qualified Noah and his family for salvation you find that his just behavior was only part of the qualification. Verse 9 declares that "Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations," meaning, genetically pure. He had the right pedigree, being of the Lord God through Adam and Eve without mixture. Anyone who reads Genesis 6 can see that judgment was related to the sons of god taking the daughters of men to wife, who populated the earth with their wicked offspring. These angelic beings who left their former estate had procreative ability, and procreate they did with the pedigreed daughters of Adam. The time came when the limit of this mixture with the Serpent's seed was reached and drastic measures were called for. Intervention came at the appointed time. The last of the just Adamic race was preserved as seed to repopulate the earth while the wicked flesh progeny of the serpent through Cain and the Watchers were purged from the face of the ground.
After the flood (Genesis 9), the Lord God promised He would never again destroy the earth by water, and he set the rainbow in the cloud as a sign of that covenant. Yet, He never promised the earth wouldn't be destroyed by other means.
The fire and the water are similar agents appointed for the judgment and the destruction of ungodly men. (Population control isn't a bad thing of itself, like racism and sexism.)
Thorns, Thistles and Tares - Destined for Fire
There's an account in the gospel of Matthew where the destruction of ungodly men by fire is in view. The points I want to make from this passage open the way for us into the subject of the destruction of Sodom.
(verse 15: See Who is Pope Benedict XVI?)
I used to be confused about this passage and the others like it. This really isn't about a tree that might have some good fruit and some bad fruit. This is about something other than our judging a person's deeds or the Lord's ultimate judgment of a person's deeds. This is Genesis language, where a tree reproduces after its kind.
Think - two kinds of fruit bearing trees, good and bad. Think - Garden of Eden. Think - Lord God tree and serpent tree. Think - Adam and Cain as the patriarchal fruit.
The reference made from Matthew 7's allegorical lesson to the account of the Garden is doubled, establishing the connection for us. The thorn bushes and thistles associated with the bad tree in Matthew 7:16 should seem familiar because these same two elements were part the judgment pronounced to Adam! "Cursed is the ground because of you ... Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you." Should these be understood as literal thorns and thistles, or, rather, according to the metaphorical language in the context of both Matthew 7 and Genesis 2 and 3 as men related to the bad tree? Consistent with the use of figurative language in these contexts, the thorns and thistles must represent the ungodly men of the bad tree.
The meaning of the thorns and thistles becomes even more apparent when you consider how the Lord God told Adam that the cursed ground would bring forth the thorn and thistle to him and that Adam himself was taken from the ground.
Amazingly, from the obscure language of this familiar passage of scripture comes the truth that thorn and thistle men from the cursed ground are promised until the end of Adam's, and even Adam-kind's age of abiding in this dust body. Today, as before the flood, two trees and their fruit are in the earth, and one of them is appointed for destruction.
If you're becoming convinced of this matter of the two trees and their fruit, this mysterious parable from Matthew 13 should make better sense to you now.
There are tares sown by the enemy in the field of wheat! These will be separated out and burned up. There is a bad tree that bears only bad fruit after its kind that will be cast into the fire. The enemy's tares, the bad fruit of the bad tree, the thorn bushes and thistles that the cursed ground brought forth for Adam, these are the ungodly men who are appointed for fire. The serpent's seed, even the firstborn, Cain, whose deeds were evil, was he not the first murderer among men, born of his father who was a murderer from the beginning? Cain's progeny were destroyed in the flood, yet, the fruit of this prolific Tree are among us and appointed for a day of judgment by fire.
This is not to say that your words and deeds will not be judged, of course, because they will, but your kind of judgment will pertain, first and foremost, to the kind of tree whose fruit you are.