Have you ever heard stories about someone receiving a brand-new car from their parents as a gift for getting their licence…only to total it in a wreck soon after?
I recently read of a spoiled young Indian man whose wealthy parents purchased him a brand-new BMW for his birthday. He plunged it into the river in a fit of rage. He had wanted them to buy him a Jaguar. Poor guy.
Humans have a penchant for ruining good things. Sometimes we do it knowingly, other times unwittingly. Most of the time half-wittedly.
We have been ruining stuff from the very beginning.
We are still at it today. God gave us paradise with thousands of trees producing fruit for health and life and we managed to eat from the one producing thorns and briars and death.
This reminds me of the safe and effective medicines which were censored and banned over the last two years in favour of some ‘new’ knowledge from the pharmaceutical tree. When once flourishing societies soon find themselves toiling in barren dust and sweating for the things which once sat in surplus on our shelves perhaps you will realise the serpent is not a saviour.
Stubborn as we are, when things go wrong, we like to blame God.
According to Adam, there must have been a fault in the woman God gave him. Suddenly he realised he had wanted a Jaguar and not the BMW and decided to send his wife downstream.
One statement I always struggled with was when Jesus was referred to as ‘good teacher’ by someone from the crowd. His response of, ‘why do you call me good? Only one is good, God?’ perplexed me.
Firstly, Jesus is good. Secondly, what about all my Christian heroes I grew up on? They seemed rather good to me.
I can’t speak for Jesus in this instance, but I can for myself. There are now people that highly respect me for the calling of God on my life and the ministry God has given me. They are few in number, but they exist. Now, if they don’t know of anything about myself that would tarnish my reputation, than I surely do. That is why I must point to the irrevocable gifts and calling of God.
What is good is of God.
If I could ruin it, I would, and I would have already. Thankfully, the Grace of God in Jesus Christ is supreme over anything I could sow or reap.
The misunderstanding of the God of the Old Testament is more a reflection of a failure to grasp the reality of who we as humans are than who God himself is. Not content with ruining our own reputation we would ruin God’s if possible.
Pre-flood, I see a God more than willing to forgive and forget. Merciful to the very core. He protected Cain’s life after Cain slew his brother Abel, and made sure others had to show him the same grace. In fact, it was the earth that was programmed to curse Cain for his act, and God helped him hack a way around it.
How did Cain’s offspring respond to this grace?
Not long after we see Lamech murdering for minor slights against him and then boasting about how God will be an even better security guard for him than his great grandfather. That is how you turn a blessing into a curse. This false doctrine caused the earth to fill with violence to such an extent that God was sorry for all the good he had made.
We ruined it all.
God decided to take a good man and good seed and make all things new. The old was wiped out. I would say that it would have taken pretty serious stuff to go down to bring the God who clothed Adam and Eve when they became naked and ashamed, and the God who mercifully protected Cain from earth and man’s justice, to the point of utter destruction and rebuilding.
God found a righteous man, perfect in his generations through which he could have a great reset. That man was Noah, and he found grace in God’s sight. Then Noah ruined everything as soon as the new earth yielded its first crops.
Like Jesus said: None is good but God.
The first thing God does when Noah and his family exit the ark is to bless him and his sons and set a covenant which will not allow God to flood the earth again, or things to spiral unchecked because of man’s appetites and inclinations.
So, God blessed Noah and all Noah’s sons. Shortly thereafter, Noah in a half-witted drunken state, decides to reveal a little bit of Lamech in himself by cursing one of his sons for a minor slight.
Paradise lost. Again. Violence, back. Again.
To this day, the cursing of Ham has been used to justify racism, war, genocide, honour killings and the list goes on and on. God blessed Ham. It was Noah who decided to curse him. Somehow, generations later we have concluded that it was God who cursed Ham and that justifies our continued mistreatment of our brothers.
One of the types of evidence of God’s direct involvement with us is how much he gets mixed into our messes. That is love, I guess.
We are on the cusp of a great reset. We can make the world better, or we can ruin it.
Bless and do not curse. Loose lips sink ships. Receive the gift of God with thanksgiving.
Don’t wait for a perfect world to come. Be perfect like your Father in heaven.
Bless what is broken.