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Genesis 4:9 – Wonders From the Word – Keeping is Loving
Cain dismissively answers God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain is sarcastically saying he isn’t responsible for Abel; he isn’t Abel’s baby sitter, although many years ago he might have been as the older brother. Such an attitude cautions us on how we answer and treat one another. In Iain Provan’s Seriously Dangerous Religion, he writes, “By ‘love,’ I mean ‘keeping’ other persons. I am to look after them actively and to look out for their interests, as best I can and as often as the opportunity presents itself. I am to do this in line with God’s own character and actions in the world, and in the light of God’s own specific commands about what love entails, rather than making the mistake of thinking that I can myself, without God’s help, ‘know good and evil.’ I am to imitate and obey God, rather than falling for the heroic myth that we human beings ourselves, as individuals and groups, are the measure of what ‘right’ means” (212). As Peter Leithart observes, “Provan believes in the goodness of God’s law, and believes that the Bible has normative force” (http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2014/05/seriously-dangerous). Pilate’s futuristic Post-modernistic, “What is truth?” cannot be answered without inspired revelation. God’s law is the only way to know how to treat one another (1 Tim.1:8), let alone how to treat God. Doing away with God’s law is exactly what Cain did. He dismissed both God and Abel, in worship, love, and words. While we are justified by grace, we are judged by law, which is why we need to be justified by grace. Go back to God’s question, “Where is your brother Abel?” Go back to the New Covenant and see how often we are called “brothers.” “But encourage each other daily, while it is still called today, so that none of you is hardened by sin’s deception” (Heb.3:13). Now use God’s love and law to answer God as to how we treat “one another.”
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