As persons emerging into adulthood, our first duty is to take responsibility for our own lives, with the understanding that we need something more than biology. So, if we are diligent we discover what is missing, find it, assimilate it, all used in continuous formation. God would say we need something more than repair as a beginning process, so he provides spiritual experience, an experience that will take the rest of our lives to work through, which includes sustaining for both natural and spiritual life. We may need some dramatic event, or events, that reveal to us – ourselves. Cain did not find himself until confronted by God after the murder of his brother, Abel. It was not the murder that revealed Cain to himself, but the confrontation of God that caused Cain to perceive enough to seek and gain change for his person. He moved away from the tragic context, and started a new society. The rest of the Genesis Chapter shows that Cain’s issue of generations did as well as earthly generations might do – with both successes and failures in the life and culture of earth’s society. What happened to Cain’s generations happens currently to generations of families, godly or ungodly. We assume from the passage that common grace was illustrated through the experience of Cain, and his encounter with God and his parental family. Cain would not have known himself in a way that would make any difference in the mortal/immortal conflict without a dramatic event (or events) that gained his attention. Arrested attention does not assure that results will be favorable. One’s response will determine the direction of the outcome. We can follow a number of these dramatic events in the Bible: David and the prophet relative to Bathsheba; Saul with the Witch of Endor and the appearance of Samuel; Jonah and the great fish; Job and his friends; Elijah and the threatening queen; Simon the Sorcerer challenged by the Apostle Peter – so the stories go. The process is also a cultural one as the closing of the Red Sea on the Egyptians, or the experience of Pentecost on the birth of the church.
Private dramas are not large and newsworthy. For me the encounter was the result of a sermon on January 21, 1940, a sermon that made me aware that I wasn’t really a good boy. That strong conviction sent me to a place of prayer, and a conscious reception of Jesus Christ into my life. That hour remains sound with me many decades later – eighty years. Other everyday kinds of alerting events have assisted the growth of that initial event. That which began a steady growth in spiritual life has needed surges along the way. Most persons seem to need periodic prodding. For every public event, attention getting, there are many events that are private, perhaps startling. Ravi Zacharias tells the story of a man who, during business forays, would visit brothels. On one occasion he was stimulated to seek a brothel in his town, and was given the business name of a particular prostitute there. He went, made his request, and was led into a room, so to find the prostitute to be his wife. Under an assumed name, she made extra money when her husband was long absent. He would have attacked his wife, perhaps killed her, had he not been restrained. He learned in the awful moment his own depravity. What he had readily accepted in his own conduct, he immediately would condemn in his wife’s. In his duplicity, the lesson was doubly painful, but meaningful.
We must sense who we are, what can be done to save us from the faultiness (depravity) of our own nature, a matter addressed in the Gospel of Christ. All is ministered to in what follows after one’s initiation into God’s kingdom of holiness. Gracious God by his Holy Spirit assists us; by the Scripture guides us; and, by prayer engages us, so we learn what it is to grow Christianly. This is the encounter that leads to peace, to discovery, to hope in a Christ life as it is meant to be – immortally to the ultimate. We may create our own narrative on how God deals with us in forming the Christian as a child of God. That is what he does – form us. The pattern may be gentle and moving along without great hindrances for most persons. This last is common for those who believe and live the Christ forming experience early in life. They seem to move along more easily in the pattern than those coming later with life baggage they find difficult to abandon. For every Christian there is a price to pay to learn how to give up the life one has cultivated for life guided in ways of righteousness. It is usually quite personal, but if these private dealings with God are resisted, they may become open, perhaps extremely embarrassing and costly. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020