Cain hated the model of Abel. Ideally we hold to positive models, found in experience, literature and history, especially in Scripture. We learn that modeling is a major teaching method in pedagogy, secular or religious. Negative models can also teach us well. I never caught on to gambling, partly because of the grief it caused my mother, derived from my father’s conduct. His inability to resist wagering, and his inability to win when he did wager, including his arrogance in practicing both, were enough for me to resist. I could walk through a thousand casinos and never wager a coin, even just to avoid a holier than thou attitude – which attitude I deplore.
Does churlish Nabal have anything to teach husbands, especially to those who have wives as noble as Abigail? Do the responses to enemies given to Zerubbabel, Ezra and Nehemiah show a likeness in my response to persons who do not agree with me? Am I showing some of the contradictions found in Simon bar Jesus, who received a stern dressing down from the Apostle Peter for his hypocrisy? Am I as guilty of similar hypocrisy as Ananias and Sapphira who dropped dead at the feet of the Apostles after aborting their promises? Struck down, they modeled greed and hypocrisy to the church, and everyone in the church body learned about it.
For several years in the American Colonies, a day each year was designated for self-debasement. The individual might identify self, on this day only, as the worst of persons in one or more ways, usually identified with some shamed character in Scripture. He might call himself Judas, or Balaam, or Absalom, or Cain, even as an Imp of Satan. The holiday never caught on, and has faded to less than a memory in the history of the church. There is a kernel of truth here that might help in negative role playing if it were used guardedly as a counseling tool. Happily for us, the peculiar fad died out. What would modern man do with such a fad – ghosts of Halloween?
Our era of the feel good religion shies away from self-evaluation that might solemnize us. Evaluation is a major factor in the communion service. We do need something that gains our attention to the residue of the old nature within us. When it is strong enough we are driven to live daily in the awareness of our dependence upon the gift of Christ to forgive and set us straight, with the appropriate humility that should adorn us. If the humility is genuine, it is evidence of that faith that honors God in the actions and thoughts of our lives. Even humility is a gift to us.
God permits us to honor him in any righteous way we choose. Not that he needs to be honored, but that we need to honor him. God needs nothing from us, absolutely nothing. When I honor him, serve him, praise him, pray to him, share his name in service to others, and seek his holiness for righteousness, I tell myself that matters are in order for me. Models, affirmative or negative, partially inform me how to bring that about. Genuineness is also renouncement of all that is opposite to that special life. Evil, greed, unruly habits and passions, hatred, anger, jealousy, and the like are pushed out with righteousness, peace, grace, humility, joy and the like – to clearer meaning for immortality. It is education for life when one can identify and follow effective models. I gained the gifts of models in my life. Jesus is the first one. The problem, of course, is to make the procedure effective. Christians ought to be interested in the biographies of persons with an important purpose of finding models of both the good to follow and the poor to avoid. We do well to know our models – negative factors to avoid or affirmative factors to follow. The principle applies to both natural and spiritual contexts. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020