Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Does Might Make Right? | Torah | Genesis 4:17-25

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here to grow in your faith this year. Are you a spiritual anarchist? That might seem extreme, but does your respect for God's order and plan say otherwise? In today's episode, Patrick looks at Genesis 4:17-25 to discover how sin first begins to run rampant in the world. Listen to find out how to seek God during a time like this. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Social Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks Twitter: https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast Passages: Genesis 4:17-25 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. I'm Tanya Wilman. I'm Jensen Holmick-Mir. And I'm Patrick Miller. We are exploring the first books of the Bible. Right now, we're in Genesis. If you're like me, you love email newsletters, but most of them don't bring me closer to God.

Well, it's time to give Jesus access to your inbox. Sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talks email newsletter. Once a week, you'll get a blest to get a blessed. lessibly short email with guides on spiritual disciplines, inspiring challenges to grow, interesting cultural backgrounds on today's passage, and even quick studies of Hebrew and Greek words. Each week's going to be a little bit different and you're going to love the variety. So stop what you're doing. Click the link in the show notes and sign up today. Now, let's hop into today's episode. Okay, this is super weird to share, but it's totally true. When I was in high school,

get this, I was an anarchist. Now, of course, I don't think I really understood what that meant at the time or what its implications were, but I was committed to the cause. And I thought that all governments, federal and state level, I thought they were all de facto tyrants, that they were all run by corrupt megalomaniacs who get a high from controlling their ponds and keeping the populace under the delusion that they're actually free. Now, the solution in my mind was anarchy. You throw off the shackle. You throw off the shackle. Don't let capitalism and its aspirations keep you pinned. Don't follow the rules. Don't follow the laws. Resist. And in my idealistic political anarchist fervor, I took to spray painting anarchy signs on the back of buildings that I thought were run by the government or by the evil capitalists. Again, remember, this was all supremely idiotic. And I probably just like doing it because I was a high schooler who wanted to break the law. But I remember on one of these Stick It to the Man outings, I decided that the man I needed to take down was the ultimate giant, Blockbuster. Now, for our younger audience who don't remember Blockbuster, Blockbuster was the biggest movie rental company in the U.S. And as such, they needed to be vandalized by me. And so I went behind the building at three in the morning with some friends, and we went to town.

The next day, I came outside and I looked at my handiwork. and I discovered that we had not vandalized Blockbuster. Instead, we'd accidentally vandalized a small family-owned business, about as far from the man as I could imagine. I remember sitting there looking at that, and I felt awful. In fact, it was that event that made me realize how ridiculous I'd become in this whole anarchy phase. But my stupidity highlights a deep and profound truth.

God is not for disorder. God does not love anarchy. But when we reject God's law and order, moral anarchy is often the consequence. This is exactly the point that Genesis 4 wants to highlight. Let me set up the broader context. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve refused to take personal responsibility for their sin. To quote the Shaggy song, they say, it wasn't me. And then Adam blames Eve. Eve blames the serpent. And you fast forward a few decades, and all of a sudden, their elder son, Kane, is doing another sin. He is murdering their younger son, Abel. But Kane is even more brazen in his sin than his parents. He doesn't deny what he did. He admits what he did. Instead, he denies that what

he did was wrong. He tells God, I'm not my brother's keeper. In other words, what I did wasn't really wrong and who are you, God, to tell me what's right. Kane's descendants, they actually descend further in this downward spiral. If there's no right and there's no wrong, there's just anarchy. There's just might-making right. You can do whatever you want, regardless of whatever God says, which finally takes us to Cain's son, Lamek. In Genesis 419, we read this. Lamek married two women, one named Ada and the other, Zilla. Do you see the anarchy beginning to spin out of control? Lamek begins by rejecting God's order, specifically God's vision for marriage as being between one man and one woman. Lamek is the first polygamous in the Bible.

And sexual disorder is a really common form of spiritual anarchy. It's endemic to almost every single society. We reject the idea that God has a good plan for sex, a plan which is actually for our good. It's for our spiritual good. It's for our mental welfare. We reject what God says and we take a no-holds-bar approach. We say, I can do whatever I want with whoever I want.

But the spiral into anarchy for Lamek doesn't stop with sex. It continues. verse 23, we read this. Lamek said to his wives, Ada and Zilla, listen to me. Wives of Lamek, hear my words. I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for insulting me. If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamek 77 times. You see, Kane, he murdered his brother out of jealousy. But Lamek takes it a step forward. He murders a young man, a child, just for insulting him. Spiritual Anarchy he always denies the dignity of human life. It thinks of the world hierarchically, where some humans live superior lives to other humans. And therefore, there's nothing wrong with a powerful man like

Lamek murdering a child because he's higher up on the hierarchy. Lamek matters. The child doesn't. These stories, when you read them about Lamek and his sexual disorder, Lamek in the way that he denied human dignity and murdered, when you read them, they're extreme, aren't they? They're kind of sickening. And yet, you can trace your own spiritual lineage to Lamek. Chances are you, I know it's true of me, you find aspects of God's good order unappealing. And when we think that God's order is unappealing, we end up acting like anarchists. We reject his definition of good and evil. We make our own definition of good and evil. This might be happening to you right now in your sex life. It might be happening to you and how you treat a coworker who you don't like. It might be happening

to you in the way that you speak about your friends at school, or if you're a parent, how you speak to your child, it might be in how you view the world. Maybe you see the world as a hierarchy, and you like putting yourself at the top. Maybe we look down on people who have less than us. Or maybe we make negative assumptions about people who have a different gender or a different race. We may not even ever say these things out loud, but we know it. And when we feel those things, that, that is spiritual anarchy. And just like me in high school, when we give into spiritual anarchy, we begin to vandalize God's creation. We vandalize God's Shalom. Now the Hebrew word Shalom, it's translated as peace in the Bible, but peace is way too thin of a word. Shalom is the world as it should be. Shalom is a world

where people live in right relationship. It's a world where people treat one another with dignity and kind as love and generosity. When we give into spiritual anarchy, we give in to spiritual anarchy, we give in spiritual anarchy. We pull out our spray paints and we vandalize God's shalom. And it's only to our own detriment, only to our own hurt. But God never gives up on his creation. In the very next verse, when we read this, Genesis 425, Adam made love to his wife again. And she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, saying, God has granted me another child in the place of Abel since Kane killed him. Seth opens up a new possibility. Could there be a humanity that embraces God's shalom and doesn't try to vandalize it? And the answer is yes, because from Seth's line eventually

comes Jesus. And Jesus comes to reestablish God's good order, to put an end to spiritual anarchy, to reestablish the worldwide shalom that our hearts absolutely long for. If you give your life to King Jesus, you are asking him to end the spiritual anarchy in your own heart. You're asking him to scrub clean all the vandalism of Shalom that you've done in your life. You're asking him to work through you, to manifest God's beautiful order in the world. Today, I want you to pray that God would help you see the ways that you're being a spiritual anarchist. Confess those things to Jesus. Receive his forgiveness and ask him to work through you, to undo the vandalism that you've done in your life. Ask him to work.

through you to manifest God's shalom in a beautiful, magnetizing, true, and good and loving life. Before you forget, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talks newsletter. Hit the link in the show notes, and you'll get an email every Wednesday that's going to help you beat that midweek slump and go deeper in your walk with Jesus. Thanks for listening.