ABRAHAM, LOT, AND JOB

 In ancient cultures, human life didn’t mean anything outside of the family, tribe, city, or nation you belonged to.  Sometimes even family wasn’t enough to guarantee your safety. There were no human rights, no protections from those who held power, no worth outside of who you belonged to.  Those who were physically strong were often the rulers of tribes, and armies. There were only two classes of people at that time in our history, those who were free, and those who were slaves.  Sadly most people were slaves. Even Abraham owned slaves.  Sarah had a handmaid (a slave) who served her, and could even be instructed to sleep with her husband.  Do you think this kind of lifestyle could happen in America today?  There is no way to really calculate how many years lapsed between the flood and the birth of Abraham, but the common number is 350 years.  During that time the world didn’t improve much.  

By the time we have Abraham in the picture, we have a world that we can’t even fathom today.  To give it even more depth, let’s make it clear what the world was like at that time.  You had people like Abraham, Job, and Lot who were considered righteous men.  YET, they had handmaids and servants.  Abraham had so many servants, he could join them to a war with three other kings and win.  Maybe you aren’t seeing the power of the story, but the facts are, that people ‘owned’ other people and it was considered acceptable. Slavery isn’t acceptable to God.  Getting people to see the wickedness of slavery would take thousands of years. God’s textbook is often written over hundreds and thousands of years, and the lesson against enslaving others required a drastic course of action. You might wonder why I’m making a big deal about slavery, but I can tell you that even in its most basic expression, slavery is detestable to God.  Ancient peoples didn’t feel slavery was wrong, with many considering owning slaves to be a noble virtue.  God didn’t approve, but he wasn’t willing to start over again like He did with Noah.  He had a better plan. That plan to bring men to a higher level of understanding would require a greater sacrifice than anything men could offer.  

During the time of Abraham, Lot, and Job, we find entire cities given over to sexual debauchery. We find the rampant sexual desires so strong that the inhabitants demanded any new men to be given to them.  In other words these ancient peoples were raping each other regardless of whether they were men or women.  Mobs of sexual bullies roamed the streets at night without restraint.  Children were their main target.  They wanted ‘new’ men, which meant that they’d already molested and raped everything that was in the city.  To refuse to give in to the sexual depravity of the city was to risk your home, your family, and even your life.  Sexual liberty is just a mask for slavery, just ask any little girl in Asian street markets.  The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are an ancient example of what is beginning today. If we don’t stem the tide of this sexual liberation it will soon be a hate crime to deny someone’s sexual advances.  Crazy, you say!  Even now we are making it a hate crime to speak out against the LGBTQ agenda. Just ten years ago we were promised that legal recognition of gay marriage wouldn’t change anything in the church.  How’d that work out?

During the time of Abraham, children were also given to be used as temple prostitutes.  There was no sanctity of life!  Children were of no value to the culture of that day.  Babies were often abandoned at the doorsteps of shrines and these babies would be given up as sex slaves from infancy.  Human life held no worth.  Babies were often thrown alive over the walls of ancient cities into the smoldering trash heaps outside the city.  Is this too bleak of a picture?  Is it too dark for you?  Are you wondering why I’m even dwelling on this?  This isn’t even a hint of what was going on during this time in our history. When a culture loses the sanctity of life, when a child is nothing more than a sex toy, and we begin to allow our children to be played with in their sexual identity, we are not far away from the insanity of the ancient world.  

There is hope!  The influence of the church hasn’t been completely destroyed. There is an ancient wickedness that we haven’t seen yet, because of the Church’s influence in the world today.  Sadly, that influence is diminishing, and we are beginning to see mankind revert to the evil of the past. I am hopeful that God will intervene if we ask Him to. 

Slavery is more than one man owning another!  Slavery is the repression of free thinking, free speech, and freedom of movement. God’s plan to make slavery abhorrent would take thousands of years, and sadly turn families against each other.  Carnal nature is hard to break!  God has to first declare it wrong, then mankind has to experience firsthand why it is wrong, and then that memory becomes part of a desire to seek God’s way over the carnal nature. 

Slavery is the epitome of every evil we do to one another.  Rape, violent cruelty, torture, abuse, child abuse, and emotional abuse are all expressions of slavery.  The carnal nature finds its greatest expression in enslavement, and murder.  Wars throughout human history have all been the result of someone wishing to take what isn’t theirs through physical brutality. Power, whether physical, or mental, finds a way to express the worst of the carnal nature. 

A PERSONAL REVELATION:

As a young man in the Air Force, I was a military hawk.  I believed we had a right to enforce our form of government on other peoples and cultures. If another nation challenged us, I had a sad statement that was simply “Nuke them till they glow.”  Without even knowing it, I was exhibiting the most base aspects of the carnal nature, enforcing my will upon another.  

This carnal nature to enslave isn’t excused even if the desired result is good.  A matter of fact, I’ve found out that the carnal nature to enslave others is usually cloaked in the desire to ‘do good.’   As our current culture has shown, enslavement can be manifested as ‘political correctness,’ and  ‘controlling speech.’ These manifestations of enslavement are ancient in origin, and evidence of the fear of free societies. The mainstream media has taken the art of mental enslavement to a fine art, by declaring anyone who doesn’t agree with the progressive agenda as deplorable, uneducated, haters, and fascist. If freedom lovers don’t stand up against the move to enslave us to thought control, we will be enslaved once more to the elitist, totalitarian lifestyle of ancient cultures. Yes, free speech can be abhorrent at times, but it is still freedom. A truly free society is able to exist with dissent, different thought, and even rebellion.  How do I know this?  Because God has existed with us even in our worst expression of the carnal nature.  He could have simply spoken us out of existence and started over, but He didn’t. He could have made us automatons simply carrying out a set of programmed functions, but He allows us to be FREE.  Sadly, it was fearful Christians who began the cries for censorship in the media instead of offering up hope, and faith in God. The knife of censorship cuts both ways, and now it is cutting at religious liberty.  Christians will soon find themselves slaves to an overbearing, overreaching government intent on enslaving everyone.  

Enslavement is unique to the carnal nature.  Throughout this study you’re going to see many references to slavery because it is so endemic to the carnal nature.  God has never sought to enslave us, but to free us from the carnal nature. The carnal nature rebuffs God’s love, and despises grace.  The perfect law of love can’t be manifested outside of regenerate man.  That is why the Church was given the mandate of ‘preaching’ the gospel instead of ‘enforcing’ the gospel. There are many voices in the halls of Christianity that want to create another Christian ‘state.’  I hear them, and see their posts on social media.  This was never what Christ intended.  Yes, I believe we should prefer one another in business, in relations, and in invention. The regenerate mind is far superior to the mind controlled by the flesh, BUT that doesn’t give us the right to enslave others to our views. Abortion, sexual deviancy, and cruelty to others will always find a path to expression as long as mankind is free to think.  This is why God has never instituted a theocracy on earth. The book of Revelation shows us that when Christ returns to rule the earth, it will only take a thousand years for the carnal nature to rebel against the divine Kingdom. Please discover how Christ has to rule doing those thousand years.  History is replete with the horrors of the carnal nature. God knows that the carnal nature will pervert good into evil.  Enslavement is the definition of wickedness. Wickedness ruled mankind from Adam to Moses, until God became so frustrated with what he saw, he decided to finally declare His nature to a small group of insignificant people who’d been enslaved for hundreds of years. His hatred of slavery would finally be written in stone.  

WICKEDNESS: FROM ADAM TO NOAH

 “It is impossible for men to govern themselves without God,  because they've proven they can’t govern themselves.”  David A. Bragg from The Chronicles of Zach Rader: Last Flight of the Ice Warrior.

I wrote this statement in 2004 in a fiction novel based in a future almost 400 years from now. I wrote the book in response to utopian dreamers who believe that humans can overcome their carnal nature, and create a society free of despotic rulers, class warfare, and tribalism in all of its forms. The best we can hope for till Christ returns is what we’ve enjoyed here in the United States of America till about 10 years ago.  Our great Republic was a brave experiment in self governance, but even the founding fathers knew that it could fail given a slight tip in the precarious balance of checks, and balances they’d set in place. They knew that if one branch gained leverage over the other, the republic would crumble into a smoking ruin.  More than anything else, they knew that the governance they sought to give the people was fragile if it wasn’t based upon God given rights to every man. The unravelling of our republic is due to our government denying God, and embracing the carnal nature. The rejection of God's boundaries always leads to a slippery slope toward unchecked wickedness. 

While our present generation seeks to create a grand utopia, free of religion, and free of social expectations of any kind, the truth is, it will never happen. Wickedness has reigned from the day Adam and Eve left the garden of Eden, and it continues to this day. We weren’t even one generation removed from Adam and Eve before we had the first murder. There was no religious or societal expectations in the beginning. Cain and Able had no one else to affect them.  They had no societal pressures, no environmental issues to lead them to express the basest of human nature, yet we find Cain upset at his brother over something as simple as a gift given to God. Cain’s reaction to rejection is classic carnal nature, he sulks.  It is at this point that God intervenes and says to Cain;  “If you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door: and its desire is for you, but you must master it.”  (Genesis 4:7 emphasis mine.)

The way we would say this to our children today is; If you make a mistake, anger and shame is lurking at the door, and it desires to consume you, but you can master it.  Simply put, 'you didn't get it right this time, but you can try again.' Instead, Cain continued to sulk, envy soon took over, and mankind began its first generation with a homicide. From this point forward, humans have repeatedly demonstrated the power of the carnal nature to destroy, and enslave. The carnal nature is described by God as Wickedness.  The Hebrew word for wicked is “Ra” or “Resh” which is also the letter ‘R’ in the Hebrew alphabet.  It’s root meaning is to break, demolish, or destroy, it implies the desire to destroy the purpose of something. The power of wickedness doesn't get weaker over time.  If people are left unchecked by moral standards, they will destroy everything, and everyone in their path. It doesn't take long for wickedness to multiply to the point where God has to intervene.  I did some real sloppy math and came up with about 1,670 years from Adam to Noah, during which mankind was ruled by wickedness.  A matter of fact by the time Noah was born, you have to realize that man was pretty wicked. In Genesis 6:5 it says; “Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of mankind was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.”  For God to repent of creating man, you know it wasn’t good.  Then came Noah.  Here was a good man in his generation. How bad could mankind have been?  Can we even begin to imagine what people were doing that would drive God to obliterate mankind with a flood? How wicked could a bunch of stone age people be?  I guess my answer would be: bad enough to destroy mankind from the face of the earth.  Everything was contaminated by man’s wickedness, even the animals. Sadly, there has never been a time when people weren’t wicked. The greater truth to be learned here, is that mankind was destroying God’s purpose for the earth.  That means ancient man was killing, stealing, destroying, and doing wickedness all the time.  Time to wash the earth of the wickedness.  Enter the flood.

When Noah entered the ark, you would hope that would bring peace between God and man.  God would wash away the wicked, and leave the righteous.  You’d think that reducing the earth’s population down to one family would solve everything.  NOPE!  Almost immediately, we  have incest, murder, more murder, and even more murder immediately after the flood.  We had people exploring every facet of sexual behavior.  Lying, and stealing, cruelty of every kind followed mankind wherever he went. Families turned against families, and within a generation we were right back where we started. The carnal nature is pervasive!  It didn’t take long for Noah’s children to forget God, and create their own gods.  Once that happened it didn’t take long before people began offering up their children to  those idols.  People had sex with anyone they wanted to. (polyamorism as opposed to polygamy.)  Eventually polyamorism led to deviant sexual behaviors, pedophilia, child enslavement, human enslavement, adultery, murder, torture, and evils beyond anything I am willing to write about in this blog.  Simply stated, mankind did whatever they wanted whenever they wanted.  

Why am I being so negative?  Because this present  generation is proof of how wicked people can be to one another when God is removed from the equation.  In today’s ‘woke’ culture, if you don’t agree with the left's ‘woke’ ideas, you are ‘cancelled.’  The rage culture on the internet is beyond the norms we would talk to one another if we were face to face.  Cancelling people today is no different than ancient cultures throwing you out of the tribe, city, and family in ancient times.  

Oops, rabbit trail!  Back to Noah.  Not long after the flood, we find nations being formed, magnificent structures being built, and people trying to subjugate one another by force.  The sin of slavery began to introduce itself throughout all peoples, and cultures. BE SURE, God deplores slavery as much as He hates killing.  Slaves at that time weren’t solely acquired by conquest, but they were often the result of people simply selling themselves to another person. Once again, we see mankind unable to govern themselves. However, before you start judging ancient people, you have to see what is going on today.  If you want a car or a house, you sell yourself to a bank and they demand payment from you.  In order to make that payment, you ‘sell’ yourself to an employer who pays you what they think you’re worth.  Not quite the same as slavery, but it is the same motivation for selling yourself as a slave in ancient times.  The major difference between then and now, is that often times parents would sell their children into slavery, not unlike what we are doing with all of this Coronavirus relief stuff. We are selling our future generation of children  to the taxman, just as parents would sell their children to anyone who would buy them.  There was no appreciation for individual worth or dignity.  REMEMBER THAT!!!!!  

The carnal nature is revealed throughout time, and is prevalent today. Christianity is the only antidote for the carnal nature.  I can say that with confidence, because I can point you to what people have done to one another throughout ancient history.  As we move deeper into this study, you’ll find out that the Church is God’s best plan for mankind.  Salvation is more than just a personal experience, it is God’s purpose for all people, and designed to bring liberty to all the earth. The United States of America was founded upon the idea of religious liberty, but we’ve seen it perverted into an experiment into sexual liberty.  This clash of ideals will eventually bring us to the point of dividing this nation in a hundred different groups.  The carnal nature doesn’t give in, neither should we.  The Church has always been and will continue to be God's best plan to redeem people from their wickedness.  Of that I believe, and I am sure.