If I read the bible and don’t feel challenged, stretched or convicted, I’m probably reading it incorrectly.
I said this the other day as the thought I have been dwelling on. I still find this true, and found a great example of it in a conversation my friend Amon started with a provocative blog Tuesday.
You would think of God as someone who treats everyone equally, right? Wrong. Matter of fact you shouldn’t be thinking about how God plays his favoritism game. He is God and it is His game. With this in mind, I have never stopped wondering why God plays unfair. At least in my human mind. And there is no better place to find God playing unfair than in Genesis 4. Two good guys Cain and Abel choose different jobs. Call them a lawyer and a doctor or something like that. Cain brings something from his profession and so does Abel. God looks at Cain’s gift and decides, “Well, I don’t think I care for that”. I am curious to know what you think about God’s game of favoritism.
What ensued was a conversation about the heart behind the gifts being offered. What is tough about reading this passage in the Bible, is that there is no justification given for why God favored one gift and not the other. We want there to be a why, a way that we can control this God: the how to for how we earn His favor.
and instead we get the statement that God favored Abel’s gift over Cain’s.
This is a great example of the thought I’ve been processing, for it is a passage that does not work well with my box that I try to put God in. He breaks it by not fitting my systems. Instead He does something I don’t like.
While the discussion of whether or not God shows favoritism is much more nuanced than just Genesis 4, we must deal with this story of God showing favoritism with no reason really given for why.
