Love tested--Adam, Cain, and Abraham

     The Bible’s first use of the word “love” is in Abraham’s journey to offer Isaac (see Thomas L. Brodie, Genesis as Dialogue). This doesn’t seem to make sense, though, if you think of God as love. But the God of love converses with us through the Bible that He himself permeates and if we haven’t found him in our reading of a passage, we’re missing something. Adam failed the test of his love for his wife. Cain failed the test of his love for his brother over himself. But Abraham did not fail the test of his love for God over his son.

     Genesis 22:1-2 states, “After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here am I.’ He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” So Abraham’s offering of Isaac wasn’t for some sin of his in the story. It was a test of his love. Do you love me more than your own dear son Isaac, Abraham? Abraham’s willingness to offer to God even his most cherished joy in life, his son, brought God to say “'your offspring shall posses the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice’” (Gen 22 :17-18). Isaac was blessed because of Abraham’s love for God.

     God asked the same of Adam—do you love me more than Eve, Adam? But Adam failed—he chose Eve over God, the gift over the Giver, but not in the way you might think. “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘you shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you” (Gen 3:17). Sapphira, do love me more than your husband Ananias? (Acts 5) When our spouse sins by lying, cheating, stealing, complaining, etc. do we sin with them? Or, do we allow ourselves to be alienated from them, refusing them as if a prostitute or a tax collector?  Our daughter who is heavily involved with discipleship in campus missions at GMU explained to me their strategy. At the first stage of discipling another, the one being discipled has euphoria and every part of following Christ is exciting. In the second stage, that wears off and they can get discouraged and figure out that Christianity can be costly and hard. She said that this is the point where we need to “go into the trenches with them,” as Christ did for the world. Adam failed the test—he did not go into the trenches with Eve. But the second Adam did. Christ didn’t sin with us or shun the sinful but instead “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom 5:8).

     Cain messed up. But he hadn’t sinned with his grain offering because sin was still “crouching at the door” for him, according to Genesis 4:6. The whole question for Cain was what he did with his mistake. Was he repentant and go and learn from his brother how to offer a right offering? No, Cain instead failed the test of his love for his brother. He did not fix his mistake in humility, he excused it in pride and killed his brother instead.

When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” 

He said to him, “Feed my lambs.”

(Jn 21:15)