Tag / sin

by Annie Newman

Job 01 – A Different Way to Think About Satan

A quick word on pronouns, and my usage of them from here out:  I believe God transcends/is all inclusive of gender.  I was raised, as many Christians were, referring to God using male pronouns.  I’ll admit it is what is most comfortable for me, but I’m committed to recognizing not only the divine female within God but also the overall inclusivity of God, and am making it a practice to now refer to God (and any angels, spirits, etc discussed in the Bible) with the gender neutral pronouns xe, xem, xyr, xemself.  I realize this may be awkward for some readers, but the more we practice the better we get!  I will continue to refer to Jesus using masculine pronouns as he came to Earth as male.

6 One day the angels came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came with them. 7 The Lord said to Satan, “Where have you come from?”

Satan answered the Lord, “From roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.”

8 Then the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job?There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.” (Read the rest of the chapter, here.)

A little personal theological background

Today I’m going to discuss a new understanding of Satan that I reached after reading this chapter.  But first, I feel it’s necessary to explain where I come from, theologically, when discussing Heaven and Hell and the Devil.  I don’t have a fully formed notion of “heaven” and “hell,” if they exist at all, and who is going to end up in which place.  I came of age during the release of the “Left Behind” series, and for most of my teen years was terrified of the Rapture and what came afterwards and if I would be one of those left behind or not, and firmly believed there were those who were “saved” and those who were not.

Then, after sophomore year of college, a friend committed suicide.  He was open about his struggles with mental health, and I never knew him as anything but bright, kind, generous and loving.  Seriously, everyone loved him.  And I just couldn’t imagine that God would condemn him to eternal hell for his brain being sick.  If you think about the brain being an organ (which it is), condemning someone to hell for acting out of a mental illness is like condemning someone to hell for Chrons disease, or endometriosis.  I simply could not accept this hard and fast saved-not saved, heaven-hell duality.

Also, after having kids, and knowing how much I love them even when they are driving me insane-I mean literally have to put them in their beds and walk out of the house to cool down before I go back in – I can’t imagine a loving God rejecting any of us for forever. Yes, that includes people as terrible as Stalin and Hitler.  Sure, God might be angry at us, and might punish us, but condemn us to hell forever? I just don’t see how a parent could do that.  I pray I never get tested in this, but I can’t think of one thing that my daughters could do that would make me stop loving them.  I might be deeply wounded, horribly shamed, or incredibly angry, but those feelings would still be rooted in a place of love.  And if God is much more perfect than I, wouldn’t Xe love all Xyr children, too?

Finally, the idea that hell and the devil even exist seems counter-intuitive to the idea that there even is a omnipotent, loving, good and just God.  No one can deny there is suffering in this world, and I don’t believe all suffering is part of “God’s plan,” so does that mean I have to believe that God isn’t omnipotent, loving, good and just?  Does that mean I have to believe in hell and the devil?  It’s something I’ve wrestled with, and this chapter gave me another option, which I’m excited to share with you now.

Etymology of “Satan”

Briefly, let’s take a look at a few ways the Bible designates Satan, starting with…well, Satan.  “Satan” is not a name, or at least, it didn’t start out that way.  “Satan” is a title, it means “accuser.”  The story of Job is an old one, possibly as old as 2000 BC, and in it, the Hebrew word for Satan is always preceded by the definite article. In other words, it reads “The Accuser,” so xe is kind of like a prosecuting attorney, presenting all the facts against us.  By 600 or 500 BC the article is dropped, and “Satan” becomes an actual name, but it started as a title. Second, we’ve already seen “serpent,” in the story of Adam and Eve.  Related to this description is “dragon,” which is used in Revelations. Both are often symbols and bringers of knowledge and wisdom, if not in Western cultures certainly so in other cultures.  Additionally, Lucifer literally means “morning star.”  So, it is a harbinger of the light of day, which, to me, sounds pretty positive.  Could it be another allusion to Satan being the bringer of knowledge, or of bringing things to light?

The Accuser

So, with this in mind, what if we’ve been viewing Satan the wrong way?  Not as an adversary to be overthrown, but more of a combined undercover cop-moral auditor?  Still not exactly someone you want to come up against, but also not an eternal tormentor.  My new thought, after reading this chapter, is that God created Satan as an impartial witness, one who can bring the truth to light, like the morning star, one who seeks knowledge over everything else.  When viewed this way, we can see why the serpent would encourage Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge – lacking more nuanced views of God’s design (including empathy and patience) the serpent saw a direct line to knowledge and wanted to go for it, and didn’t understand why it could possibly be off limits to anyone.  Seeing Satan as an impartial truth seeker also helps to reconcile how a God who is beneficent and loving and the source of all creation can exist side by side, indeed, create-a being like Satan who is not beneficent and loving.  I’m not saying that Satan is an extension or part of God like Jesus or the Holy Spirit is, but perhaps xe is, still, an agent of God: something God created to be apart from Xyr love of mankind and creation through which Xe could judge them fairly.

Would God have tested Job without Satan’s recommendation?  I don’t know.  Xe tested Abraham’s faith asking him to kill Isaac, so maybe it’s not outside the realm of possibility.  But seeing Satan as an agent of God, instead of an adversary of God, makes the stories more similar. In both, the faith of man is being tested through great hardship.  Why does our faith need to be tested in the first place?  I honestly don’t know, but perhaps it has something to do with growth.  All good parents want to see their kids grow, and God is nothing if not a good parent. These aren’t perfect correlations, but I think the following examples still fit: I make my kids do hard things on a regular basis.  Climbing up the ladder to the big girl slide all by themselves, sitting on the toilet, and, as babies, letting them cry it out to get back to sleep were all controlled situations where I stepped back and essentially asked more of them.  Sure, I could have helped them, but they wouldn’t have grown. Job’s test is far harder than most of us will be asked to pass, but God was watching over him the whole time.  Perhaps, when being tested by the devil, or Satan, or whatever you want to call xem, we are not being tormented by a demon but instead being encouraged to grow, to achieve new knowledge, and new spiritual insight, just as Job did.

This new view of Satan also makes failure a little easier to accept.  It took Marienne months to build up her confidence to go all the way up the ladder at the playground all by herself.  Potty-training is still a work in progress.  Do I condemn my daughters because they haven’t learned certain skills yet? Of course not.  Do I continue to get them to try? Of course I do, that’s the only way they’ll learn.  So perhaps we need to cut ourselves, and everyone around us, a little slack.  We’re all trying, let’s keep encouraging each other.  Satan may be setting up sting operations for us and pointing out our failures, and possibly we’re even punished for those failures (like when I put one of the girls in time out for scratching her sister-a favorite form of combat in our house). But even then, God is there rooting us on, watching us with pride as we learn and grow.

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by Annie Newman

Genesis 09 – A Response to Events at the Indigenous Peoples March

Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. 2 The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. 3 Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.

4 “But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. 5 And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being.

6 “Whoever sheds human blood,
    by humans shall their blood be shed;
for in the image of God
    has God made mankind.

7 As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.”

8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: 9 “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. 11 I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

12 And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: 13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. 16 Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”

17 So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”

18 The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) 19 These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth.

20 Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. 21 When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. 22 Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. 23 But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s naked body. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father naked.

24 When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, 25 he said,

“Cursed be Canaan!
    The lowest of slaves
    will he be to his brothers.”

26 He also said,

“Praise be to the Lord, the God of Shem!
    May Canaan be the slave of Shem.
27 May God extend Japheth’s[b] territory;
    may Japheth live in the tents of Shem,
    and may Canaan be the slave of Japheth.”

28 After the flood Noah lived 350 years. 29 Noah lived a total of 950 years, and then he died.

I usually write these a few days in advance, so I finished Chapter Eight last week, before events at the Indigenous People’s March transpired.  I’ll share it on Friday, but today I’m going to share my thoughts on Chapter Nine.  I have been angry the past few days: little and big angers.  The little angers have been normal domestic problems that are nothing more than a flash in the pan, and heightened by the fact that I am so close to a child-free project that I am getting impatient.  But the bigger anger, the anger over how Nathan Phillips, a war veteran who was trying to diffuse a tense situation, was first smirked at by an arrogant and entitled teenager, and now is being wrongly vilified as one of the instigators.

It’s all over the news now that that boy in Mr. Phillips face was “smiling to diffuse the situation.”  If you haven’t heard me say it elsewhere already (because I’ve said so several times now), I am a woman who has received her share of unwanted advances. I know what smiling to diffuse a situation looks and feels like, and that boy is not doing that, at all.  He is intimidating, he is threatening, and not from any “fight of flight” position.  Let me be as gracious as I can, given my anger: perhaps he is just young and stupid and doesn’t fully comprehend how his actions were perceived. What grieves my heart is now he never will: His parents, whatever publicity firm they hired to spin the story, and whatever outlets chose to buy this load of bullshit have all reinforced the idea that he’s done nothing wrong, that he can go out and act like that again.

What does this have to do with chapter nine of Genesis? Honestly not much on the surface, but I’ve been at a total loss as to what to write until I decided to just go ahead and write about this, and then things started falling into place.

The first thing I noticed is here we have two examples of wrongs being held to reckoning.  Let’s start with the second, in 9:25, where Noah says, “Cursed be Canaan [Ham’s descendants], the lowest of slaves shall he be to his brother!” Now, this may seem like an outsized response to just accidentally stumbling across his dad naked.  I don’t have proof of this for this particular passage, but these “uncovering” and “naked” passages are often euphemisms for sexual acts, like when Ruth uncovers Boaz feet.  (She had sex with him, in case that isn’t clear.)  So, did Ham violate his father? I don’t know, but it seems likely to me, and the punishment would make more sense. In 9:6 the wrongs and reckonings are more hypothetical, but still firm in the decree: “Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind.”

Humans are made in God’s image, and from the two passages in this chapter, it is abundantly clear that we all have a divine right not to be violated by another human. Killed, raped, or otherwise visited upon by violence. Now, this child in Mr Phillips face did not kill or rape him, but he was still very much in the wrong, and he will have to answer for it.  I only pray it is in his own conscious, and that he can rectify himself with God.  As abhorrent as I may find him, he is still a mother’s son, and still a child of God, and anyone who visits violence upon him is as much if not more so in the wrong than he is.

Let me try to end on a hopeful note, since this chapter does.  God provided Noah with a covenant and a sign of that covenant-a rainbow.  There’s a reason the rainbow has also been adopted by the LGBTQ movement as a symbol of gay pride: It represents the diversity within that community, and celebrates that diversity.  Why did God pick a rainbow?  It comes after a rainstorm, the likes of which had never been seen before and won’t be seen again, so that makes sense.  But it’s also ephemeral and colorful, just like our lives.  No, this is not a “life is too short, let’s celebrate our diversity and all get along” ending.  This is a “life is too short to not recognize the divine in all our brothers and sisters, so get out there and speak out against injustice” ending.  Your life is short, my life is short, their life is short.  We ALL deserve to live it to the fullest, and people who stand in the way of that, like this teenager and all the people who condone or turn a blind eye to his behavior, sin not only against their fellow man but sin against God.

by Annie Newman

Genesis 05-Cain, Seth, Lamech, and Enoch

This is the written account of Adam’s family line.

When God created mankind, he made them in the likeness of God. 2 He created them male and female and blessed them. And he named them “Mankind” when they were created.

3 When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth. 4 After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters. 5 Altogether, Adam lived a total of 930 years, and then he died.

6 When Seth had lived 105 years, he became the father[b] of Enosh.7 After he became the father of Enosh, Seth lived 807 years and had other sons and daughters. 8 Altogether, Seth lived a total of 912 years, and then he died.

9 When Enosh had lived 90 years, he became the father of Kenan.10 After he became the father of Kenan, Enosh lived 815 years and had other sons and daughters. 11 Altogether, Enosh lived a total of 905 years, and then he died.

12 When Kenan had lived 70 years, he became the father of Mahalalel.13 After he became the father of Mahalalel, Kenan lived 840 years and had other sons and daughters. 14 Altogether, Kenan lived a total of 910 years, and then he died.

15 When Mahalalel had lived 65 years, he became the father of Jared.16 After he became the father of Jared, Mahalalel lived 830 years and had other sons and daughters. 17 Altogether, Mahalalel lived a total of 895 years, and then he died.

18 When Jared had lived 162 years, he became the father of Enoch.19 After he became the father of Enoch, Jared lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters. 20 Altogether, Jared lived a total of 962 years, and then he died.

21 When Enoch had lived 65 years, he became the father of Methuselah.22 After he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked faithfully with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters. 23 Altogether, Enoch lived a total of 365 years. 24 Enoch walked faithfully with God; then he was no more, because God took him away.

25 When Methuselah had lived 187 years, he became the father of Lamech. 26 After he became the father of Lamech, Methuselah lived 782 years and had other sons and daughters. 27 Altogether, Methuselah lived a total of 969 years, and then he died.

28 When Lamech had lived 182 years, he had a son. 29 He named him Noah and said, “He will comfort us in the labor and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed.” 30 After Noah was born, Lamech lived 595 years and had other sons and daughters.31 Altogether, Lamech lived a total of 777 years, and then he died.

32 After Noah was 500 years old, he became the father of Shem, Ham and Japheth.

Adam and Eve and Noah were Bible stories I learned early on, but Lamech and Enoch I didn’t know about until later, and I’m kind of surprised.  Perhaps it’s just that there isn’t a lot of story, mostly names. Maybe it used to be more well known. It seems like the kind of allegorical contrast between righteous and wicked that would have been popular in the earlier centuries of a country founded on Protestant ideals.

Thanks to my NIV study notes, I know that Lamech is the seventh generation removed (seven being the number of “completeness”) from Adam through his fallen son, Cain.  In chapter 4, we see how “evil” he is -in his greed and lust he marries not one but two women, then he kills a man and haughtily declares his immunity.  Even though he is also the father of the arts (remember, his sons introduced music, animal husbandry, and metal smithing) he’s made out to be a pretty unlikeable dude.

Seth was granted to Adam and Eve to replace the slain Abel, and stands in contrast to his fallen brother Cain.  Verse 5:1 reminds us “When God created man, He made them in the likeness of God.” Then, in verse 5:3, we are told Adam “had a son in his own likeness, in his own image, and he named him Seth.” This repetition reinforces Seth’s own godliness, again, as a foible to wicked Cain.  And from this “good” son, a line of good men is brought forth. The seventh son removed from Adam, Enoch, was so good he “walked with God 300 years” (5:27) before being taken away by God.  The generally accepted interpretation of this is that Enoch did not have to suffer death, but was taken into Heaven alive.The more famous Noah, Enoch’s grandson, almost seems like icing on the genealogical cake at this point-it’s hard to top walking with God.

So, the seventh son of wicked Cain: wicked. The seventh son of righteous Seth: righteous. Wicked begets wicked, righteous begets righteous.  It just sounds like an 18th century saying to me. So, what can we learn from this story today? I don’t think anyone is cursed to repeat the same mistakes of their parents.  That’s not to discount trauma and just the general influence of upbringing, whether it’s good or bad or somewhere in between.  But we all have the chance, every day, to sow the seeds of righteousness.  Sometimes it’s large and noticeable, like the men who died protecting two women, one wearing a hijab, from a hateful attack in Portland two years ago.  Other times it can be as small as holding the elevator door open for the person who is still twenty paces behind you.  I guess what I’m saying is, we aren’t doomed by bad genetics and we don’t all have to be heroes.  What we do need to do is start paying it forward.  Start with an act of kindness today, and let’s see what it will inspire down the road-tomorrow, in a generation, and seven generations from now.