My Father’s World, Part 3

Cain lost his communion with Creation. The symbolism was that the ground would no longer cooperate with him and speak to him. The communion was blocked by unjust blood. The ground had only one thing to say to him, and it was the priority of calling for justice. It was unjust blood that silenced the ground against Cain. What would have saved Cain this sorrow?

Repentance. Had he confessed his sin and repented, there’s no doubt the cost would have been high, but mercy and redemption was available as long as he lived. We aren’t given much hint why Cain rejected that path, but he did. So he was sent into the Land of Nod, a symbolic name for moral wandering. His life was filled with sorrow and superstition because he refused to know God as God chooses to be known. He refused to hear the voice of his brother’s blood calling his name to live in the Land of Repentance.

Pay attention here: Repentance is not simply satisfying the accounting of some great cash register in the sky. There’s nothing objective about it; it’s entirely personal. Repentance is a way of life in the shadow of God’s mercy, covering you from the heat of His wrath on sin. God is not an accountant, but your Father who wants you near Him. There is nothing you can do in this life that would make it impossible to repent. You can certainly blow away some one-time moral opportunities, but if you are able to want repentance, it’s there. Repentance restores the Father’s covering.

If you move out of that covering, God’s wrath falls on you. Covering is a Hebrew concept of moral affinity, making you a family member with certain privileges. When we toss aside the false mythology of Western Christianity, we realize that Satan is not able to threaten us with much. He has been confined to this realm of existence, and is bound under the same basic moral imperatives of God’s divine justice. That is, if you live under divine moral covering, the Devil is constrained. You aren’t allowed to see the whole picture, but the point is that you are supposed to walk in that covering with confidence that comes from a high moral privilege. Yes, God plays favorites and He’s quite eager to make any of us one of His favorites.

People who don’t commune with God will hide from Him like Adam and Eve after they chose reason over revelation. That’s what happens when you don’t have your heart-mind on the throne of your soul. When spooky stuff happens, the mind can only guess what it means, and is usually afraid because it’s usually wrong. But the heart recognizes spooky stuff as just another way for moral truth to manifest to your attention.

Nature is not fallen; we are. The earth has a form of sentience and recognizes God’s divine moral character as its own. It knows when you are penitent and seeking a godly moral character because it reads your heart. It surely recognizes injustice. It also remembers people, every soul whose soles trod upon it.

You see that ghost of someone who died unjustly? It’s just like blood crying out from the ground. And while there may not be much you can do to restore justice, chances are that what registers on your eyes as a ghost is simply some manifestation of that moral memory. Nature speaks to us of God’s glory. At a minimum, it is your moral duty to recognize it and savor it for what it is. Once you get it through your thick head that most paranormal stuff is either a word from God or fakery from the Devil, or simply something outside your experience, you’ll start deferring to your heart to let you know. And while the answer may never be quite what your mind is expecting, that’s not the point. Give it time and don’t fear. God won’t hurt you and won’t let Satan mess with you beyond certain moral boundaries you can probably discern if you try.

Stop getting spooked about that stuff. You cannot discern what it might represent for you until you stand firmly under His covering. Nightmares? Most of them signal some moral issue not yet resolved in your soul. Visions and other odd manifestations may not mean much right away; our culture has crippled the faith God intended for us. But that stuff is likely to register somewhere inside your soul and comes back out to remind you later when the moral fruit ripens.

You won’t be growing thorns and thistles in your garden, but harvesting sweet fruit from the Lord’s Garden.