People keep asking: Where did Cain’s wife come from? The answer is not direct. We have to go back to were Cain stood, in the sense of what Scripture tells us. We must restore to our minds the biblical outlook buried under centuries of obfuscation that results from humans avoiding God’s truth.
As we’ve noted before, one of our biggest problems in understanding the Bible is the persistent error of democratic assumptions. This is deeply rooted in western thinking and appears to us manifestly just. But it is not from the Bible; the Bible is relentlessly feudal. God’s Creation is fundamentally feudal in nature. God plays favorites.
It is this fundamental disjuncture that results in western biblical scholars coming up with all kinds of nonsense to explain things so differently from the ancient Hebrew people. This is why people like Heiser and Moreau dance all around the Doctrine of Election; they stand on the very weak ground of their human assumptions and reasoning. For all their mastery of the background of the Bible, they simply do not have Hebrew minds because they reject the fundamental assumptions. Instead, they weaken their view of Scripture and inspiration in order to dodge the inevitable requirement of believing what God says.
Our human existence after the Fall is not ultimate reality. When Christ returns, we will be pulled from this existence and transformed into our true created nature. We were not designed for mortality. In the Fall, we were thrust into this form. We did not lose our eternal form; it was masked under mortality.
Mortality means we are limited. A fundamental element of Hebrew epistemology is that, in this human form, we cannot possibly comprehend ultimate truth. The best we can hope for are parables, symbolism that allows us to act on God’s will. The ontology of things is not in our grasp. We must live “as if” on just about everything that matters.
Thus, as has been noted on this blog for many years, we must act as if Creation is alive, sentient and willful. That’s the correct approach. The miracles of Christ make a lot more sense from that angle. We can then begin to consider how to stand where He stood; the process to restore Eden and eternal norms can begin. The flesh must die, symbolically now and literally later.
What makes us capable of bearing the Spirit of Christ in this world is our inner spiritual nature that has been thrust into a highly limited human form. While the Gospel narratives about Christ after His resurrection point to an eternal form that looks and acts something like our current form, there were clearly distinct differences. He was not bound by the “laws” of space and time. He could appear when and where He wanted without having to take the time to travel the distance. He was in His eternal form as the first fruit of resurrection.
There is every reason to assume that our eternal form is like that. What we had in the Garden of Eden was like that. Given the scriptural declaration of Election, we should presume as if there have always been people who had no eternal nature. It’s not a question of them being chosen to remain mortal, but that they simply never had an eternal form.
They existed in the Garden as highly intelligent, but wholly temporal, creatures. They were part of the flora and fauna. Adam and Eve were not part of that until they were thrust into mortal form. Their original mission was to transform the natural world, to propagate God’s Edenic existence across the rest of Creation. They took a detour in agreeing to embrace the Devil’s offer. It turns out that his offer required them to become mortal and come under his dominion.
This is how the human race gained eternal people in the mix. Today, some of us are born with that higher eternal nature, while most are not. Those who lack the eternal nature are still part of the mortal human race that had been in the Garden all along. Cain crossed the boundary to live among the mortals, so his wife was from among them.
The mortals cannot tell the difference; they instinctively deny that there could be a difference. They are not wired to grasp eternal things. Scripture tells us that the Elect do not breed true in mortal flesh. How God makes that choice in each life born into the human race is beyond our grasp, but we are obliged to act as if this is true. The whole point of a Doctrine of Election is to make is possible for us to obey the Lord and form realistic expectations. Some people will never understand what the Spirit tells us in our hearts.
Meanwhile, since we cannot discern who is and isn’t eternal, we are obliged to act as if every human we meet could be an eternal in disguise. We treat them the same, not out of any democratic delusion, but out of practical necessity. The first question in a Hebrew mind is not the ontology of anything. It is, “What can I do with this? How will it glorify God?”
