Am I my brother’s keeper?

All of the Jewish Scriptures and the teachings of Yeshua (the real Jesus) focus on answering one question – “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

I have spent a lot of time for over the past thirty years trying to understand those answers. For many of those years, Dr. Ike Tennison and Rabbi Jeffrey Leynor have been involved in that research with me. In this blog, I am going to give you a 21^st century reconstruction of the story that is responsible for that famous question.

After Adam failed to guard and protect Eve’s life from a walking, talking religious snake in the Garden of Eden, God evicted them from their luxurious home -- which also cut them off from a life in which God provided everything for them. How many times sitting around the campfire times do you think Adam was reminded of how “he” really messed up a good thing!

Now Adam and Eve had to find water, grow crops, make clothing, find shelter and do all of the things required just to survive. But, somehow, in spite of all of their new responsibilities, they discovered sex. Obviously, it is an indisputable fact that people do not have to understand the biology of sex in order to do it – anymore than other animals require “sex ed.” courses.

Anyway, Eve and Adam experienced the first recorded pregnancy in the Bible together -- apparently without a clue as to what was happening to her body. And then it happened – Eve gave birth to twins! How did she interpret what had just happened to her; she looked at Adam and said, “I created them!”

God didn’t drop in and explain the “birds and bees” to them. Their new reality was Adam got them kicked out of the Garden and Eve creates people.

But, God did drop in to receive His portion of the crops and flocks Eve’s creatures produced. Cain brought God part of his harvest and Abel brought the best animals of his flock. Interestingly, Adam and Eve did not bring God anything. Now the story takes a strange and unexpected turn:

God ignores not only Cain’s gifts, but He ignores Cain!!!

We have no idea about what Adam and Eve had told Cain and Abel about God, but as he stood there completely being ignored – whatever was going on in his mind made him really angry at his twin brother, Abel!

It doesn’t appear that Abel has a clue about it. But it is very clear God saw that Cain was angry when He asked him “why his face had fallen.” God didn’t wait for him to answer. Pay close attention to what God said next:

Surely, if you protect and preserve the lives of your father, mother and brother your face will be lifted up! But if you do not protect and preserve the lives of your father, mother and brother, sin will be like a predatory animal crouching at your door. Its desire shall be for you, but you will be able to master it if you protect and preserve the lives of your father, mother and brother.

 Well we all know the rest of the story!

1. Cain ignored God.

2. Cain murdered Abel.

3. God did not intervene to prevent it; and neither did Adam or Eve.

4. God evicted Cain from his homeland.

5. Lamech, one of Cain’s descendants, out did Cain by committing the first “recreational murder” in the Bible.

The moral of the story: What would happen if people really saw themselves as each other’s keepers!

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What would happen if people really saw themselves

as each other’s keepers!