The Highway Forums General Discussion Theology Discussion Forum Towards a Theology of the State

J_Edwards quoted Genesis 4:14-15 above. J_Edwards, I hope you won't mind if I quote 4:13-15 here again, but in the NASB, which I'm convinced is closer to the original language: I may be overly optimistic, but I'm hoping that we can agree on this much:

• There is an eternal law against murder as surely as there is an eternal law mandating that water freeze into ice when it gets cold enough.
• Cain murdered Abel.
• Cain complained to God that "My punishment is too great to bear!". He made this complaint after God had told him (Genesis 4:10-12; NASB):
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  "What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to Me from the ground. Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. When you cultivate the ground, it will no longer yield its strength to you; you will be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth."
• As you indicate, a crucial part of Cain's complaint is that "whoever finds me will kill me." Cain is hereby claiming that people will be trying to translate the eternal law against murder into positive law which by definition differs from eternal law (among other ways) in that it has a penalty that's executed by human beings, i.e., through moral free agency.
• I agree: "death of any type is an appointment designed by God (Heb. 9:27), He still uses secondary causes to execute it (i.e. whether it be nature, angels (Gen 3:24) or man, (Rom. 13:4-5), etc.). And since God knew/foreordained the 'secondary causes' prior to the fall they are included in His paradigm for death!!!"

Here's where I suspect we disagree: It looks to me like you're painting with a very broad brush when you speak of God's use of "secondary causes". God certainly uses secondary causes. He could use a refrigerator to make ice. The fact that there's an eternal law against murder doesn't automatically translate into God's use of human free agency as a "secondary cause" in the punishment of murder. The punishment that God indicates to Cain is that the latter will be (i)"cursed from the ground"; (ii)deprived of the "strength" of the "ground" when he "cultivate(s)" it; and (iii)"a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth". Nowhere in Genesis does God point to human free agency as one of the "secondary causes" of Cain's punishment for murder. On the contrary, when Cain complains to God that "whoever finds me will kill me", God doesn't respond by saying, "Yeah! That's right! You're gonna get what you deserve through human free agency.". On the contrary, when Cain makes this complaint, God responds by putting a very severe impediment to the use of human free agency as a "secondary cause" in the punishment of Cain. God responds by saying, "whoever kills Cain, vengeance will be taken on him sevenfold". I have no idea what sevenfold vengeance would look like, but it's obviously something that every human being on the planet would have feared. It's like God said, "I'm going to make ice (punish Cain). If any human tries to assist Me by using their refrigerator (by intervening as a 'secondary cause', by supplying human free agency in Cain's punishment, by translating the eternal law against murder into positive law), I, God, will make sure that such interfering moral free agent will suffer big time.". To make sure that no one dared avenge Abel's murder, "the LORD appointed a sign for Cain, so that no one finding him would slay him".

I agree that Cain feared man's retaliation more than God's punishment. That speaks to how rotten Cain was. But the fact that God impeded the use of human free agency as a secondary cause in Cain's punishment speaks to how rotten the rest of Adam's race was, and is. The impediment that God put in the way of the translation, by any of Cain's contemporaries, of the eternal law against murder into positive law -- the "appointed ... sign" and the stated penalty for ignoring such "sign" -- is a perennial warning to everyone interested in law enforcement, to take extraordinary care in translating eternal law into positive law (i.e., in asserting human free agency as a secondary cause in the punishment of human violations of eternal law).

The strong linkage you make between eternal law and positive law apparently extends to before the fall. This is a point at which I disagree emphatically. You make a case for the existence of the Ten Commandments even before the fall. It looks like a fairly reliable argument, so I'll agree (although not without some reservation) that the Ten Commandments existed as eternal law before the fall. I agree that being obedient to the eternal law is the essence of being in relationship with God. But when you say, I see no evidence in Scripture supporting this. I agree that "don't eat" is a command. As such, it falls within the purview of Deuteronomy 29:29: "The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law.". By revealing this command, "don't eat", to Adam and Eve, God was translating eternal law into an oral, unwritten precursor to the divine law. The existence of the commandment -- without clearly indicating that it needs to be translated into positive law, i.e., law imposed by people upon other people -- means that Yes!, "Adam as covenant head was suppose to obey". Since he was supposed to obey it, he was supposed to enforce it on himself. Furthermore, as "covenant head", he was supposed to lead his wife by example. But I see no equation of headship and the use of force, anywhere in Scripture. Headship might entail the use of force on other people, and it might not. Prudence demands always erring on the side of NOT using force, rather than on the side of forcing compliance. If it's not spelled out clearly that force against someone else is needed, then it's always best to avoid using it. So I see no reason to believe that "don't eat" is positive law, given that positive law is law enforced by people upon other people. When you say, I'm inclined to suspect that we're using totally different definitions of positive law.