Emails to God

⁶ The descendants of Ham were Cush, Mizraim, Put, and Canaan.

⁷ The descendants of Cush were Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, and Sabteca. The descendants of Raamah were Sheba and Dedan.

⁸ Cush was also the ancestor of Nimrod, who was the first heroic warrior on earth. ⁹ Since he was the greatest hunter in the world, his name became proverbial. People would say, “This man is like Nimrod, the greatest hunter in the world.” ¹⁰ He built his kingdom in the land of Babylonia, with the cities of Babylon, Erech, Akkad, and Calneh. ¹¹ From there he expanded his territory to Assyria, building the cities of Nineveh, Rehoboth-ir, Calah, ¹² and Resen (the great city located between Nineveh and Calah).

Genesis 10:6-12

Dear God, I wanted to follow up this morning on Noah’s curse of Ham and see how it ended up. I couldn’t remember. My assumption was that Moses, in recording all of this in writing, was using the curse story to explain the subjugation of Ham’s descendants over the millennia, but from going through this passage, it looks like Ham’s first several generations of descendants did just fine. In fact, they became quite powerful and influential.

I know that there is probably an interpretation of all of this that I don’t get. In fact, every passage I read is an English interpretation of a text written by someone in a different culture with different paradigms for life. Everything I process is an incomplete interpretation of the story because no one today can completely understand what it was like back then, why stories were handed down the way they were, or why Moses recorded them the way he recorded them.

Father, use the collected scripture you have provided to me to speak to me and teach me. Let your Holy Spirit whisper in my ear and guide me into submitting myself before you and knowing you better. Help me to be exactly the man you need me to be for the people in my life. Let your kingdom come into the world through me.

In Jesus’s name I pray,

Amen

After the flood, Noah began to cultivate the ground, and he planted a vineyard. One day he drank some wine he had made, and he became drunk and lay naked inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw that his father was naked and went outside and told his brothers. Then Shem and Japheth took a robe, held it over their shoulders, and backed into the tent to cover their father. As they did this, they looked the other way so they would not see him naked. When Noah woke up from his stupor, he learned what Ham, his youngest son, had done. Then he cursed Canaan, the son of Ham: “May Canaan be cursed! May he be the lowest of servants to his relatives.” Then Noah said, “May the Lord, the God of Shem, be blessed, and may Canaan be his servant! May God expand the territory of Japheth! May Japheth share the prosperity of Shem, and may Canaan be his servant.”
Genesis 9:20-27

Dear God, I was looking at this passage today and I came up with a controversial take on it. Is this a case where Noah was wrong in cursing Ham? Did he overreact out of shame? Was there more to their relationship than this story tells? Did Ham do the wrong thing? Sure. Was he disrespectful and mean? You bet. Did his actions deserve the curse of eternal slavery for him and his descendants? Well, that seems a little harsh.

I heard a teaching on this passage that I completely disagreed with. In fact, I’m not even going to repeat it here because I thought it was so ridiculous. But I think the person or people who came up with the theory were doing their best to justify Noah’s response to Ham instead of entertaining the idea that Noah made a mistake. The Bible’s forefathers made mistakes all of the time. Some of them were called out, but maybe all of them weren’t. Maybe some are just there for us to make our own judgment. Kind of like I’ve talked about with the disciples taking it upon themselves to appoint Mathias as Judas’s successor instead of waiting for you to bring Paul into the fold.

Father, I guess the point is that I make all of these mistakes too. I overreact. I make mistakes. Please keep my mistakes from reverberating too much through history. Help the dominoes that knock over because of my mistakes be few, and restore them to your original plan and design. And when I make the mistakes, make me quick to repent and redeem what I have done.

In Jesus’s name I pray,

Amen

3 The serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild animals the Lord God had made. One day he asked the woman, “Did God really say you must not eat the fruit from any of the trees in the garden?”

² “Of course we may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,” the woman replied. ³ “It’s only the fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden that we are not allowed to eat. God said, ‘You must not eat it or even touch it; if you do, you will die.’”

⁴ “You won’t die!” the serpent replied to the woman. ⁵ “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil.”

⁶ The woman was convinced. She saw that the tree was beautiful and its fruit looked delicious, and she wanted the wisdom it would give her. So she took some of the fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it, too.

Genesis 3:1-6

Dear God, I was thinking about this story this morning and wondering about the oral tradition of it being handed down. Why is it told the way it is told? So I’m going to make some assumptions here. Two key ones, really. Assumption #1: Moses wrote this thousands of years after it happened. Assumption #2: It’s an accurate version of what Adam and Even first shared with Seth and their other children with nothing being changed over the millennia.

So what did Adam and Eve share about this experience? Why did they tell the story this way. I guess I really don’t know why they said what they said about it, but the apparently communicated that the serpent first approached Eve even though Adam was apparently standing right there. Was this significant? Was Eve perhaps a little more precocious than Adam? Could he have just as well have approached Adam first? We will never know. But the order of events does seem to play into the “curse” God gives later.

¹⁶ Then he said to the woman,

“I will sharpen the pain of your pregnancy,
    and in pain you will give birth.
And you will desire to control your husband,
    but he will rule over you.^[c]”

¹⁷ And to the man he said,

“Since you listened to your wife and ate from the tree
    whose fruit I commanded you not to eat,
the ground is cursed because of you.
    All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it.
¹⁸ It will grow thorns and thistles for you,
    though you will eat of its grains.
¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow
    will you have food to eat
until you return to the ground
    from which you were made.
For you were made from dust,
    and to dust you will return.”

Genesis 3:16-19

Funny, but I just noticed something in this curse. For Adam, it was an indefinite curse of the ground. For Eve, however, you pointedly say that it is about her relationship with Adam. I suppose I would also point out (and I heard this point from Baylor professor Beth Allison Barr in her book The Making of Biblical Womanhood) that apparently women being subject to men was not part of the created order. You did not design my relationship with my wife to be a dominant/submissive one. Your perfect created order was for us to be truly partners and equal with each other. Isn’t it interesting that, as men (and some women), we have taken this passage of a curse as a justification for male dominance instead of seeing it for what it really is: against the created order.

Father, I don’t want to be domineering over my wife, and I don’t want her to dominate me. That’s a hard thing to pull off in any relationship because, more often than not, one spouse will be more dominant in personality than the other. Frankly, in our marriage, I have the more dominant personality. So it is up to me to submit to and strive to bring our marriage and relationship back to your perfect created order as much as possible. So help me to do that. Give me eyes to see and ears to hear. Help me to be exactly the husband and father you need me to be.

In Jesus’s name I pray,

Amen