The Three Basic Questions

A sermon preached by Dr. Peter James Flamming, Pastor
First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
May 31, 1998

Text: Genesis 3

Often on sports broadcasts they ask a question to test your knowledge of the sport. Let me ask you a question to test your knowledge of the Bible? What are the first three questions God asks in the Bible? The longer I live the more I believe these three questions are basic to life. Even though they are found within the first four chapters of the Bible, all three questions are as current as today's newspaper. For those with an analytical eye, around each basic question are supporting questions. But the three basic questions are clear.

The first is addressed to Adam after he sinned. God asks, "Where are you?" (Gen. 3:8,9)
The second is addressed to Adam's son Cain: "Why are you so angry?" (Gen. 4:6)
The third is also addressed to Cain: "Where is your brother?"Cain answered, "Am I my brother's keeper?"

Friends, these are basic. For instance, you could use them to begin developing a spiritual life.

Where am I, really? Am I willing to share my emotions, like anger, with God? What responsibility do I have for those I hate?

Or, would you like to develop a sense of balance in life? Consider the balance you get from these basic three.

Where are you? forces you to look within yourself.Why are you so angry? forces you to deal with your emotions.Where is your brother? forces us to admit others are important too.

Or, would you like to learn how to pray?

I have discovered that these three questions allow me to handle my life in the presence of God.
1. Lord, this is where I am right now.
2. Lord, help me look honestly at my anger.
3. Lord, who should I pray for?

So, lets look at the three questions in turn.

1. Where are you, Adam?
Let's start with Adam. In Hebrew, Adam is a generic word, a generic word for man. In other words, we too are included in the question God addresses to Adam. God asks, "Where are you, Jim?" Often the first step to salvation is to honestly answer God's question, "Where are you?" What are you building your life around? What are your values? What do you believe? Where are you headed? What do you really worship?

Those are tough questions, too tough for me to handle by myself. That is one reason I ask Jesus, who I believe lives within me and knows exactly where I am, to help me face these questions. Without the Lord Jesus within I would despair. But the Lord says simply, "Follow me, and we'll figure this out."

Some years ago while on a mission trip to the interior of Brazil we came upon an intriguing nutritional tradition. Young mothers, after they became pregnant, were not allowed to eat any fruits or vegetables. It is an area of Brazil where fruits and vegetables abound, growing almost wild. The people who live there grow them, sell them in the market place, and eat them readily. But for young mothers, it was a taboo to eat either fruit or vegetables while they were carrying their child. Taboo means, "a prohibition caused by local custom."

We have our own taboos. One of the most powerful is this: don't look within for your answers.

Our culture says, "All the important answers can be supplied by science, or technology, or government, or more money." All of those are out there. All can be put on a graph, or studied in a lab, or statistically measured. We have, in virtually every part of our society, separated the head from the heart, or as I would prefer to put it, we have worshiped the analytical mind and ignored the relational and spiritual mind. Parker Palmer summarizes what this has done to us:

We have minds that do not know how to feel and hearts that do not know how to think.

We have separated facts from feelings with the result that bloodless facts rule the world from a distance while ignorant emotions destroy us close at hand.

See, God gave us wonderfully complex minds. We do have and need the mind that analyzes, plans, monitors, and judges.

But we also have a physical mind that runs our body; an emotional mind that feels; a relational mind that needs love and friendship; and a spiritual mind that asks, what is the meaning of all this?

When God asks, "Where are you," God is asking a very modern question.

Some years ago at a youth camp we had a campfire when the youth were free to share with one another what had happened to them that week. Toward the end a young fellow got up and stood before the others. I was surprised. I had never heard him speak to anyone. Withdrawn, he was the brain among the students. A nerd. A bookworm. Incidentally, some of our members were in he same church as Bill Gates when he was a teenager. He was a nerd. Now the richest man in the world, nerd can't be all bad. Well, at that youth camp a young man got up to speak who almost never spoke. As he began he opened up as if a can opener had hold of him. Unlike some of us, he knew where he was and didn't like it. He said, "I'm a good student. Some of you have called me a nerd and I guess I am. But I don't need another A. What I need is a friend. The most important thing that ever happened to me may have happened this week: I made some friends with you guys. I think I have even become a friend with God. I have no trouble making A-s or understanding computers. I have trouble making friends. You have no idea how much I needed all of you in my life."

God has a wonderful sense of humor. At the end of our lives we can't take our technology, graphs and statistics, and grade point averages with us. But our friends of faith - these go with us even into eternity. Three things remain says Paul: faith, hope, and love.

Where am I? is a wonderful question for the age of technology. God says, " know all about your computers, but where are you?"

2. The second question God asks is abruptly modern and rudely relevant. God asks: "Why are you so angry?"
When I read about the most recent shooting on a school campus by an angry student with an automatic gun, I just sagged. I thought of the parents and what they are going through. I thought of what the students feel, especially the close friends.

Those who demand the freedom for everyone to carry a gun, deal with this out there, as a matter of principle, a human right. What they forget is that we live in an angry world that has no skill in handling anger. Typical of our age, objective principle becomes more important than how it affects people.

Consistent with the taboo of never turning inward for answers, we treat anger as if its solution is out there. What we do, of course, is deal with anger by blaming someone out there for our problems. Like Adam and Eve. Adam blamed Eve: the woman she made me do it. Eve blamed the serpent, that rascal made me do it. Now all these millennia later we follow the same pattern. But never before have we had the firepower and the nuclear power to turn truly destructive.

God comes to Cain and asks, "Why are you so angry?" God hopes Cain will look himself in the mirror and say, "I'm at fault here. I'm the one who took some shortcuts with my offering. I'm the one who prefers being jealous of Abel to finding my own strengths and developing them." But rather than face his own weaknesses and explore his own strengths, he projected his anger on Abel and killed him.

Anger is like Cholesterol. There is a good kind and a killing kind. The killing kind of anger is when you blame someone else for the frustrations in your life. Like the kid on the school ground who pulled the trigger. The killing kind of anger not only affects us but hurts lots of innocent people. We need a strategy for handling our killing anger. A good place to begin is to ask, Why am I so angry?

But there is good anger also, anger that is brutally honest within, and uses anger to motivate us to achieve our goals. Good kind of anger is never blame placing and always able to ask God's question.

3. But God doesn't stop with anger - he pushes out the boundaries and asks, "Where is your brother?"
The brother here is the hated brother, the unliked brother, the rejected brother, the dead brother. Sooner or later Christ comes to us and asks what we are going to do with those we can't stand and often frankly hate?

Scott Walker grew up the son of missionary parents in the Philippines. There he came across a Christian leader whose name was Zachariah Dayot. Zach’s remarkable story included the bitter experience during World War II when the Japanese invaded the Philippines. In the little village Zach lived, the elders met and decided that the best way to protect the women and children was for the men to take to the hills and have the Japanese chase them. Surely they would not harm the women and children! It worked just the opposite. The Japanese decided to strike fear into all the other villages by destroying the village and everyone in it. Zach returned to find his family gone, his wife and children destroyed. In his anger he returned to the hills to fight with the guerillas against the Japanese. Caught in an ambush, he was beaten and left for dead.

Miraculously Zach survived the war and decided to use his life for God. Zack became a minister, and a good one. He was, in fact, President of the Philippine Baptist Convention when the Japanese Baptists decided to send a delegation to formally restore relationships with Filipino Baptists. Zach was the obvious one to meet them at the airport and welcome them. He had thought his inner wounds were healing. But his simmering anger and bitterness boiled over as he thought of meeting the Japanese. He remembered the burned villages. He remembered burying his own family. Rage consumed him. He wouldn't go. He couldn't go. He kept asking, what would Jesus do? But he knew what Jesus would do and it just made him the more angry. Soon a haunting realization broke in on him. His hate was burning out all of the love and compassion within him. It made him shudder. The night before the arrival of the Japanese delegation he could not sleep. He tried to pray but mostly he just felt bitter. But sometime in that night the thought occurred to him, what if Christ had treated me like I am treating those Japanese. The next morning, the day of their arrival, he caught a Taxi and was the first to meet the Christian brothers and sisters from Japan. He bowed as Orientals do in a gesture of welcome. Something changed within him as he bowed. I suppose it was like Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. On that day he turned the corner he was able to say, "The Japanese are my brothers and my sisters in Christ."

Three questions to take along and make camp with. Where are you? Why are you so angry? Where is your brother? Give thanks to God for not treating us like we treat other people. His grace has abounded. His forgiveness is real. His presence is with us right now. But where are you? Is it time to change course? Why not let God love the hostility out of you. It's God time.

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