Build - 1

Did you know the word "build" appears 237 times in the NIV version of the Bible?  When you throw in the word "built" that number goes up to 423!  Wow!  On top of that 7 different words are translated as build in our Bible.  Looks like there is more to this than a simple case of get moving and make something!

I have decided to study each occurrence of the word "build" in the Bible from beginning to end and see where God takes me with that.  First is Genesis 4:17, "Cain lay with his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch. Cain was then BUILDing a city, and he named it after his son Enoch."

This is the first of our translated "build" words, banah which simply means to build or establish.  Interestingly, this is also the word used in Genesis 2:2 when God made Eve.  

So here we are with Cain, the son of Adam and Eve who half heartedly gave an offering to God and then killed his brother out of jealousy.  After that he attempted to hide it from God, only to be cast out and marked.  He settles in Nod.  Whether Nod was an actual place or just a description of his life is anyone's guess.  Scholars tend to vary on this point and since the flood there really isn't a map with an X marks the spot on it.  Nod simply means, "aimless wandering, to shake, waver, more to and fro, show grief, flutter, lament.  As one person put it, "Nod was a God forsaken region".  In this wandering away from God he settles and become a father to Enoch.  

Enoch means dedicate, begin, instruct, and make wise with the root having connotations of speech (source). So Cain names his son in such a way that we know he is a beginning, and proceeds to build the first city and name it after his son.  This is to be a new beginning, a place of instruction where people can be made wise.  The problem I see is that the instructor (Cain) was a bitter teacher.  Here is a man who knew God, whose parents actually walked and talked with Him, and had been cast out.  It is hypothesized that Cain began a false religion here.  Instructing his descendants on God but in a distorted way.  He kept enough of who God is so that his family recognized Him, but twisted it due to his own feelings of rejection.  He may have regretted killing his brother, but not enough to truly be remorseful as evidenced by his building of a city to train up other according to his views of God rather than return to God himself.  Cain didn't completely give up on God, he did move towards Eden, the home of his parents when they walked with God.  

Enoch was built, but then never mentioned in the Bible again, presumably destroyed in the flood.  It was a city touched by God, but twisted by man's selfishness and pride.  Cain built the city without God and it didn't stand the test of time.  

How many times have we build something in our own lives as a result of our own wandering?  We step back from God because we have created a separation through sin and rather than be honest and face it, ask for forgiveness, and truly repent.  So we begin to perceive God through our own hurt and that distorts our picture of who He is.  Then we begin building - a wall between us and God, a career that consumes us, a life that only marginally reflects who God is.  People around us know that we know God so they look to us as examples.  Only what they see in us isn't the real picture.  None of Cains descendants survived the flood.  The legacy of what he built isn't that of a beginning of something good, but the continuation of a fallen world's spiral.  God wasn't building this....Cain labored in vain.