As a writer, I’ve often heard the writing advice to eliminate adverbs. IMO, it’s horrible advice because I don’t think it states what it means very well. I know that this advice is suggesting a writer use stronger, more vivid, and precise language when conveying their ideas to their audience. It’s a suggestion that relying on simple -ly words to describe something might not be the best way to do it. 

However, there are times when an -ly word or two help to clear up any possible misreading. 

Today, I was wishing for an -ly word while reading the Bible, and it wasn’t the first time I had wished for such. You see, I was reading the account of the first murder in Genesis 4. God has come to talk to Cain (a second time) and asks him what he has done before telling him that Abel’s blood cries out from the ground. 

I wondered what tone of voice God used when speaking to Cain just as I wondered what tone of voice He used when He asked Adam the same question in Genesis 3 after he and Eve had eaten from the forbidden tree. 

Was it a foreboding tone – the sort that is intended to make one fearful? The sort that an angry judge who is just waiting to throw lightning bolts at the offender would use? 

Or was it the heartbroken plea of a parent who has discovered the disobedience of a child and knows that correction must happen? 

Or was it something else completely? 

The text doesn’t tell us, but I think the way we read that question – the tone of voice we use in our minds – tells us a lot about how we see God. 

You see; I’ve always read that question as one coming from an angry God because of the way He had always been presented to me over the years: as a God just waiting to judge us for our sins, as a God to be feared and obeyed because of that fear. I’ve always read about the mark that God put on Cain as if it was simply a symbol of shame he was forced to wear. 

But this time, after having spent a few years now purposefully noticing the love of God in scripture, I didn’t hear the angry God. I heard the sorrowful Father who was disappointed and unhappy, who knew that the action could not be divorced from its consequences, who pronounced the punishment from a heavy heart and not one which rejoiced in the pain that would come from it. And I noticed more clearly the benevolence of the Father when he puts a mark of protection on Cain and vows to avenge him should anyone kill him. 

I knew that over the past few years my view of God has been shifting, but I don’t know if I had realized just how much until I heard a different tone of voice saying to Cain, “What have you done?” 

How do you hear it? 

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