Are you ready for another adventure through the Bible? Today I’m going to be your tour guide and we’re going to take a slow walk through one of the earliest stories in the Bible… the story of Cain and Abel. Or, as my Dad says, we’re taking a slow walk because Abel needed a Cane/Cain (haha!). Genesis 4 is the first story we get outside of the creation account. It starts the wilderness narrative rolling. Eve and Adam had just been exiled out Eden, and then we read in chapter 4:
Genesis 4:1
And Adam had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain. “With the help of YHWH I have brought forth a man,” she said.
Eve notes that she brought forth a man. That phrase “brought forth” isn’t the best translation. It is qaniti and it means I’ve acquired in Hebrew, so Cain (Qayin) means the “acquired one”. With the help of YHWH, Eve acquired a man-child.
Genesis 4:2
Later she gave birth to Cain’s brother Abel.
Abel or, as it’s pronounced in Hebrew, Havel means a vapour… a thing that has little substance.
It’s the same word used by Solomon, in Ecclesiastes where he says, “vanity of vanities” or “vapour of vapours”. It’s all wispy wind. This name gives a hint of his life. Abel’s breath would not be long for this world… his life was like a vapour.
Genesis 4:2
Now Abel was a keeper of sheep…
This is very early in the Biblical story, but already we start to see imagery that points forward to Jesus. Abel was the first shepherd ever mentioned in the Bible and, (spoiler alert) we’re going to find out he gets killed by his brother! Jesus was called the Good Shepherd, a shepherd who was killed by his brethren. See the connection? Sometimes you’ve got to read between the lines to see the full story!
Genesis 4:2-4
Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, while Cain was a tiller of the soil. So in the course of time, Cain brought some of the fruit of the soil as an offering to YHWH while Abel brought the best portions of the firstborn of his flock.
It’s interesting to note that this was the first recorded sacrifice to God in the Bible. Did God ask them to make a sacrifice? Not that we’re aware of. So why do they do it? When Eve and Adam were in the Garden, God gave them everything. God walked alongside humans and they enjoyed all the abundant gifts of the Garden.
Out in the wilderness they had limited access to what was good, and so it might be that they felt the need to give something to God, in order to remain close to Him and maybe get something back from Him. They were striving to maintain a relationship with God, and that’s good, but it wasn’t the gift God was interested in, it was the heart of the giver:
Genesis 4:4
And YHWH looked with favour on Abel and his offering, but He had no regard for Cain and his offering. So Cain became very angry, and his countenance fell.
His “countenance fell”... this is an interesting phrase. Countenance is also the word for “face” or “presence”. Do you remember in the Creation account that humans were made in the Image of God. We are made to be the face of God to our fellow humans. Cain’s face fell and he no longer looked like the Image he was supposed to bear… God’s image.
Genesis 4:6-7
“Why are you angry,” said YHWH to Cain, “and why has your countenance fallen? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?”
It wasn’t about what Cain brought for a sacrifice, it’s about doing right. “If you do what is right”… Being “righteous” means having a “right relationship” with God, the people, and this planet. Cain’s heart was not in the right place. He was not doing right.
Genesis 4:6
“But [YHWH continues] if you refuse to do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires you, but you must master it.”
Sin is like a monster that desires your allegiance. It wants to bring you down, it wants to make your face fall so that you no longer represent God’s face. We must rise above that monster before it destroys us. Cain heard the words of warning but he did not respond to God because he did not want to rise above the monster. Instead, he submitted to it and made a devious plan…
Genesis 4:8
Then Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out to the field.”
Cain turned to deception. The “field” was his domain. He tilled the earth to bear its fruit. He appeared to kindly invite his brother to enter his work space and Abel unwittingly accepted his brother’s invitation:
Genesis 4:8
And while they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him.
Cain was supposed to rise up against sin (the crouching monster) and instead he rose up against his brother. It’s life out of order.
Now God saw it all, but He gave Cain the opportunity to own up to his sin…
Genesis 4:9
And YHWH said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”
God knew the answer, but He was giving Cain an invitation to confess and seek forgiveness. So how did he respond?…
Genesis 4:9
“I do not know!” he answered. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
“Am I my brother’s keeper?” Yes! The answer is Yes! Yes, Cain, you ARE your brother’s keeper! In fact, we are all our brother’s and sister’s keepers! What was the great commission just a few chapters earlier?… Humans were made to be stewards of the planet, caring and nurturing everything that is in it… including each other!
Genesis 4:10-11
“What have you done?” replied YHWH. “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground. Now you are cursed and banished from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.”
The field was Cain’s domain. He was supposed to nurture it and help good things LIVE in it. Instead he killed on it. He fed it death. By the way, there’s a whole theme of the earth swallowing people up which runs all through the Bible, and this is the first instance of it. The earth was made to give forth life, not devour us in death. Cain’s action of murder shows that he had taken God’s good world and with Abel’s blood he stamped a big Out of Order sign on it. He’s made it what it was never intended to be… a death zone. All the subsequent times we read about the earth “swallowing up” humans, it’s a reminder of Cain’s sin of feeding death to the earth.
The earth will one day be renewed, to be God’s kingdom, as He planned it from the beginning. But first, death must be defeated, and Jesus would come to do just that!
Now God is a forgiving God, but here’s the thing… Cain never asked for forgiveness. He didn’t repent. He showed no regret. “Pft… am I my brother’s keeper?” And because of that God had no other choice but to spell out the consequences. So He said to Cain:
Genesis 4:12
”When you till the ground, it will no longer yield its produce to you.”
Why? Because Cain introduced death to the ground… so it will not give him life back. Then God said to him:
Genesis 4:12
“You will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.”
Cain, you have lost your purpose. You have lost your ability to bring life out of soil… you will wander, begging for food; you will represent the death you brought upon your brother, and brought upon yourself. By your own deeds you no longer represent the image of God. You represent the image of death.
Genesis 4:13-14
But Cain said to YHWH, “My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, this day You have driven me from the face of the earth, and from Your face I will be hidden.
Notice that?… we’re getting face/countenance imagery again. Cain lamented that he was being pushed away from the face of the earth and that he would no longer see God’s face. But that’s the thing: If you stop looking like God (reflecting His character), then you’ll have a hard time seeing God’s presence in the world around you. The same goes for if you stop seeking God, you’ll never find God. Then Cain lamented:
Genesis 4:14
“I will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”
So now Cain’s freaked out. He still didn’t care about his brother. He didn’t repent… He became immediately self-absorbed in his own problems…. He felt that this consequence for his actions was a bad deal. Now (he thinks) MY life is the one at stake. In his mind this was not a fair punishment. But here’s the thing… God was (and is) a just God who never promotes death to be an answer..
Genesis 4:14-15
“I will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” “Not so!” replied YHWH. “If anyone slays Cain, then Cain will be avenged sevenfold.” And YHWH placed a mark on Cain, so that no one who found him would kill him.
We don’t know what this mark was, but people would see Cain as a harbinger of death, the walking dead, but they would not kill him for it.
God would not have Cain killed, instead He would make Cain LIVE with what he did.
Genesis 4:16
So Cain went out from the presence of YHWH and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
Cain walked away from God’s presence… he could no longer see God’s face… and he settled in the wilderness without the presence of God. In the story, God and Cain never speak to each other again. The last words we hear Cain say is the Hebrew phrase (ya-har’geni) (they) will kill me.
This is a really tragic story and remember, Adam and Eve were present when all this was happening to their family. They lost their two sons: Abel was murdered and Cain fled deeper into the wilderness. Eve and Adam were, once again, without children. But…
Genesis 4:25-26
Adam had relations with his wife again; and she gave birth to a son, and named him Seth, for, she said, “God has appointed me another child in place of Abel, because Cain killed him.”
Eve named him Seth because God “sethed me another child”. Seth means appointed. Cain was the “acquired one” but Seth was the “appointed one”… and from the line of Seth would come Jesus the “Anointed One”.
If you read the genealogy of Jesus found in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus was a descendant of Seth. So Seth is the one who starts the new chosen family.
Genesis 4:26
To Seth also a son was born; and he named him Enosh. Then people began to call upon the name of YHWH.
Cain stopped talking to God, but the descendents of Seth (the appointed one) called upon the name of YHWH. Seth’s family invoked a relationship with God their Creator. They were on the right track! And that track started a complicated story of the Jewish people… the line from which Jesus the Messiah would come and rescue all the world from the death that constantly tried to swallow them up.
Cain introduced killing into the world… to counterbalance that, God immediately started a family that would get humanity back on the track of life. And so Jesus came as the life-sustainer.
Now the story of Cain is referenced three times in the New Testament. We’ll look at one. Here’s what John had to say about it:
1 John 3:11-12
For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we are to love one another; not as Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother.
Cain’s allegiance was not with God, he was aligned with the Great Deceiver… “the evil one”…
1 John 3:12
And for what reason did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil, but his brother’s were righteous.
This goes right back to the first sacrifice…Cain gave a sacrifice that lacked conviction. His heart was not right. He gave to God in order to take what he desired. Abel gave with the goodness of his own heart.
1 John 3:13-14
Do not be surprised, brothers and sisters, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers and sisters. The one who does not love remains in death.
Cain remained in a death-state, because he had no love to give.
1 John 3:15-18
Everyone who hates his brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life remaining in him. We know love by this, that He [Jesus] laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers and sisters. But whoever has worldly goods and sees his brother or sister in need, and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God remain in him? Little children, let’s not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth.
“Everyone who hates his brother or sister is a murderer.” Yikes! Hatred itself is a kind of murder. Have you ever hated anyone? According to John, that’s an emotional murder made by the heart… and it damages both the hated and the hater.
Jesus, would preach that everything hinges on love… love at all cost. Remember what He said the greatest commandment was? Love God… and then love your neighbour as if your neighbour was you!
But who is our neighbour? The story of the Good Samaritan tells us that everyone is our neighbour, regardless of race, gender, class, religion, political opinion… we are to treat everyone as a brother / sister / neighbour.
We are a brother/sister/neighbour to the people we judge most harshly! We can’t be like Cain with his hardened heart. He was a harbinger of death, not a promoter of life. Regarding the death of his brother, he felt no remorse and asked no forgiveness. He severed his relationship with the God who gave him life. He let his face fall so far away from God that he no longer bore God’s image, and instead began to look like death itself… and he wandered the earth as a marked harbinger of death… here is what death looks like; it looks like Cain.
Jesus, on the other hand, told us what LIFE should look like…
Luke 6:35-38
“But love your enemies and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons and daughters of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil people. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you… For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return.”
Cain was measured by his own standard of measurement. He got what he gave… Cain brought death and he bore the image of death. But through death, Jesus brought life.
Jesus died for the men who put Him on the cross and He died for the ones who spit in His face, and He did not hate them for it. He knew their weaknesses and yet He still loved them, and He wanted, desperately, to save them.
We can all be saved, even the worst of us; our only task is confession. Confess to God and (honestly) confess to yourself about what’s really holding you back from loving God. Cain put a wall up between him and God. When God warned him about the crouching monster of sin, Cain didn’t even give God a response. He just turned to his brother, invited him into the field, and slaughtered him… like one of the lambs that Abel was born to protect.
Confession immediately breaks down the wall between God and ourselves… a wall that many of us keep rebuilding and reinforcing over and over again… so that life feels like a prison of our own making.
1 John 1:9
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous, so that He will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
This is the freedom that we all seek. Confession is letting our sins go… so that we can walk in freedom, guilt-free, renewed, refreshed, living life to the fullest and helping others do the same. Cain never confessed, never repented, and he acted like what he did meant nothing. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Sin is crouching at the door. We can’t let it take us down into darkness and death like it did to Cain. We were born to be free… not enslaved to hatred or greed. If we confess our darkness then we can live in the light of freedom that Jesus has freely offered every one of us.
What’s this Cain and Abel story really about? It’s about life and death. It’s about confession and freedom. We can build up a wall and imprison ourselves like death slaves OR we can use confession as a key to setting us free from the chains of death.
If we turn our backs to the harbinger of death and face God, then we will really start to look human, as God intended humans to be… filled with life and love, mercy, generosity, kindness and joy. But the biggest takeaway from the Cain and Abel story is this: we need to be each other’s keepers so that no one gets left behind. The kingdom of God is not fully here yet, but why not live like it is?! Let’s be the keepers and caretakers we were meant to be! By our actions we can make the world a little kinder, a little more compassionate, and a lot more loving! Let’s show the world what God’s face really looks like.. Amen? Amen!
Next week: Keeper
