After their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Adam and his wife seem to have settled down nearby, close to the cherubim and the place of offerings referred to as ‘the presence of the Lord’ (Genesis 4:16). Here, no doubt, they felt secure, and in any case their life of toil left little time for thoughts of moving on into the unknown world beyond the horizon.
Cain had grown up in this environment. As soon as he was old enough, he had learnt to till the fields of his father’s homestead, and the web of life’s routine was spun for him about its homely boundaries. Now that familiar pattern was to be shattered. His growing envy of godly Abel had matured into hate. The clash over their sacrifices had provoked the murder for which he now stood on trial, like his parents before him, before the Lord of all the earth. Like them, he now heard the dreadful words of a curse from which there was no escape.
Expulsion and Exile
His sentence, which is recorded in Genesis 4:11–12, was divided into two parts. The first hit at his livelihood, the horticulture in which his skills lay, and the fruit of which had caused the fatal quarrel. ‘And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength.’ His security was being torn from him. Worse was to follow: ‘You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.’
He was to be driven out, away from home, but worse, away from the presence of the Lord, excluded from all hope of return to the Paradise. He was no longer in communion with God. The severity of the sentence sank home, and Cain cried out, ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden’ (vs. 13–14).
There is something strangely moving about this cry. It has a sadness about it like the ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’ which Jesus attributes to those he will reject at the last Judgment (Luke 13:28). Separation from God is the worst state of a human. It leaves them desolate, ‘having no hope and without God in the world’ (Ephesians 2:12). It is a state which we can leave behind if we repent and lay hold of the Gospel. But Cain showed no sign of repentance. So the great Judge excluded him with a finality that should make us tremble.
In this situation Cain was to wander the earth until he died. God took the unusual step of protecting his life from any avenging of Abel’s blood. ‘“If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him’
(Genesis 4:15).
Later, God would lay down laws which called, after a proper judicial investigation, for the death of a deliberate murderer (Genesis 9:6, Numbers 35:29–33). These laws were not like today’s, which are based on expediency or the principle of deterring others from crime. They were based on natural justice towards one who had usurped the right of God Himself to give or take away life.
Hating Your Brother
We leave the topic of Cain’s crime with a last reminder from the New Testament Epistle of John that we do not have to kill our brother to be guilty of murder. John picks out Jesus’ commandments in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:21–22), and at the Last Supper (John 13:34–35). He writes:
This is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother… Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him
(1 John 3:11–15).
It is wrong even to hate our brother or sister in our heart. The thought, as the proverb says, is father of the deed. Violence begins as a cultivated grudge.
How sad it is that disagreement over the way we should worship God has produced some of the strongest hatred and the bitterest wars of Christendom’s history. The very thing which divided Cain and Abel in the beginning led to the Crusades, the Inquisition, the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the Troubles in Ireland.
Jesus knew that it would be so. ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace,’ he said, ‘but a sword’ (Matthew 10:34). It seems that pride, the cause of nearly all strife, is at its worst in the field of religion. The closer we stand to the light, the stronger are the shadows. How carefully we must examine our own motives to make sure we are truly right, like Abel, and avoid condemning our fellows before we have compared their position and our own with the Word of God.
David Pearce
(to be continued)