There’s a vast amount that’s enormously important in Genesis 3 and 4. People often express a sense that something is, somehow, wrong with our world. Why is it such a mess? Why is there so much selfishness? We need to understand what’s gone wrong, and what is the solution.
We’ve watched the catastrophic events in Eden in our Genesis 3 post: how the first human beings grabbed at independence; but independence of God doesn’t work, because we lack God’s power to make life and our relationships work. Through their insistence on independence the first human beings wrecked our world; yet generation after generation we make the same mistake, choosing and trying to live without God.
In the next verses we start to see the results, as the processes get underway that will lead to the world we know. They record a spreading breakdown of relationships; once the vertical, God/human relationship breaks, the horizontal ones start to follow. It is as if they (we) are disconnected from the power‑source for love that would make the other relationships work; like a heater disconnected from the mains, still glowing indeed, but slowly turning cold. The man/woman relationship weakens first: we’ve seen in chapter 3 how the man tries to shift his guilt to the woman, instead of standing by her in mutual care and protection (3:12); and in 3:16 comes God’s prophetic warning of the results in sexual relationship, and how the liberty of love he had planned gets replaced by a turmoil of desire and domination. (The sin that had seemed to point to fuller life in fact leads to ever-spreading death.)
Then 3:17 shows us a step further as the human/nature relationship follows. (Leading towards…… global warming, poisoned oceans, millions of species dying, the rainforests plundered & destroyed.) How different might it have been? We don’t know; we are outside Eden. Next by chapter 4 it develops into the first murder; then someone invents polygamy (4:19, which is institutionalising male promiscuity). By ch6 the earth is `full of violence`; and it ends in the environmental catastrophe we call the flood.
Spreading breakdown: we too know what it is to feel our marital relationships struggling, our family relationships, our relations between races, generations, classes, tribes, communities. The story of our world is the story of broken relationships. And people wonder why, and there’s a reason; it all goes back to that insistence on independence, meaning the central, empowering relationship with God is not there. There is no more crucial decision, and it turned paradise into catastrophe. When the God/human relationship is broken, the others start to disintegrate. God has shown us why, and also the solution!
Why The First Murder Happened
To understand our world we need to grasp the profound story of Cain. First, more detail on what went wrong…
Sometimes people say: Religion causes wars and violence. Obviously that’s questionable. When, say, so-called Protestants or Catholics, or so-called Catholics and Orthodox, are hating each other, the religious label is usually there just to dignify tribal hatreds; if any of them were truly following Jesus, they’d be obeying his command to love their `enemy` (if they must call them that). Religion can be used like this with no connection at all to genuinely following Jesus; and we can no more blame `religion` for these hatreds than we can blame football for Spurs fans hating Arsenal, or Spartak Moscow fans hating Zenit St Petersburg.
EXCEPT – the Bible says… It’s true: religion can cause violence! It did with Cain. Since the religious impulse – how can we link into the universe’s heart and be in relationship with God?- is so deep – maybe the deepest thing in our being?- then it’s going to matter to us at a very deep level; and if in our alienated state we find we `can’t make it work’, our frustration may well trigger all kinds of emotional storms – guilt especially, and fear; anger, hate… Our most powerful drives can turn to violence very easily if they are thwarted. The religious impulse is so vital, so basic to us, that it can be a seriously destructive thing – until it is brought under Christ’s Lordship. That’s the issue here. The very first murder – Cain & Abel, here in Genesis 4 – was about how you approach God. Abel’s offering is accepted; Cain’s is not. Abel offers God a blood-sacrifice (v4). Cain has a different idea, bringing God a sacrifice of what grows naturally (v3); and when he finds that that didn’t bring him to God, instead of learning why, learning God’s way, he slaughters Abel (v8).
What’s going on here? Was Cain ignoring God’s Word about what had happened in Eden, along with its results in judgment and alienation, when he presented God with the fruit of the natural ground (the ground that was fallen and cursed, 3:17, 5:29), as if God should be pleased with it? Cain brings what grows naturally when natural goodness is no longer enough; naturally we’re alienated from God, something needs to be done about that, and recognising this is the essential starting-point for relating to God. But Cain’s worship doesn’t face that, and therefore – this is important – God actually rejects his worship. Abel’s offering in contrast involves a death (and possibly this was a vegetarian era; if so it would have been dramatic & painful); and this blood-sacrifice God accepted.
Did Abel know? Was he learning from what God did earlier (3:21), that in some way the covering leaves there were insufficient, and sorting that problem out involved, symbolically, involved death? Is he remembering that natural goodness wasn’t enough now, that death was the inevitable consequence of our rebellion (2:17), and that somehow this must be taken into account? ‑ that (as the new testament says, looking to Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice) `without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness’ (Heb 9:22)? (God puts so much else in the Bible’s early books to teach us this vital lesson; the whole system of sin offerings, climaxing in the Day of Atonement when the high priest sprinkled blood on the mercy-seat before the cherubims of God’s judgment on sin (Lev 16); and especially the central Jewish celebration of Passover, where people were safe from judgment only if they sheltered in a house with the blood of a sacrificed lamb at its entrance (Exodus 12). God wants to make it very clear that it’s essential we approach him aright, and that involves a blood sacrifice. Sin’s penalty must be paid; God is holy and cannot simply ignore his own law. And so the cross that these things point to is utterly crucial to true religion. And: bound up with that, God’s colossal love; unless he had come down we would be trapped in our lostness forever – but he has!)
So did Abel have some glimpse of this? Or: was the acceptance of Abel’s offering over Cain’s simply educational, teaching both brothers how to approach God, and challenging them both to consider why? We don’t know. But what we read is that Cain wasn’t having it, and gets angry (as we often do when our natural righteousness is declared inadequate), and murders Abel. There was no blood in his offering (v3), but there’s certainly blood now (v10). And the breakdown of relationships has spread a crucial step further.
Why does this matter? Well: we may well see here another of the huge questions marking off biblical, `evangelical’ faith decisively from `liberal’ Christianity. For the radically biblical `evangelical’, forgiveness resulting from our sin’s judgment-penalty being paid for by the Christ’s blood must be as central as it is in both old and new testaments; whereas liberal theology often rejects the whole idea of atonement by the blood of the cross, that Jesus died in agony to pay our penalty (`penal substitution`), as primitive and barbaric. But it’s tragic that such liberalism rejects what is clear over and over again in the old testament, where sacrifices of blood paying for sin are so central, and the new, where Jesus dying to pay for our sin is even more crucial. Indeed our human nature (`religious` human nature too) finds all this hard, as Cain did, and wants to be accepted by God while remaining just the way it is. So various forms of modern Paganism and New Age faiths base their worship on nature in this way, although that’s a sentimentalism that doesn’t face up to the violence of the (now-fallen) natural world. All too often we, like Cain, ignore the issue God calls Adam to face up to in 3:9: `Where are you?` We need to recognise the `natural` evil in ourselves: we cannot approach God, we cannot even live well, as we are.
So biblical faith stands out saying, No: something in us is radically wrong in the sight of God and must be dealt with; we need a whole new birth. And this was why Jesus had to die, opening the way for that by paying for the barrier of our sin; this too is why he gives us his Spirit, because only the Spirit can make possible the radical change we need. And we now can be forgiven, be born again of the Spirit, and the Spirit’s super-natural new life will spread through us (and to every place we bring it)… Let’s (unlike Cain) submit to these realities, and rejoice: Jesus died to make all this possible, Jesus’ love will see our natures transformed and in the end made unimaginably glorious!
But the point here is not just that payment for our sin by the shedding of blood is set out carefully throughout the Bible, as the only way we are able, genuinely, to draw near to a holy God. It’s also that we live in a deeply violent world, and violence is a basic human psychological reality. It has to be faced, grappled with; we can’t just pretend it’s not there. Unless it’s faced in the cross it will resurface. It was at the cross that the violence was faced and dealt with; it’s as the cross works deeply in us that the violence in each of us can be dealt with. Only that bloody, atoning sacrifice of the cross speaks to all that we are. And unless this is grappled with, dealt with in the bloody cross, it will reappear destructively in all kinds of ways; it’s disastrous to try to hide from it, pretending that from childhood upwards our natural humanness is mostly sweetness and light. I am violent, in heart if not in deed (see 1 John 3:11-12’s comments about Cain); and the cross is essential if my inner violence is to be dealt with. There is no other way to approach God than to face these realities, as we’ve said; but also, no other way to get a grip on being human.
And indeed we must take this drastic principle seriously with regard to our personal transformation as Christians, as well as our sins’ forgiveness. I have all sorts of sin that are an affront to God; to a holy God my `old nature` is unacceptable; I’m not `OK’, and my old self actually has to die, `die with Christ` (Rom 6:8), and a whole new life begin, a life of ongoing salvation spreading through every part of me, because every single part of me needs this transforming new birth. Paul writes, `I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me` (Gal 2:20). There is something so desperately dark at the heart of what I `naturally’ am that it cannot be gently improved, only `crucified`, amputated (as we are `united with Christ in his death’), and then replaced in `new birth’ by an entire new life; God’s almighty Spirit coming in to reign at the heart of my innermost being, then slowly spreading this same repentance and rebirth throughout my personality. (See Romans 6-8, especially 6:5-11 and 8:7-15.) We need surgery; we need the cross; and we need the Holy Spirit! Only something as drastic and `un-natural’ as all this is true biblical faith; only this can match our reality, and enable us to walk with God!
Thus God’s Word. But what Cain did ran counter to all this. And so he doesn’t have God’s power to handle the evil inside him. And so the evil spreads…
How The Breakdown Spreads
Another, much broader angle now: To understand our culture, and our world, we need to grasp more from this profound story of Genesis 4…
The fundamental human problem, according to Marx, is alienation. Marx was right ‑ although his diagnosis (and hence his solution) didn’t go deep enough. Jesus insists that the most fundamental thing in our lives, determining our experience of alienation, is not our work, as Marx suggested. Logically, the most vital thing in our lives must surely be our relation with our divine Maker. So if our relationship with him is broken, then the inevitable result must be alienation and destruction spreading into our other relationships, in ever-widening circles: marital crisis, generational fights, class struggle, ethnic, racial, tribal and communal conflict. This process is embodied in the rest of Genesis 4. The realism is again so striking.
What happens? God who loves the sinner comes to Cain with a question, just as he did to Adam in chapter 3: `Where is your brother Abel?’ ‘I don’t know’, replies Cain. `Am I my brother’s keeper?’ (v9; NIV as usual). The answer, of course, is Yes; love involves each of us in full responsibility for the wellbeing of each other (‘Love your neighbour as yourself‘; that’s the difference between a community and a crowd!) Cain denies that (just as we often do, eg when we allow ourselves to get over-pressured – or when we’re faced with global poverty, even of our fellow-believers). But this egocentric individualism leads one step further in his deepening alienation, and he feels it happening: `”I will be a restless wanderer on the earth”`, he tells God (or `a vagrant and a wanderer` (NASB), `a fugitive and a vagabond`(AV)). And so `Cain went out from the Lord’s presence, and lived in the land of [literally] Wandering` (vv14-16). Cut off from God’s presence (even while it’s still only by his Creator’s grace and mercy that he stays physically safe, v15, cf Matthew 5:45); alienated increasingly, first from his fellow-man, also from the land (vv10-14; this is important, see PS), and indeed from his work (v12). The relationship with God is gone, his other relationships slowly follow suit. He becomes an outsider, a ‘restless wanderer’, lost in the waste land (v14).
Homelessness, alienation. So what does he do? (What do any of us do when faced with that inner emptiness, that lostness, that wandering??) Crucially, Cain doesn’t face up to his lostness and go back in repentance to what has gone wrong. Instead, over time he seeks shelter, in family and in community; he `lay with his wife` (presumably his sister (5:4)), starts a family (4:17), builds a city (4:17; maybe populated as the years went by with his descendants, or with humanoids that were not really fully human with the soul that God gave Adam; we don’t know). Trying to feel `at home’ without God, let’s say; and to put down some roots in his emptiness. But as many of us know too well, if we seek comfort and shelter by hastening into relationship, we may just bring our inner alienation and lostness into it, and break that too… And as for throwing ourselves into urban life to hide from our lostness, alienation and violence can await us there too. The cure for Cain and those who followed wasn’t to try to feel at home without God; the cure could only be to recognise that something was fundamentally wrong, and repent, and recognize, indeed, that there had to be a sacrifice for sin. But it seems Cain never learned; so the shape of this whole section is an increasing tragedy of lostness and alienation, leading in the end to catastrophe.
Do the next verses offer us a vital way of thinking about our own culture’s wanderings? Cain’s family are creative, and a mini-renaissance takes place. There are breakthroughs in agriculture (v20), music (v21), metal working (v22). Even in rebellion, Cain’s family are still made in God’s image, God-gifted, and capable of creating genuinely good and innovative things; and clearly Noah’s family felt their achievements deserved commemorating for the future. Unfortunately, technical progress doesn’t mean increased goodness, and it doesn’t help if it’s built on the wrong foundation; if it’s built on alienation from God it can simply make matters worse. (Advanced technology just makes matters worse if it enables a dictator to monitor his citizens continuously. Advanced media, or the internet, are wonderful gifts from God; but built on the wrong foundation they can actually lead to more widespread evil. Our media may be the most powerful brainwashing humankind has ever inflicted on itself, making it ever harder to take spiritual realities seriously, to think independently, to live in radical holiness. A major use of the internet is to channel vicious pornography worldwide, far more widely and destructively than ever before, and leading to more such mental defilement than ever before in history. Technical progress isn’t neutral, nor in itself will it cure our culture’s lostness; if its foundation is alienation from God it just spreads the breakdown, spreads the crisis further.)
And so Cain’s family’s story climaxes in vv19-24, with Lamech (himself an innovator, the inventor of bigamy (v19) ‑ relational breakdown carried a step further) boasting openly (the first gangsta rapper?!) of the murder he’s carried out (v23). The darkness deepens: innovation built on rebellion against God can just make matters worse. By 6:11 we read that the earth is ‘full of violence’. As Jesus said, that generation were so preoccupied with the everyday activities of `eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage’ that they missed the spiritual trajectory of their culture, and were taken wholly by surprise when disaster swept down on them (Matt 24:37‑39). And the eventual climax of all this is the obliteration of much of humanity in an ecological catastrophe (Genesis 6‑8).
So the history tells us. Breakdown of the central relationship through our declaration of autonomy and our determination to run our own universe. The consequent loss of God leading to ever-widening relational powerlessness and breakdown, then to increasing violence. The hiding from alienation in sexual and familial relations, and the flight to the city; progress, but built on bad foundations and so leading to yet more violence; final environmental disaster. All this is so hugely important for our own era. The loss of God was why Cain’s line headed to disaster; it’s why our culture is living out increasing breakdown too.
This is why it’s so daft when people say it doesn’t matter whether there’s a God or not. If we look at many of the key pressure points in our culture, I believe it grows clear that, at their heart, the crisis is a result of our having lost God. Our crisis of identity and self-worth: why, at the absolute root? Surely because we’ve lost faith in God who offers us the clear sense of our true identity and value. Similarly with our widespread sense of pointlessness and purposelessness in life, of fear and things being out of control, our loss of hope, of direction, our loss of understanding of maturity, of the meaning of suffering and indeed of death; and our collapse of ethics and any clear understanding of right and wrong, of what love is and how to make it work. All these are unnecessary, and they are consequences of our deepening loss of God. (For further explorations of this, please see the posts titled `The loss of God as key to western culture` in the `Literature & culture` section of this site.) We’re in an increasingly desperate mess, just like in Genesis 4 and 6.
But there is an explanation, and a solution: if there is a God, it makes a massive difference. So it matters enormously whether God is real (and that’s why it’s so daft when people say, Well, you believe and that’s ok, I don’t and that’s ok too, it doesn’t matter either way). When we’re wondering what’s gone wrong with our world, biblical faith has the answer: there is a `God-shaped blank` in us, as there was in Cain, and indeed in our whole culture; and that’s why we’re empty inside, and wandering, and headed for disaster.
So if these ancient stories really are the Word of the living God, setting out what happens when people build life on excluding him; and if these things are true of our culture also; what `way home’, what possibility of healing and renewal, might they also offer? Genesis 3:15 gave us the astonishing answer. Let’s remember: it was at the very point of deepest catastrophe that the utterly unforeseeable possibility of rescue entered the story. The judgment God pronounced on the demonic power that contrived the whole disaster in Eden concluded, `I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.‘ Throughout the centuries that followed, expectation of this `offspring’ who would break the power of evil was a longing haunting humankind. The new testament makes clear that it was when Christ himself – `offspring of the woman` like no other – absorbed in his death the worst that the Enemy could do, that evil was finally broken.
And in this case there could be no clearer picture of the unbelievably loving nature of the God we worship. There, in that moment of treachery and rebellion, he guaranteed his own identification with this deceived and ruined rabble to the point where he himself, God in Christ, would die to open their way back to paradise. (The glorious vision at the Bible’s close picks up the themes of Eden: access back to the tree of life, the permanent abolition of the curse (Rev 22:1-3); finally everything comes full circle, as everything we lost, and more, is regained, because of Jesus.) But as he did so, he would be crying out himself in utter anguish and horror: `My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?’ This is the Christ we worship; an ultimate Creator of colossal wisdom and power, but also our endlessly patient Redeemer and Rescuer, our God of infinite – and infinitely costly – love……
The cure for Cain was not to try to feel at home without this God; likewise the only thing that will heal us (and our culture) is if we face our lostness, go right back repentantly to where we went wrong; back to this Saviour, back to the cross-sacrifice; taking these things in repentance and faith to be the very heart of our existence…
An important PS: less important than those last paragraphs, because it’s only one fruit of our crucial, foundational alienation – yet it surely matters: Why would it have been a bit surprising if what we read in Genesis 4 had been chronicled that way by a westerner?
When we read God’s Word it’s good to listen for what `I would never have written like that`. How about this, after Cain murders Abel: `The Lord said, “Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you are…driven from the ground… When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.” ‘Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is more than I can bear. Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth…’ (4:10-14).
`The ground… the ground… the ground… the earth… the land…the earth’: Genesis seems to repeatedly present a bond between humans and our environment; and it’s strange to western ears. But westerners aren’t always right (and what have we done to the world from which we’ve separated ourselves?) It wouldn’t be so strange to other cultures – `First People’, `Indigenous Australians`, Native Americans – who sense much more intimate relationship binding us (and, our right- or wrong-doing) to the land God set us to care for. Nor, indeed, to old testament Jews: look at the effect of human wrongdoing on the land in Leviticus (26:34‑35,42‑43), Jeremiah (3:1, 23:10), or the close of 2 Chronicles. In this worldview, ecological collapse is directly linked to our moral behaviour; `the land’ itself, we read, is very literally `polluted’ by bloodshed or by sexual perversion, and so it `vomits out its inhabitants’ (Leviticus 18:25‑28, Numbers 35:32‑34). (What?- that surely can’t be implying a link between the appalling mass slaughter of abortion and our ecological crisis? To 21st century science any such idea would be absurd – 21st century science can be a bit of a knowall. But who knows, because 25th century science will probably be as different from ours as ours is from that of the 17th century.) We should also note Paul’s very clear linkage between the repentance of people and the transformation of the entire creation, in Romans 8:19‑23.
Who knows, indeed, what 25th century science will say to all this. What we do know is that, when Christ returns, God will `destroy those who destroy the earth` (Revelation 11:18). And might even the following verse possibly be totally literal?: `How long will the land lie parched and the grass in every field be withered? Because those who live in it are wicked, the animals and birds have perished` (Jeremiah 12:4)…
Perhaps. Anyway as we swelter, and fires & floods kill people around the world, let’s remember this: a truly biblical worldview must include taking the environment seriously. We belong in `the land`; what we do shapes it; and God created us as his stewards to live in it, to care for it (Gen 2:15), and will hold us responsible for it…
(For more of these resources please click on https://petelowmanresources.com/category/bible-introductions-1/genesis/ )
