Sin Lieth at the Door

The first two people ever born were brothers, and one of them killed the other. That is the fourth chapter of the Bible, right after the garden, and it is not there as a horror story. It is there because God spoke to the killer before he did it, and what He said is the plainest description of how sin works that Scripture contains. It has a door, a crouching thing, and a command. And it ends, a very long way off, with blood that speaks.

Two offerings

Eve names her first son with hope in her voice: "I have gotten a man from the LORD" (Genesis 4:1). She had been promised a seed who would bruise the serpent's head, and here was a son. Then a second, Abel, whose name means breath, or vapour. "Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground" (4:2). Nothing wrong with either trade. Adam had been put in the garden to till it.

"And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering: But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect" (4:3-5). Genesis does not say why. People have filled the gap for three thousand years: Abel brought blood and Cain did not; Abel brought the firstlings and the fat, the best, and Cain brought "of the fruit," some of it. The writer of Hebrews gives the answer Scripture actually gives: "By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous" (Hebrews 11:4). By faith. The difference was not on the altar. It was in the man bringing it, and God, who sees the man, had respect to one and not the other.

"And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell" (4:5). His face fell. You have seen it on a child and on a grown man, and you have felt it on your own face. Somebody else was accepted and you were not.

The warning

Now watch what God does. He does not strike Cain. He does not lecture him. He comes and asks him a question, the way He had come into the garden asking "Where art thou?" a chapter earlier, and then He tells him exactly what is about to happen.

Three things are in that sentence, and each one matters. First, the door is still open: if thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? Cain is not rejected. His offering was. He can bring another. Second, sin "lieth at the door." The Hebrew word is robets, and it is what an animal does: it crouches. Sin is pictured as a beast lying at the threshold of Cain's tent, waiting for him to come out. It is not yet in him; it is at the door. And third, the last clause, which is the same shape as the words spoken to Eve a chapter before: its desire is toward you, and thou shalt rule over him. In Hebrew that is not a prediction, it is a charge. You must master it. God tells the first murderer, before the murder, that the thing at his door can be ruled, and that he is the one who must rule it.

Cain says nothing. That is the whole of his answer. "And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him" (4:8). The thing at the door came in. Gregory the Great, who spent his life watching what envy does to men, put it in one sentence:

Where is thy brother?

God comes again with a question. "Where is Abel thy brother?" (4:9). He knows. He knew where Adam was, too. The question is a door held open for a confession, the same door Nathan would hold open for David, and Cain does what David did not: "I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?" (4:9). A lie, and then a sneer. It is the first question a man ever asks God in the Bible, and it is asked to get out of answering one.

"What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground" (4:10). Abel, whose name was breath, has no voice left, and his blood has one. Remember that; the Bible will come back to it. The ground that Cain tilled has drunk his brother, and it will not work for him any more: "a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth" (4:12). The farmer loses the soil. The man who would not keep his brother will now be kept by no one.

And then Cain speaks, at last, and it is not repentance. "My punishment is greater than I can bear" (4:13). He is sorry for himself. He is afraid of being killed. And here is the thing nobody expects: God protects him. "And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him" (4:15). Whatever the mark was, and no one knows, it was mercy on a murderer who had not asked for mercy. God will not let the first killing become the second. Then Cain "went out from the presence of the LORD" (4:16), and the last we hear of him is that "he builded a city" (4:17). Augustine saw the whole of history in that one line:

The man who walked away from God's presence made himself at home in the earth. The man God accepted never had time to.

The way of Cain

The New Testament does not let this story stay in Genesis. John, writing to Christians about love, reaches back to it: "Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous" (1 John 3:12). That is the motive, stated flat. Not the offering. Not the field. Abel was righteous and Cain was not, and the sight of it was unbearable. Jude calls it "the way of Cain" (Jude 11), a road, something people still walk. And Jesus, on the last day He taught in the temple, counted the blood from the beginning: "from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias" (Matthew 23:35). He knew the story. He was three days from being the end of it.

Where this lands

Abel's blood cried from the ground, and what it cried for was justice. It is the first voice raised against a killer in the Bible, and it was heard. Then, at the very end of the letter to the Hebrews, the writer lists what a Christian has come to, and this is the last item: "to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel" (Hebrews 12:24).

Better things. Abel's blood spoke, and it said guilty. Christ's blood speaks, and it says forgiven. The same ground drank both. The first was a brother killed by a brother out of envy; the second was a Brother who let Himself be killed, by men who envied Him, so that the killers could be brought home. And the mark God set on Cain, which kept a murderer alive though he never asked, was the first small sign of what that blood would do for anyone who will answer the question God is still asking at the door: what hast thou done? Say it, the way David did and Cain would not. The thing at the door can be ruled. And the One whose blood speaks better things is the One who rules it.

Related: The Word He Used Only Once, Repentance, Born Fallen, Not Born Guilty, and The Atonement. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple.