How God deals with evil (Genesis 4:8-16)

Genesis 4:8 (NIV)
Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.

Death is the ultimate destruction of our life. Death entered the world by disconnecting us from our Life-source. Cain sees it as a way to be rid of his rival. When we reject God’s perspective of good and evil to do what’s right in our own eyes, we don’t care what’s good for the other.

So who will make Cain pay for the murder? In these early chapters of Genesis, there’s no human government deciding whether people have done evil. God delegates that authority only after the flood (Genesis 9:4-6). God reigns directly, so God investigates Cain’s crime, just as God investigated the three rebels in the garden (3:9-19).

Genesis 4:9-10 (NIV)
⁹ Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
¹⁰ The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”

As his parents and the serpent had done, Cain evades responsibility. His defence is that God never made him his brother’s keeper (šā·mǎr). God had made them keepers of the garden (2:15), but that responsibility had been taken from them (3:24). Abel “kept” flocks (4:2) because God gave humans responsibility for the animals (1:26-28). But God had never given people responsibility over each other’s lives.

Cain’s claim that he had no responsibility for Abel’s life doesn’t wash. Cain had in fact taken Abel’s life into his own hands! The blood stain in the dirt was evidence of Abel’s life returning to the ground from which humanity was taken (3:19). Abel’s blood demands the heavenly sovereign’s response (compare Hebrews 12:24).

Genesis 4:11-14 (NIV)
¹¹ “Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. ¹² When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.”
¹³ Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is more than I can bear. ¹⁴ 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, and whoever finds me will kill me.”

The blood-stained soil will be unresponsive to Cain. God originally decreed fruitfulness for the earth (1:11), but creation in rebellion bears thorns and thistles (3:17-19), and the blood-stained soil rejects the murderer.

His family will reject Cain too. Our sense of justice demands criminals pay for their crimes. We expect the punishment to match the crime, that what they have done be done to them. But God does not execute Cain. God simply explains the consequences: that Cain can no longer be part of his family. He’s a fugitive now, a restless wanderer.

Cain appeals this absurdly light sentence. Since God has not given him justice, he fears his family will. He shows no remorse, only self-interest. Does the sentence God gave to Cain satisfy your sense of justice?

Later, God does authorize the death penalty for murders (Genesis 9:6). The Sinai Law is based on retribution: “life for life” (Exodus 21:23; Leviticus 24:18; Deuteronomy 19:21). But God’s response here is truly astounding. God protects the criminal:

Genesis 4:15-16 (NIV)
¹⁵ But the Lord said to him, “Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.” Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. ¹⁶ So Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

What do you make of that? In the world before human governments, when the heavenly sovereign dealt with crimes and delivered justice, God did not take a life for a life. God protected the murderer, marking him as under royal protection.

Jesus would later describe how some provisions of the Sinai Law represented God’s response to the hardness of human hearts rather than God’s ideal, for it was not this way in the beginning (Matthew 19:8). The way God reigned over the world in the beginning may be closer to the kingdom of God ideals than the Sinai covenant laws.

The heavenly sovereign’s judgement combines God’s love with Cain’s trauma:

• Cain is not outside God’s sovereignty: God extends protection to Cain (verse 15).
• Cain is outside God’s presence: he’s a restless wanderer, isolated from those who know God’s presence (verse 16).

And yet, Cain’s sin divides the world. More on that next time.

Related posts

• Cain, Abel, and the fight against sin (Gen 4:1-7)
• What kind of world is God running? (Gen 4:1-15)
• Capital punishment? (Gen 9:6)