A week or so ago, I saw a license plate: "CAIN." [I pay attention to license plates often when I am driving. Sometimes I believe God can and will speak to me through them.] With my finances being attacked (taxes, estimated payments, and on this day, an expensive parking ticket (the car troubles had not come up as of yet)), I was pretty pissed off at God and told Him so. I believe that the word "Cain" may have been a response in context with all of this.
The passage I read was from Genesis 4:1-16 (New International Version):
Adam made love to his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. She said, “With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.” Later she gave birth to his brother Abel.
Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought an offering—fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.
Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”
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.
Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. 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, and whoever finds me will kill me.”
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. So Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
Before I was able to sit down and re-read through this passage, I remembered three things: 1.) Cain killed his brother, Abel; 2.) God had rejected Cain's offering, because it wasn't the best of what he could have offered (Abel's was, and so God accepted it); 3.) even though God was angry at Cain for killing his brother, He gave him a ton of mercy, basically by swearing He would punish anyone for murdering him.
[Since reading the passage, two other new observations came up, two firsts that occur in the Bible: 1.) Cain is the first human being to be born, through sex, conception, and childbirth. And 2.) Abel is the first human being to pass away out of the flesh.]
Genesis 4 is really not one of the most fun chapters in the Bible. Heck, Genesis 3, although it tells the story of how Adam and Eve rebelled against God and were thrown out of the Garden of Eden, at least carries historical significance that is referenced much later, particularly by the Apostle Paul. Genesis 1 and 2, well... that's the beginning of time, and how God created the heavens and the earth. Later chapters in Genesis get into some of the more significant early stories: Genesis 6 through 9 tells the story of Noah, his ark, and the flood. Genesis 12 recalls God calling out Abram (whom He renamed Abraham) and telling him He will make a great nation of his descendants, which He eventually does. And so on.
But Genesis 4, in spite of it being less fun and less significant than much of the rest of the Book of Genesis, was impressed on me. I believe it was impressed on me because of how I even now still tend to handle things in my thought and prayer life when life gets tough, even too tough, for me to handle. Below is a brief background for how I've been processing life's current challenges right now:
All of 2017 and into the first few months of 2018 I had a host of car issues, one after another: first, the slow agonizing death of my Prius; then, my first ever experience at buying a car, which gave me an understanding as to what a "used car salesman" was, and why people typically don't trust them; then, to a series of car repairs that sent my new used vehicle (a Honda CR-V) into the shop on average once every 1-2 months (each case including at least a couple "this needs to be fixed now" repairs); not to mention a whole other scenario where my car was hit while parked, and in the end, after a month of body work and car rentals, the other person's insurance reimbursed me for only 1/3 of the rental car costs. The big takeaway from this season was less so the situation around my car but more so the hit on my finances: I barely got by, because I saved up like heck. It was disheartening, in the end, to see the fruits of all my furious saving efforts evaporate completely. And I mean, completely. I never went into debt, thankfully, but still.
Since over a month ago, circumstantially it all appears to be happening all over again, except even worse this time, and seemingly with no light at the end of the tunnel. All of this, even though I believe in my heart of hearts that I've done what I can to save and to maintain financial prudence the best way I know how. I've been in the trenches, sometimes with God, and sometimes without Him, ever since.
Hence the passage about Cain. The two things that stood out to me, after all is said and done, are these:
1.) God only punished Cain after he killed Abel. Previously, somehow, probably because I knew that that was what ended up happening, I had instead believed that Cain was going to get the punishment he got anyway, not because of him killing Abel but because he was simply angry that the Lord rejected his offering. (After all, Jesus said centuries upon centuries later, that anyone who is merely angry with another person is subject to judgment. (See Matthew 5:21-22.)) But in this case, it's not the case. Rather, God punished Cain in this way because he killed his brother.
2.) The verse where God intervenes with Cain before he ended up killing Abel: "Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it." First, the importance of doing what is right, even when it is hard; second, coming off my previous point, at some point in time Cain shifted his anger from it being about the Lord not accepting his offering, to blaming Abel and being jealous of him. It's why I believe God intervened when He did, to try to stem the tide of what He knew could happen, and, in the end did happen.
There is a third bullet point in there, really about that shift between being disappointed -- and "downcast," as the text says -- to cultivating a vindictive anger. No one, not even myself, goes immediately from "this circumstance sucks and I am upset about it," to "I'm going to do what it takes to get back what is mine, even if that means killing someone to do it." No, there is an extra step that one chooses to take, or not to take, that can mean the difference in everything, including life and death. Cain chose to move from "downcast" to vindictiveness. He refused to trust God.
Good Friday is in two days. So here is my question to close out this post: in the midst of your storms, your fear, even your desire to bet on yourself (because "that's what adults are supposed to do," etc), what is something that you can do differently this time around, to choose to trust God, even when the way out appears to be non-existent? What can you bring to the Cross that will then allow you to respond differently?
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