Chapter Twelve
When we were growing up our father taught me and my brother to do everything he could do, which included every skill from farming to building furniture. Though out of necessity we learned how to do everything, we each enjoyed and eventually focused on different areas.
I developed a great love of farming. I enjoyed every aspect of making things grow; I didn’t even mind weeding the fields. I loved nurturing the plants and doing everything I could to make my fields produce the finest crops possible. My produce was our main source of food, as we did not eat the animals we raised, but used them only for wool, milk and eggs.
I was an excellent farmer and very successful at raising bountiful crops for our family. It was hard work, much more difficult than my brother's job of watching our flocks. I would be in my fields every working day as soon as possible, sweating under the hot sun to plant and till and nurture my crops. Taking care of my fields was an enormous task, and though my father, mother and brother would help in the afternoon when it was needed, most of the work I did on my own.
The animals my brother raised for the family, which he sheared and milked to cloth us and provide milk and cheese, were really no labor at all. He only had to watch them for most of the day, making sure none wandered off and no predators carried any away. My fields required a steady stream of hard physical labor to produce the food we ate, while all he had to do was sit under a tree, watch his flocks and occasionally scare off a bear or a lion.
Hardly anything ever happened, and in the evenings he occasionally spoke of the quietness of his day. He liked to tell me how he filled his time by talking to God. My brother said he often spent the entire morning praising God and His work on the earth. He would praise God for the beauty of the world around us, and how bountifully God had blessed us. He would go on and on about how he talked or sang to God, as if he had not a care in the world!
I found this quite frustrating. I usually worked so hard during the day that I just wanted to sleep. I had no time to talk to God, much less time to reflect on how beautiful the world was! I had to weed and hoe and carry water in order to grow the crops that were required to feed us. I could not afford the time to hold a one-sided conversation with God.
My brother once told me I needed to nurture my relationship with God as much as I nurtured my crops. He thought this was funny, but he was also being serious. He told me that my crops could wait and the work would always be there, and I needed to take the time to thank and praise God for the bounty which I was able to provide for our family. He even had the gall to say that he thought I was becoming angry and resentful of him for no reason, which was ridiculous.
I may have been angry and resentful, but it was for a very good reason. I was sick of working hard all day to grow food for our family, and then coming home and hearing my brother talk about the wonderful day he had watching his flocks graze while he praised God.
I was proud of what I did. My crops were a result of my toil and sweat, my hard work and that alone. God had nothing to do with my crops growing and flourishing, so why should I need to praise Him?
It was my ingenuity that found new ways to take care of the fields and get more crops with less labor. I had the idea to dig the trenches that would move the water between my rows of plants. I was the one that decided to put animal waste around my plants. My brother laughed at me, he thought it was a joke, but the plants grew taller and stronger, and they produced more food for the family than ever before.
These ideas had been mine and mine alone. Why would I thank or praise God for this?
Even now, as I thought back on the past and how I had been overlooked for my work and ingenuity, my blood began to boil. I provided most of the food for the family, and yet I had been found lacking. Instead of being honored, I had to take a place behind my brother.
My mind went back to those last fateful days with my family, and the events which had caused my downfall. Even though my parent’s relationship with God had changed dramatically since they had left their Garden, my family still worshipped God. This was something my parents thought very important; that even though they didn't have the same close relationship and He no longer spoke with them, it was still necessary that we continue to praise and honor His power and glory.
This had taken the form of giving Him a portion of everything we produced as a sacrifice. According to my parents everything came from God, so we were to give back to Him the best portion of everything we had as a way of honoring His generosity.
This always bothered me, since it was my ideas and hard work that was causing my crops to thrive. What did God have to do with it? But my parents insisted we sacrifice, and of course my brother Abel was all for this idea.
I always felt that he didn’t mind sacrificing to God because raising flocks was so easy. All he had to do was take one of his sheep, kill it and place it on the altar where we made our sacrifices. To me, my brother’s sacrifice was really no sacrifice at all; he didn’t have to toil or sweat over his sheep.
For my sacrifice I had to take some of the crops I had grown with my backbreaking work. Out of this hard-won food for our families’ sustenance, I was supposed to give the best to God. This was a difficult sacrifice for me, and not one I made willingly.
My brother once said something very interesting when he noticed how grudgingly I was going to sacrifice some of my first fruits. He said that the sacrifice God really wanted was not a physical sacrifice, but an emotional and spiritual one. That God was not as interested in what we laid before Him as He was interested in the state of our heart. Abel said that we gave the best of ourselves to Him symbolically through sacrificing the best of what we produced.
This gave me pause, and I thought about what he said for a long time. I actually was trying to give God my best crops; this really wasn’t difficult, since they were just crops and they were pretty much all the same. But in my heart I was definitely not happy about it. I resented giving Him anything, since I couldn’t see that I was getting anything back in return. Everything I did for God seemed to be one way. I did all the work and saw nothing from Him in return.
I finally had to admit that while I knew on an intellectual level what my brother was talking about, I just couldn’t understand this emotional relationship he seemed to have with God. I couldn’t make myself care for God more than I cared about myself. I continued to bring the best fruits of my labor in sacrifice to God, but I felt increasingly resentful towards Him and my family as I did so.
Since my parents left their Garden no one in our family had been in direct contact with God. He had once spoken to them in person, but no longer. The first time God came to me in a dream was the most frightening moment of my life. It was so real, that to this day I do not believe I was actually asleep.
“Cain, your brother Abel is correct. The sacrifice I desire is something that comes from your heart. The sacrifice is only a symbol of your spiritual gift to Me. I find favor with your brother; his sacrifice is sincere. But your heart is not right and your sacrifice is lacking.”
I came out of the dream with a start, my heart racing. I could not sleep, but sat up in bed deep in thought. Over and over the words of God and my brother went through my head. I tried to make sense of them, but increasingly my frustration grew. I was working so hard to feed our family. I gave us almost everything we ate; everything that kept us alive. How could I be lacking?
I tried to understand why God thought I was lacking, but I kept coming back to how much I was doing for our family, and how I was the one that deserved the praise and thanks. My anger grew the more I thought about the injustice of the situation; that God found favor with my brother and not me.
Once again, though I did not sleep, God came to me in a dream.
“Cain, why are you so angry? If you do the right things you will be accepted by Me. But beware. Your sin is right here, ready to take you over. Only you have the power to master your sin and not let it control you.”
I woke up again, i
n a cold sweat this time. I didn’t know what He meant by this, but it frightened me. What sin was taking me over? What sin could I master?
Again I sat in my bed thinking. I just couldn’t understand why God found favor with my brother and not me? I worked hard to feed our family, while Abel sat on his behind watching his flocks and spent much of his time singing and praying. Why would God find favor in what was really just laziness?
By the time the sun came up I had decided that this was all my brother’s fault. It wasn’t that I was doing the wrong things, I was doing just fine. The problem was my brother Abel.
For some reason God couldn’t see that Abel was really just lazy, and instead thought he was doing everything right. My brother was the one that would need to change his behavior. If God realized that Abel wasn’t as good as God thought he was, I would be fine and God would leave me alone. I would need to talk to my brother and make him change. I would talk to Abel alone that same day and make him stop acting like he was so righteous.
That morning at breakfast I told Abel I would need his help in my fields later that day. He gave me an odd look like he knew something was up, but he agreed and said he would come out after the midday meal. He was all I could think about that morning. I had to make him stop acting so righteously; he needed to be normal like me, otherwise I would never look good in God’s eyes.
That afternoon, while our father worked elsewhere, Abel met me in one of my fields. I immediately started in on him. All morning my anger had been growing as I thought of the injustice of the situation, how I was being persecuted because of how my brother worshiped God.
I insisted that Abel stop praising God all the time, that he needed to work harder for the family and focus less on God. He laughed as if I was making a joke. This made me even angrier, and I told him everything about my dreams the night before.
I concluded by saying, “God finds favor with you and not me. This is not right and it’s not fair. You need to change so God will like me more and find favor with my sacrifices.”
Abel was very serious, and his face was downcast. After a moment he quietly said with sadness evident in his voice, “Cain, how can you not see that your heart is the problem? You are the one that needs to change if you want God to find favor with you. As for me, I will never stop loving God.”
His response and the complete refusal to do as I wanted infuriated me. Without another thought I pulled my knife and drove it deep into Abel’s chest. I can still see the shock in his eyes. My brother fell to the ground, his blood pouring into my tilled soil.
I immediately realized this was the sin God had warned me of. He had known my uncontrolled anger could drive me to murder my brother.
I stood stock still with my knife still clinched in my hand. I had no idea what to do as Abel lay dead at my feet, his blood still staining the soil. Finally I turned and began to stumble towards our house, my mind spinning as I tried to think of what I would tell my parents. I had not gone far when suddenly there was a blinding light in front of me. I could see nothing and fell face down on the ground in fear.
The voice of God said to me, “Cain, where is your brother?”
I lied, “I don’t know, am I my brother’s keeper?”
This was stupidity on my part; of course God knew exactly what had happened.
He said, “What have you done? Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”
As I lay prostrate upon the earth, unable to move or answer Him, God continued, “You are now cursed, and the ground will no longer yield it’s bounty for you. From this day forth you will be a restless wanderer upon the earth. You must leave this land at once. You may no longer speak to your parents.”
It was then I said to God that I would be killed by the first people that saw me. To prevent more murder, He gave me a mark so no one would kill me out of hand.
Then He was gone.
When I was able, I picked myself up from the ground and went home to gather food and the things I now carried on my back. And I left, never to see my parents or my home again.
Now here I stood with a mark on my head, among strangers in a foreign land, once again seeing shed blood stain the earth because of me.
In The Beginning Page 12