If we were taught this story as children, we likely learned that this was the first murder, and we learned that we cannot get away with sin without God seeing us. If we were taught this story as teenagers, we likely learned that there was an important difference between the offering that Cain presented to God and the offering that Abel presented. Cain went through the motions of giving an offering to God, while Abel gave the best he possessed to show his love for God. Both of these lessons teach us important truths.

If you have lived beyond your teenage years (possibly by several decades as I have), you recognize that this lesson really isn't about murder. Cain's premeditated act was the final expression of the anger and arrogance in his life. We generally are too civilized to consider murder as a solution to our problems, but we constantly wrestle with the destructive emotions of pride, despair, and hate. Cain's choice of a merely adequate offering grew out of these same internal struggles and provoked him to resist recognizing God's authority. In love, God provided visible evidence to Abel that his offering was accepted and evidence to Cain that his disrespectful offering was not worthy of God. Cain could have acted on this rejection—and the conversation with God that followed—and turned away from the sin that was taking control of him, but he did not.

I may be wandering from the main plot, but I find an interesting contrast in how God interacted with Abel and how God interacted with Cain. This historical account is painfully laconic, and we can appreciate how oral tradition and the high costs of writing materials in ancient times forced an extreme brevity in the stories we have today. At the same time, it is startling that we have no recorded conversation between God and Abel, yet Abel had a healthy and loving relationship with God. We all want to be reassured of God's presence with us, and there is nothing wrong with that. However, we may try to measure the depth of our relationship with God by the numbers of prayers God has answered (to our liking), or by those times we have felt God talking personally to us—but we have it backward if we are evaluating how God is interacting with us. It is our interaction with God that we must assess, both in our actions and in our motivations for those actions, for God never changes and God's Love is always with us. Our desire must be for the kind of intimacy with God that God wants for each of us. In the case of Abel, it seems that God had moved beyond openly speaking with Abel to interactions that were less visible and dramatic but were deeper and brought Abel closer to God.

Cain's relationship to God was far different from Abel's, but we need to notice that the continuity of that relationship was not broken by the murder of Abel. If we consider the theological nature of sin and Jesus' teaching that sin exists in our hearts, not merely in our actions, we recognize that Cain's sin came even before his choice of which harvests to offer as a sacrifice. God even warned him not to let that sin rule him, but Cain killed anyway. God took extraordinary measures to warn him—tradition tells us that people believed smoke would rise from an acceptable offering but fall from an unacceptable offering, so God manipulated weather conditions as Cain and Abel were burning their offerings to urge Cain to listen. God never stops trying to reach us.

Finally, we have the crime of murder. We have a weak defense from Cain, we have nature testifying for the prosecution, and we have a guilty verdict. The sentence God hands to Cain is the same as was handed to Adam and Eve—Cain's sin had created an enmity with nature and he was banished from the way of life he had known.

But look at Grace. Cain recognized that his crime was not just against Abel, but against human life, and that other humans might retaliate against him out of indignation or fear. We might label it justice that the man who had planned the murder of his innocent brother would be executed—but not so for Grace. Instead, God listened to Cain and protected him. Grace held tightly to Cain when he had rebelled against what was good and holy, and Grace gave him the opportunity to repent and rebuild the relationship with God that he had rejected. In following verses, the Genesis account tells us Cain had a wife and descendants, so the scriptures tell that God blessed this reformed murderer with the gift of children and longevity of his family lineage.

This is Grace, that God would not give up on Cain. Before the birth of the Christ child, before the Ten Commandments, before the Great Flood and the covenant of the rainbow, there was powerful, ever hopeful Grace—and Grace will lead us Home.