Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Differences Don’t Have to Divide (Genesis 4:1-7)
Date: August 25, 2024
I love my sister. But we are not the same. For starters, she’s my sister. That fact sets us apart pretty well by itself. But the differences run much deeper than that. We didn’t like or excel at the same sports or activities growing up. We didn’t share the same tastes in music. Her friends sometimes made me want to move out when they visited. My friends and I once snuck into her room after a sleepover when there were like four of them on her big bed, and lifted up one side of the mattress so they all slid off the other side, one after the next on top of each other. That is to say, my friends drove her crazy too. We watched different TV shows. We had different interests. She would occasionally try to do things that I did before her (probably because I was her big brother and she wanted to be like me), but I would give her such a hard time about not doing whatever it was like I did that she didn’t tend to stick with those things very long. She quickly found her own things, and I don’t blame her.
I used to torment her. But the thing was, I was never loud or aggressive about it. I’d pick at her quietly until she finally hollered at me. She got in trouble for that for a little while until my parents figured out what was really going on. Then, whenever she would holler, they’d tell me to quit it first. And we’d fight over all kinds of things. I don’t ever remember us getting physical with one another, but we could throw words and stubborn attitudes around with the best of them. We almost had a knock down, drag out one time over a pink Easter egg. It was one of those cheap, plastic Easter eggs. I was sure it had been in my basket, and she was equally sure that it had been in hers. My dad finally solved the matter by taking a page out of Solomon’s playbook, except instead of merely threatening to cut the egg in half, he just smashed it and threw it away. We weren’t bad kids by any stretch, but we did occasionally make things lively for our parents. Today, though, she is exceedingly successful, has a beautiful family, and I am immensely proud of her. It’s amazing the difference the wisdom of a little bit of age can make.
My guess is that while your own story may not dovetail perfectly with mine, there were probably some differences between you and your siblings that resulted in your butting heads on more than one occasion when you were growing up. And if you didn’t have siblings, there were probably some points at which you were different from your cousins or maybe just different from your parents. Those differences, whatever they happened to be, whether they were big or small, likely contributed to conflict in your family from time to time. Maybe all the time. Family conflict is something all of us experience at some point in our lives. Hopefully it manifests itself fairly mildly, but it can get pretty intense. And it’s never fun. Those are stormy waters we’d rather avoid. It makes gatherings that should be joyful and encouraging stressful and hard. It divides us from the people who, by rights, we should be the closest to in the world. And, because of the permanent nature of family, it’s really hard to escape. Some people try, but even intentional separation can be difficult to maintain after a while. What we need is help in navigating these treacherous waters.
Well, for the next few weeks, in a new teaching series called Stormy Waters, we are going to be talking about just that. Conflict in families is sometimes unavoidable. Because of that, what we need most is not help with preventing all of it—because we can’t—but rather wisdom for navigating it. Thankfully, this is something the Scriptures offer us in abundance. They offer this not by giving us pictures of families getting it right. There aren’t any of those. In fact, if you’ve ever wished for or heard somebody wish for a more biblical family, that’s a pointer to a lack of understanding of what the various families we meet in the Scriptures were actually like. Believe me: you don’t want your family to be like any of them. If your family is like one of them, that’s a sign that something has gone wrong. Those families were pretty much all slowly unfolding disasters. In refusing to sugarcoat this messiness, though, what the Scriptures give us is the gift of being able to learn from their mistakes. We can learn from them some important truths that can help us navigate our own family dramas in ways that aren’t quite so messy. This sermon series is actually going to pair up with the Sunday school teaching series our various adult and youth Sunday school classes are going to begin next week. That means this is a great time to get into a Sunday school group if you aren’t already connected with one.
This morning, we are going to start our journey with a look at the first family we meet in the Scriptures. You would think that by virtue of being first they wouldn’t be quite so messy as the rest, but you would be wrong. Adam and Eve’s family had plenty of their own drama, especially between Cain and Abel. If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way with me to Genesis 4. Through the story we find here about the first two brothers, we are going to do some reflecting on where our own family drama often originates, what kind of storms that can cause, and how to navigate that drama successfully.
Genesis is a book of origins. It gives us a picture of how everything got started. When reading the various stories in Genesis, and especially the earliest stories, there are a couple of things to keep in mind if you want to be able to make positive sense out of it. Number one, these stories are not intended to give us an exacting, detailed, precisely chronological (let alone literal) account of how everything we see and don’t got here and looks the way it does today. That was never its purpose, and if you try to make that its purpose, you’re going to wind up confused, frustrated, or else trying to figure out how to justify things that seem silly. That doesn’t mean it’s not true and reliable in the information it conveys, that simply means we have to understand that information in the way it was intended to be understood by a group of people who thought about the world and its workings in vastly different terms than we do today.
Number two, struggling with accepting the historicity of these stories does not preclude someone from following Jesus. In fact, whether or not these stories are even historically true (I think they absolutely are, but let’s assume otherwise for the sake of argument for a moment) doesn’t have even the slightest bearing on whether Jesus rose from the dead. If someone could somehow prove Cain and Abel never existed historically, Jesus still walked out of His tomb on the third day. Those two things are certainly not mutually exclusive of one another—that would be silly—but neither are they somehow inextricably linked such that one can’t exist without the other. If you encounter someone who cites something in Genesis as a reason they couldn’t possibly be a Christian, point them to Jesus. He’s the one they’re following. The rest of the details we can work out later.
None of this means, though, that what we find here isn’t still worthwhile. It is. Very much so. And as we see this story unfold, I think you’ll start to see why. Let’s finally turn our attention to Genesis 4 and see what’s going on here. “The man was intimate with his wife, Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain. She said, ‘I have had a male child with the Lord’s help.’” Now, which “man” is this? Adam, of course. Then why didn’t the text just use his name? It did. You just couldn’t see it. The Hebrew translated as “the man” is the word adam. Now you see it. So, we know from the end of Genesis 2 that the man, Adam, and the woman whom he named Eve, became husband and wife (it was a small ceremony). Now the two of them have a son and name him Cain.
Now, there are some translation challenges around exactly what Eve says in response to her delivering of the first naturally born human baby. The Hebrew isn’t totally clear, and scholars debate exactly which is the best way to understand what she says. Is it wonder? Is it arrogance? Is it misunderstanding? You can make a case for all three, but I personally lean in the direction of wonder. I do this not just because it is the easiest of the three to make sense out of, but because I was there when all three of my own boys were born. Wonder is what you feel in that moment. Terror too, but mostly wonder. If this really was the first time this had ever happened, I can fully imagine the wonder being turned up to eleven.
As much as we get hung up on the precise English rendering of Hebrew words so that we can properly understand what Moses was trying to convey in the text here, Hebrew was not a language that was originally intended for writing. It was intended for speaking. The word here that expresses exactly what she thought about God’s involvement may have been chosen not primarily for the precision of its expressiveness, but because it sounds like the word translated “Cain.” In other words, the name Cain may have been chosen as a way to express their wonder and delight over what they had achieved with God’s help.
This was the firstborn son of the first couple. Talk about a moment rich with hope and optimism and great expectations. God had told the woman in the Curse that her seed was going to crush the seed of the serpent. Well, here was her seed. Cain was the beginning of their path to redemption. What an absolutely thrilling moment for this couple this must have been.
And then they had another son.
If that feels like I made it a bit of an afterthought, that’s because his introduction is treated like an afterthought. Look at v. 2: “She also gave birth to his brother Abel.” With Cain, there was this grand expression of wonder in proclaiming his name for the first time. With Abel? Meh…he arrived too. He was the second kid. They had done this before. The luster was somewhat lost. Even his name expresses this. The Hebrew word here is hevel, which means nothing. No, that’s actually what it means. It can be translated as vapor, breath, wind, or just nothing. When Solomon expresses his frustration with the emptiness of life in Ecclesiastes, the word he uses over and over again is hevel. Abel just…was.
He didn’t even follow in their father’s footsteps as a worker of the ground. “Now Abel became a shepherd of flocks, but Cain worked the ground.” Everything about Cain captured the hope and vision for the future of their parents. Adam presumably remained a worker of the ground like his name suggested. Cain joined him in his labor, the two of them trying to stave off the futility God proclaimed on them. But Abel became something different, and this in a day when different was even less well received than it is now.
So, the boys were different from day one. Now, just what these differences were, we don’t know for sure. We don’t know how they manifested. We don’t know if they were sufficiently pronounced that they became bitter enemies. But God noticed. He understood the differences between them intimately. He recognized acceptable faithfulness in one, and something less than that in the other. But which one was which comes as a surprise. Remember: Cain was the first child. He was the one in whom his parents had placed all their hopes and dreams. He was the good son who followed in their father’s footsteps. He should have been the one following in their faith as well. And yet, at some point in the future when they were making offerings, we discover that only one of their offerings got accepted…and it wasn’t Cain’s. “In the course of time Cain presented some of the land’s produce as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also presented an offering—some of the firstborn of his flock and their fat portions. The Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but he did not have regard for Cain and his offering.”
Now, we don’t know why God accepted the one and not the other. We can make guesses, even educated guesses, but we don’t ultimately know. Our best guess comes out of the way the two sacrifices were described. For the original audience of this story, they would have already long since known about the law and its requirements for acceptable sacrifices. This, of course, preceded the law by a long shot, but the words would have been evocative for them anyway. They would likely have immediately thought, “Well, of course Cain’s sacrifice wasn’t acceptable. He didn’t follow Abel in offering his firstfruits to God. He only gave Him ‘some of the land’s produce.’ God has never been satisfied with what’s left. He wants our best.” Now, is that why God didn’t have regard for Cain and his offering? Again, we don’t know for sure. But the why doesn’t really matter here. The fact of it is where the text directs our focus. That and Cain’s response.
“Cain was furious, and he looked despondent.” Cain was angry and he was hurt. And can you blame him? I mean, God accepted the sacrifice of his brother. He was the runt. He was nothing. That was literally his name. What did he have that Cain didn’t have and better? But evidently Cain’s heart wasn’t in it. He wasn’t engaging in an act of intentional faithfulness. He was going through some religious motions because it’s what he was supposed to do. Remember? Cain was the “supposed to do” child. God didn’t want this to be a breakpoint for Cain, though. Cain’s offering may not have been something He was willing to accept, but He wasn’t rejecting Cain outright. He was inviting him forward into the kind of faithfulness his brother had demonstrated. That’s where the text goes next.
“Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you furious? And why do you look despondent? If you do what is right won’t you be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.’” In other words, “Cain, get up, brush yourself off, and let’s try this again. Instead of being committed to doing life your way, try doing it mine. Things are going to go better for you that way.”
Cain and Abel were different. That was simply how things were. The question was what those differences were going to do to them. If they leaned into their differences and walked a path of envy with one another, those differences were going to divide them. If they saw the outcomes they were respectively achieving in life and wanted those outcomes without giving much thought to how they were being achieved, they were going to wind up disappointed and frustrated. The same kind of thing is true in our own lives. How often do we let differences divide us? How often did you let that happen when you were a kid? You wanted what your brother or sister had, and rather than trying to get it on your own or celebrating them for having it, you settled for hating them for having it. Maybe you still carry some hard feelings toward a family member whose different personality package and life choices has resulted in their having different life outcomes than you have experienced. Perhaps you feel like God has given them something He hasn’t given you. Sure, it doesn’t bother you too much on most days, but when you are really feeling discontent with where your life is for one reason or another, those feelings of envy or anger or missing out or bitterness bubble back up to the surface and those divisions become sharper again for a while.
Or it could be a point of division with your parents. They wanted you to walk one path, you chose another, and they haven’t ever really gotten over it. Or maybe they wanted you to walk one path, you wanted another, but you chose the path they wanted instead of your own, and you’ve resented them for it for years. You’re just not the same as them and they refuse to understand that.
If we are not careful, these and other differences can divide us. They can divide us and lead to all sorts of painful conflict. Navigating this particular set of stormy waters can be exceedingly difficult. Cain didn’t navigate his very well. In fact, he drowned in them. He leaned into his anger and depression and murdered his brother in cold blood resulting in a whole other problem he now had to deal with, namely, the judgment of God. I don’t suspect any of you have followed through on those occasional feelings that the world would be a whole lot better without this or that family member whose differences have left you hopelessly, frustratingly, infuriatingly divided. But that relationship may be pretty poisonous all the same.
Our differences can absolutely divide us if we let them. But we don’t have to let them. In what God said to Cain here, we see another path forward. A better path. Did you catch what He said? Listen to this again. “If you do what is right, won’t you be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.”
If you want to navigate the waters of potentially dividing differences, the pathway is remarkably simple. It’s not easy. Not even a little bit. But it is simple. Commit yourself to doing what is right. You know as well as I do that the other side—what the apostle Paul sometimes called “the flesh”—is always there, waiting in the shadows to slip out and make a mess of things. You’ve let it out more times than you’d care to admit, and it did indeed make a mess of things. Or, perhaps worse yet, you didn’t let it out, but you did give it full access to backstage where it made a mess. In this situation the other person may not have any idea just how hard your feelings toward them are; meanwhile, you’re all eaten up with bitterness to the point that you can barely handle being around this person you have to be around all the time. Hear me well when I tell you that you won’t be able to keep that other side backstage forever. If you let it fulfill its desire for you, it will eventually explode out in what will almost assuredly be an incredibly messy scene. If you want to avoid all of this and successfully navigate these waters, you have to commit to doing what is right. You have to commit to walking a path of righteousness through this life. Differences can divide us, but righteousness holds us together.
This can’t be just a show you put on to impress the people around you, though. Real righteousness is never a show. It is a whole life commitment to living out the character of Christ in all our relationships. Read the Gospels again sometime through the lens of how Jesus engaged with His family members. He was not the same as them, and those differences left them divided. In each of those situations, Jesus held to what was right. He didn’t give into envy. He didn’t let their jealousy lead Him to bitterness. He was always respectful and kind. He walked a path of righteousness with them. And in the end, He didn’t lose them. Differences can divide us, but righteousness holds us together.
Okay, but how do we actually do this, Pastor, because you don’t understand just how divided I am from ______. You’re right, I don’t, but righteousness is never not going to be the right path. Our call is to live at peace with everyone so far as it depends on us. Well, sometimes the other person doesn’t want peace and we can’t fix that. But as far as it does depend on us, we can do what’s right. We can respond with kindness and gentleness and humility regardless of what they throw at us. We can celebrate their accomplishments genuinely. We can love them even when that love has to put on a hard face. We can forgive quickly and completely. We can repent when we have sinned. We can pray for them. We can get counseling if we need it. We can learn to hold lightly to what we want, ready to let it go in favor of the needs of the people around us, especially those family members from whom we are divided. We can follow Jesus’ example in denying ourselves while never losing sight of the bigger picture of eternity waiting for us at the end where all our desires will be perfectly satisfied. When we do these kinds of things and more, those dividing differences will lose their power. Differences can divide us, but righteousness holds us together. Differences can divide us, but righteousness holds us together. Commit to righteousness, and let that path begin to draw you back where differences have pushed you apart. You will be glad that you did.