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.
—Genesis 4:4–5, NIV
In Iowa two years ago, two young women—both striking beauties—found themselves grappling for the same boyfriend. Sonya and Cindy had grown up together, gone to school together, and had competed in local beauty contests. Sometimes one would win, sometimes the other. Cindy, for instance, became the county’s Miss Harvest Princess, while over at the high school Sonya had been named Miss Homecoming.
But the main competition between these two women flared in the area of romance. It happened that both were in love with Jim, a strapping young man, and the most promising one in the area. I have no idea what Jim thought of the spectacle of two beautiful women fighting over him. Maybe he found this spectacle embarrassing. Maybe he blessed it with all that was within him, but in any case, he lived in Iowa, not Utah, so Jim had to choose. He quit Cindy for Sonya, and Jim and Sonya announced that they planned to get married.
When Cindy heard the announcement, she felt as if she had been stabbed. She felt spasms of pain and envy and rage, as if Jim and Sonya were trying to twist some primitive knife between her ribs. Cindy wasn’t used to disappointment, and she had no idea where to buy an antidote for it. It was bad enough to have lost Jim, but what really poisoned Cindy was the thought that her rival had walked off with the prize, that her rival was filled to the brim with bliss. So Cindy rose up and slew Sonya. One September night in Iowa, Miss Harvest Princess strangled Miss Homecoming with a leather belt and left the whole community choking with grief.
This story is based on an actual incident (though details were changed), but it also is a story we have heard before. It is a crime story so old and deep in our race that it has assumed the status of a legend—a true legend.
In the biblical story of Cain and Abel, the crime is murder and the motive is envy. And the biblical postmortem tells us that a murder is never really over. Abel’s blood keeps bubbling up out of the earth, and Cain becomes a fugitive and wanderer, protected from vigilantes only by a mysterious mark that God has placed on him. This is not just a story of two brothers who come to grief over a sacrifice. It is a paradigm, the first case in Scripture of a pattern that will appear again and again.
In this pattern, God surprisingly prefers one person over another—typically the younger over the older. And then God has to deal with the loser and the loser’s lethal envy. So when we read Cain and Abel, other names should be lining up on the horizon—Jacob and Esau, Leah and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers, even Herod and Jesus.
Or think of Saul and David after David’s earliest military campaigns. For years Saul had been Israel’s undisputed war hero. But now a talented Young Turk comes up—David, who has the touch of God on him; David, who is a more gifted killer than Saul. And Saul, the old warrior, feels the demons beginning to stir in him. How ominous to see these young hotshots lining up to take aim at your job. How appalling to hear the crowds roaring for them and women singing about them. One song, in particular, sticks in Saul like a syringe: “Saul has slain his thousands and David his tens of thousands.” In this classic case of a star eclipsed by a superstar, Saul sees, and fears, and murderously resents, the changing of the guard.
Cain and Abel is the story of Saul and David. In fact, the story shows us a pattern woven into all of humanity, into a whole race that has been banished from Paradise. Cain and Abel is the story of Saddam Hussein who murders rich Kuwaitis, of Miss Harvest Princess beginning to wind a leather belt around her fists. Above all, this ancient story is about us—people in whom innocent Abel and guilty Cain are still fighting for supremacy.
When you go back to it, the story makes you wonder. You wonder why Abel’s offering was blessed but Cain’s was not and how they could tell. Did the smoke from Abel’s sacrifice rise straight to heaven like some homesick angel? Did the fire under Cain’s vegetables just smolder and stink? Or did these early human beings make an offering to God and then keep a six-month growth chart to see what happened to their gardens and flocks?
What is clear is that right at the beginning of our racial history something goes seriously wrong in one man’s attempt to worship God. It is the first time God takes an offering—and also the first time he turns one down. “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.”
Something in us understands this anger. A friend mentioned the other day that when he was a child and heard the story, he always felt sorry for Cain. And—initially, at least—why not?
Suppose you are a fourth grader. It is December, and in class you have been working for a week on a Christmas-tree ornament to bring home to your parents. One day the ornament is finished, and you carry it home in a small box to protect it. You bring it home with the eagerness of a child who yearns for the approval of the biggest people in his or her life. What you had forgotten was that your second-grade sister had been working on a similar project in her class and so two ornaments would be presented to your parents.
Of course, wise parents know how to play these scenes. They measure out their enthusiasms to ensure each child gets an equal share. The same number of “oohs” and “ahs” go to each kid.
But suppose you opened your box, lifted out your handmade ornament, and discovered that your parents were uninterested. Or worse, suppose they ridiculed your gift. What if your mother turned a hard eye on you and said, “Did you think we’d like something like this? Look at it! You think we want a miserable little amateur bauble? Why can’t you be more like your sister? Her ornament makes yours look like junk!”
You would be momentarily stunned. Then you would be humiliated and wounded to the quick. You had brought a gift from the center of your nine-year-old life, a gift made at the limit of your skill. You thought about how much pleasure it would bring to people you loved. So you wrapped it and offered it up, and what they did was to crush it right back into your face.
“On Cain and his offering [the Lord] did not look with favor.” How are we to understand this? Is Cain like an innocent fourth grader whose ornament gets tossed out with the trash? And is God like some brutal parent who keeps shredding the tenderest gifts of his children? I suspect that if the generations of Jews and Christians to follow had felt locked into this interpretation, their reading of the Bible would not have gone much beyond Genesis 4.
Fortunately, the narrator of the story is leading us another way. His first hint is the description of the offerings. Cain “brought some of the fruits of the soil.… But Abel brought fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock” (Gen. 4:3–4, NIV). Of course, there is nothing wrong with bringing asparagus to God instead of loin chops—certainly not from a contemporary perspective. There is nothing wrong with being a farmer instead of a shepherd and giving what you have to give. That’s not where the distinction lies.
Instead, I believe the narrator wants us to think of Abel offering what really cost him something—the choicest cuts from his most valuable stock. And he wants us to think of Cain bringing a perfectly ordinary offering, not first-fruits, but garden-variety produce. “Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil.…” Abel, on the other hand, brought “fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock.”
One man’s worship is focused, thoughtful, self-giving. And the other man—well, he may be the one we know better.
All of us are, after all, deeply divided creatures whose impulses toward God may be simultaneously noble and tacky. For instance, as theologian Geoffrey Bromiley says, we may despair of ourselves and our own efforts and all along be “fiercely aware” of this despair and keenly interested in its merit. We may humble ourselves before God in repentance—and be proud of it. More than one preacher has confessed that he was deep into a congregational prayer—one he had worked on so that it would express the fears and longings of his congregation—when he caught himself admiring it and wondering what grade heaven would assign it.
Or suppose we are listening to a sermon. Suddenly it occurs to us that we have just been nailed by a word of the Lord. We honestly try to heed its warning. Still, we don’t want to take the whole warning because we want to make sure plenty of it is left over for folk who need it more than we do. Everybody knows, Helmut Thielicke once observed, that while we are at worship the wolves may be howling in our souls.
So it is with Cain. Something is wrong in his worship. It doesn’t take. And Cain gets depressed and angry. Not puzzled. Not humbled. Angry—even though God gives Cain a chance to redeposit his offering: “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?” (Gen. 4:7).
But Cain does not want to do what is right. He is inconsolable. And somewhere, so quietly and subtly we can hardly see it happen, Cain’s anger pivots. He had hated this mysterious God who was so hard to satisfy, this inscrutable God who was such a finicky eater that he would not even touch his vegetables. But gradually Cain swivels around until he has Abel in his sights.
Who is it, after all, that turned God against him? Who is it that seems to win at everything? Cain looks over at Abel and no longer sees his brother. All he sees is a rival. Not somebody to love and lift up, but somebody who needs to be cut down to size. Who does Abel think he is? Making people feel like losers! A fire is eating Cain’s innards. And his terrible conclusion is that only his brother’s blood can put it out.
Was Abel’s offering more costly and generous? Or was Abel preferred by the same mysterious providence that for centuries has been parceling out gifts unequally?
I think the text leads us to see a difference in both the offering and the character of these two brothers. The writer wants us to find self-sacrifice and integrity in Abel’s worship. Abel is not just blessed out of the blue; there is some reason why he is preferred.
To Cain it doesn’t make any difference. An envier does not care whether we have earned our success or whether some golden parachute straight from heaven has dropped into our lap. To an envier, either way is totally unfair. Enviers are theological switch hitters. Sometimes they are Arminians, and sometimes Calvinists. But all of them are potential killers.
From the time of Cain and Abel to the time of Miss Harvest Princess, the goal of envy has always been to strip and destroy. What envy wants is to strip another person of some vital good and thus destroy his or her happiness.
Why? The reason is not covetousness. What an envier wants is not, first of all, what another has. What an envier wants is for the other not to have it. That is the deep reason for vandalism. Deeper than the surface reason of idle amusement is a desire to kill. A vandal cannot let beauty and wholeness be, nor can he tolerate anyone else’s delight in these things. Confronted by beauty or blessing, a vandal wants to raise Cain and let him go to work.
That is why Saddam Hussein torched oil fields he could not harvest and polluted beaches he had to abandon. The envier is a child of Satan. If he cannot have heaven, he can at least raise hell in the lives of others.
Maybe out in Iowa, Cindy hoped insanely that with Sonya gone Jim would come back to her. But what Miss Harvest Princess wanted above all was to keep her rival from having him.
For all of us who live east of Eden, the story of Cain and Abel needs to be on our minds and in our hearts. Why? Because we have a lot of Cain in us. Because sin is crouching at our door. Because the blood of our victims is crying out from the ground—people, for example, whose character we have assassinated; people we have resented because we had to grow in their shade; people who irritated us for no better reason than that they had integrity.
If you are an envier, you have got to get free. Envy will rot your bones. How do we get free? We do some spiritual behavior modification. We make ourselves praise others for their gifts, their graces, their accomplishments. We include them in our prayers, and we thank God for them—even if we have to grit our teeth to do it at first. And always, always, we need to foster in each other the sense of belonging to a community—a civic community and, above all, the community of God’s people—a community in which the gifts of others, properly used, bless us all. If you ride the bench for the Chicago Bulls, how foolish it would be to envy Michael Jordan. You ought to thank God that he is on your team.
For all of us who live east of Eden, Cain and Abel need to be on our minds and in our hearts. Why? Because we have a lot of Abel in us. If you are a person God has favored, you may have attracted a certain amount of envy.
Of course, everybody knows that envy poisons the envier. But being envied is, at least for a person of character, no delight either. To be envied is to have something venomous aimed at you. And it is hard to find the right antivenom. If we do well, we will be resented. If we try to be kind to the envier, we may be thought condescending. Even a whiff of pity in our attitude is natural gas to the fires of envy.
What can an Abel do? He can make sure his gifts go to God, that they are not flaunted, but offered. And he or she can foster that sense of community in which gifts—intelligence or moral goodness or money or skill, or maybe the sheer gift of youthfulness—bless us all.
Cain and Abel keep struggling down the ages. They struggle in us. But we have reason to think the struggle will one day cease. That is because Cain and Abel were both alive in Jesus Christ our Lord. Jesus Christ, the naturally innocent one, became sin for us. He took Cain’s place as well as Abel’s. And when the terrible struggle between them was over, on resurrection morning, God raised the one who had been slain, the one whose blood had been crying out from the ground for so many centuries.
Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. is a professor of systematic theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
