Two Gifts and a Hurting Heart

Outside the garden, the ground grew thorns, and Adam had to sweat to dig around them. But one morning, Eve held her first baby boy.

"With the LORD's help, I have gotten a man!" she said. (He was a very new, very wrinkly man, but she was proud of him.)

They named him Cain. Soon he had a baby brother, Abel. Cain grew up to be a farmer, with dirt under his fingernails all year long. Abel grew up to be a shepherd, with sheep trailing after him wherever he went.

One day each brother brought a gift to God. (An offering was a present you gave back to God, to thank him and to show that he came first.) Cain brought some of his crops. Abel brought the firstborn lambs of his flock, and the best parts of them.

The Bible says Abel gave his gift trusting God, and God was pleased with Abel and his gift. He was not pleased with Cain and his.

Cain's face went hot and dark. He was angry, and he was jealous of his little brother. He scowled at the ground and would not look up.

So God came and spoke to him. "Why are you angry, Cain? Why is your face so low? If you do what is right, won't you be accepted? But if you don't, sin is crouching at your door like a wild animal. It wants to have you. You must rule over it."

Cain gave God no answer. He turned to his brother instead. "Let's go out to the field," he said.

Abel went. Out in the field, far from the tents, Cain attacked his brother and killed him. Abel was dead, and his blood soaked into the ground.

Then God spoke again. "Cain, where is your brother Abel?"

"I don't know," said Cain. "Am I supposed to look after my brother?"

(Cain was trying to hide the truth from the same God who had found his parents hiding among the trees.)

"What have you done?" God said. "Listen! Your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground." The ground would not grow crops for Cain anymore, God told him. He would be a wanderer, always moving, never settled.

"This is more than I can bear!" Cain cried. "Anyone who finds me will kill me!"

"No," said God. "Anyone who kills Cain will pay for it seven times over." And God put a mark on Cain, so that no one who met him would kill him. Then Cain went away from the LORD to a land called Nod, east of Eden. (Nod sounds like the word for "wandering," which tells you how the rest of Cain's life went.)

The mark kept Cain alive. It could not bring Abel home for supper, and it could not take the anger out of Cain's heart. Abel's blood kept crying from the ground, and what it cried was "This is wrong!"

Year after year, brothers kept fighting brothers. God's people waited for someone who would answer the question Cain had shrugged away, someone who would truly look after his brothers and sisters.

Then came a brother who was a shepherd like Abel, the oldest in a very big family. He brought God the best gift ever given, and the gift was himself. Men who were jealous of him had him nailed to a cross outside the city, and his blood fell on the ground too.

But the Bible says this brother's blood speaks a better word than Abel's. Abel's blood cried out for Cain to be punished. The blood of Jesus cries out for mercy, for the wrong to be forgiven, even for brothers like Cain.