WordLive - Year OneSample

Prepare: Think about the motives behind your recent actions. How godly would you say these motives were?

Ordinary man
Compared to his mysterious parents, Cain is depressingly easy to understand. This is what you might call a ‘base-level’ human being: so many lives have followed the dreary pattern of this ordinary man’s experience.

No colour is added to the biography of Cain: he ‘worked the soil’ and he ‘lay with his wife’ but there is no indication that the poor fellow experienced love and joy or even made friends and had fun.

Paying the price
When he turns to his God, his approach is rejected. It is not clear why and, as the Bible does not offer a reason, we can only accept that somehow Cain’s motive in bringing his offering is not right. He allows his initial, instinctive anger to grow until, in a quite calculating way, he does a terrible thing.

There are unremarkable people in our prisons who have lived similarly dull lives and then, at some point of trial, have acted wickedly. Like Cain, they pay a price in terms of loneliness and fear (v 14).

Merciful God
For these bleak souls, the story of Cain does hold a glimmer of hope. When Cain turns again to God, in despair, remarkably his Creator comes to his aid.

This is not a tale of transformative redemption. However, we are reminded here that God does not reject the sincere cry of any human heart.

Respond: Imagine Cain as one of those men in verse 26b. What do you think he called to God?

http://www.wordlive.org/Session/Classic/2012-01-06