Episode 23: The First Murder

Cain refused to listen to God and then took out his anger on his brother Abel. Now Abel is dead and Cain is still angry at God. This week, we will learn what Jesus had to say about being our brother’s keeper and how our hearts get hardened when we refuse to obey God and do what is right.

If you can’t see the podcast player in your inbox, click here.

Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.

(Parents, all scripture is from the ESV unless I say otherwise)

Last time we visited with Cain and Abel, God was trying to reason with Cain because Cain was totally heading in the wrong direction. They both made offerings, which are different from sacrifices. Abel offered one of the firstlings of His flock and Cain offered some of his harvest. Both of these kinds of offerings are perfectly acceptable, animal and grain, as we will see when we come to the book of Leviticus. We are never told why God didn’t approve of Cain’s offering but we did talk about a few possibilities. Of course, what is most important is that God didn’t just shut Cain out and give him the silent treatment. God went to Cain and talked to him about the problem and told him that everything would be totally okay if he would just do what he knew was right, so obviously God had told them before this what He expected of them. Unlike the false gods of the ancient world, God let His people know what was right and what was wrong, what He does and does not like. The gods of the other nations?–they had no version of the Ten Commandments and they were imaginary so they couldn’t tell anyone what they wanted anyway. When things started going wrong in a person’s life, that person would start to freak out wondering which god they had ticked off, and what on earth they had done because there were no written down standards. I am so grateful that our God gave us commandments so that we can know when we are doing wrong. What a relief to not have to play the guessing game! That’s just one more of the many reasons why God’s word is good news for the world—it’s good news not to have to be all scared wondering which of a thousand gods might be angry at you for who the heck even knows what reason!

So, what’s Cain going to decide to do? He’s angry. He has a choice–‘fess up and admit he was wrong and take the blame and do better (which is all God is asking) or get angry at God or, lash out at someone else, maybe? Let’s see.

4⁸ Cain spoke to Abel his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. 

Great googly moogly. Cain walks up to his brother Abel, and they are talking. It doesn’t say what the conversation is about. It doesn’t say that they were fighting or yelling. It doesn’t say that Abel is making fun of Cain and his offering. We literally know nothing except that they were talking and then, quick as you please, Cain kills Abel. What the heck are we supposed to think about this? It’s another one of these annoying stories where we want to know about a million things but the Bible doesn’t tell us. It’s like we are on a “need to know basis” and evidently, God doesn’t think we need to know. We’re curious and we’d like this to be more satisfying and entertaining (we often want the Bible to gossip to us but it won’t give us any of the juicy details we want) but one minute they are in the field and the next minute Abel is dead. We don’t even know how Cain killed Abel. And these questions have been driving people crazy for thousands of years. During the few hundred years before Jesus was born and ever since, people who love the Bible have written fictional stories about what they think happened. Because we don’t like a hopeless mystery! We want to solve the mysteries.

Sometimes in these fictional stories, Cain hits Abel in the head with a rock. Sometimes he uses a club or strangles him. But what do I always tell you when we don’t have these kinds of details? “Don’t get distracted! Notice what the Bible says more than what it doesn’t say!” Later, there will be missing details in stories for other reasons—context reasons, things that the original audience in the wilderness would have understood without being told—like in the story of Jacob’s “ladder” (hint, it isn’t a ladder at all) or the Tower of Babel (remember when we learned about ziggurats?), but this is not that. There is no way we can know these answers and so we have to ask what message God was giving them, and us.

First, God had warned Cain about the importance of controlling his anger and doing the right thing. God told Cain that if he didn’t do what was right, his sinful desires were going to pounce on him like a lion or a wolf and that there would be trouble. But God also told Cain that he had the power to overcome his anger and sin. Although we saw God talking to Cain, we don’t have Cain answering God in return—that is a big red flag right there, a warning sign. Cain didn’t take God’s loving advice. He didn’t think about how special it was to have God talking right to him and what a great thing that was. All he knew was that he was angry about his offering not being accepted. Instead of talking to God, He talked to his brother instead.

We don’t know what happened. We don’t know if Cain went to Abel with plans to kill him or if it just happened. What we do find out later is that he doesn’t seem to be very sorry about it—but he does end up feeling pretty sorry for himself. Can you imagine being angry enough with a brother or sister to kill them and not even feeling bad about it later? That’s pretty cold. And this story is just cold. BAM! Abel is dead, and it would appear that Cain went back to his normal routine. This wouldn’t have been a made-up story either, because you don’t really find stories in the ancient world about brothers killing one another, and really you don’t even see a lot of stories about brothers fighting either. In this sort of culture, family was more important than anything else. You didn’t grow up and move away like people do now, No phones, no texts, no mail. If you left then that was it. Family was forever and you had to protect one another from outsiders. So, this story would have been very shocking!

⁹ Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” 

Oh no he didn’t…he did not just talk back to God with a flippant, disrespectful, lying response! I guess after committing the first murder in recorded history, he just decided he might as well go for broke and insult God and His intelligence too. This is a good life lesson—God will never ask you a question that He doesn’t already know the answer to. Lying to Him is just plain stupid. And I know some of your parents might not like that word but I couldn’t think of a better one to describe what Cain just did. I doubt you will ever know anyone who does anything equivalent to that—killing a family member and then being sarcastic with God after lying to His face. So, I save words like that for truly special occasions and not just when I am irritated.

Next week, we’re going to talk about God’s response to Cain’s smart-alec backtalk but for the rest of today’s lesson, we’re going to talk about some of the times that Jesus had to ask people this same question. In the first century, two thousand years ago, Jesus’s own people, the Jews, were asking this question again. But instead of “am I my brother’s keeper?” They were asking, “Who exactly is my brother?” or “Who is my neighbor?” You see, there is a commandment that God gave us, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” (Lev 19:18) but you know how folks are. We want to know who our neighbor is, because if we do then we know who God is telling us we have to love and, more importantly, who we are allowed to hate and refuse to care for. Rich and powerful people didn’t want to do the hard work of loving poor people, and vice verse, which means the poor people didn’t want to have to love the rich people either. And no one wanted to have to love the Samaritans! And sometimes brothers fought with one another over their inheritance. But this wasn’t what God had in mind when He said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” He meant, “YOU be a loving neighbor to whomever you meet!”

One day, Jesus was teaching, and another Bible teacher came up to him and asked him a question, “What do I need to do so that I can have eternal life in the World to Come?” Jesus replied to him, “You know the Bible, what do you think it says?” The man thought about it and said to Jesus, “It says you must love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and it also says that you must also love your neighbor just as you love yourself.” Jesus nodded, and told him, “You’re absolutely right. Do that and you will live forever in the world to come.”

But the man still wanted to make sure that he was in the clear, so he asked, “Yeah, but who actually is my neighbor?” Jesus responded by telling everyone a story. “There was once a man travelling from Jerusalem down to Jericho. While he was walking, robbers came to him and beat him, took everything he had, and left him to die naked and bleeding in a ditch. There was a Temple priest walking by, and when he saw the man, he thought he might be dead. He didn’t want to be ritually unclean and be out of commission for a week and so, just in case, he moved to the opposite side of the road. Plus, he thought, there might still be those bandits around and he didn’t want to get attacked too. Besides, he was walking, what could he do for the man even if he wasn’t dead? He had people to teach and sacrifices to perform, so it was very important that he be on his way. So, he just kept on walking as though nothing had happened. Next, a Levite came by. He was one of the singers in the Temple. He saw the man in the ditch, naked and bleeding, and thought, “If I get too close and he is dead, then I won’t be able to sing in the Temple for a whole week. The work I do leading Israel in worship is very important. I can’t risk it. Who knows? Maybe this was an evil man who deserves what happened to him! I had better be on my way.”

Then, along the road came a Samaritan! Those people who were so angry that we Jews aren’t worshiping on Mt Gerazim that they took the bones of dead people and smuggled them up onto the Temple Mount to make everything ritually unclean. The people whom we Jews reject because they don’t have pure Jewish blood in them and they do things differently than we do. The people we have been taught are horrible ever since we were little children. Well, one of those guys came down the road and he saw the man and he stopped. He was very upset about that poor man. He ran up to him with some of his own precious oil and wine and cleaned the man’s wounds and then tore up fabric to make bandages to stop the bleeding. Very carefully, he lifted the heavy body onto his own animal and took him to a nearby inn. When they got to the room, the Samaritan took care of the man all that night. He had somewhere very important to be so he had to get back onto the road but he gave the innkeeper a lot of money to take care of the man until he returned. And he said, “Whatever more you have to spend to keep him alive and well, I will pay you back when I return.”

“Now,” Jesus asked, “who was this man’s neighbor?” The Bible teacher was very ashamed and replied, “The one who was merciful to him.” Jesus nodded, “I want you to go out and do the same thing for everyone who needs help.”

And those people who heard the story would have been very shocked. “But…but…the Samaritans are the bad guys! They are outsiders!” Jesus didn’t care about that—He tells us that we are all responsible for one another, no matter who we are and no matter who needs our help. And if we are required to love strangers, like this Samaritan did, how much more so should we love our own family members? Like Abel! Cain asked God if he was his brother’s keeper and Jesus might have said, “As a matter of fact, yes you are. I gave you humans to one another so that you would take care of one another.”

That’s what Jesus had to say about someone who has been hurt, but what about poor people? Are rich people and poor people neighbors? Of course, they are! Jesus once told another story about a very rich man who lived in a fancy house and ate fancy meals every single day of the week. Outside his gate there was a very poor man named Lazarus, and he was in terrible shape. He was so hungry and had open sores all over his body, and he would watch people come and go from the parties this man would throw, in their fancy clothes. And after the parties, the servants were told to feed the leftovers to the dogs. The guard dogs were kinder to Lazarus than their own master was—cleaning his wounds with their tongues. Even though the rich man had so much, Lazarus was starving every day and one day he finally died. And then, the rich man died as well. When the rich man saw Lazarus, he was shocked to see Lazarus living the good life with Abraham! The rich man was far from Abraham and couldn’t even get a cup of water—he was suffering just like Lazarus had suffered while he was alive. When the rich man begged for water, Abraham rebuked him for not being a good neighbor to Lazarus. Even his dogs were better neighbors.

One of the most amazing things about the story of Lazarus and the rich man is that the rich man (whose name we do not know) even knew Lazarus’s name! He allowed a man whose name he knew, to get sick and hungry enough to die, right outside his house! How did he know Lazarus’s name? Probably because Lazarus was asking him for mercy every time he left the house or came back and whenever his guests came and went. As in all the Bible stories, there aren’t a lot of details so we are guessing—but obviously, a lot of bad, heartless, cruel stuff was going on and the rich man wasn’t acting like a neighbor. He was acting like Lazarus’s enemy—or worse. Even most of us couldn’t bear to watch anyone die like that, even if we hated them. And of course, Jesus commands us to love our enemies, and bless and pray for them.

Now, we aren’t all murderers like Cain, but the truth is that we don’t naturally want to help everyone—and especially people we don’t like or people we think we are better than. We will often ask, “Who is my neighbor? Who do I have to love “as myself”?” And Jesus tells us that’s the wrong question—it isn’t “who is my neighbor?”–it’s “who am I going to be a neighbor to?” And it might be hard for you to imagine walking past someone who might be hurt or dead on the side of the road, but when Jesus walked the earth, that wouldn’t have been strange at all. And you might be shocked that a rich man would be so heartless as to allow someone to lay sick and hungry and dying outside their home while they are living it up, but stranger things have happened.

You have never lived in a world without Jesus. Jesus changed everything. Not all at once, mind you, but Jesus changes everything He touches. Whenever Jesus told stories, it was to teach us not to be hard-hearted. What does that mean? To be hard-hearted? Well, a soft-hearted person is someone who cares very deeply when other people are hurting. Soft-hearted people are generous and want to show God’s love to everyone because they listen to Him and want to be like Jesus. The more they care for others, the softer their hearts become. Hard-hearted is the opposite of that. Hard-hearted people only care about themselves and what they want and what they think is right. When we won’t listen to God, the Bible says that we are hardening our hearts—like Pharaoh when he kept refusing to let God’s people go out of Egypt. He thought he was a god and so he figured that meant he didn’t have to listen to the God of the Hebrews—how awesome could He be if His people were slaves anyway? I know that seems shocking but that is how pagans used to think about things. If my people take your people as slaves, it is because my god kicked your god’s butt and your god went crying home to mommy.

So, Pharaoh didn’t listen to God. He hardened his heart against what God was saying and did exactly what he wanted even though the consequences got worse and worse. The Temple priest’s heart was hardened too, in Jesus’s story, so he left that beaten man by the side of the road. And the Levite did the same thing! The rich man’s heart was very hard to Lazarus. And they all did that even though God’s word told them to love their neighbors as themselves. Well, that’s what Cain did too! Cain was hardening his heart by not listening to God’s warnings. At first, the only consequence was having his sacrifice rejected, not accepted, because he didn’t do what he knew was right. But now, because he didn’t listen and he got angry, his brother is dead. When Pharaoh was hard-hearted, a lot of people got hurt—not just him. When Cain was hard-hearted, his brother was murdered—which of course would have hurt their parents terribly as well.

You might be asking how a heart can become hardened and how they had such a strange expression. Well, in the ancient world, they didn’t know that people thought with their brains. They believed that whatever part of their body felt strange when they were thinking certain things, or worried or angry, that that’s where their thoughts came from. By the time Jesus was born, they knew what brains were for and so Jesus talks not just about hearts but about minds too. Being hard-hearted means that we are setting our minds, and our wills, against what God wants. We are deciding to do what we want and not what God wants. That’s what will means—our determination to do what we want in order to get our own way. God’s will is similar—God’s will is His desire for things to go on earth the same way they go in Heaven. God’s will is for everyone to love one another and to obey Him and to believe that Jesus is our King who died for us. God’s will is for us to do things His way so that things will be good for everyone. Our will is to do what we want so that we can get our own way but our own way generally leads to one big old mess for us and everyone around us.

Look at what Cain’s will did to his family! They will never be a family again. Cain doesn’t have a brother anymore. Adam and Eve only have one son. Do you think that things are going to be lovey-dovey between Adam and Eve and Cain from now on? With Adam and Eve crying all the time? Next week, we will be talking about what happens to Cain as a result of murdering his brother, but we never find out about what happens between him and his parents. I imagine it was pretty horrible when they found out that one son killed the other.

The lesson for us, of course, is that we need to listen to God and especially when we are angry. In a few weeks, we are going to talk about the importance of going to God when we are angry—and even when we are angry at Him. Especially when we are angry at Him! I have been angry at God many times in my life but you know what? He has never abandoned me or stopped loving me. Sometimes, He comes to me and tells me that I am wrong about something and that I need to apologize to someone. Sometimes, I have to apologize to people I don’t like because I did something wrong to them when I was frustrated. Oh, I hate that. But when I don’t apologize, when I know God is telling me to do it, I am hardening my heart. I am setting my mind against God’s mind and my will against His will. When I do that, it makes it harder to obey Him the next time. And I might start blaming the person I was mean to, like Cain blamed Abel, when I am the problem. All Abel did was do the offering correctly, but Cain treated Abel like he was the problem! Sometimes we do that. Sometimes when we don’t want to do what is right, we want everyone to approve of us anyway and when they don’t, we decide to hate the people who are making right choices. But that’s not fair to everyone else. We can’t act like we are the only people in the whole world and as if everyone has to make us feel good about doing the wrong thing. Next week, we will talk about what happens to Cain.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you.