Continuing In Communion With God—The Sin Spiral (Part 5): Genesis 4:1–26 A Clash of Legacies

by on November 4, 2025 | Comment

Everybody loves a good inspirational poster. One of my favorites is the picture of the single flower sprouting through the garbage in a landfill with the caption, “Hope grows in a dump.” The idea is that the prospect of good things can appear in even the most surprising places or situations. We should never lose hope because no situation can entirely destroy the possibility of positive developments.

In Genesis 4, we have a set of events that, as it develops, seems like it may totally eclipse the possibility of good things coming to pass. The situation, in some ways, gets increasingly worse as the events unfold. Is the world to end in total chaos? Or is there hope amid a worsening situation?

Genesis is a book about communion with God. Chapters 1–2 teach us how God made us to know him and enjoy him. Chapters 3–4 show how we broke that communion. In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve rebelled against God, so God cursed them. Genesis 4 gives us a snapshot into the fallout of our condition once sin entered the world. It shows us how sin continued to grow and worsen as time went on.

Remember that the background for Genesis 4 is the curse that occurred in Genesis 3, where Adam and Eve were sent out from the Garden of Eden as a form of exile. Also in the background of Genesis 4 is God’s promise in Genesis 3:15 that the seed of the woman would crush the serpent’s head, bringing an end to evil in the world and overturning the sin that Adam had introduced. In view of that promise of a victorious seed, Genesis 4 puts attention on two of Eve’s children.

Genesis 4 teaches us that the ways in which God marches his purposes of redemption forward in the world are not new but have been at work since sin’s entrance into the world through Adam’s fall in the Garden of Eden. Genesis 4 teaches us that God will deliver on his promises even when it seems that the odds are stacked against him and when we cannot see how he is going to come through for us.

If things in the world are growing as bad as described in Genesis 4, how is God going to keep that promise about a good seed? Has God’s promise come to nothing? Genesis 4 teaches us to trust that God will come through on his promises even when it seems that things are unraveling around us. This article argues that God fulfills his promises in unexpected ways.

Hatred

In the previous article, we considered the first part of the tragic story of Cain and Abel and saw that Cain had a heart problem when it came to worship. He wanted to set the terms for approaching God without coming in heartfelt gratitude. He neglected the spiritual component of worship and came before God with presumption.

The full story in Genesis 4 fills out the portrait of the problem that began in Genesis 3. In Genesis 3, beginning with Adam and Eve, sin disrupts relationships and causes all sorts of problems. And these problems were not limited just to that first couple. Genesis 4 gives a picture of how the effects of sin carry on past Adam and Eve. The murder of Abel reveals sin becoming more deeply entrenched in the world.1

Cain came to hate Abel because God regarded Abel’s sacrifice and not his. Then Cain became angry with God for favoring Abel. All because he had come with his heart and motivations out of place. As his reaction escalates, we see a parallel with what happened after Adam and Eve sinned. They looked for ways to avoid responsibility and to blame someone else.2

God told Cain that if he did well as he approached the Lord, he would be accepted. Rather than repenting of his previous failure of bitterly offering something inadequate to the Lord, he grew in hatred toward his brother who had truly honored God. Instead of checking his own heart attitude toward God, he got mad at the person who was walking with God.

So, he murdered Abel, because he could not stand that God had favored his brother. He preferred growing his sin rather than dealing with it. He liked the idea of killing his brother more than he liked admitting that something was wrong with himself. Even after God gave him the opportunity to repent of killing his own brother, he chose rather to flee from God’s presence altogether: “Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden” (Gen 4:16). Cain chose to walk futher away from God rather than face up to his own sin.

What can we learn already? We see that sin does not change much as time goes on. In the first sin, Adam and Eve looked for ways to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions. They did so by blame shifting. Cain went even further, first by killing his brother. When God asked him about Abel, he then tried to dodge the question altogether: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” He should have said, “I killed him because I felt jealous.”3

It is a reminder that our first impulse about our sin is to cover it up and find ways why we are not in the wrong. We thought about this point when we looked at Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, but Genesis 4 puts it immediately back in front of us. It is not a passing point. It is a feature of life in the fallen world.

We ought then to keep in mind that whenever we feel a desire to jab at someone else, we should probably ask ourselves what is motivating that desire. Cain hated Abel because Abel made him feel bad; he hated Abel because he did not want to examine his own life; he hated Abel because Abel made him see his own weaknesses. Hatred can be an indicator of where we sense our own shortcomings.

History

Cain’s hatred was not a limited affair. The way he fled from God shows his true disposition toward the Lord. He would rather be anywhere doing anything than walking with God. That disposition is manifest in his continuing response to God.

The first thing we know of Cain after he moved to get away from God’s presence is that he had children and built a city. That might seem inconsequential, but we should remember that, in verse 12, God sentenced Cain to “be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth” as the consequence of his sin.

In other words, when Cain builds a city, he directly rebels against God’s sentence against him. He is trying to be at the center of society and to create a stable home. He acts in direct contradiction to God’s verdict.4 As the story of that city unfolds, especially in Lamech, its rebellion against God increases. This city, even as the earliest city after the fall, shows us the inevitable pattern of every culture since: rebellion against the Lord.

What can we learn there? Well, we easily lament that society keeps getting worse. The godless practices that predominate society shift as time goes on. Our generation may feel those pressures in ways different from past generations, but Genesis 4 teaches us that opposition to God has been a feature of culture since the fall and will remain so until Christ returns. Yet, even as the moral landfill seems to expand, it does not prevent a flower of hope from growing in its midst.

1 John 3:12–14 reminds us of how that principle abides:

We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous. Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you. We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death.

It should not surprise us that rebellion against God grew to horrendous heights when Cain built our earliest major civilization, nor should it surprise us that the world today follows Cain’s example. Cain killed Abel because he could not stand that Abel loved the Lord and followed him. Our pursuit of the Lord will equally, even if not with the same result, ruffle people who cannot abide Christ’s people expressing their love for the true God. History is full of sinful opposition to how the Lord would have us live.

Hope

With Abel’s death and Cain’s line prospering evil upon the earth, it appears as though the serpent won. Perhaps God’s promise of the seed of the woman who would crush the serpent’s head would not hold true. Yet, even as sin seems to reach new heights in our earliest city, God provided Seth as a reason for hope.

What can we learn? We ought to find great encouragement in this principle. From the perspective of the faithful, Abel’s death and the prosperity of godless culture might seem to suggest that Satan and sin had won. It might seem like God’s promises could no longer prevail. But God gave Eve another son to further the godly line. Then, “To Seth also a son was born, and he called his name Enosh. At that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord” (Gen 4:26). The righteous seed wins unexpectedly while the evil seed seems to develop the culture. We ought never lose heart about how things appear, because God likes to claim his victories amidst the appearance of defeat. That way he gets glory as the one who comes through for justice and for his people.

The same principle applied when God won his ultimate victory over Satan, sin, and death. In Christ’s crucifixion, it appeared as though Satan had won and that the Messiah had been defeated. The truth was that even in his suffering and death, Christ was winning the victory to crush Satan’s head. In his death, he dealt effectively with sin.5

The line of Seth culminates in the birth of the Lord Jesus, the true seed of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent. Even when it looked like he had lost, he was winning his greatest victory. He was forgiving our sin in his own death. He was overturning death to give life even as he died.

As Christ rose from the grave, the risen Jesus is the greatest ground of our hope. He ensures that sinfulness will not prosper forever. He ensures that righteousness will reign in the kingdom of God forever once he returns. The world may look like a dump, but hope is growing as the Lord Jesus causes his gospel to go forth. The flower is in full bloom as people look to him for salvation.

Notes

  1. Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, Word Biblical Commentary (Zondervan, 1987), 100.
  2. John Goldingay, Genesis, Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Pentateuch (Baker Academic, 2020), 99.
  3. Goldingay, Genesis, 99.
  4. John D. Currid, Genesis, 2 vol. (EP Books, 2015), 1:153.
  5. Currid, Genesis, 1:160.

©Harrison Perkins. All Rights Reserved.

You can find this whole series here.

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