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The consequences of sin

Genesis 3:16–24; 4:1–16


Today's passages talk about the consequences of sin. In summary, sin - separation from a right relationship with God - leads to conflict with other human beings. Partnership is replaced by competitiveness and attempts to dominate one another.

The easy mutually caring relationship which Adam and Eve enjoyed when they were good friends with God is replaced by male domination and patriarchal control. And farmers are soon at odds with nomadic herders.

Their self regarding attitudes bring Adam and Eve into conflict with  Nature too. Eve seems to find childbirth more difficult, perhaps because she can no longer count on loving support - at least from her husband. Adam seems to find farming more difficult, perhaps because he now sets out to subdue nature instead of working sympathetically with it.

And Cain the nomadic herder is soon in conflict with Abel, the settled farmer, after his offering to God is rejected. We don't know why this was. Perhaps his motives were dubious. Perhaps he was hoping that God would do him some inappropriate favour. What we are told is that he didn't make his offering well, and this has allowed sin to find an opportunity to gain even more influence over him. God's warning that he must not allow this to happen is ineffective and when Cain discovers that Farmer Abel’s offering has been accepted he is overcome by murderous jealousy. Under cover of an offer to hold a parley he kills him 

The end result is that Cain is driven out of that region but then finds that his own efforts to practise settled agriculture are even more counterproductive than Adam and Abel’s were. God warns him that when he tills the ground, it will no longer yield to him its strength. Like nomadic herders the world over, define himself squeezed out of the rich pasture land occupied by the farmers and marginalized to the wilderness. The name means the Land of the Wanderers, people forced to scrape an existence where they can. 

So what are the consequences of sin? We often think about sin, indeed obsessive about it, purely in personal terms. But here the consequences of sin affect relationships between men and women, farmers and herders, and between humanity and the natural world. The writer says that sin causes us to try to dominate others and impose our will on them. Inevitably that leads to unhappiness, and in the worsst cases it can lead to death.

The more we try to dominate nature the greater the struggle becomes. Eventually, like the glacier which collapsed in Switzerland causing a huge landslide which swept away the village beneath, we will become the losers in the struggle. Surely it's better to try to work with one another and with nature as equal partners rather than competitors.

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