Generational Homicide

“What have you done?  The voice of the blood of your brother cries to Me from the ground.” Genesis 4:10

Blood – If we could only see what is hidden in the text, oh how we would rejoice at the beauty of God’s rich vocabulary!  Here is a simple statement.  We know the story.  Cain kills Abel.  God judges Cain.  But unless we see the actual Hebrew text, we will miss something amazing.  You see, the word for “blood” in this verse is not singular.  It’s plural.  The Hebrew is kol demei (voice of bloods).  This is not a mistake.  It is not some sort of ancient medical misinterpretation.  God says that He hears the generations represented by the bloodline of Abel crying out to Him because now they will never be born.  The death of a single human being has consequences that reach to eternity.  God acknowledges that murder is generational homicide.

Just think of the implications.  First, this concept completely overrules our Greek preoccupation with individualism, even when it comes to individual murder.  We tend to think (thanks to our pervasive culture) that life is contained within the entity called the “person.”  This verse tells us that God thinks otherwise.  No one is a single individual.  Every one of us is connected to both a past and a future.  That future is represented in who we are right now, today.  When it is cut off, all of the future that could have been reality dies with the present person.  Since God sees all the potential in our present existence, His view of the purpose of our lives stretches toward an eternal fellowship with Him.  Murder does more than destroy a person.  It destroys a world.

Secondly, if the “bloods” of Abel can cry to God over the fact that all those unborn generations will never come to be, imagine how God views other less terminal sins.  Do you think that you sin by and for yourself?  Impossible!  Your sin alters the direction of the world.  It affects untold generations to come, nudging your posterity away from the Creator.  Your sin leaves an indelible mark on the universe and nothing that you can do will ever erase it.  Perhaps if we truly understood the eternal effect of sin we would be far more scrupulous about our behavior.  We would certainly put behind us once and for all the heresy that once we are forgiven our behavior no longer counts.  We may have experienced imputed righteousness.  We may have been given a “not guilty” verdict, but that does not diminish the consequences of our actions.  As by one man sin entered the world, so death passed on to all men.  Adam never looked into the future to see what grief his choice would cause.  Most of the time, we are as blind to eternal reality as he was.  That has to stop.  There is simply too much at stake.

Fortunately, there is grace.  No man or woman can carry this kind of burden.  But God can.  God does not erase sin.  Let’s be quite clear about that.  The Old Testament uses the words “blot out” for good reason.  God covers over our guilt.  He does not eliminate the consequences; He absorbs the guilt.  As long as we live in this broken world, the consequences of sin will spin on through generations.  We look forward to the time when all of this bloodline damage stops.  Between now and then, the ground will cry out at our moral pollution.  We must become much better caretakers of the soil.  With God’s help, we can.

Topical Index:  Sin