
Based on Genesis 4:1-26
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” – Ecclesiastes 1:9
“God is doing everything so that Cain can repent. Why? Sin is man curved in on himself. Sin is always choosing yourself over God and others, placing yourself at the center. Sin determines that even when you do good things – even when you help the poor, enter into friendships, go to church, try to obey the Ten Commandments – it’s always about you. Sin determines that you relate to God and other people only in such a way and only to the degree that it furthers your agenda – doing things the way you think they should be done, giving you the self-image you want. As soon as a relationship with God or other people becomes costly, we’re out of it. Why? Because even when it looks like we’re serving God and other people, we’re really serving ourselves. That’s how insidious sin is.
“Repentence gets to root of that. It means you get out of yourself. You get out of the center. You get the favor of God and you begin to heal the blindness and hardness and the pride that sin brings into your life. Therefore, there is nothing more important than repentence. Nothing.
“Look what Cain does. He is weeping, ‘My punishment is more than I can bear!’ There is a kind of sorrow, a kind of weeping, that is just as self-absorbed as the sin you are crying about. Cain is sorry for the consequences of the sin, but not for the sin itself.” – Tim Keller