Cain's Battle With the Borg

Suggested Reading: Genesis 4:1-16

There is a pivotal scene in Star Trek: First Contact where Captain Picard has issued orders for the crew to stand their ground and fight a hopeless battle against the Borg, a group of cybernetically enhanced aliens who are over-running his ship. At the time his judgment seems to be clouded by his own experience with the Borg, an experience in which he himself had been kidnapped, his body implanted with Borg devices, and his mind controlled as he was forced to kill and destroy people for whom he cared. Though he had buried his anger and desire for revenge, when the Borg attacked his ship once again he allowed those feelings to take over. Only when a stranger quoted Moby Dick to him, comparing him to Captain Ahab who allowed his thirst for revenge to destroy him, did Captain Picard realize what he was doing and decide to let go of his anger in order to save his crew.

Unfortunately for Cain in Genesis 4, Moby Dick hadn't been written yet, but Cain did have someone point out the danger of holding onto his anger. After his offering had been rejected, Cain was visited by God himself who warned him, "Why are you so angry? Why is your face so downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it" (Genesis 4:6-7, NIV). God himself warned Cain about his anger, and told him that he had a choice to make: deal with his anger and do what was right by mastering his sin, or allow his anger to continue unchecked and allow sin to master him instead.

Another path along the road to committing horrible deeds we never could have imagined is the choice to stay angry. God warned Cain that he had a choice to make, but Cain chose to stay angry. Cain chose to ignore the warning that God himself had issued about the dangers of allowing anger to rule him and he ended up murdering his brother. Even when we are truly injured and wronged, we have a choice to make about the role anger will play in our decisions. We can continue to be angry, justified or not, or we can choose to forgive so that we don't give sin a chance to master us. At times, it simply feels good to be angry. It feels good to be consumed with something that energizes and motivates us. But we cannot allow anger to be our driving force. 

Paul said in Ephesians 4:26-27, "'In your anger do not sin': Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold" (NIV). Allowing anger to motivate us and dictate our actions is a very dangerous game, one that offers Satan a foothold in our lives. Cain didn't pay attention to the warning he received. Will we?

Dealing with Cain's Login Errors

Suggested Reading: Genesis 4:1-16

Not long ago I had one of those frustrating computer moments. I was trying to login to one of my online accounts and I kept getting the error message that my user ID and password didn't match. So I kept trying different passwords in an attempt to get something to work. Nothing did. I just kept getting that same error message. After about 15 attempts I finally stopped long enough to look at my user ID and noticed that I had left out a letter in the ID. After that, I tried the very first password again and within seconds I had logged in. I felt rather embarrassed that I had gotten so frustrated about forgetting my password only to discover that something else had been the problem all along.

In the story of Cain and Abel we see a similar dynamic in Cain's descent to murder. He and his brother had both brought offerings to the Lord but only Abel's had been accepted, probably because Abel had offered the first fruits, the first-born of his herds, while Cain had just brought some of the produce the ground had produced, not the first fruits of his crops. Whatever the reason, God had a conversation with Cain about the rejection of his offering, asking "Why are you so angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?" (Genesis 4:6-7, NIV). The fact that Cain then went out and murdered his brother Abel would seem to indicate that his anger was directed in the wrong place. He either murdered Abel because his brother had made him angry by showing him up (not an uncommon emotional response) or in order to get back at God for accepting Abel's offering but not his own. In either case, Cain directed his anger and probably the blame for his failure somewhere other than where it should have been: on himself.

Quite often, as sinful human beings, we find ourselves doing horrible things we never would have imagined doing beforehand: killing people, having affairs, cheating on our taxes, lying. And quite often the first step along the path to those unimaginable deeds is blaming someone else for our own failures. Affairs often start because one spouse blames the other for not meeting his or her unrealistic expectations. Cheating on taxes or stealing from the office is justified because we manage our money poorly and then blame the government for taking too much or our bosses for not paying us enough. The first step on the road to unimaginable deeds is frequently placing the blame for our failures anywhere but on ourselves, which, apparently, is exactly what Cain did.

Have you experienced anger so deep that you feel tempted to do things you know are wrong? Have you felt so cheated or under-appreciated that you consider doing things that would previously have been unfathomable? If our reaction to those feelings is the temptation to knowingly do something wrong, we have a problem. Instead of placing blame on other people for our own failures, lets take good long looks at ourselves. Just like when trying a dozen different passwords instead of checking the user ID, putting the blame in the right place will help us fix our problems a whole lot faster than laying our failures at someone else's feet.