Lying to God and Confession: Cain (Genesis 4)

Lying to God and Confession 

Adam, Eve and Cain had sinned. Cain had sinned badly and committed a murder out of jealousy.

God steps in and starts an investigative judgment again. He already did this in Eden where he asked Adam and Eve some questions and a judgment was pronounced.
The same kind of process is executed here. Here we will focus on a particular issue that has not been discussed yet.

Our depravity in even our knowledge of God by sin.
When we sin, we wish to hide it just like Adam and Eve did. It’s shameful and we’d rather not have people see it.

This sense of guilt and shame can get so high that we lose faith in God's power and omniscience. It is easier to think we can get away with our sin and to think that God doesn’t know than to realise and believe the full omnipotence and omniscience of God.

Since this is easier and we have already fallen into depravity the next step is to simply take this idea and believe it. Surely God doesn’t see? We would love to remove Him from our own hearts and thoughts! This is what it means for the wicked to say in their hearts that God does not exist. It’s not just atheism, it’s a way of thinking.

Let us take Cain after he murdered his own brother:


[Gen 4:9 NKJV] 9 Then the LORD said to Cain, "Where [is] Abel your brother?" He said, "I do not know. [Am] I my brother's keeper?"


Same thing happened in Eden:


[Gen 3:8 NKJV] 8 And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.


In the case of Adam and Eve they thought they could hide from an all-knowing God.

In the case of Cain he quite literally tried to lie to God. Then he adds an excuse to it as well which shows how he thought of his brother: “Am I my brother’s keeper”.

Simply confessing a sin is too much and therefore we lie to God. In the back of our mind we act and think like He doesn’t know.

But He knows very well what we did. Cain probably ‘knew’ about the omniscience of God. But his heart was not there.

He knew it in the case with Cain:


[Gen 4:10 NKJV] 10 And He said, "What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood cries out to Me from the ground.


So we have a problem that can be structured in this way:


  1. We sin.

  2. We know our guilt and feel ashamed of it.

  3. We wish to hide our guilt.

  4. To do this we lower our view of God within our hearts and in the back of our minds.

  5. Then we lie to God and perhaps to ourselves once God starts asking us questions by which we should search ourselves.


What is the solution? We should know that God is a merciful God. The way to fix our guilt and shame is through confession though it will be painful and humbling.

We need to take the investigative questions God gives through the Holy Spirit and Scripture seriously. We need to take our time to search ourselves.

We are not escaping God's all-seeing eyes anyways. Why lie and hide?


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