Confession and Connection
From Genesis 4 – 3 And in the process of time it came to pass that Cain brought an offering of the fruit of the ground to the Lord. 4 Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat. And the Lord respected Abel and his offering, 5 but He did not respect Cain and his offering. And Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell.
6 So the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen? 7 If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it.”
On the television drama The West Wing, President Bartlett is a fit representative for husbands everywhere, and really for anyone who has ever attempted relationship. He's wrong. He's wrong, and he doesn't like it. He's wrong, he doesn't like it, and this acidic discomfort eats through the solitary confinement to which is otherwise remarkable discipline sentences it.
In President Bartlett's case, his wife called him on the passive-aggressive misdirection from confessing to her to defensiveness toward her. She recoils, "You're pissed at me! I don't believe it! I don't believe you!"
With acid of her own, she retraces, "You go from 'I've got a lot to say' to 'I can't say it right now You go from 'I've got a lot to say' to 'I can't say it right now because I've got so much to say' to" an issue he uses as an hostile, discussion-closing distraction.
I recognize that digression. I recognize it from Genesis 4. Like the First Lady holding the President accountable, God sees through Cain's dissembling, his slipping from awareness of being wrong in one setting, in one relationship to a more general hostility. As would be expected of God's relational perfection as compared to the muddled nature of human-to-human connections in a fallen world, God's tone leads more with invitation than recrimination.
God asks directly, "Why has your countenance fallen?" If a good lawyer never asks a question without knowing the answer, certainly God knows the inner workings of Cain's heart, and ours, better than any human does. Yet He asks, that Cain, and his heirs, might more objectively examine the reason anger bleeds into our facial expression and our actions.
Then He invites, "If you do well, will you not be accepted?" The New Living Translation paraphrases memorably and hopefully, "Your face can be bright with joy if you do what you should." There is hope beyond this squirming moment. There is comfort on the far side of this conviction.
Confession, offering, God invites, almost entices, can renew us and the relationships which will otherwise be poisoned by what's blocking our relationship with Him.
The all-too-common alternative is stark. A wrong turn here, away from the invitation of God, leads Cain to murder. The hardening of his heart toward God leads Cain to seek relief from the weight of conviction at the cost of his brother's life.
If we don't see that happening because our rightful guilt before God metastasizes into hostility toward others, we've forgotten the continuity Christ presents in the New Testament equivalent of murder, teaching that if we are angry enough to cut off our brother, we have murdered him already.
The especial challenge here is that we wrong so many. Yet none have the access to all of the terms of our heart that God does. Precious few have the access a spouse does to connect our behavior in one setting to our behavior in another, and the steadfast position to call us on it.
We can sin at work, confess incompletely, and carry that sense into our next dealings with coworkers like a rock in our shoe. Worse, we can bring the consequences of resistance to or incomplete confession home, or into our dealings with our neighbor.
Very few of the people who get the runoff of our heart's misdeeds have access to diagnose the source. The shadow of our fallen countenance is cast on humans around us who may have had little or nothing to do with the obstruction of God's light in our lives.
Spurgeon, predictably and helpfully, points us to resolution and renewal that is even more pervasive than our sense of estrangement. Specifically pointing to the scene of the cross, he insists, "Nowhere does the soul ever find such consolation as on that very spot where misery reigned, where woe triumphed, where agony reached its climax."
We miss the power of this if we apply it only to Golgotha 2000 years ago. Look at our fragmented relationships. Our misery is more widespread than that spot of ground. So, then, Spurgeon equates, is the corresponding consolation Christ offers. We carry around residual guilt, residual bitterness, residual patterns of, "I'll get you before you get me with what I deserve," because our sense of the atonement is incomplete.
Different awaits. Different invites. Wherever we taste misery's first acrid sip, there, before we draw again from a broken cistern, is the well of Christ's living, renewing water. We can take our disappointments, even the ones with ourselves, and be cleansed there. His water is not scarce. It, to borrow the phrasing from the rejoicing with which my friend Chuck texted me this morning, cleanses our shame as well as our sin.
Whatever binds us in our relationships, these same stretched and manipulated ties which so often make us miserable can help bring us to mutual confession, cleansing, and consolation at the very spot of our hurts.
6 So the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen? 7 If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it.”
On the television drama The West Wing, President Bartlett is a fit representative for husbands everywhere, and really for anyone who has ever attempted relationship. He's wrong. He's wrong, and he doesn't like it. He's wrong, he doesn't like it, and this acidic discomfort eats through the solitary confinement to which is otherwise remarkable discipline sentences it.
In President Bartlett's case, his wife called him on the passive-aggressive misdirection from confessing to her to defensiveness toward her. She recoils, "You're pissed at me! I don't believe it! I don't believe you!"
With acid of her own, she retraces, "You go from 'I've got a lot to say' to 'I can't say it right now You go from 'I've got a lot to say' to 'I can't say it right now because I've got so much to say' to" an issue he uses as an hostile, discussion-closing distraction.
I recognize that digression. I recognize it from Genesis 4. Like the First Lady holding the President accountable, God sees through Cain's dissembling, his slipping from awareness of being wrong in one setting, in one relationship to a more general hostility. As would be expected of God's relational perfection as compared to the muddled nature of human-to-human connections in a fallen world, God's tone leads more with invitation than recrimination.
God asks directly, "Why has your countenance fallen?" If a good lawyer never asks a question without knowing the answer, certainly God knows the inner workings of Cain's heart, and ours, better than any human does. Yet He asks, that Cain, and his heirs, might more objectively examine the reason anger bleeds into our facial expression and our actions.
Then He invites, "If you do well, will you not be accepted?" The New Living Translation paraphrases memorably and hopefully, "Your face can be bright with joy if you do what you should." There is hope beyond this squirming moment. There is comfort on the far side of this conviction.
Confession, offering, God invites, almost entices, can renew us and the relationships which will otherwise be poisoned by what's blocking our relationship with Him.
The all-too-common alternative is stark. A wrong turn here, away from the invitation of God, leads Cain to murder. The hardening of his heart toward God leads Cain to seek relief from the weight of conviction at the cost of his brother's life.
If we don't see that happening because our rightful guilt before God metastasizes into hostility toward others, we've forgotten the continuity Christ presents in the New Testament equivalent of murder, teaching that if we are angry enough to cut off our brother, we have murdered him already.
The especial challenge here is that we wrong so many. Yet none have the access to all of the terms of our heart that God does. Precious few have the access a spouse does to connect our behavior in one setting to our behavior in another, and the steadfast position to call us on it.
We can sin at work, confess incompletely, and carry that sense into our next dealings with coworkers like a rock in our shoe. Worse, we can bring the consequences of resistance to or incomplete confession home, or into our dealings with our neighbor.
Very few of the people who get the runoff of our heart's misdeeds have access to diagnose the source. The shadow of our fallen countenance is cast on humans around us who may have had little or nothing to do with the obstruction of God's light in our lives.
Spurgeon, predictably and helpfully, points us to resolution and renewal that is even more pervasive than our sense of estrangement. Specifically pointing to the scene of the cross, he insists, "Nowhere does the soul ever find such consolation as on that very spot where misery reigned, where woe triumphed, where agony reached its climax."
We miss the power of this if we apply it only to Golgotha 2000 years ago. Look at our fragmented relationships. Our misery is more widespread than that spot of ground. So, then, Spurgeon equates, is the corresponding consolation Christ offers. We carry around residual guilt, residual bitterness, residual patterns of, "I'll get you before you get me with what I deserve," because our sense of the atonement is incomplete.
Different awaits. Different invites. Wherever we taste misery's first acrid sip, there, before we draw again from a broken cistern, is the well of Christ's living, renewing water. We can take our disappointments, even the ones with ourselves, and be cleansed there. His water is not scarce. It, to borrow the phrasing from the rejoicing with which my friend Chuck texted me this morning, cleanses our shame as well as our sin.
Whatever binds us in our relationships, these same stretched and manipulated ties which so often make us miserable can help bring us to mutual confession, cleansing, and consolation at the very spot of our hurts.
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