Genesis 4:7

Genesis 4:7

The key to the interpretation of these words is to remember that they describe what happens after and because of wrong-doing. They are all suspended on "If thou doest not well." The word translated here "lieth" is employed only to express the crouchingof an animal, and frequently of a wild animal: "Unto thee shall be itsdesire, and thou shalt rule over it"Words like these were spoken to Eve: "Thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee." In horrible parody of the wedded union and love, we have the picture of the sin that was thought of as crouching at the sinner's door like a wild beast, now, as it were, wedded to him.

I. Think of the wild beast which we tether to our doors by our wrong-doing. Every human deed is immortal; the transitory evil thought or word or act, which seems to fleet by like a cloud, has a permanent being, and hereafter haunts the life of the doer as a real presence. This memory has in it everything you ever did. A landscape may be hidden by mists, but a puff of wind will clear them away, and it will all be there, visible to the farthest horizon.

II. The next thought is put into a strong and, to our modern notions, somewhat violent metaphor the horrible longing, as it were, of sin toward the sinner: "Unto thee shall be its desire." Our sins act towards us as if they desired to draw our love to themselves. When once a man has done a wrong thing it has an awful power of attracting him and making him hunger to do it again. All sin is linked together in a slimy tangle, like a field of seaweed, so that the man once caught in its oozy fingers is almost sure to be drowned.

III. The command here is also a promise. "Sin lies at thy door rule thou over it." The text proclaims only duty, but it has hidden in its very hardness a sweet kernel of promise. For what God commands God enables us to do. The words do really point onwards through all the ages to the great fact that Jesus Christ, God's own Son, came down from heaven, like an athlete descending into the arena, to fight with and to overcome the grim wild beasts, our passions and our sins, and to lead them transformed in the silken leash of His love.

A. Maclaren, Christ in the Heart,p. 171.

References: Genesis 4:7. S. Cox, Expositor's Notebook,p. 1; J. Van Oosterzee, The Year of Salvation,vol. ii., p. 329; A. W. Momerie, The Origin of Evil,p. 101; B. Waugh, Sunday Magazine(1887), p. 489.