NOTES for Gen 4:7

Before Christ came into the world, no one had ever spoken of original sin. But this does not mean that nothing was known about it. It is another matter that the fundamental damage, the corruption of human nature that became the source of concrete sins, was not perceived in itself as sin. Indeed, how can one accuse a person for having been born the way he was born? No one is guilty of his hereditary diseases, even if those diseases became the consequence of his parents' sin.

But what a person was considered responsible for at all times was his concrete actions. Of course, in the times described by the sacred writer, there was no Torah and no commandments yet. They still lay ahead, for according to the logic of the author of Genesis, the matter takes place at the very dawn of history, though already the history of fallen humanity. And yet God turns to man with a call to do good deeds and calmly look God in the eye. Evidently, even after the fall, there remained in the human heart that "natural Torah," that law of which Paul says that it is written in the hearts of the Gentiles. And here, after all, this is not paganism proper; here people still remember the One, He is not yet completely forgotten.

And God calls Cain to that simplicity which frees one from all inner fears and perplexities, from all questions about the accepted and the unaccepted sacrifice. If you do good deeds, lift up your head and look boldly toward heaven. Otherwise sin itself will be drawn to you, for the one who does nothing good will sooner or later slide into the swamp of sin, which for fallen man is always a direct and immediate threat. Thus God points Cain to the only spiritual path possible for him, as for anyone else. The path that could have freed him from fratricide.