My Punishment is Greater Than I Can Bear

Unexpected Prayers STUDY

When I pray, I first think of giving thanks to God, or maybe praying for strength and deliverance when times get tough. God evokes the feeling of an old friend that I can always count on. That is until I screw up. I know I do not deserve mercy, and I certainly don’t want to speak my failures out loud. How do I pray to God when He sits as a righteous judge against me? When there is nothing to praise Him for, and when there is nothing I can do to make it up?

I feel this tension in small pieces as I sin, often, against my family and friends. I feel the weight of punishment looming. And it overwhelms me in bigger ways when I have blatantly ignored the commandments of the Almighty that I am supposed to love. God is right, I am a poor miserable sinner. I have failed to do what is right. But usually, that makes me want to hide in the bushes. I do not want to call on His wrathful name or pray in the open, because I do deserve God’s righteous judgment. So I don’t speak the truth, even to my God who already knows. I would rather keep the bad stuff to myself.

Trapped in a cycle of silence, I’m not doing myself any favors by hiding the truth. In reality, I am just lying to myself about something that God already knows. In my infantile wisdom, I am shutting down God and isolating myself.

Children of our first parents, Adam and Eve, had an open prayer life. Probably not because they even wanted to, but simply because their mom and dad used to walk around the Garden of Eden with the Almighty God. (Genesis 3:8)  Adam and Eve knew what it meant to absolutely lose everything and still have trust in Him. So to some extent, their boys learned this. And we glean a little piece of an unexpected prayer in the middle of a terrible situation.

Cain and Abel, born to Eve, were first in the running as the “promised seed.” (Genesis 3:16) Mankind was promised by God to look for a savior, a son, who would change the course of human history. Since expulsion from the Garden, we have all been locked into a cursed world: pain in childbearing, strife with one another, fruitless labor, and eventually death. But the hope was that this offspring would reverse these curses. All would be well again. So the first children of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, were the first offspring to bear this hope.

They prayed, they offered sacrifices, they worked in the field and in the home, but sin still gripped their hearts. They struggled with pride, deceit, jealousy, and one day sin totally overwhelmed Cain, and there was murder within God’s household. He sinned against God and against his family. Cain certainly deserved death. He knew it. So how was this prayer to God going to go?