In this sermon on Genesis 4:1-16, Ian Rush examines the story of Cain and Abel, highlighting the consequences of sin and the importance of genuine worship. He emphasizes how sin disrupts relationships and leads to judgment, while also pointing to God's mercy and the hope of redemption. This message offers insights into human nature, the effects of sin, and God's grace, providing valuable lessons for personal faith and community life.
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Good morning everybody. It's good to be with you this morning. I want to extend my welcome to you as well. Those who are visiting faith, Bible Church, we're glad you're here with us this morning. It's been a Sweet Christmas season together as a church, and I'm blessed to be able to be with you this morning as we get back into Genesis. My name is Ian, for those of you that don't know me, I'm the youth pastor here at Clay Bible Church, so get to hang out with the high schoolers and middle school students. We've, along with Caleb and myself, we've got a great team of volunteer leaders who put time, effort, energy, all of the things, into youth ministry to make it a enjoyable time. But they are disciple makers as well, bringing the truth to our students. So thankful to be a part of that ministry. Up on the screen behind me, you will see some books out in the tribe, coffee room, the coffee cart room. There are Genesis journaling Bibles. Okay, so we are working our way through Genesis on Sunday mornings in our growth groups, we're going through, for the most part, Genesis Bible studies. Journaling Bibles are just a cool way. There's a few different options of ones you could get. I like those skinny black ESV ones that they put out. It's just great. As you read through, you can take notes, you can highlight things, and you can kind of make connections of repetition and all that kind of stuff right there in your in your own journaling Bible. So we've got some of those out the back for you guys, if you want one of those, and that would help you in your own study. All right. So we are in Genesis chapter four this morning. So if you flip in your Bibles to Genesis chapter four in a moment, we'll read verses one to 16 together. But as you turn there, I just wanted to give a little bit of a recap on where we've been in Genesis so far, because it's been a couple of weeks with the Christmas break since we just rounded off chapter three. And I just wanted to give you the kind of the big picture storyline of what's going on in Genesis up until the point that we're about to get into this morning. So for most of our time this morning, we'll be coming in kind of at the ground level and looking at the details of the Cain and Abel story. I know what you're thinking. What would Christmas be without death and murder? Right? I was thinking it too. So we're going to be looking at the details of the story of Cain and Abel. But to begin with, what I want to do is give us more of like the bird's eye view of what's going on more broadly in God's plan and in God's story and how things are working out. So we'll begin with the bird's eye view, and then we'll get back to the bird's eye view again at the end, after we've gone over the details. So in the opening three chapters of Genesis, we've already met God. Okay, so he's the the key character, the key player in all of these chapters. He's the one we have been introduced to right from the very first two verses, we're told that he is the one who exists eternally, and he's also the one who exists independently. He doesn't have a beginning, and he will never have an end. He has always existed. He doesn't change, he doesn't grow, he doesn't get stronger, and he's independent, which means he didn't need to create anything in order to fulfill some kind of desire that he had. He just did it out of his own creative, good, gracious character. So God was completely satisfied in his eternal existence before anything came in to being. So that was the God that we met right at the very beginning. And we see as we work our way through chapter one, he displays himself through his creative acts, up to and including the creation of man and woman, and he gives man and woman the special task of filling the earth with His image and likeness, otherwise known as glorifying Him. So He creates man and woman, and he gives them the task of filling the earth and as. Do glorifying Him as they do it. And they do that by bearing his image and bearing his likeness, as well as filling the earth and bearing His image and likeness. He tells them to rule over the rest of creation under his rule. So they have these, these, these, first people, Adam and Eve, a special, blessed and perfect relationship with God. Then we get to chapter three, where we meet Satan, the enemy of God. He presents Adam and Eve with a different way, a way other than the way that God has pointed them to and called them to hold to. And we see Adam and Eve give in to temptation, to sin, which results in their separation from God. And while God still expected them to fulfill their roles they would now be carried out while living in a creation cursed with sin and death. But as we've heard, God does not leave them without hope. He doesn't leave us without hope either. He promises that things will not always remain in this cursed state that came about in Genesis chapter three. You will not you do not always have to exist in a cut off relationship from God. The ground will not always be cursed you. All of the curses that you read there down through Genesis three will not always remain that way. God brings hope. He promises that things will change. A Savior will come from the descendants of the man and woman, and this Savior would destroy the work of Satan, and would destroy Satan himself, which is where we pick up in our text this morning, in chapter four. So please stand for the reading of God's word, and I will read to you as you follow along verses one to 16. If you don't have a Bible, it's up on the screen behind me as well. So Genesis four, beginning in verse one. Now Adam knew his Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, I've gotten a man with the help of the Lord. And again, she bore his brother, Abel. Now, Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain a worker of the ground. In the course of time, Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering, he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his face fell. The Lord said to Cain, why are you angry? And why is your face for him? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it. Cain spoke to Abel, his brother, and when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. Then the LORD said to Cain, Where is Abel your brother? He said, I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper? And the Lord said, What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground, and now you are cursed from the ground which has opened up its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it shall no you longer yield to you its strength. You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth. Cain said to the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground and your and from your face. I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me. Then the Lord said to him, not so. If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him, sevenfold. And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest anyone who found him should attack him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, East of Eden. This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray,
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Father, we come to you to. Gathered this morning with great Thanksgiving in our hearts. It has been a a great season of the year in which we remember the coming of the Savior into the world. God took on flesh, came to live among his creation, Father, we're so thankful for that great plan. We're so thankful as we read passages like Genesis three and Genesis four, to know that out of your love and your grace and Your Mercy, you chose not to leave things that way, but you've provided a way of salvation through the Messiah. We're thankful father for everyone in this room who is represents a different story of salvation, Christ working in their lives and saving them from saving us from different battles and wars with sin, sin that dominates all of our lives. You have intervened in different and unique ways in all of our lives and brought us to salvation in your Son, Jesus Christ. So I'm thankful for all who are here, represented by Christ this morning, having been saved by Him, and thankful that we can gather together and come to your word, father. We're thankful for the opportunities that you give us to minister together as a church, and I think this morning of the seminary that we're able to host at our church, thankful for the vision of our church to not only be thinking of today and how we might glorify you today, but how we can equip men to lead and preach and pastor in Churches well into the future, not just in this moment. So really, it's a privilege that we get to do that through the seminary. We're thankful for the teachers who invest so much time in the men and and also the ladies and the wives that are invested in there as well. Thankful to just be a part of that process. And we're thankful for the students that come in and have committed and dedicated time and effort and energy and made great sacrifices to be equipped for the task of ministry, missions and those things. So just pray this morning, many are in the program. Many have already gone out. And even before there was a seminary here, many were trained up and sent out Ian missions or serving as pastors at churches. And there are, there are pastors wives out there, missionary wives. I just pray for them this morning that you would help them to remain faithful to you. Help them to stay true to your message. Help them to proclaim it with boldness and love and clarity that your name would be glorified, Father, we pray for the teaching of the word within our church this morning and in the coming weeks that you would help us to remain true. Help us to uphold the doctrine, the teaching that we see in your word and help us to glorify you as we do it. Pray that you'd bless our time in the Word this morning, help us to understand it and apply it to our lives in the ways that you intend in Jesus. Name Amen, please do have a seat.
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I wanted to just say thank you to all of you this morning, some of you may not know, so maybe it's not all of you, but we just had a baby, baby Iris. She was born on November 19, so she's just over a month old. So thank you. I know many of you were praying for us. You've been praying for our family. Many of you have blessed us and given us gifts and brought us meals and come and spent time with us and been encouraging to us. So we're so very thankful to you guys. Iris, if I didn't already say she She's our our new little one, we've been really enjoying a nice, cozy season of being at home together as a family, holding the baby and enjoying just the different different things that that she does that make us laugh and bring smiles to her face, our faces. She's doing really well. So thank you for praying. Claire is doing really well as well, and baby is doing all of the things that a baby should do. So we all love definitely having her in the house. There are two commonly. Asked questions that we get having just had a baby. One of them is this, we've got five other kids, five older kids, and people ask us, do your kids really love having the baby around? Do they love it? And of course, the answer is yes, I know. I guess maybe it's not always the case, but our kids love having the new baby in the house. And one thing I often say to people is, there aren't enough hours in the day for our kids to be able to hold the baby as much as they want to. So like, there was an instance, I don't know, maybe 10 days ago, I was walking around with the baby in the morning in my arms, and I had to our young are the youngest two were kind of following me around. And they got their arms sticking up. They're just trying to they're trying to touch something or grab something or hold something, and they're just following me around as I'm walking around with the baby. They just love it. And then there's a ways, a line of older kids that are ready to hold the baby or go and pick her up. If there's any peep from her bed of noise, it's like, I'll go get her. I'll go get her like, no, she needs to sleep. So that's question number one. Question number two that people often ask us is, Who does she look like? Who does she look like? So I thought about doing this this morning, but ended up not. If I put a picture of each of our kids up on the screen at one month old, I don't think I would even be able to tell them apart. So there are times when I'm holding Iris, or when someone else is holding her, and I'm like, Oh yeah, that's a daisy. Look right there. Or, Yep, she's looking like Jasper today, or she looks like Camden like. That's a Camden face, for sure. But what I've, what I've ended up saying to people, is she's got, she's got the classic rush baby look. So when they were all a month old, they like, they look really, really similar. They're not exactly the same, but they've got very, very similar features. They look similar, similar, similar eyes, similar shaped faces and nice and chubby and all that good stuff. So she looks similar to how, how all the others did when they were babies, too. So this morning's message I have entitled The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. So just as baby Iris bears the resemblance of her siblings and her parents, so too, in Genesis four, we see Adam and Eve have babies, and their children are born in their physical image and likeness, but they also follow the same pattern that has been set for them by their parents. So the main idea this morning is this, sin and death have spread to all humanity, but you can be saved through the Savior God sends sin and death have spread through all humanity, but you can be saved by this through the Savior God since. So that's the first part of our kind of bird's eye view. So now let's go down and we'll get into the details of Genesis four a little bit and start to put some of the pieces together. I've broken the passage into two points, and the outline that we'll follow is pretty simple, because as you read through this verses one to 16, you look at it and you're kind of like, well, Kane just does a bunch of dumb stuff, like he seems to do everything wrong. So what, like, what we get? What encouragement can we get out of this? So the outline that I've put together this morning really just instructs us to do the opposite of what Cain does. Don't do things the way Cain did. So we've got two points. The first one is verses one to seven, and it's this love God, and the second one will be verses eight to 16, and it's love your neighbor. Okay, so I think this text is a good illustration of what Jesus illustrates well for us. Maybe I'll say what Jesus was talking about with the greatest commandment, and then the second greatest commandment, the golden rule, like those things, what we should take from it is that we should love God and we should love our neighbors. So point number one, love God. I'll start just by saying this. Everything within us strives, and we see this in Cain here strives to put me at the center of the universe every. Everything within you desires to have you at the center of your own kingdom, to be pursuing your own kingdom purposes we are all naturally self centered and self serving. So what we see here in this passage is that the best way to live in a sin and death cursed world is actually with God at the center, not with me at the center. So in these opening seven verses, we can see there are at least three ways three that I'll highlight, that we can do that keep God at the center. Number one is this. In verses one and two, we should thank him. Be thankful to him. Listen to it again. Now, Adam knew his wife, Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, I've gotten a man with the help of the Lord. And again, she bore his brother, Abel. Now, Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain a worker of the ground. So what's happening here is we're just resetting the scene. Okay, the scene was initially set in Genesis one and two with the creation God was there before orchestrating everything. And he sets the scene of creation, and He brings the the actors into the scene, and he gives them their instruction. But they go, they end up going off script. We see that they're tempted and they fall into sin. They choose a different path than the path that God had set out for them. So what we then see in Genesis, chapter four, after God had delivered to them the consequence of their sin, we see what comes next. Chapter Four is the transition. These first two verses in particular we read at the end of chapter three, verse 24 God drove out the man, and at the east of the Garden of Eden, he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. So God had driven them out of his presence in Eden, and he'd even put a guard there, so if they tried to get back in, they wouldn't be able to get back in. So then the question comes at the end of that verse, What was life like after this like? What happened next? What was it like outside of Eden? All we've heard so far is Eden. So first, what we see in these opening two verses is that God continues to provide. He's still the provider. We seen it abundantly in verses, in Chapters one through three, and it doesn't change outside of Eden. In this world in which we live, cursed and sinful and under the curse of death, as it is, God is still faithfully, providing God is still good to his word. We see it here as he blesses Adam and Eve with children, Cain and Abel. He had given them the instruction to be fruitful and multiply in Genesis, chapter one, and here he makes them fruitful, and they multiply. He also gave them work to do in Genesis, one and two.
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And here we see that they work. The boys that are born have jobs. They have plants to take care of. They have animals to take care of the implication God continues to make animals and plants grow and reproduce and provides for them and blesses them. So the birth of these boys is a reminder of the initial purpose of humanity that God gave. He instructed people. He instructed Adam and Eve, the first people, to fill the earth with images and likenesses of God. So that's what he carries on doing. He enables them to reproduce. He enables them to provide for themselves. He enables them to live and survive. So that that plan, that purpose for which he has created, can come about. Eve, here you see, recognizes God's provision of her children. I think we see glimmers of of Eve's faith, as she names and recognizes that Cain is one who has been given to her by God. Kane's name literally means gotten, and that's kind of her word play there, I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord in verse one. That's why she called him Cain. He was a gift from God, though she did not deserve it. God. Was merciful and still gave her a gift and still enabled her and Adam to do what he had created them to do, and the jobs that these brothers had follow on from what we read in Genesis chapter two, Adam was given the task of agricultural work, of taking care of farming the ground and the plants. And then later in chapter two, naming the animals. At that point, it's just Adam that's doing it. And then God provides Eve, but now God blesses them with two sons to take on that mantle. So there was a lot of opportunity here. God provided this for Adam to multiply his efforts as he divided the labor with his sons. Now, Adam could work, Cain could work, Abel could work, and Eve was there, as well as the helper and any other kids that they would have along the way, they had a better capacity to do the job that God had given them, which included providing for his growing family. So we're to be thankful to God. How many of you own a pair of binoculars? How many of you look through your binoculars? Who's ever looked through binoculars, who's ever looked through binoculars the wrong way around? Everybody, everybody who's looked through binoculars the wrong way around, but not the right way around. So when you look through binoculars the wrong way, it makes things that are close up look like they're way off down on some weird little tunnel that's in front of your eyeballs. Okay, like it's a bad perspective of reality. So I think what we need to do here, according to these first two verses, is get our perspective right. We need to remember that God is not distant. I think it would have been tempting, and it's even tempting for us as readers, as we wind up Genesis chapter three, to think like this. Is it like we're cut off, we're kicked out, we're done. He's done with us, we're finished. It's only going to be like a miracle that will bring us any kind of blessing or goodness from God, but we see there in the very next two verses that that's just not the case. Yes, they still need a savior, but God is not distant. God has a plan, and it's the same plan that he had, and he's involved in everything that happens in all of creation, and he's giving you everything that you need, and he's giving Adam and Eve everything that they need, and he's giving Cain and Abel everything that they need to be able to succeed in that plan. Now we hear the word success and all kinds of dreams and ideas come into our heads, but when I say the word success here, what does it mean for me to be successful as a human being? What I mean is, am I faithfully bearing God's image. Am I faithfully bearing God's likeness? It's not any of these other things. Success, in God's eyes, is living on this planet in a way that glorifies Him, no matter what's going on around you, no matter what stuff you have or don't have. And what we see here is God gives them everything that they need to succeed in that way, and he does that for us too. So God is not distant. He's providing. He's blessing. He's working. He's there in your marriage, he's there in your pregnancy, he's there in your giving birth, he's there in your child raising. He's there at your work. And he has a purpose for you, whatever venue you think of any of the ones I just said, or anything else he wants to mold you into a faithful Earth filling image bearer. That's what he's created you for. So I want to encourage you, just as we finish verse two, have a day by day, moment by moment, relationship with God, remind yourself you need to spend time with him so that you can remind yourself of the great things that he has done for you, so that you can be reminded that he's not distant, that he's here and he's working his plan out, and he's leading me. Every step of the way. So have a close relationship with God. Spend time with him moment by moment, so that you can remember that and so that you can be thankful to Him and not live in despair or thanklessness or worry or difficulty. So the second way we can live with God at the center. So first was thank him. Second is worship him. Listen to verses three through five. In the course of time, Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering, he had no regard. So Cain and Abel bring offerings to God, and that's an appropriate thing to do. A creature brings offerings to its creator. That's what an offering is. And the offering is supposed to be a sign of faith in that creator. It's supposed to be a sign of worship of that creator and dependence upon that creator, faith in the sense that faith and dependence, really what I am bringing. I give to you and I trust you. I know I don't need to hold on to it. I don't need to hoard it to myself. I trust that if I give this to you, then you can provide for me. It's also a mark of respect and worship. You are of more value than me and I get I give this to you. I worship you. I'm thankful to you. That's that's the offering. That's what offering is. Now Scripture gives us no specific detail as to what God had instructed them to bring in these offerings, which I think brings us to the conclusion, then that what happens next is not actually about the offering. It's about something else. It's not about fruit versus meat. That's not what this is about. But the two and a half verses that we just read do give us the insight that we need to understand what God is teaching us in this passage. So look again and compare the description of Cains offering with the description of Abels offering. So Keynes was an offering of the fruit of the ground Abels was an offering of the First Born, of his flock and of their fat portions. We also get some insight from God's response to their offering. God's response to Cain was that he had no regard for Cains offering, and his response to Abel was that he had regard for Abels offering. All that means is God looked favorably upon Abels offering. He approved of it, but he was unfavorable or disapproving of Kane's offering. We'll come back to that in a minute.
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But first, imagine a Christmas tree. Okay, it doesn't take that much to imagine, because you probably will have Christmas trees up and it's Christmas. Imagine a Christmas tree, and everybody comes out on Christmas morning, or whenever it is that you do your present giving, and the tree is surrounded with presents. Okay, what kind of response is there from the people that go out? It's kind of like, there's joy, right? There's happiness, there's excitement. It's like, this is great. Okay, rewind, same Christmas tree. Now, imagine everybody comes out and there are zero gifts around the tree. What kind of response would there be then? It's like a gasp. I think I heard a gasp that was somebody's child. I think, like, it would be disappointing, and you'd be wondering, like, Did I do something wrong? Like, what's
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happened? What happened?
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So we'll come back to it in a minute, but just keep that image in your head and we'll elaborate on it a little bit more in just a moment. So the Cain, the offerings of Cain and Abel had nothing to do with what was sacrificed, but actually it was to do with what was the heart that was behind the sacrifice. Okay, so it wasn't about one of them. Brought fruit, and the other one brought me. Okay, it was about their heart behind the sacrifice that they brought. Abel showed faith in God. Abel showed respect toward God and dependence upon him as a provider by sacrificing his best, his most valuable animal. We see that in the text, right, like he gave his his first born, he gave his of the fat portions of his of his flock. It's like Abel came to God, and he was, he was kind of like, there's nothing too valuable that I could give you. Like, where's my best stuff? I'm gonna give that to you. Okay, that's what I want to give you. Cain, on the other hand, gave a half hearted offering. Look what it says in text. It just says he brought an offering of the fruit of the ground. Abel says it was his an offering of his flock. Like, here it's like, I don't even know if this was Cain fruit, let alone the best of his fruit. But for Abel, it was of his flock, and he gave the best of it, the best of it to God. It showed that he had a heart that was the opposite of Abel. He trusted himself instead of God. He respected himself more than he respected God. He thought he should be the one that gets to keep the best stuff, that offering should be made to me, that's mine. And he depended upon himself for provision by keeping back what he thought he needed. If I give this up, then I'm not going to have what I need. Cain wanted to be able to come to God on His terms, but here God says no. He says, No, there's only one way to the Father, and it is God's way. Abel understood this, which is why he came in faith. This is confirmed later in Scripture Hebrews 11 four says, By faith, Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain through which he was confirmed as righteous. God commending him by accepting his gifts. And in first John 312 we should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. Why did he murder his brother? Well, it tells us because his own deeds were evil and his brothers righteous. Cain made an evil offering to the Lord, and then he got angry, and then he murdered his brother. Abel made an offering of faith, of worship, to God. So get back to the Christmas tree. Okay? The first illustration just helped us understand a disapproving and an approving response to what we might see. Listen, listen. Now we'll take it a bit further. Imagine that you get a present for someone, okay, a loved one, someone you're closest to, and you're kind of like, I've got them the present that it's like the present of all presents, it's the perfect gift for this person. I've done research, I've asked them questions, I figured things out. I've observed what they're interested in. I've observed what really makes them happy. I've saved up for the whole year, and I bought them the present. I've wrapped it the best in their favorite color wrapping paper, and I put it in the shape that they like to unwrap, and I know they like bows and balloons floating off of it, so I put that on it too, because I want them to enjoy it, and I want them to love it, and I want them to know I care about them. So you give it to them, and all of it comes true. They love it. They love all of it. And now they bring you one. They give you they hand over an envelope. You open up the envelope, and you pull it out, and I don't know whatever your equivalent of this is. It's something like,
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Oh, you got me an NFL season pass on the TV. Thank you. That's great. Like some people would love that. Clyde would love that.
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But the illustration is this, you've put a whole bunch of effort into finding the perfect thing for the person, but then they come to you and they say. Me, hey, now we can go downstairs and spend quality time together, because you can sit with me while I'm watching the game. One person's gift is all about the other person, the other person's gift is all about themself, and what they can get like this is going to be a blessing to me, and you're just gonna sit there, enjoy and enjoy me while I'm enjoying it. I think that's some of what we see with Cain and Abel. Abel worshiped God, and he wanted to bring him the best thing that he could possibly bring him, whereas Cain was focused on himself. I'll bring you an offering that will benefit me. I'll only bring you something if it benefits me. What? What good does this do me? So God looked favorably upon one offering, but not the other. So it's important to assess our hearts. Is your heart in your relationship with God?
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Do you have a meaningful relationship with God?
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Assess yourself.
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Do you truly worship and love him? What are you keeping back to you for yourself. What are you unwilling to give up? What do you keep turning to in place of him?
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So third, we see in the next part of verse five through the end of verse seven, we can also live with God at the center by hearing him. By hearing Him. We read next, Cain was very angry, and his face fell. The Lord said to Cain, why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it. So we see a couple of responses here, first Cain response, and then we see God's response to Cains response. Cain gets extremely angry that his gift is not accepted by God. He's angry with God's decision, and ultimately he is angry with God himself, and Kane's response is evidence of his hard heart. He doesn't have a humble heart. When it's clear he has offended God, he does not respond in humility, but as if he was the one who has been offended, he makes himself at the center of everything when he should be recognizing God is at the center and confessing and asking God for forgiveness for his sin. God responds then, and we wonder like, well, how, how is God the Creator of the universe and everything in it, by the breath of His mouth from nothing. How is this God going to respond to this dishonor of him by one of his creations? He responds with patience. How do you respond when someone dishonors you? They ignore you, they disobey you. They say something unkind to you or about you. They lie about you. They do something unpleasant. If you're anything like me, we like to lay the hammer down as quick as possible, right? We want swift judgment bring them to justice. Oftentimes we even inflict it ourselves, like I'll, I'll be the judge and the executioner. It's not so with God. That's not what we see here. Certainly he rejects Cain offering, but then he comes and talks to Cain. He warns Cain about the blessings of obedient faith in comparison to the devastating effects of sin. He says, Those who do what is right out of trust in God will be accepted by God as Abel was, and even now, God gives Cain the opportunity to repent and turn to him,
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he says, Be warned
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when you sin, you will be tempted to cover your sin with more sin, and you will soon be overrun and ruined by your Sin.
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Cain, don't let it rule you. You need to rule over it,
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which for us and for Cain should be the point at which we say,
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I can't beat sin. I can't rule over it. I.
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Oh, God, I need your help. Give me your grace. With your grace, I can have victory, not only forgiveness. I can have victory. I can defeat sin. I can say no, I can live for you. But that's not what Cain did. So sit and think for a moment, What sin have you been taking part in or entertaining that you know you shouldn't What sin have you been ignoring or overlooking? Hear God and deal with your sin in the right way. Don't cover it up with lies or pretending it didn't happen. Don't let your feeling of guilt. Cut you off from God and force you to distance yourself from him. Don't minimize your sin. Don't try to deal with it on your own. Confess your sin to our patient, forgiving and powerful God. Come to him with it, admit your deficiency, and not only will he forgive you, but he will help you break free from it. If your sin was against others or involved others, confess it to them as well and ask them for forgiveness. Seek to rebuild that relationship. If you need it, come to a pastor and ask for help, ask a spiritual mentor or a growth group leader for help. And I think some sometimes we have to understand ourselves like that. There's an appropriate measure of sorrow over our sin, but we do need to believe that God has forgiven us of our sin and not keep punishing ourselves, because Christ has taken the punishment in our place. There is now no condemnation for you, if you trust in Christ, because Christ was condemned in your place and has absorbed the full punishment of God that you earned point number two. So the second way we are to be opposite of Cain number two, love your neighbor, verses eight to 16. So what we see here is when self and your kingdom are the most important things to you. Your actions will follow suit. And we see that and hear it with Cain in this story. And I'm sure we can all think of examples in our own life. On the contrary, when God and His Kingdom and plans are the most important thing to you. Likewise, your actions will follow suit to be able to do number two, love your neighbor. You first need to do number one, love God. There will be no loving your neighbor if you have not first loved God. So it begins there. So what are some ways that we can love God by loving others? Well, we love others with our actions, right? We think lovingly about them. We act lovingly towards them. We speak lovingly towards them. Verse eight, Cain missed this. Cain spoke to Abel, his brother. You think if it just stopped right there, you're like, he's doing what God said. This is great. He's going to confess, he's going to ask for forgiveness, he's going to go reconciliation. But quickly we see, when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother, Abel, and killed him. It's a familiar story, just three chapters and eight verses into the Bible, a familiar story already, God had given a clear instruction, but Adam and Eve thought they knew better and wound themselves and the rest of the human race, up in sin and being cut off from God and in need of a Savior. Likewise, here, Cain rejects God's counsel from verse seven. He doesn't go and confess and seek forgiveness from his brother. Instead, he decides to do things his own way. We aren't given much more detail here, but what we do know is simply this, Cain murdered his brother. Murder, of course, is wrong, is sin. It is a direct affront to the plan and purpose of God. It brings about death when what has what God has communicated and commanded is to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, it directly opposed what God had said, like a master craftsman, God forms able to bear. His image and his likeness in the world to show off his own beauty and his glory, and Cain comes in with a sledge hammer and just smashes him to pieces. He's not going to fulfill that purpose that God has made him for. There's no bearing of the likeness and image of God here. I don't want any of that to be seen. And Abel was a worshiper of God, faithfully glorifying him with his humble dependence upon him, which Cain hates and ends so it's no wonder that John first, John 312 as we've heard, already describes Cain as the spawn of Satan. He is an opposer of God. Another way we can love God by loving others is by confessing wrong doing. Verse nine, the Lord said to Cain, Where is Abel your brother? He said, I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper? And the Lord said, What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground. Again, we see a similar pattern from chapter three, when Adam and Eve had sinned our all knowing God, in His patience, sought them out and gave them an opportunity to come clean and humbly confess their sin. But instead they start pointing fingers and blame shifting. Here God, who already knows everything, speaks to Cain and asks him where his brother is, to which Cain responds in proud, angry
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arrogance.
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We need to confess our wrongdoing. A final way that we see that we can love God by loving others is to accept the consequence of our wrongdoing. In verses 11 to 16, God says to him, now you are cursed from the ground which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength. You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth. Cain said to the Lord, My punishment is to is greater than I can bear. Behold, you've driven me today away from the ground and from your face. I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth. Whoever finds me will kill me. Then the Lord said to him, not so. If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold, and the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, East of Eden, as was true with his parents, again, Cain is cursed by God because of his sin, and that punishment fits the crime. The ground that received Abels blood will no longer yield fruit to Cain since he has killed his brother, he is driven from the fellowship of the family, and he will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and he's also driven from what fellowship he did have with God, and Kane's hard heart is still evident. Rather than expressing sorrow and repentance, he resists the punishment. He wants to be able to just get away with it on his terms. He attempts to replace God as the judge and executioner, and he wants to be the king. He's not satisfied with God being king. Let me make the decision. Your decision isn't good, and still, God's grace is evident. He doesn't just incinerate petulant Cain. He doesn't even allow others to seek him out and harm him and kill him. Instead, he gives him a lifetime of opportunity to repent.
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God is patient with us also.
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Whatever sin you have been living in, repent and turn to God for mercy and help. Verse 16 brings us to a telling end, where we read earlier, his parents were driven from Eden, and they had to have like a force field almost put up so they couldn't get back in here. Cain just leaves the presence of God, of his own accord, and settles away from the presence of the Lord in a different place. I think one of the dangers of this story is to kind of independently vilify Cain. Certainly, he is the villain of the story, but we're no different than he is. You are naturally self seeking and self serving. You see. In you respond poorly when you're confronted. You cover up and lie, and then you complain about the consequences that you receive. We need what we wish Cain would have received. We need it too. I encourage you to cultivate a heart of love. Cultivate a heart of love for others by reading about the love of God. The gospels are a great place to start with that think as well about what are some ways I'm not naturally loving. So what are some ways that I can change my thinking and think in more loving ways about people. What are some actions I can do, some words I can speak that would communicate love to others. How can I be a loving person? How can I love my neighbor?
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Think of WHO HAVE YOU BEEN unloving towards?
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How could that be changed? What steps do you need to take to repair any broken relationships that you have? Have you confessed an unloving spirit or actions to God and accepted the consequences from him? Are you also resting in his forgiveness? I maybe you've attempted to distance yourself from the presence of God and settle somewhere that he is not. The truth remains the same. He's patient. His door is open, and he calls you to come back. He calls you to trust in Him, He calls you to repent, he calls you to confess, and he waits to forgive. So those are the details. Let's go back up to the bird's eye view as we close. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Children bear the image of their parents. Parents pass on certain characteristics to their kids. And I don't just mean nurture, the things learned. I mean nature, things that were born with. This is written by Moses to a group of Israelites who have been rescued by God from Egypt and are now wandering in the wilderness on their way to the promised land, and he wants them to know that sin is not just an Adam and Eve problem, where Chapter Three showed us mankind first step into a life of sin and death, chapter four shows us all of humanity is now plunged into the same fate. We are all under the curse of sin and death since the fall of Genesis three, we all now come into existence with a nature that chooses to reject God and serve self, and this reality manifests itself through our sin and death, separation from God is our inherited, earned wage. Romans, 512, summarizes it. Sin came into the world through one man and death through sin. And so death spread to all men, because all sinned. That's not all. Moses wants these people to know. He wants them also to know that God will remain faithful to the promise he made in Genesis 315, a descendant of Adam and Eve will come and defeat sin, death and Satan. The Israelites back then were to live in anticipation of this coming, and they did. But we remember it. We don't anticipate it. We look back on it. He has come. The Savior has come. We just celebrated the coming of God into the world as the man Jesus, that's what Christmas is, the descendant of Adam and Eve, who would reverse the curse has come. Romans 518, goes on as one trespass led to condemnation for all men. So one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men, he lived a perfect life without any sin, and yet chose to die in the place of sinners who believe in Him. He became our substitute and took God's death sentence upon himself in the place of the believer.
Ian is the Youth Pastor of Faith Bible Church. He and his wife, Claire, have 5 kids and recently spent a few years serving in a small church in England.
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