The story of Cain and Abel is very familiar to us. Many sermons have been preached on it. Preachers usually focus on verse 7 - "If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it." And then they draw the inevitable moral lesson of avoiding jealousy that leads to hatred.
Now that's not a wrong way to preach on this passage. John says something similar in 1 John 3:12: “Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous.” However, other passages in the New Testament make it plain that Genesis 4 is more than just a warning not to be like Cain. Matthew and Luke’s Gospel, and the letter to the Hebrews, present the story of Cain and Abel as pointing to the Lord Jesus Christ and faith in his blood shed for us. Genesis 4 illustrates how we can read the Old Testament not just to gather little moralisms, but to get a view of God's majestic plan of salvation. The gospel of Jesus did not just appear overnight. It was worked out to the smallest detail over many centuries of careful preparation.
So I'm not going to use this passage just to find a little moral about hatred. Nor am I going to get involved in endless speculations about the more puzzling aspects of it. One of the most frequent questions asked in Sunday School or Scripture classes is "Where did Cain get his wife?" Or, how could he build a city when there was hardly any people in the world? Well I'm not going to touch those questions, because they are not the concerns that the Bible has. The writer of Genesis was no less intelligent than we are, but he didn't seem to be concerned with those issues, so let's just take God's word as it stands, on its own terms, and trust God for what we don't or can’t understand.
First then let's look at where Genesis 4 fits in with the scheme of things.
Genesis 1-11 deals with our beginnings. The Bible answers for us the basic questions of our existence on earth. It makes sense of history and the world we live in. The Bible sees history as the unfolding of a huge plan of God to bring everything in creation to perfection in Jesus Christ. Genesis answers the questions we ask about our world - who are we, how did we get here, why is the world like it is?
Everyone, every religion and philosophy (almost) sees the world as imperfect somehow, because they all try to improve it and they all put forward some sort of plan of salvation. But they all fail to reckon with the sinful nature of humankind. As we saw last week, Genesis 3 explains how we got that nature and how sin, evil and destruction entered the world.
Genesis 4 and following chapters show the inevitable spread and dreadful consequences of sin. So any solution to the world's problems must take sinful human nature seriously. That is why human solutions don’t work, as I said last week. All these ignore the real problem - alienation from God, and the solutions they offer ignore the fact that human beings are not basically good, but are basically and fundamentally evil.
But along with the bleak picture of the gradual degradation of mankind, Genesis 1-11 shows God's reaction to human sinfulness. We see a pattern developing in these chapters. A pattern of sin, punishment, mitigation, and promise. In chapter 3 Adam & Eve sin. They are punished by being thrown out of Eden. But then their punishment is mitigated, that is, lessened, or eased by God. How did God mitigate the punishment of Adam and Eve's sin?....
1. Well first of all he provided skins to clothe them, as chapter three verse twenty one records.
2. Next we see the birth of children in verse one of chapter four;
3. Also at the beginning of chapter four we see God not cutting them off completely,
but going to them outside the Garden;
4. Fourthly, God has fellowship with them by an offering system that he has obviously set up, as we see in verses two to six of chapter four.
5. And then, perhaps most importantly, is the Promise back in chapter three verses 15 & 16, which we will come back to in a minute.
How is this pattern seen in relation to Cain's sin? Well, the Sin part is obvious – Cain hates then kills his brother Abel. Then we see his Punishment – he is banished, the ground now won't yield crops for him and he's forced to become a nomadic herdsman. Cain complains about his punishment, and God mitigates it with the mark or sign that he puts on Cain. The word for this sign is the same word as the sign of the covenant with Noah in 9:13 (i.e. the rainbow). It is also used at 17:11 of the sign of circumcision with Abraham. So it’s almost as though God is making a covenant with Cain, and this mark on him is the sign of the covenant. Certainly it is a promise, that God will protect Cain from those who would apply a more severe punishment than the one God has already decreed, which is banishment.
Now we also see as we go through, that the punishment gets worse in a way - people get further and further away from the Garden situation. Adam's punishment was to till the ground in painful toil. He was driven from Eden to the ground outside. In 4:11 Cain is now driven from the ground itself, to become a wanderer, far from the LORD's presence.
Let's look again at the promise of Genesis 3:15. This promise becomes the focus of the rest of the Old Testament. From now on God’s people are waiting for the One to be born. Genesis puts a high emphasis on birth. Birth is often the occasion of prophecy. By the time we get half way through the Old Testament we can see that every godly woman would have been wondering, could it be my child that will be the promised deliverer, the one who will crush the Serpent?
I want you to imagine reading Genesis as a story, without having read any of the Bible before. We have the promise of Genesis 3, that one would be born, the seed of the woman, who would crush the evil serpent's head. It is a promise that humankind will continue - a seed, an offspring will be born. We know Adam believes this promise, because he names his wife Eve, meaning `living' because she would be the mother of all the living.
And when we get to chapter 4 that promise seems about to be fulfilled. Do you see what the narrator of the story is doing here? We get really blasé about it because we've heard it all a hundred times before. But imagine you were hearing it for the first time. You get to 4:1 Adam lay with his wife Eve and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. She said, "with the help of the LORD I have brought forth a man." Now what's the question immediately on your mind? Will this seed of the woman crush the serpent?" Then another is born, Abel. Will it be this one? We read on, and come to a huge anticlimax - one brother is killed, and one becomes a murderer, banished from the presence of God and Man - far from being a saviour, he's further away from the Garden than Adam.
But then, verse 17, Cain's wife has a child. Perhaps there is hope here? The name Enoch is similar to the Hebrew word for "initiate" or begin, and perhaps Cain thinks a new beginning will be possible through this son. But nothing comes of it. There is Enoch, Irad, Mehujael, Methushael, and Lamech.
Let's look at Lamech for a moment. Here we see the pattern that continues through Genesis 1-11 of mankind's deterioration. Cain killed his brother Abel. That was bad enough, but look at Lamech - he kills a young lad just for a slight injury, and then boasts, almost threateningly to his wives about it. We see here also the first incidence of polygany, which is far below the perfect ideal of Genesis One.
Now there's an interesting connection between Lamech and Galatians. In Galatians and in Romans, Paul tackles the problem of those who say, well if we're forgiven by grace, we may as well just go out and sin so that we can get more grace. Lamech is saying something very similar. The mitigation for Cain's punishment was that if anyone killed him, that person would suffer vengeance seven times over. Lamech figures that if he does something far worse than Cain did, then if anyone kills him for it, they'll get not seven, but seventy-seven times the punishment, and so he boasts of his sin and warns his wives that if they do anything about it, they'll be liable for seventy-seven times the vengeance.
Does Lamech's boast remind you of something else from the New Testament? Yes, Matthew 18:22. Peter asks whether he should forgive his brother up to even seven times when he sins against him, and Jesus replies, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times." And then he tells the parable of the ungrateful servant.
Cain's family is a microcosm of human nature in general. Gifted and accomplished in the arts, music, metallurgy and so on, able to use these skills to tame the harsh environment of outside Eden, but unable to tame their own sinfulness. Jesus, in Matthew 18:22 is saying that his disciples must respond in just the opposite way that ordinary human nature responds, as exemplified by Lamech. He wanted vengeance to the full, but we are to seek forgiveness to the full.
Lamech is typical of humanity apart from faith in God's saving promises. But that brings us back to Genesis 4:25, where we see a new hope appear. So far in the story we've been disappointed. Cain was not the one. Nor was it Abel. Nor any descendant of Cain, and certainly not Lamech! But now we read, "Adam lay with his wife again, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, saying, "God has granted me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him."
The word translated "child" in verse 25 is the word "seed" or offspring, the same word as in Genesis 3:15, so here we have a definite allusion to that promise. Will this child be the one? There is the positive comment that at this time people begin to call on the name of the LORD. It looks very promising. But… nothing more is made of Seth: he has a son Enosh, and lives a long time, and then in 5:8, he dies. Another disappointing anti-climax.
It's at this point that we begin to discover another great theme of the Old Testament - the idea of the Righteous Line, the Holy Remnant, through which the promised seed of the woman would come. Cain's line is evil and unregenerate, not faithful to God's promises. But the line of Seth is different. Lamech was the fifth generation from Cain. The fifth generation from Seth is Enoch, who walked with God and was taken away. Cain's line is destined for destruction in the flood, but Seth's line goes down to Noah.
Actually, the New Testament makes clear that spiritually, it was with Abel that this division begins. Hebrews 11:4 says that "by faith Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did. By faith he was commended as a righteous man, when God spoke well of his offerings. And by faith he still speaks, even though he is dead." What characterizes the righteous line all down the ages is faith in God's promises. It's what makes the difference between an Abel and a Cain, an Enoch and a Lamech, Shem and Ham, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, and so on through the Old Testament. God’s people become a mighty nation, but then we get this continual narrowing down of the righteous line again, until at last there comes a woman who is able to say, "from now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me - holy is his name." Because Mary is indeed the most blessed of all women – over the centuries, thousands of godly Israelite women longed to be the one who would give birth to the saviour of God's people, and now he has finally come - the seed who would crush the serpent's head and bring his people salvation from all their sins, and a return to the paradise that was lost.
Finally, let's meditate on Hebrews 12:24, "[we have come to]...Jesus, the mediator of a New Covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel."
Abel's blood brought condemnation and drove Cain from God's presence. Jesus was innocent, righteous and pure, and like Abel was killed unjustly. But where Abel's blood cried out to God for vengeance from the ground to which Abel returned, Jesus' blood cried out to God for forgiveness, from the Holy of Holies in the heavenly Temple where it was poured out for our sin. His blood brought not condemnation, but salvation. His blood did not drive us from God's presence like Cain, but brought us back into the presence of our loving heavenly Father. And Jesus did not return to the ground like Abel did, but was raised to life and then ascended to the Father.
So, we learn from the life and death of Abel, to trust in the blood of Jesus shed for us, and to offer God right worship as Abel did. Abel came to God with a heart of faith, trusting in God’s way of salvation. Jesus has made for us the once for all sacrifice for sin, to make us right with God. And now that we have that sacrifice, we are able also to offer up a thank offering to God by giving up our lives to his service. Hebrews 13:15-16 says, “Through Jesus, …let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that confess his name. And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased.” Have you accepted Jesus’ once for all sacrifice for your sin and been made right with God? And if you have, are you offering to God every day the worship that is his right? A life of praise and of confessing the name of Jesus. May God’s Holy Spirit work in us to make us a people who proclaim him and worship him in Spirit and Truth. Amen.