We Should Not Be Like Cain

Turn with me, you can turn to Genesis 4. So some of you may be thinking, I thought we were on Exodus 20, 13, which is thou shalt not kill, or thou shalt not murder, or you shall not murder. Genesis 4, now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, I have gotten a man with the help of Yahweh. 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 Yahweh an offering of the fruit of the ground and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions and Yahweh had regard for Abel in his offering but for Cain in his offering he had no regard So Cain was very angry, and his face fell.

Yahweh 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. Cain spoke to Abel his brother, and when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. Then Yahweh said to Cain, Where is Abel your brother?

He said, I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper? And Yahweh said, What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground. That's a reading of God's holy word. You may be seated.

We've been going through the Ten Commandments. and the first five commandments were largely related to the worship of God and how we're supposed to be disposed toward God and then even the fifth commandment was the first one that really started to have what we call a horizontal relationship view which is where we're actually talking about how we interact with other people. They all had implications for that. But now we're in the last five commandments, which at least six through nine, those five, or five through nine, those ones are commandments that I think are a little easier for us to conceive about because usually it's an outward action we can see, right?

If you murder, you usually see an outward action. If you steal, if you lie, commit adultery, these are things that are easily identifiable outward actions. They're things you can make laws about, and you can really try to criminalize certain behaviors, right? And whereas some of the other commandments, the 10th one and the first three in particular, but even four, require us to have a view of people's hearts that we don't have to truly help other people see that maybe they're in sin with any of these.

Can we go higher? Yeah. Right here? Yeah, maybe there. Okay, yeah, that's a little better. All right.

So here we are in the sixth commandment, you shall not kill. And on the surface, it seems really obvious what it must mean, not to kill things. And not to kill people, more specifically, is what it actually means. If it meant not to kill at all, we'd have a lot of problems with farming and some of the things God's permitted us to do. and so I should have done this before but there we go, that's a little there so a couple things a couple brief comments about the commandment itself and then I really wanted to dig into Cain and Abel this week and I wanted to talk about what is the first recorded murder in the Bible or in all of history that we would know of so first of all we're going to discover over the next couple weeks that thou shall not kill or you shall not murder means more than simply you don't just take someone's life.

That there is requirements that accompany that that require us to do things to actually help preserve other people's lives, including our own. And also that we can be guilty of violating this command of God even if you have never physically murdered someone yourself. And Jesus talks about that, and we'll get into Jesus' teaching on this commandment from particularly Matthew 5.

We'll get into that, not this week, but in the future. We probably have to think about the fact that there's people who have gone to war, and they've killed people, right? and so is this a commandment that would say you could never go to war and kill someone if so then most of the heroes of the Old Testament in particular were constantly violating this commandment while filling out God's will for themselves and God gave them commands another thing to consider is that there's such a thing as self-defense that we most of us understand exists at least And if somebody is coming to hurt an innocent person in your home, or somebody, God forbid it would happen, came into our church with the intention of hurting innocent people, for a man usually, or even a woman, to stand up and defend that innocent person, and if necessary, use legal force to prevent that person from doing evil, we have to ask the question, well, have they just become a murderer? have they violated the sixth commandment by doing that? And those are the kinds of questions that we have to try to contend with And so I tell you briefly that self and defending innocent life is actually part of this command It part of the command in the sense that you ought to do it So whereas some people would say, hey, your Bible says you shouldn't kill, so you can never defend yourself, we'd actually argue that because the Bible says thou shall not kill, we ought to do what we can to prevent others from killing when necessary, and if that means we have to take some kind of lethal force in a difficult situation, then that actually is acceptable.

And we see that in courts of law. This is natural law. People understand these concepts. And so we have a hope that by understanding what life is and what death is and what God giving life means that we'll be able to interpret this well. So first, turn to Genesis 2. So I want to get into a little bit of what life and death mean, partially because our culture has destroyed the teaching about death and life.

And I hate to bring up stories sometimes, but yesterday Erin watched a memorial, or this week there was a memorial for someone she knew who had passed away, had died, had entered into either heaven or hell. Quite literally speaking, this person had, Their fate had been sealed at that point, even though from election we understand that it was earlier. And people were posting on social media selfies with the coffin.

And Eric kind of asked me, like, what do you think of that? And I thought, well, that's the kind of thing I'd have done before I was saved. It's foolish, disrespectful. And I think ultimately when people do those kinds of things, it's an attempt to disassociate themselves with the reality of what's actually going on. By making light of it, by making fun times of it, simply by calling what should be a funeral a celebration of life.

Wide groups of people are denying the reality that death is actually a really horrible thing. It's an interruption of your God-given life or your family members, and it actually spells the last chance that that non-believer had to actually trust in Jesus Christ for a Savior. And even for a believer to die, we're happy that they are with Jesus, but we still sense that sting of death that Paul talks about, even that Christ has helped us not to feel so strongly, but our culture which is a strange culture in a lot of ways because they love death in some ways is so afraid of death that they create these complete denials of it and I think selfies with a coffin is a good example of that in Genesis 2 when God created man I just want to read verse 7 you can read all of Genesis 1 and 2 to get the creation account But it says, then Yahweh God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

And the man became a living creature. So there is this sense that God very particularly and specially gave man life. And there are people who argue that unless you're breathing, you're not alive. and if you're thinking at all about what I just said why would people make that argument? Because if you have a baby in the womb and the baby's lungs don't take in air then you can actually say I believe the Bible and I believe in slaughtering children that are still in the womb.

So the fact that God breathed life into Adam who was already an adult and well-formed and stuff has nothing to do with whether or not all life must be breathing necessarily. And so babies in the womb, which we just preached about this a few weeks ago, are, as a matter of fact, human beings with souls and are to be protected by those of us that understand this commandment against those who are, frankly, just bloodthirsty and money-hungry, usually sexual pagans is what they are, who love a board. Nobody really loves abortion who doesn't also have some form of promiscuity or perversion in their life.

People that stay virgins until they die, they don't really have a need for abortion, if you know what I'm saying. So God breathed into Adam, though, but it was a special thing, is the point. And Adam breathing signified that God gave him a spirit, even. Some people think Adam had the Holy Spirit indwelling him in a similar way that we end up with after salvation, and that when Adam fell, he actually lost that.

I'm not going to argue for or against that right now, but I don't think it's a crazy, exceptional, strange teaching, and I don't think if you weren't sure about it, that would be a problem either. But so chapter 2 happens, and they're told not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Chapter 3 happens, Eve is tempted, she is deceived, Adam gets tempted, they both end up eating of the tree, and in Adam every one of us now falls.

So Adam sinned against God. God promises that there will be an offspring that will come who will bruise the head of Satan, and Satan will bruise his heel. That's Genesis 3.15, which everyone needs to know that. You need to know that that's the first proclamation of the gospel, frankly. So here's Eve, I think, a believer in God. She believes the things God has said, so she has faith.

Now whether at this moment she understood things and whether she was truly saved, you can argue. But she believed what God said. She believed the promise that an offspring was going to come. And so in chapter 4 now, we'll just go verse by verse through here, and then there's a couple New Testament passages that will help us. Adam knew his wife Eve from the beginning of the verse This has to do with a knowledge that is very intricate It knowing someone well in an intimate way When God actually describes himself as having foreknowledge of his people his beloved it's the same concept.

It's that he knows them intimately. Foreknowledge isn't knowledge before it happened. Everything's foreknowledge if that's how you want to define it. God already knows everything. So there can't be some special section that God knows better. Foreknowledge is that God predestined to love certain creatures who were fallen in Adam.

But Adam knew his wife Eve, and we're in a family-integrated church. Those of us who know what that means know what it means. The point is she conceived and had a son. And she says, I have gotten a man with the help of Yahweh. So it's a really neat phrase. And trust me, this is the neat thing about preaching, is some people will say, hey, that was a good job.

And it's like, well, I really just read a lot of other people and somehow just tell you what I thought of them. The neat thing about studying a lot of other people sometimes is they all disagree so much. Like, guys we respect. It's like, well, I'm kind of safe saying anything I want now because there's somebody that agrees with me, right? And I'm not saying I take it lightly, you know, trying to teach the Scripture. but it's interesting to wonder if Cain was the first baby.

And I've heard people say things like, you know, Cain was the first child, and then Adam, or then Abel, right? And it's kind of funny, though, because if Cain found a wife, and there were people on the earth, we'll read later, who he was afraid of, there wasn't much chance that he was all alone here, right? So Cain and Abel being the two spoken about at the beginning of chapter 4 does not mean that Adam and Eve didn't already have dozens of other children, as far as we know.

We really don't know that for sure. In fact, I'd almost question whether the very first person after the fall became a murderer, right? I don't know. But it's interesting to wonder this, though. If Eve's sitting there waiting, right, for the Messiah, it's not like God said hey your offspring is going to come and he's going to crush the head of the serpent it's not like Eve and Adam thought well we'll probably live almost a thousand years like 36,500 more days and then we're going to die and then it'll be thousands of years later this might happen they thought it would happen it was my guess and I kind of wonder if maybe Adam and Eve had a bunch of daughters first and maybe this pain that she was going through in childbirth that the result of the curse it's like each and every time this little girl would come out and they'd realize well this can't be the offspring that God promised and they'd almost be disappointed like those English kings that would kill their wives and they didn't get sons and then finally I've gotten a man there he is and I would imagine if you're Eve and Adam and you believe, I believe they believed God at this point.

She thought, this is the one. This is the one that's going to crush the head of the serpent. We lose sight of that because we already know, well, it's going to be a long, long time and there's going to be all these things that happen, right? We know this. So we, I think, lose sight of the fact that even that moment, it says, I've gotten a man. She's excited.

She's excited to have a male child who can crush the head of the serpent. And I think Cain probably had a lot of expectations on him. And I'm not going to blame his parents for him turning out so bad. But as parents, we may want to be able to be a little bit light on the expectations sometimes of an older sibling. Because a lot of times it's like, well, you're the older one, so you should basically function like an adult and never be bothered by the younger sibling and never get in a fight with them and never condescend to their level and things like that.

And yeah, I think sometimes it's good to try to raise your older children to be good leaders of the younger. But I think we need to be careful. So I'm not saying anybody here is like treating your kid like Cain or whatever. And I don't blame Adam and Eve for Cain's sin. But so she's excited. She's gotten a boy.

And again, she bore his brother Abel. Now, Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain a worker of the ground. So it's already getting kind of neat because we just had the Garden of Eden, which I've postulated before, I think they sinned on the Sabbath. So I think God was resting, and Adam and Eve just went and did the deal. I don't think they spent a lot of time not sinning.

All right, that's just my opinion. It's not scripture. And then we get to chapter 4, and within like two verses, we've got boys old enough to be keeping sheep and tilling the ground. These aren't little kids, as far as I can tell. I don't know how capable 8 year olds were in the 8th year of creation to do things but these are people who have some muscle who are grown up, who know some things who are able to speak and use language and in every picture this kind of stuff bothers me and so I try to dispel these notions I said earlier this is the first recorded murder we actually have no idea if this is the first murder I don't see any reason to believe it is and I've never read a Hebrew person that said oh this is clearly some Hebraic way of saying that people just assume it's the first murder there could have been a bunch of them in fact we'll see later Cain's fear that someone's going to kill him actually makes me think he knew what murder was but I don't know that for sure the other thing is all the pictures of Cain and Abel it's always like Adam and Eve over here and then Cain and Abel doing something.

And I think we have to remember the earth was probably starting to at least have dozens of people. Adam and Eve were having babies and we know they had several of them. They at least had enough that Cain found a wife and I don't think he waited 20 years for her after murdering his brother. I don see that in the text But so Abel a keeper of sheep and Cain a worker of the ground So God created sheep on day six along with the people and Abel keeping them and he got this we call it kind of a dirty job Everybody needs to understand keeping sheep is just not fun.

It's dirty. And sheep are supposedly really dumb animals and stuff. And then God compares all us to sheep and then we act like we're not offended. But inside we all are because we think we're a little smarter than God thinks we are at least. And Cain's a worker of the ground. What this means is Cain is, he's planting stuff and he's growing stuff and he's watering stuff and he's getting fruits and vegetables and all that kind of thing.

So one of them is producing something wonderful. He's able to make salads and all the stuff you make with vegetables. And the other one's taking care of sheep. And as far as we know, we don't know for sure if they're eating the sheep or not. Okay, so that's a neat argument. Not an argument, but something I'll throw out there for discussion at the fellowship.

Do you think that God permitted people to eat animals before Genesis 9, where he explicitly states they can eat animals? It's interesting to wonder. Now, I do believe that whether God told people to or not, I'm sure people were doing it before the flood. People were doing all sorts of evil. So what God had actually commanded was irrelevant to them. But we don't know why he's keeping the sheep, whether it's just taking care of them, whether they actually farmed them for food.

But one thing we do kind of assume here based on what God did in an earlier chapter is that they would make sacrifices to God. And that somehow it was communicated what was the proper sacrifice. So in the course of time, verse 3, Cain brought to Yahweh an offering of the fruit of the ground. So Cain's out there working hard. Abel's working hard. They're both good men.

They're probably better guys than we are at this point. They're all kind of perfect. They're not too far away from the original perfection of man, stuff like that. But Cain brought an offering of the fruit of the ground. So he worked. He took the fruit of his works and his labor, and he took the vegetables or whatever it was, herbs, and he brought them to the Lord.

This is my offering to you. I know that we owe you something. I've been taught by my parents. There's some things we have to assume here. People don't just wake up in the morning and just think, well, I've got to bring an offering. They're taught something, and they had parents who knew Yahweh.

They had parents who were able to explain to them, hey, this is what happened. Here's where we are. This is why you just cut yourself on a thorn. This is why the sheep bit you. There's things they can tell them and explain to them. And God killed an animal to cover us up, and in that somehow either God communicated it explicitly or their understanding, hey, we need to sacrifice to Yahweh.

A sacrifice has to be made for sin. And Abel brought in the firstborn of his flock, verse 4, and of their fat portions. And Yahweh had regard for Abel and his offerings. So just real quick, for those judgmental people in here, remember Leviticus 3.16, all fat is Yahweh's. So don't be too judgmental of people that are overweight. But the fat portions are what they brought to the Lord.

And Abel did that. And if you read through Leviticus and the places where all the sacrifices were made, there's a lot of talk about the fat of the animal, the different parts of the animal that have fat in a certain part. And there's no concept here that when you're cutting a steak, you have to cut all the fat off or something like that. because they're not supposed to eat some of it.

But there were certain parts of the body of these animals that had fat portions that they would burn up and sacrifice. And so Abel brought an animal from his flock that, obviously, it's implied here, the animal had to be killed. There was death involved. This wasn't like, hey, here's a sheep, and you just hold it up, and then he had to kill the sheep in order to offer a sacrifice to Yahweh.

And so Yahweh had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So this is what it's saying. It's saying Yahweh accepted Abel's offering. He had regard for it. It was a good offering. And Cain's offering he wouldn't accept.

And if you just read it on the surface, especially if you've never read the New Testament, you would think that, well, I guess what Cain did was bad and what Abel did was good. It's hard to tell exactly why in this passage. We have a lot of revelation that helps us understand what kind of sacrifices God accepts. And if the only argument was, well, Cain brought from the works of his own hands, well, so did Abel, right?

Abel was a keeper of sheep. But we'll see in the New Testament why God accepted one offering over the other. So Cain, well, so let's do that real quick. So turn to Hebrews chapter 11. I don't want to jump around too much. We only have three passages in the New Testament that I'm planning on going to.

So we'll see how that goes. But in Hebrews 11, an inspired author who knows way more about everything than we would know because the Holy Spirit inspired this, writes in verse 4, By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. and through his faith though he died he still speaks and so what we have here is God explaining to us that Abraham The sacrifice that he brought was brought by faith. What is faith?

Faith is the evidence of things not seen, and the substance of things hoped for, right? But ultimately, to put it even simpler, and this is a good one for you kids to remember, faith is believing what God has said. Faith isn't hoping something will happen just because you think it will happen. Some of us think that the snow is going to melt sooner than later, I guess. we're pretty sure it'll melt.

But faith is believing something God has actually promised. Do you understand that? This is not just some kind of random believing stuff just because we feel like believing it. This is about trusting what God said. So what we believe here, when it says, by faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice, we believe that what that means is that God revealed something to Adam or to Eve, to Cain and Abel, maybe Adam and Eve down to Cain and Abel revealed it and that Abel believed it and he offered a sacrifice that was according to what God had commanded it's that simple now we can also surmise from the rest of scripture that it had to be a bloody sacrifice blood had to be shed to make an actual offering to God that would be acceptable it should have been the best sheep in the flock too, it doesn't say that anywhere but it should have been the most pure one the one that was the had the least number of blemishes And if you think about day after day, year after year, having to find the most unblemished thing in your flock to bring it for your sacrifice, you can think about how you start to get discouraged.

Think about how much do you think you'd start to notice blemishes if you were looking so much? You'd start to realize, I cannot even bring God a worthy sacrifice. That even the best I have falls short of what must be His standard. and actually caused people to cast their cares upon Christ. But so faith is what Abel actually brought to God. So forgetting for a moment whether Cain brought cucumbers and Abel brought a sheep and all these things, it's his faith that actually justifies him before God.

And this is how God has always saved people. They believe his promises, and then they get saved based on the fact that they're trusting what God has promised. But so Cain was very angry and his face fell. So this is where it gets interesting to me, and hopefully to you too. Cain gets angry. Anger generally precedes murder.

Now there are some cold-blooded murderers that just are passionless about it. They just happen to like to play God, I think, is what it is. They like to take life, which is only God's prerogative. But in general, most of the murders that we see in our culture on TV, if you went down to a courtroom and just watched court proceedings, it's usually somebody's angry.

They're either angry in the moment, and so they do something that they lose self-control, and they maybe they didn't even mean to kill the person, but they end up killing someone just in a rage. Or they're so angry about something that happened that they actually plan the murder somehow. They think it through. But Cain is angry, and anger in Matthew 5 we're going to see, actually, in God's is the same as murder from a judgment perspective.

Now, I'd much prefer you get angry with me and not kill me than get angry with me and kill me. We see a difference. And we have a civil government that helps handle some of those actual behavioral changes. But Cain is angry, but why is he angry? Why is Cain angry? He's angry ultimately because he refuses to worship God the way that God has prescribed.

And I don't mean to make this all about the first and second commandment, but ultimately that's what's happening here. Cain knows God. He knows the right God. He knows his name. He knows how to find them wherever he's doing the sacrifices. He knows what he was told needed to happen.

He's actually going through what I'll call proper religious motions in order to go and do something before God. And he's failing in only one point outwardly. He's just not bringing the right kind of thing. and God doesn't accept it. And Cain's angry because Cain wants God to accept him on his terms and not on God's terms. Cain wants God to look at what he's doing and think, Oh, well, you tried your best.

I'm good with that. And yet it's God who defines worship. This is why we follow the regulative principle of worship. And we talk through that in the commandments. and we believe in the regulative principle of worship where we worship God the way he's prescribed and anything outside of that is sin in fact and we tremble when we come before God that's why I've been meditating on whether we should read the confession during church the confession isn't in the scripture it's commanded to be done as part of worship so does it fall under the element of teaching that's a good question and so Cain's angry and its face fell.

If you're happy and you know it, then your face will surely show it. And if you're angry, your face is going to show it. Now, some people learn to hide it. But most of us need to understand that our face shows what's going on in our heart. And when somebody looks at you and says, like, why do you have that look? It might be worth thinking about instead of just telling them, no, I don't have a look.

They see something. And we could be mistaken about the look. That's fine. But we should think about it. So Cain's face fell. His countenance falls.

He's angry. He shows God by his lack of joy on his face, by his lack of reverence for God that he's angry with him. And now God says to Cain, why are you angry and why is your face fallen? And this is one of the neatest things in Scripture with God who knows all things, actually asks someone a question, which is giving them a chance to repent ultimately Because the moment he killed his brother well this was before he killed him but Cain was wrong He should have been struck dead simply for being angry that God didn't accept his sacrifice.

And God says to him, if you do well, will you not be accepted? Okay, he's kind of giving them an idea here. If you were able to live a life that was well done, that was pleasing to me, you'd be accepted by me. I'm a very fair judge. God's not up there just striking people for doing good things. But then he says, and if you do not do well, okay, so if you fail to do well, he says, sin is crouching at the door.

He says, its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it. Now this is an interesting verse to me, because I think that I agree with the people that say that this word used for sin could actually be the same word that's used for sin offering. And so if you wanted to research this, this word is the same word that's sometimes used in Scripture for sin offering.

So when it says Jesus Christ, for example, in the New Testament, He who knew no sin became sin for us. He became a sin offering for us. And in the Old Testament, where it talks about sin offerings in Leviticus and all Exodus and all those places, it's the same Hebrew word. And so I translate it as, if you do not do well, there's a sin offering crouching at your door.

I've already provided everything necessary for your atonement, is what I think God's telling you. If you fail to keep my commands, which you do, but at least if you can confess it, I've already provided what's needed for you to be atoned for. And this is true of Jesus Christ, of course. But at that time, there was plenty of sheep to go around, I'm sure.

I'm sure that Abel could have helped his brother out with a sacrifice. The point is this, that nobody's going to go to hell because they didn't get an opportunity. The atonement was made by Jesus. It was promised beforehand. And all those who ever in the history of all time will ever have a willing heart to believe it, God will find them and he will grant them faith.

Do you understand me? There's no good atheist in some remote country that's just never heard about Jesus that actually deserves heaven that dies and ends up in hell. This is why we go on missions to find the people whose hearts God's preparing for these kinds of things. So Cain spoke to Abel, his brother, and when they were in the field, Cain rose up against them and his brother Abel and killed them.

It's a quick explanation. He's in the field with them, and he kills them. I would venture to say he went somewhere alone. We do our evil deeds when we're alone. We don't do them out in public. He didn't go in the kitchen with his mother there and kill them.

But I think Cain was overcome with anger because God accepted Abel and not him. And history is littered with people who have been murdered because God granted them grace and didn't grant grace to someone else. This is why the church is ultimately persecuted. People are angry that God is angry with them and that God has bestowed grace on someone else. And so he kills them, committing the first recorded murder.

And God said to Cain, the Lord Yahweh, he says, where is Abel, your brother? Another question. God asking people questions is a way for God to make the person think. God knows everything. So you have to ask yourself, why would God ask this question? It's to make the person who's supposed to answer the question think about the answer.

I also think it shows Cain a lesson that Cain must have forgotten, or at least suspended in unbelief and denied, which is that God sees all things. A lot of people think their evil deeds aren't seen. A lot of people think that the things they're doing in private and in secret and in the dark, because nobody's come up to them and said, hey, I noticed that you do this thing.

They think that they're getting away with it. This is a lesson for every one of us, that the things we do that we think nobody knows about, God knows every single one of them in every single detail, including He knows your heart while you were doing it. he knows how you were actually devising a plan to remain in secret while it was going on and what you did to cover it up afterwards too so we should fear we should fear the Lord in that sense so he said to the Lord I do not know where he is and then he says the famous line am I my brother's keeper this was a line I knew as a kid as a non-Christian am I my brother's keeper Well, that's rhetorical. So Cain is rhetorically asking God, am I my brother's keeper?

If we look at the Baptist catechism for a moment, it says what is required in the sixth commandment. Sixth commandment, of course, if you're not remembering that's the one we're talking about thou shalt not kill the sixth commandment requireth all lawful endeavors to preserve our own life and the life of others so the answer to Cain's insolent, haughty and foolish question in my my brother's keeper is yes you are you absolutely are the sixth commandment actually command you to be your brother's keeper. Now Cain was being sarcastic about it.

So maybe not in the way Cain was meaning a little bit. But yeah, we're to take care of each other. We to love one another 1 John chapter 3 We have another commentary on this. John tells us we're children of God. He says in verse 10, By this it is evident who are the children of God. Well, children of God are all brothers and sisters, right?

I just said you're your brother's keeper. I'd say you're also your neighbor's keeper on top of that. But he says, and who are the children of the devil? Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother. Now we get a commentary from a Holy Spirit-inspired author of Scripture on what happened with Cain. He says, this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another.

We should not be like Cain, he says. Why? Well, he says, Cain was of the evil one. Satan. This was not some conscientious guy who just couldn't get his hands on a sheep. This was a guy who knew the right way to go.

And frankly, my guess is that he just thought killing a sheep and draining its blood and doing whatever was necessary to offer that sacrifice was just too dirty for him. and the irony is that some of these people even today who are so opposed to what they'll call death that they won't hurt an animal don't bat an eye about slaughtering human beings in any number of ways the king was no different he was of the evil one, he was of the devil there's like no greater insult like there's people who have mastered insults and there's books where you can probably find new ones, and I'm sure on Twitch you guys have some insults people do, some of them are fun. Calling someone of the devil is about as bad as it gets. Maybe child of the devil, similar, right?

He says he was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And he says, and why did he murder him? Now we get the reason. So in the Old Testament, the reason, well, Cain was angry, his sacrifice wasn't accepted, right? So he went and did something bad. Well, now what does John tell us?

John says, because his own deeds were evil and his brother's righteous. Well, now that's a little more detailed than we had. So now you can imagine Cain kind of growing up with his brother, and maybe his whole life Cain was just son of the devil. I don't know, but I don't guess that Cain was this outstanding young man who had Messiah hopes and everybody was thinking, this is it, he's the one.

And then all of a sudden this bad day happened and it's like, oh, whoops, turns out he's not. I have a feeling Cain was a very disappointing young man to everyone around him for a long time. And he looked at a brother who by faith in God was doing the right things, following what God had revealed and the natural law that's so obvious to everyone in our hearts, partially because of what's obvious in creation and partially because God writes.

The Ten Commandments on each and every person's heart. This is why all your non-sabotarian friends still go to church on Sunday. And it's why most of them will try not to have soccer practices that day and some of those kinds of things. All right? Because it's written on their heart. They don't have to say they believe what the Scripture says about it.

So back to Genesis 4. The Lord says, What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground. God sees and he will avenge the death of his people in particular but even all murders he says and now you're cursed from the ground so the ground is where Cain made his living right it's where he found his fulfillment it's where he made his living he says now you're cursed from the ground which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand he says 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 And one of the things that's fascinating here is that we seem to think everyone before us was really dumb, and we're the culmination of intelligence, where it's like we can't function if our phone doesn't tell us when we're supposed to do something.

You know what I mean? It's the other way around. These words that... People have argued, well, Adam and Eve couldn't have known what death was unless they saw it at once, and that's the argument for death preceding sin. What do you mean? God couldn't make a person that was smart enough to know language that God himself was using with them?

A fugitive and a wanderer. Cain knew what this stuff was. That's a side note. And then Cain says, My punishment is greater than I can bear. He says, Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden. He says, I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.

He says, And whoever finds me will kill me. So I think it's kind of interesting to think that Cain at this moment in time realizes he's going to be going away from probably still close to the Garden of Eden where they probably can still see the cherubim. He's protecting the baby. And he's going to go somewhere else. And he's actually worried someone's going to kill him.

And why would he worry about that? Either there was some kind of rampant murder going on already, right? Where Cain knew, like, I'm not going to the bad neighborhood because they'll kill me there. Or Cain understood that what was going to happen was people would realize what he did. And somebody would take retribution on him. Now, God doesn't give the death penalty for murder until after the flood.

And so at this point, God had never told people, by man's blood, your blood shall be shed if you shed man's blood, which is what he says in Genesis chapter 9. And so at this point, there is no government sanction for capital punishment. So whether they were practicing it or not, we don't know. God hadn't told them to do it yet. And so God, who has a divine prerogative to make any exception he wants to even his own rules that he gives to his creatures rather than sentencing Cain to an immediate death through some kind of capital punishment which he certainly we would find deserved says not so in verse 15 if anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold, and Yahweh put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him.

And so God marked Cain in some way so that people would know, wow, if I killed this guy, whether he deserves it or not, things are going to be way worse for me. And that protected Cain. And what's astounding about it is this man, who is of the devil, who killed one of God's people, who maybe by that point, people started to think, well, maybe this guy's the Messiah.

He actually seems to follow Yahweh. He actually does the things that Yahweh says to do. And Cain killed him. Maybe, at this point, what we can see is God's amazing grace toward even the heathen in a sense that he gives them a little more life and although Cain, I don't believe ever believed on the Lord Jesus Christ although he didn't, Cain was given time to repent.

And God is gracious even to his enemies to give them time to repent. And in some cases that time is only used to further offend God. And it's only used to further hurt and persecute God's people. And in some cases though that time ends up being used to bring that person to faith. Sometimes at a much later date. If you had been struck dead the moment you deserved it, that would have certainly happened before you met Jesus Christ as Savior.

So Cain, one final note about the guy. He's a bad guy. He murdered his brother. He was angry with God, which is entirely unacceptable. Then he was angry with his brother and hated him, simply because his brother did right things. And I would dare say this, that some of us have the same problem.

And generally we describe it as jealousy or envy in the Bible. Where somebody else is doing something well, and we resent them because we can't do it as well. or we don't have the same gift of whatever. Or they are, and I don't like the phrase, but they seem more holy than us. I find, you know, you find yourself laughing at a coarse joke and then there's the other guy that says, hey, we shouldn't laugh at that.

And you almost kind of hate the guy in the moment because he says that to you when what you should be doing is repenting. and so we all have this natural tendency in our flesh to want to be seen as justified in our own right at any given time rather than understand that we're justified by faith in Christ alone and that means you're going to have vestiges of sin that people will point out and you'll notice but in the book of Jude which is a little book at the end of the New Testament that's written to warn us of false teachers, false prophets People who were designated for condemnation from all eternity. People who deny Jesus Christ as Lord and Master. People who pervert God's grace into sensuality.

So these aren't your run-of-the-mill non-believers marching in pride parades and living in some other country and being a different religion. These are people who actually take what God has defined as His grace in Jesus Christ and they pervert it and they teach falsely about it. It says in verse 11, woe to them. So that's a nice little way of saying they're going to hell.

We say woe to them. That means they're going to hell. It says, woe to them, they walked in the way of Cain. And the way of Cain, I dare say, is a hatred of God. and his ways that he wants to be worshipped, and a hatred of anyone who would dare worship God the right way. And that is the way of Cain. And ultimately, Cain's anger and hatred, which was enough to condemn him already, led to the murder of one of God's people.

And if everyone in this room had had the strength and the dexterity, or the weapon close enough at a time when you were angry at one point in your life, I dare say we'd all be murderers physically. That the only thing that kept some of us from being murderers was the fact that we didn't hit the person when they ran into the wall in the corner. Because a lot of the things that happen when people get in fights, they didn't mean to kill them.

They were just punching and they were fighting and something else happened. It was an accident in that sense. but in their heart they weren't doing all they could to preserve the other's life just like you. So Cain is kind of your good non-example. So Jesus is always the example we like to bring up of righteousness, and Abel wasn't a bad one either in this sense, but Cain is your example of somebody that you can look at the way he behaved in the Bible, you can look at the progression of events, and you can look at your own heart then especially before we pray and especially before we go to communion and you can try to ask yourself where do I need to repent of violating the sixth commandment slander, gossip, malice, envy rivalries, dissensions, divisions, fits of anger these are the deeds of the flesh that all manifest themselves ultimately in murder but in your heart there's still violations of God's sixth commandment Father we thank you that you have given us the truthful stories of the Bible that teach us lessons we pray that we see Jesus Christ in those stories as the hero.

That we would recognize even the sacrifice of Abel pointed to a greater sacrifice one day. That a righteous man dying at the hands of the unrighteous because they hate God is the story of redemption that we all needed. We pray that we would be able to be honest with ourselves and our hearts and that we would learn to fight the flesh and to put away the deeds of the body and to mortify the sin that remains in us that causes us sometimes to even commit the same sins in our hearts that so many others have had manifest as murder.

So forgive us, Lord, and strengthen us by Your grace to do these things that we cannot do on our own strength. Amen.