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v. 1 It is not certain whether Eve thought that Cain was the
promised seed of 3:15. In any case, her statement shows faith, a reckoning with the Lord
and with her son as his gift to her. Indeed, Eve's statement can be translated: "I
have gained a man, the Lord" in which case she would, at first, have thought that
Cain himself was the promised seed of 3:15, a belief subsequent events in the
chapter prove false.
v. 4 There has been a long debate as to why the Lord preferred
Abel's offering. Hebrews 11:4 tells us that Abel had faith whereas Cain did not, but that
does not settle the question: how did Abel's faith evidence itself: was it in the spirit
in which he offered his sacrifice or was it in the type of sacrifice, animal sacrifice,
that Abel brought. Most commentators prefer the first explanation, but I am not so sure.
Fact is, how did they know to bring any sacrifice to God; they knew well enough that he
didn't need food. Surely God had given instructions. And while grain or produce offerings
were a part of Israel's worship later, the fact that the two offerings are distinguished
as to type and not as to the spirit of the offerer suggests to me that already we have one
man insisting upon coming to God on his own terms and the other man coming as God has said
he must come. It is also perhaps important that Abel offered the "firstborn" of
his flock and nothing similar is said of Cain's offering. The laws of sacrifice would
later make explicit that the sacrifice must be made from the choice portion of the flock,
a lamb without defect.
v. 8 Unlike Hollywood the Bible never dwells on the violence
itself. It is even more impressive and dramatic for its stark brevity. The evil of the
deed is accentuated merely by the fact that twice in a single verse we are reminded that
Abel was Cain's brother. (Rabbi Duncan asks if you have ever given thanks for Abel's many
years in heaven?)
v.10 At least Adam, when confronted by the Lord, told the truth.
Cain tells a barefaced lie and follows it with a clever retort that has no respect or
reverence for God in it.
v.12 The point is not that Cain would live the life of a Bedouin,
but that he would be banished from his home and family. And, of course, behind and above
that punishment, he would be banished as well from the presence of the Lord, as Cain
himself understood and will say in v. 14.
v.14 The fear is that other descendants of Adam and Eve, the
family members themselves, would seek to avenge Abel's death. The principle of justice
enshrined in the human heart from the beginning.
v.15 The promise of protection is the utmost that divine mercy
can do for the impenitent. What was the sign? No one knows. In any case, while it warded
off potential enemies and lengthened Cain's life, it was at the same time a constant
reminder of his banishment.
v.17 It is not as clear in the Hebrew as the NIV makes it seem in
the English, who built the city, whether it was Cain, who has just been condemned to a
wandering life, or Enoch. As to the identity of Cain's wife, we seem shut up to the
conclusion that she was a sister or, at least some relative.
v.18 Both names, Enoch and Lamech, appear again in the genealogy
of Seth, but in the case of these men enough information is given to prevent us from
thinking that they are the same individuals. Most of the antedeluvians are just names, but
of these four men we learn something.
v.22 We might have expected the narrator to say nothing
complementary about Cain and his descendants, but even sinful man produces culture, even
wonderful products of inventiveness and utility, such as here: music and work with metals
(which, of course, requires mining, the extraction of metal from ore, the producing of
alloys, as bronze, and the working with the finished metal. And, we may take this as a
hint of still more. Even sinful men will do good things, beautiful things, noble and
honorable things -- at least noble and honorable and good to a certain measure. For man
still bears the image of God, still has God's law written on his heart, and God's mercy
--as here to Cain-- keeps him from being as bad as he might often be.
It is unclear why Naamah is mentioned. One Jewish tradition is that she
became Noah's wife, but that is a wild guess only.
It is important to begin our consideration of this chapter by taking
note of the fact that Gen. 4 belongs to the account of the creation and fall that began at
2:4 with the heading or title: "This is the account of the heavens and the earth when
they were created." You have the next such title at 5:1 indicating a new section of
the narrative. What that means is that Gen. 4 is clearly meant to finish the story of the
beginning of man in the world, that that story is not complete without the history related
in this chapter. Or, in other words, we haven't really understood what happened in the
fall, the foundation for the rest of the human story has not been fully laid, until we
have read this history that follows immediately upon it.
Indeed, there are many similarities between the account of the fall in
chapter 3 and the history of Gen. 4: the sin is committed and God comes looking for Cain
and asks him why he is behaving as he does in much the same way that he questioned Adam in
chapter 3. Judgment follows for Cain as it did for Adam and Eve and in much the same way.
There are other parallels. In other words, chapter 4 indicates that the fall is repeating
itself in the next generation, not that Cain was innocent until he sinned, but that the
cycle of sin and consequences is now to be a fact of human life and was not limited to
Adam and Eve themselves.
But what is more important in this history is what is revealed about the
nature of human sin. If its fact and presence is reported to us in Gen. 3, Gen. 4 tells us
what sin is, what it means that human beings became sinners, and how sinful human beings
are going to live. I want this morning to elaborate the chapter's anatomy of human sin in
three points.
I. First, already, here at the beginning we are taught that the
fundamental human problem is Sin, not sins, a sinful bent, a sinful nature, not simply the
accumulation of sinful acts.
The accumulated acts are bad enough. In this single chapter we have
jealousy, anger, hatred, murder, lying, a miserable refusal to accept responsibility,
adultery, pride, vengeance and cruelty, and probably many more. But that is just the
point. Where did all of this come from. What makes it pour out of human beings as it does?
We do not have here in Gen. 4 or anywhere early in the Scripture a
comprehensive or systematic presentation of the doctrine of sin or original sin. We have
it here rather in portrait form, painted with bold strokes. But we are to think as we read
and it is perfectly clear that the author of this section of Genesis wants his readers to
gain a vivid idea of what the fall has done. It has corrupted the hearts of human beings
so that, and here is the first point about sin, given the right circumstances, the
opportunity, the encouragement, so to speak, human beings will do one corrupt, one evil,
one bad thing after another. This is the lesson of Gen. 4: man, by the fall, had become a
sinner by nature. Sin, capital "s" was his real problem, a disposition to sin in
his heart, that produced the sinning in his life, the visible acts of evil.
The rest of the Bible will confirm this verdict, this miserable fact
about us human beings, our penchant for sinful acts both petty and great, our universal
inclination, coming up from deep within us, to do that which is wrong.
Now, it is true that you will find some today, mostly in the so-called
social sciences and in humanized religions that will dispute this melancholy verdict about
the universal and inveterate character of human sinfulness. Some will still speak about
native human goodness and the like. But no one should take any of this seriously and no
one of any intellectual or moral weight ever has.
As G.K. Chesterton put it, the facts are there for all to see. Original
sin is the only Christian doctrine with universal empirical verification. One has only to
open his eyes to see!
Those who still speak sentimentally about human goodness must, of
course, redefine goodness to make humans fit for it. We say, with C.S. Lewis, that if you
want to know how much evil really lurks within human beings, how deep it is fixed in our
hearts, simply try very hard to be good. No one knows how bad he is until he has tried
very hard to be truly good: loving, honest, pure, faithful, humble, obedient, and so on.
The simple fact of human history, proved innumerable times, is that the better men and
women are, the more persuaded they are of their own badness; and the more they realize
they would be still much worse if only their sinful natures had been given greater
opportunities to express themselves.
We see this in the church, of course. The greatest saints were to the
man and woman deeply convinced of their own badness; they saw it much more clearly and
were alarmed much more by it than is generally the case among Christians, certainly among
Christians today, who have been encouraged both by their culture and by their church to
take their sinfulness less seriously, to regard it as merely a condition of life, instead
of the positive and deadly evil, the disgusting corruption that it is. When the saintly
Scottish pastor Robert Murray McCheyne admitted that he saw in his own heart the seeds of
every conceivable sin, he meant that he knew full well that he was capable of any badness
if only the circumstances were right.
There are only three ways one can deny his or her sinfulness, real moral
badness, and all of these ways are used all the time by human beings, and all of them
prove, at the last, pathetically insufficient, unable to hold back the flood of evidence.
The first is to judge oneself only by outward acts. So many today give
themselves credit for not committing sins that they have no opportunity to commit and do
not see that their hearts are quite ready and capable of sin in all manner of new and
terrible ways, if only the occasion permits. What is more they tend to ignore or downplay
the attitudes and thoughts of their hearts, full of all manner of things they would be
mortified to have another person learn! [Pascal!]
The second way of protecting a high opinion of yourself is to judge
yourself according to a standard of your own devising. This is a very popular technique in
our day. Anyone can be a good person who is allowed to define what is good. Mass murderers
can meet that standard! But, then, even here, it fails, for we don't meet even our
own standards and, as the Bible often points out, we condemn ourselves many times over by
judging others for what we are guilty of ourselves.
The third way is to prove yourself good by comparing yourself with those
you think worse than yourself. But, then, the last demon but one in hell can say, "I
am at least not as bad as that!" But in a world as full of sinners as this
world is, as full of self-righteous, petty, selfish, dishonest, impure, proud,
thoughtless, irreverent, lazy people as this world is, to be better than someone else --even
if you are, which is by no means a certainty-- should be of little comfort to anyone.
This is an essential conviction. If you don't understand what is being
said about mankind in Gen. 4; if you are offended by the bleak picture painted here of
human badness and human penchant to do evil, you will not understand the rest of the
Bible, you will not appreciate the great message of salvation from that terrible sin
through Jesus Christ, and, we Christians say, you will never make sense of the world in
which you live every day, for that world is the world that is described in these verses.
Jesus assumed that those to whom he preached were bad. If we do not feel this to be true
of ourselves, while we may be part of the world he came to save, we will never be part of
the audience to whom he spoke, never understand the good news he proclaimed.
II. Second, we are taught, already here at the beginning, that sin
gathers strength in human life, that it has a cycle of growth, that makes containment
impossible.
We are, of course, going to see sin gather strength in the larger
narrative, leading from chapter 3 to the situation described at the beginning of chapter
6, a corruption that was by the time of Noah so deep and so universal as to require the
destruction of virtually the entire human race.
But we see the same development within chapter 4. Sin leads to sin --
envy and hatred to murder, lying, and the rest -- and gathers strength from one generation
to the next. Cain is a murderer, but his descendant Lamech is a mass murderer. How many
times has this dismal story been told in human history, sin gaining momentum from one
generation to the next as its opposition in the conscience becomes more and more feeble.
We are witnessing this process before our very eyes in American culture today. What
Christians now take for granted, unbelievers were horrified by 40 years ago. Many of the
terrible sins of our day -- juvenile crime, gang related violence, abortion, unlawful
divorce, drug addiction, and so on, were comparatively little known in previous
generations -- not because those generations were not sinful, for they were, but because
sin was through those generations only gathering its momentum, which momentum now is such
a force as to carry everything before it. In my high school, a very large public high
school, as recently as 1968, we had no drug problem, very few girls got pregnant, none
that I can remember; the bad element was still the boys who smoked cigarettes in the
restroom!
But sin is a virus, a kind of living, breathing, eating thing that
consumes its prey, that does not lie still or dormant, content to occupy the same place
for generations. As it works it hardens the heart, dulls the mind, embitters and weakens
the spirit until what once was thought unthinkable in human behavior is now completely
acceptable. This is the development of evil that Paul describes so eloquently in Romans 1
and that Alexander Pope immortalized in his famous lines:
Vice is a monster of so frightful a mien,
That to be trusted needs but to be seen.
Yet, seen to often, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
This is another demonstration of the fact that sin is a principle of
human life, is always present as a principle, a tendency, a commitment of the heart, and
lacks only opportunity, the right circumstances to erupt into actual acts of deceit,
cruelty, impurity and so on. But once given such an opportunity, once gathering strength
from it, it craves yet more, or as the Lord put it to Cain in v. 7, sin desire to have
men, to control them, and once given entrance is impossible to dislodge except by the
power of God.
III. Third, we are taught, already here at the very beginning, of
sin's futility as a principle of rebellion against God.
What we have in Gen. 4 is the description of the first effort of human
beings to build the "city of man." Augustine would later, in one of the greatest
works of human literature--The City of God, describe human history in terms of two
cities: the city of man, the kingdom that man seeks to build for himself and by himself in
this world, a city that we can see with our eyes, and the city of God, which God is
building all the while, a city we cannot see, an invisible city, but which alone will
remain and in which alone human beings will find -- by the grace of God and faith in
Christ -- a happy and secure and permanent home.
Here the city of man takes is first form. A city is built, either by
Cain or by Enoch and given his name. It was in this city that the sanctity of marriage was
first betrayed, when Lamech married two women. In this city Lamech's song reached the top
of the charts, a song celebrating violence, vengeance and the will to power.
After the flood, in Babel, the effort was made again. And, R.C. Sproul
imagines, at the celebration dedicating that magnificent tower, stretching toward the
heavens, the symbol of human achievement, as they broke the champagne over the lowest
courses of dressed stone, they unveiled at the bottom, on the base of the tower, a large
plaque with the words: "One small step for man, one giant step for mankind."
An ancient Friedrich Nietzsche was the schoolmaster in both those
cities. And he gave the rebellion against God and against God's law its philosophical
respectability first in that city.
Nietzsche's starting point was the non-existence of God and, whether the
unbelief in the living God took religious form or philosophical form or hedonistic form
through the centuries, this has always been the true explanation of human life: man
setting himself up as his own god and his own master and seeking to build a kingdom for
himself.
Listen to him: this is Nietzsche in his work The Joyful Wisdom:
The most important of more recent events -- that 'god' is dead', that
the belief in the Christian God has become unworthy of belief -- already begins to cast
its first shadows over Europe....In fact, we philosophers and 'free spirits' feel
ourselves irradiated as by a new dawn by the report that the 'old God is dead'; our hearts
overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentment and expectation. At last the horizon
seems open once more, granting even that it is not bright; our ships can at last put out
to sea in face of every danger; every hazard is again permitted to the discerner; the sea,
our sea, lies open before us... [In Colin Brown, Philosophy and the Christian
Faith, p. 139]
Here is Nietzsche's point. If god does not exist, man must now make his
own way, go it alone. The will to power was his prescription for human advancement, let
men take what they can. And the "superman" (the Ubermensch) the need of the
hour. Not a comic book superman, not a figure of some theory of racial superiority as the
Nazi's made Nietzsche's idea to be. But, rather, a man who faces squarely the human
predicament, man alone in the universe, who fashions his own values and lives accordingly.
Well, you can hear Lamech in all of that! The City of Man all over
again, one more among the umpteenth attempts to build this city so that it will not fall
as it has always fallen before.
But God frustrated Lamech and destroyed the city of man with the flood;
and then he destroyed Babel and scattered the nations, and he has brought down every power
that has set itself up against god ever since. Every man, every group of men who have
thought they could build a lasting kingdom by themselves and for themselves have come to
ruin. And they who are listening to Nietzsche today will come to ruin themselves. It is
the one thing in this world we can be absolutely sure of.
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
How impressive at the moment the city of man, though how cruel and vain,
but how utterly futile and fragile.
And then, how gently, how silently, the city of God steals into the
world: then men began to call on the name of the Lord.
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