This morning we’re going to go into a new section of the text finally. That’s 1 John 3:10. So on the handout if you’ll follow there, you’ll see that it’s 1 John 3:10b that – verse 23. That’s the section that comes after the one that we’ve worked over and over and over. So let’s open with a word of prayer.
(Opening prayer)
Follow in the outline - I’ve given a series of verses there because I want to go back to this theme that we keep coming up with in John. That is that we not lose track of what l-o-v-e means. The way John is using l-o-v-e is in connection with righteousness and justice because he’s looking at the character of God. That’s where these definitions have to begin - with the character of God. It can’t begin with a Gallup poll from last Monday afternoon. It has to begin with something that doesn’t change, something that is eternal, something that is going to be very basic.
This is the chart that we’re looking at. We’re seeing how God’s love is connected intimately with His righteousness and justice because what is the object of God’s love?
God’s love, His object, is His own character. This sounds contradictory to us because we’re taught not to love ourselves; but God in this sense does love Himself and has loved Himself for all eternity because He loves justice and He loves righteousness. The reason He loves justice and loves righteousness is because He is righteous and He is just. That’s the basic character.
Well now I’ve listed about 7 or 8 verses in the handout - two sets of these verses. So I want to go through those verses – just skim down through those verses because I want again to recapture the flavor of this epistle.
The first set of verses is God’s nature expressed in Christ. So there’s His nature expressed in Christ – the norm and the standard measure. So it starts with 2:29; and you’ll see so many times in those 10 verses. I mean this is just ten verses. Look how many verses anchor the whole logic of the argument in the character of God.
NKJ 1 John 2:29 … He is righteous,
NKJ 1 John 3:2 …for we shall see Him as He is.
NKJ 1 John 3:3 …purifies himself, just as He is pure.
NKJ 1 John 3:5 …in Him there is no sin.
NKJ 1 John 3:6 Whoever abides in Him does not sin.
Because He does not sin.
NKJ 1 John 3:7 …just as He is righteous.
NKJ 1 John 3:9 Whoever has been born of God does not sin,
So very clearly it’s unmistakable where the anchor of the whole argument is. It’s the nature of God. That we want to understand because we are facing in our culture, in our day, it’s whatever I feel is just. We have people going around that haven’t a clue what the word justice means – not a clue.
Sometimes I want get with these people and say, “Do you really want to see what social justice is? Read the book of Deuteronomy.”
They’d be freaked out if they read the book of Deuteronomy because their idea of justice is so bizarre. Their idea of justice actually has very little content. It has a lot of emotion with it but very little moral content. Here’s why. The concept of justice today as it’s articulated in our culture if you push people.
“I’m not trying fight with you. I’m not trying to argue with you. I just want to sit down and ask you a question. When you use the word justice, would you please tell me what you mean? What are you talking about?”
“Well, I mean we treat people fairly.”
“Oh, okay. How do you treat people fairly?”
Then just listen to the answer you get.
“Well, treat them equally.”
“How do you treat them equally?”
Use the argument that we used over and over here. If you have a blind person and a seeing citizen of America, and you ask them; do they both have equal voting rights? Yes. Do they both have equal legitimacy to drive a car? No.
Your answer to the first question – yes – and your answer to the second question – no - have nothing to do with equality. It has everything with what are voting rights and what is involved in driving a car. The word equality had no useful logical function in answering either of those two questions. So there goes the idea of equality.
Put it this way. Think of arithmetic. Can you put an equal sign between any two objects and make them equal? Is the equal sign making them equal or is there substantively equal and then you put an equal sign to describe what is substantively true? Which one is right? The equal sign doesn’t make thing equal. So saying something is equal has absolutely no logical force. Yet everybody goes along; they think this is so profound.
“We’re for equality. We’re for treating people fairly.”
Well, who isn’t? We differ on how we apply that principle. So think of arithmetic. It’s the clearest form of this. This is what I like about mathematics. Mathematics is so clear logically. You can reduce it to this question. It becomes very obvious that the equal sign has no force whatsoever. It is not a function. It is a description.
That’s why we’re making a big, big point here in this epistle. You cannot separate God’s righteousness and His justice from His love. So the first set of those verses there have to do with the idea of God’s character as the defining standard.
Now the second set and that’s where again we have to follow to get the power of the text. The second set of those verses is God’s nature expressed in the believer (qualified) who is abiding in Christ - not every believer, but the believer abiding in Christ. So what’s the picture that you always want to discipline yourself when see the word abide or you see the word continue and you know John’s writing somewhere in John; what’s the picture we know he’s thinking about? The vine. John 15. It’s the metaphor that Jesus Himself authorized when he used the vine and the branch. It becomes obvious that “abide” - He means, He visualizes in his head, a branch in a vine. That’s what he means by abide. So in that case this is the believer who is abiding in Christ.
And it says:
NKJ 1 John 2:29 …everyone who practices righteousness is born of Him.
So that is, if the branch is producing fruit, the branch is producing the life of the vine, you know they’re connected.
NKJ 1 John 3:1 we should be called children of God!
…because we are having His nature.
1 John 3:3 And everyone who has this hope…
of resurrection
…purifies himself, just as He is pure.
That’s his Johannine way of expressing justification.
NKJ 1 John 3:6 Whoever abides in Him does not sin.
You can’t abide in Christ and sin because if you’re abiding in Christ, it’s His nature that’s involved. We’ll come back to that in a minute.
NKJ 1 John 3:7 …He who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous.
See that doesn’t make any sense unless in the act in the status quo of abiding in Him; it’s really His righteousness that’s coming out.
NKJ 1 John 3:9 Whoever has been born of God does not sin, for His seed remains in him; and he cannot sin…
We’ve gone over that showing you an analogue from Galatians 3:20, Romans 6, 7 and 8, 1 Peter 2. This is not some foreign theology here. This is something that Peter and Paul both spoke of.
Remember in the Bible, each author has his own vocabulary; his own way of expressing. It’s called biblical theology when you take courses at seminary level versus systematic theology. But biblical theology is you’re studying all the books of one author. Then you are going and you’re studying all the books of another author. Then you go in and study all the books of another author. That’s biblical theology. You develop the theological summaries from just looking at only one guy’s writings. Then you go to another fellow’s. You have to do that before you can start systematizing; otherwise you’re going to grab pieces and chunks out of context of the authors.
Now let’s go back to this power set of this second set of verses. When we become Christians, God regenerates us and gives a new nature. What John’s argument is the new nature cannot sin. It’s part of the new creation. It doesn’t mean we are sinless because we can get out of fellowship. We can rely on the flesh. So when the time comes when we become a Christian; we’ve got a battle going on between the new nature and the flesh. This will last until we die because it’s a battle that goes on. Each day of our life we’re making choices as to whether we’re going to conform to the new nature or are we going to just listen to the flesh and go its way.
What I want to raise a question here at this point – at this point practically speaking in everyday life, if this is correct, that the theology of Peter, Paul and John is correct; what does that tell us as far as a tool for hope and coping with addictions? Think of alcoholism. Think of drugs. Think of same sex attractions – whatever the addictions are. All of the human race is afflicted with this so we’re not picking on people. This is just life in the fallen world.
What does this doctrine of the new nature abiding in Christ tell us about coping with those kinds of things? First of all hope. So often these addictions are so overpowering that people get so discouraged they just yield to them. There’s no hope. But if the Bible is correct, the regenerate nature is a dynamic that exists and empowered by the Holy Spirit that is a tool to deal with addiction. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be over in 6 hours. It means that’s a source of battle, that’s a source of choice. It’s almost like learning to take some sort of medical therapy. The idea is you have to make a choice, a choice, a choice, a choice. It’s a series of choices, not just one choice. It’s a series of choices.
So we have this battle going on with addictions. This is a problem that is universal in our culture and increasingly so because in a hedonistic society, which ours is, people want pleasure; and the pleasure they feel is actually a biochemical reaction in the body. That’s all it is. It’s just a biochemical reaction, which is sad because animals have that. That’s what drugs do. That’s what addictions do. They alter the body chemistry so you have seratonin and all the rest of this hormone stuff. It gives everybody feeling. The problem is that’s an alteration in the biochemical structure of the body.
Think of athletics. How does an athlete get to the point where he has the control over his body to be able to do skillfully the things that are necessary in his competition? How does he do that? Practice. And what is practice? Isn’t it making the same decision over and over and over and over and over again? But to make the decision over and over and over again, the athlete has to have his goal in mind. He has to have the vision of where he’s going in life.
That’s the same thing here. We have to go back. In this case, the vision or goal in our life isn’t manufactured here. The goal in our life is manufactured in the Word of God. It’s listening to the Word of God as to what our Christian life ought to be like. So that’s set before us. And we’re walking toward that goal. It’s a series of choices that has to happen; but the choices are not going to happen if you don’t have the hope that it’s possible. All of this to say – there’s all this theology stuff here about the new nature in Christ - has a very, very practical inescapable function in our Christian life. So that’s what this is all about. That’s what John’s doing. John’s administering to real people in a real history, in a real church that has the same kind of problems we have. No different. Human nature hasn’t changed in the last 2,000 years.
Paul, do you have a question?
Comment I was thinking. I’m having some therapy. In discussing therapy with my therapist, we got to talking about athletics. There’s stuff called muscle memory. The more often you do a particular function – it becomes kind of like… I was thinking if you choose to do drugs or if you choose to do whatever behavior, maybe it’s like a choice of memory. You get used to that. I recall when I smoked cigarettes; after I quit I could tell I was so hungry before I started something and when I finished…there was almost a celebration. And often in the middle of doing whatever it was, the cigarette would lay someplace and just burn up. But then I would light a new one up because I was dumb. It was kind of a memory type of thing. This was what I did, routine. I got up in the morning and I…I don’t need that by the way. Here’s what I did and I did. You get caught up…You choose, you choose, you choose. Then it’s kind of…
What Paul is saying it’s like muscle memory. It’s like athletics. It’s your choice. It becomes almost automatic. There are so many functions in our bodies the way they’re designed; they are automatic. I mean think of the whole autonomic nervous system. Do you sit there every day and decide to breathe? Do you decide to tell your heart to beat? All those are automatic.
By the way, a doctor friend of mine who got his Master’s in Business Administration from Wharton has written a very interesting thesis on this topic in which he shows there’s a tremendous analogy between what should happen in any business organization and the way God designed your body. He says so many times in a business or any organization or educational institutions or whatever, you’ll see some manager that wants everything down to the last decimal place and they micromanage. They try to manage everything from the top down. This is the problem with bureaucracies. This is why we have such a mess in government. We have people all the way up here in the ozone layer of management, and they think they can tell the schoolteacher down here how to teach in the classroom. It doesn’t work that way.
If you think about it, our bodies aren’t built that way either. Think of how God designed our bodies. God diversified the decision making throughout the body. Now it’s discovered through neurocardiology that the heart has a brain. The brain signals coming from the heart to the brain in our heads exceed in quantity the signals coming from the brain coming down to the heart because the heart is acting as a - somebody said like a orchestra leader in an orchestra. The heart communicates to the other organs. Because it’s sending blood to the other organs, it has to know what the other organs need. It has to know whether you are in fight or flight. So it makes all these adjustments. What the heart is trying to do is keep your other organs in the same frequency mode as it is. When there’s competition, there are all kinds of different heart repetition rate or whatever they call it. The bottom line is that there are all kinds of diversified decision making that God has done in our heart. Our lungs, the CO2 levels, in the lung are also communicated so the whole respiratory system is constantly adjusting to O2 needs versus CO2. We’re not conscious of that. It’s all automatic. That’s the way a well-run business ought to be. A well-run business ought to have diversified decision making throughout so that it’s an organism not some top down remote control thing.
Anyway, all that to say is that there are implications to the way the Apostle John is teaching us about our nature.
Now we come to 3:10. At ten we have a shift between the first clause in verse 10 and the second clause in verse 10. This is where scholars have separated the text as far as the content.
The first part of verse 10 says:
NKJ 1 John 3:10 In this
This is referring to something. What is this referring to? This is referring to the previous 9 verses.
NKJ 1 John 3:10 In this the children of God and the children of the devil are manifest:
That’s how you tell them apart. That’s those who are abiding in Christ and those who either are unbelievers or out of fellowship; and they’re under control basically of the world system.
So in this you tell them. What’s this? All that he’s discussed in verse 1, verse 2, verse 3, verse 4 and following. But now in the second part of verse 10, for the first time in this epistle, he is marrying the idea of doing righteousness (or not doing it) and the idea of loving the brethren and not loving the brethren. So watch what happens now. Here’s where we start to have the integration of righteousness and loving.
He says:
NKJ 1 John 3:10 …Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God,
He’s not being empowered of God.
nor is he who does not love his brother.
So righteousness and love are combined here, very explicitly and very tightly. From this point forward, the rest of chapter 3, it’s all about love. So you can’t as you move from the first part of chapter 3 to the second part, think that he talks about something completely different. To John’s mind, he’s not talking about anything different. What he’s talking about is the fact God - what does God love? “I love justice.” God loves righteousness. So God the Father loves righteousness; God the Son does, the Holy Spirit.
Now when it comes to us we mimic that. So we love righteousness and justice. Well what’s the source of righteousness and justice that’s the object of our love? The Holy Spirit’s work in other believers. This is why this is not impossible to apply as it first seems. It first seems like when you read this that we are to love one another warts and all. We all know people in our own families in fact that they’re very difficult people to love anyway because they’re obnoxious. Every family has its idiots so we understand that. That’s just the way life is. But what he’s talking about is loving the brethren in the sense that you know that the Holy Spirit is at work in this person’s life. That’s what you’re loving. It’s a completely different mental attitude in this area.
So let’s work and see how he follows this up. There’s an analogy if you go back to the vine. When we dealt with the vineyard I said something about how - remember we had a picture of the Furches’ vineyard and the vines were planted north south. We said one of the reasons why in all agriculture you plant plants on a north south row and not east west is because the sun is doing this. So the sun is impacting on the east side of the plant. The sun comes overhead impacts from the top of the plant; the sun sets in the west from the west side of the plant. So the whole plant gets light.
Let’s think of the illustration here. How has John used light already in this epistle? What is light a metaphor of? Remember he says in chapter 1:
NKJ 1 John 1:5 …that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.
What’s he talking about there? God’s righteousness, God’s justice - right? So he’s talking about God’s nature.
NKJ 1 John 1:5 …that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.
Now life on this planet starts with plants. It doesn’t start with animals. It starts with plants. So plants if you think about the origin of life in the chronological sense here, cause effect I mean, if you think of life as dependent on light, think of the analogy.
This is the light meter. This is used. I got this because if you can put it out in your yard at different places, turn it on for 12 hours; and it’ll tell you whether you’ve got full sun, half sun-half shade, or shade. It tells you how to plant because certain plants need to have more light than other plants. So you figure out in every point where you want to plant something what’s the light pattern on a 12-hour period on a sunny day. So you measure light.
Why are you doing that? Because you want to have production. The plant’s got to make life, chlorophyll - energize. The whole process is energized by light energy. So obviously if the plant is very efficient at producing chlorophyll and it’s energetics with light then you can kind of compromise and, “Ah we’ll just do this in partial shade or something,” and it’s not lethal to the plant. But the idea here is that light produces life. That’s a metaphor in general revelation. That’s out there in the trees. It’s out there in the grasses. It’s out there in the flowers. That’s the way God designed. But it’s more than His design. It’s a metaphor intended to teach us something.
Applied to the spiritual life, God’s nature (His righteousness and His justice) is what gives eternal life. You need the righteousness and the justice to have life functional. So that’s the background now.
Now let’s watch what he does with this. In verse 10:
NKJ 1 John 3:10 …nor is he who does not love his brother.
Then he says verse 11 and as you read verse 11, what’s the first word you see? Why is that verse important – first word verse 11? Why is that first word an important word? Anyone? What does that do to the sentence in verse 11 and the sentence in verse 10? It connects them. It makes verse 11 an explanation of verse 10. So when you read like this, watch the structures.
So he says:
NKJ 1 John 3:10 …Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is he who does not love his brother.
“Well, that’s bigoted, John. That’s kind of arrogant to say something like that. Aren’t you judging?”
In verse 11, he says, “Here’s my explanation.”
NKJ 1 John 3:11 For this is the message that you heard from the beginning, that we should love one another,
Well if that’s the message from God who is righteousness and we don’t do it, how can we say we’re of God? So that’s the explanation of verse 10. Verse 10 is not an arrogant statement given the content of verse 11. Verse 11 says that this is the message. The message is what God has revealed. We’re supposed to love one another. Okay.
Now the next few verses are fundamental in understanding not just crime but all social sin. This is a classic passage like I say I Samuel 8 is a classic political passage. This 1 John 3 is a classic passage. We’re going to go back to the Old Testament so you get the flavor here. This is the classic in understanding criminality. Anyone who studies criminology or is in police work or that sort of thing needs to see this passage. This explains crime. This is the first crime in human history. It’s fratricide. So watch how John explains why this crime started.
NKJ 1 John 3:11 For this is the message that you heard from the beginning, that we should love one another,
We’re all spiritual brothers. So he goes back to the first pair of brothers who were Cain and Abel. They’re the first brothers. This is another example of going back to the first origin point in the flow of revelation to understand the principle.
NKJ 1 John 3:12 not as Cain who was of the wicked one and murdered his brother…
There’s the first crime in history, fratricide. And why did he murder him - purpose? Now we have all kinds of economists and sociologists arguing that crime today is the result of poverty in the inner city, which is bologna because crime rates did not go up in the depression. If there’s a correlation – really if economics is the cause of crime, why didn’t you have an increase in crime in the depression? Well, you didn’t. The reason was back in the 30’s society still had some Christian restraints to it. So the argument is a fallacious argument. You hear it all the time. It’s in the media. It’s in twitter. It’s in Facebook. It’s in all these comments. It’s bologna. That’s not the reason for crime. Here’s the reason for crime.
We should love one another…
NKJ 1 John 3:12 not as Cain who was of the wicked one and murdered his brother
By the way notice source of the behavior of Cain, the wicked one. We’re going to go back to Genesis 2 in just a moment; and we’ll see what it means there.
NKJ 1 John 3:12 not as Cain who was of the wicked one and murdered his brother..And why did he murder him? Because his works were evil and his brother's righteous
Ah! Now we’ve got another little thing going, don’t we here? This isn’t a sociological problem. This is a theological problem. This is a spiritual problem. Cain didn’t like what his brother represented; and his brother represented a principle that just stuck in Cain’s face and reminded Cain – “Hey pal, you’re made in God’s image. This is God’s world, not yours son. You live this way.”
“I don’t like living that way.”
Sorry, you have no choice.
“Well, I’ll show you I’ve got a choice.”
See that’s not sociology. That’s spiritual. That’s the spiritual origin of crime. It’s an anger at God’s design. It is an anger at the fact that He requires responsibility. It is anger over the fact that other people have property that they worked for and earned and because you’re so lazy you can’t do it. So you want to take somebody else’s property because you’re lazy. You’re defiant. You don’t want to apply God’s principles. Then you’re wining about why you’re the thief. That’s the spiritual source of crime.
Now we’re going to go to the passage itself. So let’s go to Genesis 4. Genesis 4 is not only critical for crime and understanding crime; but it’s understanding psychological counseling. Here’s a case where God models counseling method.
NKJ Genesis 4:3 And in the process of time it came to pass that Cain brought an offering of the fruit of the ground to the LORD.
4 Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat. And the LORD respected Abel and his offering,
5 but He did not respect Cain and his offering.
Oh, oh. We’ve got a problem. Theologians and scholars have speculated on what’s going on here. On a superficial look it appears that God evidently had a protocol of approach.
“When you come to Me (this is right after Genesis - fall)…when you come to Me, you’re not going to show up here without a sacrifice, and I’m going to tell you what sacrifice because you don’t create the universe. You haven’t created the world. You don’t run the world. I run the world. That means you adjust to Me; I don’t adjust to you.”
So that’s the deal.
So Abel salutes, says “Yes, sir,” does the protocol. No problem.
God is predictable. He tells you to do something – you do it, and you get blessed. That’s predictability. So Cain has this arrogance that he doesn’t see why God requires this.
“This isn’t fair. I want to be equal. I want to be treated fairly.”
So he decides instead of putting an equals sign - God didn’t accept the equal sign between these two offerings. In God’s sight those two offerings are not equal because God defines which one is legitimate and which one is not legitimate.
So God predictably says …what does it say?
NKJ Genesis 4:5 but He did not respect Cain and his offering.
He didn’t accept it. Ooh. God discriminated. Yeah, He sure did. That’s another word that’s bantered around in our social circles by people who haven’t thought 5 minutes about what they’re doing. You can’t avoid discrimination. Every law discriminates.
When I was interacting with our illustrious senators from this state, I get these boilerplate letters back saying, “Well, I don’t believe in discrimination.”
So I wrote back to one of them and I said, “Sure you do. If I were on your office staff and I confiscate some of the office cash fund are you going to discriminate me or not?”
No answer. Well, of course there’s no answer because they can’t answer it. Every law discriminates. Laws don’t end discrimination. They change whom you discriminate against. Discrimination shifts by regulations and laws; it doesn’t disappear by regulations and laws.
You can’t use a noun in the English language, the German language, Hebrew language or any other language without discriminating, can you? Don’t you discriminate when you use a noun? A noun means this; it doesn’t mean that. That’s discrimination. So you can’t even speak or write without discrimination. So this idea we’re going to do away with discrimination is one of the most trivial, superficial, emotional slogans going on in our society. I’ll bet you people have given one second thought to what they’re talking about. Okay, God discriminates.
So now Cain doesn’t like to be discriminated against. So what happens? What’s the first result of God’s discrimination in Cain? Is it murder yet? It’s not murder yet. What precedes murder? Anger and hatred. So the first thing is he’s angry.
Now what’s the second verb you notice? What else does that tell you about his psychological state? When people are angry often what happens? They get depressed. So now we have two things going on psychologically in this boy. He’s angry; and he’s depressed. That doesn’t mean all depression is due to anger; but a lot of it is. So here we have anger and depression - time for counseling.
So God shows up - next verse. What does God do in verse 6?
NKJ Genesis 4:6 So the LORD said to Cain, "Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen?
(Why are you depressed?) Is this an indicative type sentence or is this an interrogative sentence? Interrogative isn’t it? It’s a question. Why does God begin counseling with a question, do you suppose? It gets you thinking. So God comes, and He asks a question. Is that how he started a conversation with Adam and Eve? A question, because a question forces somebody to start thinking. And if they’re emotional like a depressed person, the first thing you have to do is turn down the emotions and turn up the thinking because you can’t solve the problem when you’re emoting. You’ve got to go this way; and a question does that. So God then comes with a question.
He says, “Why are you angry? Why are you depressed?”
Now He gives a principle to Cain. God always gives principles. Theses are how-to’s. Who is better to tell how to live than God who designed us? So now God gives him a principle. Here is the insight into why a crime occurred here.
It says:
NKJ Genesis 4:7 "If you do well,
That is you follow My revelation; you follow what I have told you to do…
will you not be accepted?
He goes back to the original problem. What was Cain’s original problem? What got him into the anger and what got him into the depression? What was he trying to do? Make his own deal.
And God says:
NKJ Genesis 4:7 "If you do well,
“Do what I tell you to do, abandon your stupid approach to life and get some smarts son, and then you’ll be accepted.”
All right. That’s it.
He wasn’t giving Cain a pill – not that pills are - I’m not knocking medication because sometimes that’s needed. I’m just saying in this situation, he didn’t need a pill. He needed to understand why he had made a wrong decision, go back and correct it and you won’t have a problem. Keep on messing around and watch what happens now. Watch the next principle God says.
He says, “If you do well, you do what I tell you to do; you won’t be discriminated against.”
NKJ Genesis 4:7 …And if you do not do well,
You decide to live in your fantasyland…
sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it."
Sin lies at the door. It’s a picture in the Hebrew language of an animal crouching before he pounces on his prey. That’s the picture that God says the sinful forces of this world you know not of. There are principalities and powers that can energize sin, and you have no idea how much voltage they can put onto your line.
So He says, “You do what I tell you to do, son, or your whole neurological system is wide open to the evil one; and he will empower you. You’re going to have to struggle with him as you would a stalking lion. So what do you want? Do you want the easy choice (go back and do what I told you to do) or keep messing around? Now you’re going to get into high voltage; and it’s not going to be pleasant.”
And sure enough what did Cain do? John in the Greek tells you how he even killed his brother, killed him with a knife because the Greek word is he slew is brother. We can’t tell for sure, but it’s probably in his profound anger and hatred of his brother he took a knife which he saw his brother slit the throat of the lamb and he slit his brother’s throat as an ultimate act of defiance.
“Okay God, you like blood sacrifice. Try this one on.”
He slit his brother’s throat. That’s the first crime people in history. Do we learn a lot about crime by looking at this picture? This picture ought to be studied by every penologist, by every judge, by every police person, by everyone involved in this because it shows you how violent crime starts. It doesn’t start with a crime. It starts with a mental attitude sin and when mental attitude sins are not dealt with, they have a way of multiplying into aggressive behavior like this fratricide. So it happens.
Just to show you that in the New Testament this principle also holds, turn to Ephesians 4 when Paul is talking to believers in Ephesus. He warns believers of a very similar thing that can happen in our Christian lives. Chapter 4, verse 17.
See we live in a secular culture. We’re not used to thinking this way. We’re not used to thinking that there are actually principalities and powers unseen all around us that can influence human behavior, that can put thoughts into our minds in a second. We have to be alert, not sleeping, not passive.
In Ephesians 4:17:
NKJ Ephesians 4:17 This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind,
18 having their understanding darkened,
That means consciences are not calibrated. Their minds are sub-functional.
being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart;
Look at the words here: futility, ignorance, blindness.
19 who, being past feeling,
That is sensitive to conscience.
have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.
NKJ Ephesians 4:20 But you have not so learned Christ,
21 if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus:
22 that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts,
23 and be renewed in the spirit of your mind,
24 and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.
That’s exactly what John’s talking about.
25 Therefore, putting away lying, "Let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor," for we are members of one another.
26 "Be angry,
Now look at this. Look what has happened right here. We go on with the same kind of thing we noticed in Genesis 4.
26 "Be angry, and do not sin"
We’re not going to go into all that but…
do not let the sun go down on your wrath,
In other words, take a break. You may have legitimate causes for anger but when it perpetuates more than 24 hours, we’d better watch it because that anger is eating away physically and biochemically. It’s causing hormone changes in your body - all kinds of changes, chemical changes. When you get angry, one biochemist said it’s causing over 1,200 biochemical changes within minutes. Is that the kind of toxicity you want in your body? One thousand two hundred chemical changes because you’re angry and you perpetuate the anger?
do not let the sun go down on your wrath,
There are tools in the Bible to deal with this.
Then he says in verse 27 – and here’s the parallel to Genesis 4:
NKJ Ephesians 4:27 nor give place to
To who?
the devil.
You get vulnerable to evil powers by getting angry and out of fellowship. You’re just a target. You are painting a target on yourself by doing this. That’s inconceivable to a materialist secular culture. We can’t think that way. It’s very difficult to think that way; but we have to think that way because our Lord speaks to us through the Scriptures. That’s how the Scriptures speak to us.
Okay. Summary then. Why did Cain kill his brother? You’re making a video. You’re the scriptwriters. You’re the people that are signing the actors and actresses here. You’re trying to explain to the audience in this cinema graphic thing here, Cain killing his brother. So one tool you’ve got is to have the actor that’s playing Cain talk in a soliloquy. In this soliloquy he’s talking to himself; but he’s revealing to the audience watching the video his mind. What would you put in the soliloquy? He’s angry. He’s being discriminated against by God; and now he’s about to take that knife. What would you put into the mouth of the actor as he talks to himself?
George.
Comment The thing that pops out to me is how dare God tell me that I have to jump through this hoop. How is it that I am so little and He thinks that He’s so big that He can tell me that I have to do all these things.
Okay, George has said he would put into the actor’s mouth - “How dare God tell me that I have to conform to His protocol. Who does He think He is?”
He thinks He’s God. That’s one thing.
Now notice something else. Yes.
Comment
Laura is bringing up the point I was just going to bring up. The immediate target is Abel, not God. But God is the ultimate target here. Does Cain have any way of getting back at God directly? No, so how does he get back at God? Through God’s representative. And who is God’s representative? Abel. He can’t lash out at God. He lashes out at a nearby target that reminds him of his problem with God.
Isn’t that how crime starts? Isn’t the thief angry at the fact that somebody has something he wants and he doesn’t want to work for it like the person who possesses it. That’s the protocol of life. Sorry pal, that’s how wealth happens. It happens through something called labor. It doesn’t come on a parachute. It comes by your personal decisions.
Our time is up. I think we have more fruitful thing but notice the next verse in here. What does it say by way of application to us?
NKJ 1 John 3:13 Do not marvel,
That what?
my brethren, if the world hates you.
See how quickly John brings this up to us. That’s the spirit of the world. We are representative like Abel. Therefore, and we’re seeing it in our culture today, the increasing hostility to Christian business owners, hostility toward Christian students on the university campus, hostility toward the Christians in Syria that were crucified this week – literally crucified this week. That anger, that hatred, is motivated ultimately by a Christ hater.
Comment
We’re two minutes over so let’s close in a word of prayer.
(Closing prayer)