Clough Genesis Lesson 18
Life in a fallen world; things leading up to the first murder – Genesis 4:1-8
In our series we have studied the origins of many things and the last few weeks in Genesis 3 we’ve dealt especially with the origin of evil. It’s very important to biblical Christianity that we be very, very clear that evil has moral value or it can be placed on the moral value scale only if a literal Genesis is followed; only if there is a literal curse, only if the creation was perfectly good when it left the hand of God and later it was introduced by man’s rebellion against God. Only if those conditions are met is it possible to say that we ought to wage war against evil because if evil instead is part of reality, like atoms and molecules, and light and darkness, if evil is simply part of what is there’s no use struggling against it; it’s just there and its unavoidable. That’s the position all non-Christian are in.
In Genesis 3:22-24 we have the expulsion of
man from the garden in
In the Word of God suffering is caused by several things and for the Christian the Word of God lists at least six different areas or causes of suffering; three of these are deserved and three are basically undeserved. From the first standpoint, and that’s the basis of Genesis 3, all suffering starts with the fall. The fall is the cause behind every bit of suffering. Now in the technical nitpicky sense, from the Christian position and the Biblical position, all suffering is deserved. That may seem harsh when you think of the baby who has just been born who dies, and you say well, what did that baby do to deserve that. The existence of death in the universe is a desert for Adam and for all his seed; the infant is part of the seed of Adam and therefore he too is considered to be, by God, a part of Adam. And he is expelled into the fallen world.
The doctrine of suffering also reminds us that we suffer when, in addition to the fall, we rebel further against the Word of God. And further rebellion leads to further damnation. We are reminded in the Word of God that by our association with other people who are suffering in the divine institutions, we too suffer. That’s part of the way God has structured history. If the wife suffers, her husband in the divine institution of marriage suffers with her. If, in the fourth divine institution, which is the institution of the state, you have a large number of incompetents and spiritually rebellious people in the society, then the Christian element in that society will suffer with them. And so it goes, we suffer by our association with others in the divine institution. And then the Christians also suffer because they are associated with Christ in Satan’s world, and because of this Satan hates the Christian, not because of their particular thing but simply by their identification, that is, they carry the flag, as it were, of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in Satan’s world to carry the tenants and the flag of Christ is to declare your treason to the system, and therefore the system, as the New Testament says, hates this kind of thing. The Bible also tells us that Christians suffer in order to learn. Jesus Christ Himself learned obedience through the things that He suffered, and so suffering performs a pedagogical function.
And finally, suffering performs a
witnessing function in that through suffering a testimony is produced to God’s
glory and to His grace throughout the entire creation. Angels observe
Christians according to Ephesians
In the passage today, Genesis 4:1-8, describes the many things leading up to history’s first murder. And it’s a very interesting exposure of life in a fallen world because it exposes all of us. This is what is so difficult about the Genesis text, in that Genesis exposes the depravity of the human heart. It’s not an easy passage of Scripture because the Holy Spirit, as it were, is ruthlessly ripping off all the fig leaves and showing us for what we really are, and in this narrative today we have hatred and the mental attitude sin behind murder, the archetype of all crime. Incidentally, you will discover here man’s culpability, that this cute thing that is used in the jurisprudence circle about one was temporarily insane is a denial of the Word of God. God says that no one is temporarily insane, that all men are held culpable for their crime, and so in this, the first time that crime occurs in history it would do us well to pay attention to the mechanics of what leads men to their cruelty.
Genesis 4:1, it starts off where the promise left off. Genesis 3:15, in this passage God promised grace through the seed of the woman, and the scene was childbirth, that though the woman was the agent of damnation she was also the agent of grace. And in verse 1, “Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bore Cain, and she said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.” It’s interesting that the theme of these first 8 verses is tied to the theme of the firstborn. Cain is the firstborn of the woman; in verse 4 Abel brings of the flock, sheep, the firstborn to the Lord. And before the passage is over the firstborn sacrifices, but not himself or an animal sacrifice, but his own brother. So obviously the first murder is committed within the overall context of life-giving.
Eve conceived and she bears Cain; in the Hebrew the word is a play on the verb. The way parents name their children tells a lot about the parents. For example, in families that value the tradition of their family you’ll often see children named and somewhere their middle name or their first name will reflect the grandfather or some beloved person in the family. And they will remember past generations by the naming of the children, it’s considered a great honor. And in other places where the Word of God is taught consistently in a culture you will find a high percent of biblical names. It’s interesting, for example, that on the rolls of the population census how many Judas’ do you find. You see, how people are named is a reflection of how people think. So Eve is no exception.
As the first mother of history, giving
birth to the first baby of history, she gives the first name that has ever been
given by a mother to her born son, “Cain,” in the Hebrew it looks like this and
it comes from a word qanah, which
means I have acquired. And that’s the
play on the words. The word translated
in the English, “I have gotten” is the word Cain. “I have,” as it were, “Cain-ed a man,” I have
acquired a man and so I will call him Cain.
Implicit in Eve’s naming of her son is that this woman has now become a
believer. We said Adam became a believer
back when he names his wife in Genesis
Now in Genesis 4:2 which may have happened years later, and may have been many intervening children, including sisters between, we have the birth of Abel. Now again, incidentally the process of the intervening children between verse 1 and verse 2, and then after verse 2, the sisters, is a problem we’ll discuss in verse 17 when we answer the question, where did Cain get his wife. But right here we’re interested only in how Eve named her second son, or at least the second one that the Scriptures speak of and when she named this son she named him literally, habel, and habel is the Hebrew word that you are familiar with from the book of Ecclesiastes, it is the word that is the theme of the book of Ecclesiastes. In the book of Ecclesiastes habel refers to vanity, “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher.” It’s a great popular quote from that book. And by vanity the Bible refers to human existence apart from God. That is, in the fallen world it says in James our life is but a vapor that vanishes quickly away, it’s just a reminder, kind of a jab, as it were, in our ribs from God that apart from Him there is nothing to life.
And by this time, when Eve comes to the point from naming her first son, I have acquired, to naming the second boy, habel, you can tell what’s happened to this woman. In the process of time Eve has discovered what it means to be a woman living in a fallen world. She’s discovered the sorrow of childbirth; she has discovered the fact that the world outside of that garden is evil, that there’s a constant struggle with sin in the flesh, that life really just by itself, apart from God, is not very pleasant after all, and so it’s reflected in the woman’s mentality and that in turn is spilled out into the name of her baby son, habel.
Immediately the text goes on, years later,
perhaps 20 or 30 by the end of verse 2 to describe the next thing that happens
in their lives that is of significance to the Holy Spirit, and that is
something that is responsible for all real production, the division of labor. No society can be productive unless people
specialize; there has got to be specialization.
And the lifeblood of specialization is division of labor. We would not be anywhere near where we are if
we all had to raise our own food in the backyard, like the (quote)
“underdeveloped nations.” In this
situation everybody is a farmer, everybody is a rancher, everybody tries to do
basically the same life support skills, and everybody is basically
mediocre. And therefore the society is
basically mediocre. But in your advanced
societies they’ve latched on to this principle of division of labor and here
notice, contrary to our evolutionary fanatic friends, here division of labor is
something that begin, not with Neanderthal, it begins with Adam and Eve; it
begins right from the very start; it’s not a late social development. We don’t
have, for example, in
So “Abel was a keeper of sheep; but Cain was a tiller of the ground.” Adam, in the Bible, was given the overall mandate to subdue the earth. That means out from Adam, eventually the division of labor in his sons, his grandsons, and his great-grandsons, men would fan out and begin to subdue the earth in every area, there would be the arts, there would be the sciences, there would be the skills of craftsmen, there would be the areas of building and construction, there would be areas of farming and agriculture. All these are part of the overall mandate to subdue the earth. But each of Adam’s sons and his grandsons specialized in a division of labor and collectively they carry out the mandate to subdue the earth.
Here, the first two occupations, tilling of the earth and the keeping of sheep, are interesting because they are related to the previous chapter. In the previous chapter what had God said? He told Adam, you will till the ground; in chapter 2, you will till the ground and so his sons come into the field of agriculture; Cain. And then the first rancher is Abel. Now where did Habel, or Abel, where did he get his idea of ranching from, particularly the flocks of sheep? I suggest he got it from Genesis 3:21, when God first took, perhaps a lamb, and skinned it and provided man with a leather coat, a leather tunic, that there Adam, Eve, and later their sons, realized there was a use for animals in providing clothing, perhaps even animals were killed not for food but for clothing before the flood; I don’t know. At least they were used for sacrifice and other purposes.
We have these two men specialized in their occupation, and you know the story because it was read before the lesson, you know how it’s going to wind up, so since you know where the story is going to go you ought to ask yourself as you read through the text, why are the verses structured in the sequence? What is the author trying to do with approaching the text this way? Well, it fits perfectly with what we know of the Bible. What did we say in the area of the curse, how the curse affects the male and how it affects the female? The female is always affected in the area of childbearing and childrearing. That’s the curse of Genesis 3:16. But when is the man affected? He is affected on the job. And as one who is affected on the job, the male is going to get hit most severely, not in his relationships at home, he will get hit most severely in his relationships outside of the home as a producer. And so that’s why verse 2 skips from the time that those baby boys, were born until the time they become grown men and are active in labor, and it’s in the environment of their job that murder first arises.
[Genesis 4:3,] “In the process of time it came to pass,” that means after a while, or after a little while is the force of the Hebrew idiom, it means after a while when they went into a business; it’s not too long that these men have been in business when this incident happens. We know this by the way they operate with the “first fruit” concept, or the “first born” concept. As in every business there’s going to be a period of red until there can be some profit made, and when the profit is made, immediately the issue comes up as to the stewardship of what you have produced. Now precisely at Genesis 4 in this murder story the issue is the profits, the first profits of both their businesses. The male now is face to face with his worship of God; it’s not going to church, it’s his disposition of his resources.
And so in verse 3 we read, “after a while,” when their business had become profitable, “Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering….” [4] “And Able, he also brought of the first of his flock,” so we have the profit making and we have the profit making connected with offering, offering to God. And here, since we have the origin of offering and sacrifice we want to stop a moment and study something.
Most times when Genesis 4 is taught we Bible teachers always make a point of verse 3-4 and that one of these offerings is blood, that is, a blood sacrifice for shadowing Christ’s finished work, and the other is non-blood, and therefore we always note that God pays attention to Abel and his blood sacrifice and Cain and his blood-less sacrifice are simply bypassed by God. And we say that the difference is one of typology. Well, this may figure into it but that’s not the whole story for a very simple reason. In the Old Testament there were lots of non-blood offerings, all the meal offerings in the Levitical code were non-blood, agriculture, botanical type offerings. So we’ve got to back track here and say whoops, hold it, let’s not dive so fast into the text; let’s back up a moment and ask ourselves by offering do we always mean blood sacrifice, substitutionary sacrificial offerings? Is that the only kind of offering, or is that just one kind of a more general idea of offering.
In other words, in the Bible do we have this kind of thing? Do we have a general idea of what it means for a man to give offering to God, and then on top of this we have a specialization of the substitutionary blood atonement type offering for his sin. Is “offering” bigger than just offering for sin?
Let’s come to the New Testament, and this is good to go to because it’s on the other side of the cross of Christ. The substitutionary blood atonement has already been given, and in Romans 12:1, lo and behold, we encounter the idea of offering and it is not a substitutionary blood atonement, and it has nothing to do with atoning for sin whatsoever. Romans 12:1, the primary idea is not to atone for sin. “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your spiritual service.” Now that is the point which we reach in the morning service, in the evening, and that’s what we mean when we say when the offering plate is passed, that’s the point when it’s not money that’s the issue as much, because many people might not have funds. It’s not that, that is the point in the service when as believers we respond to the Word by thinking through the whole idea of what offering and dedication means. And obviously in Romans 12:1 he’s not talking about money.
In Romans 12:1 what he’s talking about is that you present your bodies a living sacrifice and that is talking about your life, the intangible things of life, the time, the talent and so on, all these things themselves are an offering. So “offering” is not just offering for sin, very obviously the end of verse 1 is talking about offering in service. It’s talking about something going on in time.
If you turn to Ephesians 5, to the very passage on the filling of the Holy Spirit, one quoted so frequently, and you look after Ephesians 5:18, where it’s talking about the filling of the Spirit, you’ll notice what is first mentioned? “Speaking among yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, [20] Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Now obviously “offering” here hasn’t so much to do with to atone for sin, it’s more connected to nothing more profound than giving thanks, a thank offering. It’s to show our appreciation for God.
In Hebrews
Well now we’ve discovered something. If the basic idea behind offering is expressing out thanks to God, what are we being thankful for? We’re being thankful for what He’s blessed. Well, then why is this important at the point when a man makes his first profit? Let’s look at this so we can understand what Cain and Abel are doing. Let’s look at God’s attributes. God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable and eternal; these are some of the attributes of God and all of these become foci for our concentration when an offering is made.
Let’s watch a man, say Abel or Cain, and he’s got to the point in his business where he gains his first profit. Now at this point he has a choice; he can take that first profit and say okay, I worked hard for this, I have sweated, I have slaved, I have had things go wrong in my business, this person failed me, that person failed me, that deal fell through and finally I have got my first profit. And I’ll tell you what I’m going to do with my first profit, I’m going to clutch it and I’m going to keep it because this is mine! And then after I’ve made some money on down the road we’ll talk about giving thanks to God. I’m not talking about giving to the church; I’m talking about the mental attitude with respect to God. And so there’s this clutching, that I am going to clutch what I have attained, you know, like the farmers around here that always ask for prayer when there’s no rain, and then every time when it rains we never hear any thanksgiving from the same people that asked us to pray, because I and my great fertilizer did this and I and my great hybrid seeds did this, and I and my fine irrigation system did all this. But God, no, He’s not involved in the process, except when it doesn’t rain and suddenly He becomes involved in the process, that attitude. And of course it happens in other businesses.
So at this point if a man doesn’t do that, if he doesn’t clutch and he says all right, this is my first profit, now this if the first tangible evidence that God is blessing my business, and I’ll tell you what I’m going to do; instead of clutching it I’m going to offer it back to God. Now to really do that in a relaxed way requires a tremendous attitude toward God’s grace. It requires, first of all, that a man believe in God’s sovereignty for tomorrow, because in taking the very profit he makes today and offering it to God means boy, he’d better make a profit tomorrow. So who’s in charge of tomorrow? I’ve got to be assured that the same God who gave me the profit today is the same God who’s going to be on the throne tomorrow. I’ve got to, therefore, believe in His kingship and His rule over all events of history including business events. And then this God who is righteous and just, I’ve got to believe that He’s going to do me right tomorrow, because if I don’t then I’m going to clutch it while I’ve got it because there’s no telling who’s going to fake me out tomorrow.
But if I believe that the judge of all the
earth will do right, then I can relax about tomorrow. If I take it God is a God who loves, then I
know that my needs He cares for tomorrow and I don’t have to clutch, I can give
to Him and relax in a relaxed offering.
If I believe in a God who is omniscient I know that He knows my needs
for tomorrow and I don’t have to say well, He doesn’t understand the situation
and I’ll get this and then I’ll give Him a little tip later. If I believe God is omnipotent then I believe
that He is able to provide for my needs through all the hairy hurdles of my
life. If I believe that God is
omnipresent then I know that He is here and He’s not a distant God that I have
to get on a long distance telephone to.
If I believe that God is immutable then I know that He stands behind His Word, His Word tomorrow will be as valid then as it is today and if I believe God is eternal then He always existed and He is going to be in existence tomorrow and He will never change tomorrow; that coupled with immutability and so I can relax. And so you see, the issue of Abel and Cain is an issue of whether they’re going to clutch their first profit, the first production of the earth, of man subduing the earth, and defy God and say ours, we did this, or are they going to say all right, I trust God’s character and we be thankful.
Let’s watch what Cain and Abel do. This is the struggle of the man in a fallen world; Eve’s struggle is implied in Genesis 4:1-2, the things she learned between her first son and her second son. The man’s struggle is in their business. And if they’re going to relax in God they can be future oriented men, looking into the future and be optimistic; if they’re pagan in their orientation they will be present centered men, and you can test, by the way, a very good business rule, a very good banking and finance rule to test any country as to whether the majority of the citizens look forward or whether they look at the present, is nothing more than the interest rates that are paid on loans. In a society that is present centered and selfish you will always have money consumed in loans, and therefore it’s bid up and therefore you have high interest in a present centered society. On the other hand, in a society that is relaxed about the future, that can save now and postpone present desires for future needs, and seize an optimistic tomorrow, then this affects the loan rate.
This is not the only thing, of course, that influences loan rates but it’s one of the great factors. A man by the name of Weber wrote a book, very famous, showing how the capitalism in the industrial revolution was attainable in northern Europe only because of one thing, those big “baddy” Calvinists that went all over Europe and the nasty prissy Puritans who were the future oriented men and women who saved their money and amassed the capital that made Europe great. And as, of course, Calvinism and Puritanist theology diminishes in the West the West is becoming more and more indebted until the United States personal debt today is 3.6 trillion dollars. That’s our children and our grandchildren’s wealth that we have ripped them off of because we want to enjoy our life today and to hell with out children and their children, let them pay our 3.6 trillion dollar indebtedness; buy now and pay later, even if it’s your grandchildren that have to do the paying. See, this is the mentality of what happens in a world that hates the future, that has no relaxation in the sovereignty of God, that has totally reversed the faith of Calvinism and the great Puritans and that built the West into the great industrial power it once was.
We have, then, Cain and Abel and they both bring offerings but there’s a difference in the offerings and now we’re prepared to see the difference in the offerings. In Genesis 4:4 the Hebrew has a little particle in there that’s hard to translate in the English but it reads something like this: “And Abel…” [dot, dot, dot], he” [underlined] did this, and the emphasis is there’s something Abel did that Cain didn’t do. Now we can’t attribute it to just the fact that Abel brought a blood sacrifice; that’s true, but there’s something else in the text, if you read it carefully, that Cain didn’t do that Abel did do and it’s related to their business.
In the Old Testament it was all right to offer the fruit of the field if what was offered out of the field was first fruits, first profits, first production, and that’s what’s missing in verse 3. Cain comes and he offers things from his field, he offers the profit of his business but it’s not the first profit of his business, it’s not the first penny, it’s not the first dollar, he’s clutched that because he’s not quite sure whether God will bless him tomorrow and clutching that and running down to the bank to deposit that and then we turn around and our second or third profit, then by that time, we’ll discuss this matter about offering to God, whereas in verse 4 when Abel, when his flock finally produces, he takes “the firstlings of his flock,” the first part of his profit and he confesses his faith in God by his management of his money in his business.
And this becomes a sign of orthodoxy, the management of their business because in the last of verse 4, in a very picturesque passage, it says that “Jehovah looked,” the Hebrew word there is the word that means He gazed; if you want to dramatize this in your mind’s eye, think of the two men having their offering placed on, say this table in front of them, they’re both side by side, and visualize God walking by and God walks by Abel and He stops and he pauses and He looks down at the table and He looks up at Abel’s eyes, and Abel knows by the way that God looks at him that this is pleasing. And then God walks off, never once stopping even to look at the table of Cain, never once catching his eye. Can you feel the animosity rise, to be totally ignored by God? That’s what happened, and that’s what the Hebrew means in a very colorful expression lost somewhat by the translation, “The LORD gazed to Abel and to his offering.” He caught his eyes, and He indicated by that little act He appreciated him. And Cain, He walked right by. Genesis 4:5, “And Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell.”
Now let’s see the rise of crime. The first great crime of history: how did it start and what are its mechanics. Was Cain just momentarily criminally insane at the time of the crime or was this a long, premeditated type situation. Let’s watch how the Bible analyzes crime. Cain begins with a mental attitude sin.
This is confirmed for us by New Testament data. Turn to Luke 11; I turn here as part of my continued propaganda from the pulpit in convincing you that you cannot take a figurative or allegorical view of Genesis, that you must take a literal view or you have no view, because in Luke 11 we have the Lord Jesus Christ commenting on this story, therefore what’s good enough for Jesus is good enough for me.
Luke 11:50-51; of course we understand that Jesus did not have His doctorate and was probably quite uninformed about higher criticism. In Luke 11:50, “That the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation; [51] From the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the temple. Verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this generation.” A rather nasty thing for Jesus to say to anybody but nevertheless He said it and He selected two particular murders of history. Now why did He select those, there are lots of other good murders in the Old Testament, why pick those two? It’s simple; the Hebrew canon began and ended a different way than ours. The Hebrew Old Testament doesn’t end with Malachi, it ends with 2 Chronicles, and that being the case, then you have the last murder of 2 Chronicles which is the murder of Zechariah, and you have Genesis beginning the Hebrew canon and so the first murder of history is Abel. And so Jesus picks the first murder and the last murder of the Hebrew canon and He says from one end of the Hebrew canon to the other you people have murdered, murdered, murdered. And He says, moreover, it’s not just murder, it’s murder for a particular motive. What is the motive, ultimately in murder? It’s not personality problems, it’s not “I have not and he has,” it’s not just that simple. The Bible says that the motive in murder is defiance of God.
Particularly note in this comment of Jesus where Zechariah was murdered, he picks the place, “he perished between the altar and the temple,” it’s a picture of religious murder; murder because of his identification with Christ in a fallen world, murder because he is identified with righteousness over against people that want to twist the Word of God into their own mold and they can’t as long as they have a Zechariah around to straighten them out, so he has to be eliminated and gotten out of the way. So we infer from Luke 11:50-51 that Abel too was somehow murdered in connection with his testimony.
Notice too in verse 50, “the blood of all the prophets,” from Abel onward, and it indicates the Lord Jesus Christ considered Abel to be the prophet of this family. Why he was we don’t know, but apparently he was the leading student of the Word of God in his home, and it was Abel, not his older brother, Cain, who basically was the dispenser of Bible doctrine in the family and therefore was the one who received the most vilification and hatred.
One more passage in the New Testament comments on Abel and Cain; 1 John 3:12, this even tells us how he was killed. With this we also have deep irony, the method of the murder. Notice in this passage of 1 John 3 the theme. You’ll notice in 1 John 3:9, “Whosoever is born of God does not commit sin for his seed remains in him,” you see the imagery behind 1 John 3 is the war of the seed, the very war mentioned in Genesis 3, his seed, God says to the serpent, your seed shall fight against the seed of the woman, and her seed shall fight against yours, the two fighting seeds, or the two lines of descendants in history will conduct a never-ending war. And so 1 John speaks of this war, “…for his seed remains in him …he is born of God.” That’s one seed. 1 John 3:11, “For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. [12] Not as Cain, who was the wicked one,” there’s the other seed, the two seeds colliding, Cain, “who slew his brother. And why did he slew him?” According to John, “Because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous.” Notice that, there is the motive, it wasn’t a mere brother/brother type argument that led to murder; it was because his brother’s acts and his brother’s principle was righteous and his was unrighteous and he was condemned.
You know how it is, if you’ve done wrong and there’s somebody around, just in the environment, though they may be quiet, they keep reminding you of your own unconfessed sin and what do you naturally want to do, you sin nature protecting all of its glory? It wants to remove any reminder; conscience is busy reminding on the inside and you can’t do anything about that except take a tranquilizer, and so therefore you’ve got to somehow suppress the reminders on the outside and you can’t get rid of them with tranquilizers so you get rid of them with guns, you eliminate them from the environment, they remind you of your past evil. And so there’s a hatred because his works were righteous and Cain’s were evil.
Notice the verb in 1 John
Turn back to Genesis 4. See, this isn’t a pretty passage of Scripture; this whole section of the Bible isn’t pretty. It disturbs people. I’ve caught more flack in this morning series of Genesis than I have since I went through 1 and 2 Samuel. And I think it’s because people are generally upset by the depravity that’s shown here in the text; it deeply bothers them, it offends them, that the Bible so strips us so far and so radically.
Genesis 4:6, besides this mental attitude, sin, the Hebrew very picturesquely speaks of what’s going on in Cain. It says in the Bible, “Why are you angry?” In the Hebrew here’s how it reads: you’ve heard of being burned up? Here’s the first time it was used in history, “It burned Cain much.” It’s the Hebrew word to burn; it “burned” him that this was going on. And then he said, “your countenance is fallen,” this is a Hebrew idiom meaning you’re depressed and you can see the depression because it’s the way the facial muscles work.
Now with this we have an interesting thing. We said over and over again that the Bible, unlike the Greeks, relates the human spirit and the body together and the meeting ground is the soul where self-consciousness is. And the soul perceives both the spiritual phenomena and the physical phenomena with much the same response pattern. In particular, when our conscience is violated, then the conscience lets our soul know about it, and by the time you’re four years old you’ve figured out pretty well how to short the conscience out, and then there’s a backup system, God has… if you visualize it as wires, over to the body, psychosomatic override here, and so when the conscience is violated signals start going to the organs of your body. Now you can very easily see this in, not so much of the violated conscience, but you can watch it when someone blushes. Try not blushing; it’s a totally involuntary act. The capillaries in your cheeks somehow know that that’s what they’re supposed to do when you’re thinking a certain way. Now how did they learn that, did you train them? No, this was an automatic response, you were born this way. One of the most intriguing books that pointed this was Dr. S. I. McMillan’s book, None of These Diseases, in which he shows how there’s this emotional center in the brain and how it affects all these organs of your body, nothing more than psychosomatic effects. The theology behind this is simply this: your physical body and mine were never built to take mental attitude sin and where you keep inputting the system with mental attitude sin you’re causing bad vibes for your whole body. Your body disintegrates, not just under the death process but you accelerate the death process by mental attitude sin.
And the Hebrew, and the way it describes emotions, has no word for emotions; it’s very interesting, there’s not one word for emotion. It’s all described in terms of the organs of the body, consistently throughout the Word of God. If you want more on that it’s in the Proverbs series. Well, here’s one of those places. It burns, there’s a physically perceptible burning sensation. Why? Because the unseen mental attitude of anger triggers off physiological effects and so Cain burns, and he becomes depressed and his face gets drawn; perhaps the way he holds his body begins to be effected. And so his human spirit communicates to the outside world through the physiology, through his anatomy; his anatomy becomes the transmission vehicle, that’s how he thinks.
So when God comes to him, notice in Genesis 4:6, God doesn’t address him in terms of his mental attitude, God addresses him in terms of what his body is doing. God says hey boy, what are you so burned up about? Why did you get the long face? That’s what He’s saying. Not one mention of the sin. This shows in verse 6 something else interesting about counseling. There are two basic kinds of questions you ask in counseling: one are informative questions and another are questions that are used to generate thought processes. And the questions that you use to generate data, the information questions, are what were you doing, when did you do this, what preceded this, where were you when you did this, who was there. Those are all data questions. But when you get this question why, no longer does it become a problem of data; now what you’re doing is you’re putting a crunch on okay, think, why did it happen. It’s not really a data type question, and so God isn’t asking for data. He knows what’s wrong with Cain in verse 6 so in His counseling to Cain he says, Cain, why is this happening to you, why is your body getting all torn up? Because your mental attitude sin stinks.
And He gives a tremendous warning here and he shows you the promise, in verse 7, that completely sets biblical counseling apart from all non-Christian psychology. Usually in non-Christian circles and this popular stuff you get on the newsstand, you talk about this book and you speak about so and so and they’re all upset and so and so has an emotional problem. They don’t have an emotional problem, their emotions are working fine. The fact they’re all ooooh-ooooh-ooooh like this, their emotions are right in gear, if they had an emotional problem they’d be kind of down, they’d be shot. So it’s not an emotional problem, it’s something else. So stop labeling it for what it isn’t; it’s not an emotional problem, that’s pagan language.
What God says in Genesis 4:7 the basic axiom in biblical psychology is this: behavior influences emotions. Now that, I assert, the direct reverse of what is often handed ministers in counseling courses. You’ve got to deal with the emotions, give them a tranquilizer, give them a depressant. His problem isn’t a tranquilizer depressant, his problem is that he’s a sinner and he’s fouled up in his mental attitude and until he gets it straightened out he’s going to go on being depressed and you can give him all the uppers you want and if you give him too much of those give him some downers, but whatever it is, that’s not going to solve his problem. Watch carefully in verse 7.
Genesis 4:7, God says,” it’s a hiphil use of the verb to do good, “If you produce good,” and then there’s an ellipse in the sentence, “If you produce good, lifting,” end of sentence. Now you wonder, what is this all about, “if you produce good” or “lifting,” all right, remember, this is a highly literal text of Genesis; now what… do you see any place in the text nearby the word “lifting” where there’s a falling. And sure enough in the previous verse what is fallen? The facial muscles. What is that? Depression, result of mental attitude sin. And what is God saying is the way around this? Produce some divine good and you won’t have your depression. You have this inferiority feeling; of course, because you’re inferior, that’s true, you don’t drive your car down the street and because the red light comes on and you don’t like it take a hammer and knock it out, it’s trying to tell you something. And when you have inferior feelings the feelings are trying to communicate; you’re inferior, do something about it. If you feel like a clod it’s because you are. You don’t have to be but you are a clod, you’ve been acting like a clod so now you feel like a clod. It’s the result, not the cause, the results.
So God says now Cain, “if you will start producing good,” and what is the good that God, in context, wants Cain to do? Just get grace oriented big boy. Just stop clutching, you just got your business profit operating, it’s in the black now, what are you doing? It’s all mine! Now what God wants you to do is just simply acknowledge that He’s sovereign, just accept Me as Creator and Savior. That’s where divine good starts and if you’ll start there you’ll solve your problem.
But then, the converse in Genesis 4:7, a very serious warning and a very practical bit of counseling too. “But if you don’t produce divine good, sin crouches at the door.” Now often I’ve read this and I’m sure many people have read verse 7 and taken the door figuratively as a door of the heart or something, the sin there being the sin nature ready to take over. Well, I agree with the sin nature bit but there’s only one problem; no noun so far in Genesis has been used figuratively, so whatever this door is, it’s got to be a literal door some place. Furthermore if you take a concordance you find it’s only, of the hundreds of times it’s used in the Bible it’s only used figuratively twice and that’s way over in the late prophets. Every other time it’s a literal door. So it doesn’t do to say the door here is the door of the heart; the door here is some other door and the solution to this problem shows there’s something neat about how God counsels a person having a problem. What he’s doing in verse 7 is Cain, if you don’t get straightened out, where your problem is, mental attitude sin, buddy… they’re in the house, because the next verse you see they’re out in the field, notice what the next verse says, “Can talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field,” all right, they’re in the house, I don’t know what it looked like, maybe they had cement blocks then, I don’t know. But they have a house here and they’re talking at the table. And he’s saying you set your foot outside of this door buddy, and it’s all over.
And with that we have a marvelous insight into the sin nature and how it works with us. When we have a mental attitude sin and that mental attitude sin starts manifesting itself in overt behavior, there is somewhere, usually a cutoff point, sort of like the alcoholic goes into a bar and he sees the glass, and he’s struggling in his mind, do I want to take this or don’t I. And there’s that point reached when he takes the first thing and it starts reacting with his body chemistry and boom, it’s all over, he might as well have had 25, but if he can just come up to that barrier of behavior pattern and back off he’s all right, and what God says, a very practical bit of counseling, is you’ve got a mental attitude sin here and you’d just better not set your foot outside the door as long as you have this struggle because the moment you get that mental attitude in motion and your feet start going out the door, you’ll never stop it, you’ll be wholly a victim of your mental attitude because the sin nature has been thrown into gear by your beginning to operate in the overt area and once the sin nature is thrown into gear you can’t disengage it until you’re all the way down the line. In other words, you reach this process and it’s like a grease slide all the way. So God says the door sill is your boundary Cain, don’t set your foot out beyond it. And so Cain, like most of us, devotes about three seconds attention to the warning and goes on.
Genesis 4:8, “And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and slew him.” And thus we have the first murder. Cain presents Abel as a present to Cain’s father, Satan. The first murder in history goes on as a predetermined murder, a murder that began as a mental attitude sin, that was not restrained, the conscience warned him physiologically and he didn’t pay any attention to it; he got actual revelation that told him Cain, don’t set your foot outside of that threshold, and he disobeyed it and finally it took over; the sin nature took over. This is why at the end of Genesis 4:7 there’s this statement, unto thee shall be its desire,” that is the nature of the flesh, notice it’s an active desire, the flesh desires to have you; your sin nature lusts to capture you. That’s the force of the text here. “Unto thee shall be its desire, but you must rule over it.”
The tragedy is that by and large men have not ruled over their sin nature. Most overt sin today comes from mental attitude sins that have been cooking for a long time. The burglar and the thief, where do they get it? A hatred toward property. Why a hatred toward property? What does property represent? It represents diligent work. I don’t like it God runs His universe, no work no eat, I don’t like that principle. And so I hate property because property reminds me of the principle that if I do not work I do not eat and so I lash out against God and I do it with theft, wrecking my environment.
But probably the most poignant illustration of hatred arise in the family, when husband fights and hates and despises his wife, and when the wife hates and despises her husband and even worse, when mothers and fathers abuse their own children. Just to show us how nasty the world may be and to realize that Genesis is talking about reality as it is, I asked one of our med students to get some slides together from a manual that they use at med school to train them to watch for child abuse in the emergency room. This is what angry parents do when they let the sin nature rule and they don’t learn to rule over it. [shows slides] Is the baby crying? Cram something in his mouth, even if you cause bruises all of it. Is the baby kicking? Tie his feet and then you produce nice gory sores all over his ankles. Are you irritated by him crying? Stick him in scalding water, that way you can give him a second degree burn over most of his body. The baby keeps grabbing for things, take a hot cigarette and burn his hands. The outworking that sin lies at the door and you’d better rule it or it rules you. And then the mother who gets angry one day and takes an iron to her child and fries his back. That’s the real result of the sin that God warns Cain about. That’s real life and that’s what happens.
So the Bible presents depravity of man as a
real thing. The warning is “rule over
him,” and you can only rule over him through the grace available in
Christ. We’d better rule over our sin
nature because God faces us on down the line as the omnipotent one. To recall that, stand and sing…..