Clough Genesis Lesson 19

Cain’s expulsion from Eden; Vengeance for crime – Genesis 4:9-15

The fallen depraved nature of man is the subject of Genesis 3 and 4 and so far we’ve watched the origin of man’s sin and with Cain we have watched the concept of the sin threshold. The idea of this is that Cain had a mental attitude of hatred and this mental attitude cycled and recycled in the depths of his heart until it wore a groove there and it enabled him, under the right circumstances to have this mental attitude sin break out into an overt behavior pattern of violence. So the pattern from a mental attitude sin to an overt sin has been established. And God warns Cain about this, He said that if you had your spiritual stuff together and you had been producing divine good, which is the hiphil form of the verb to produce good, if you had produced this then you wouldn’t get over this threshold because He said Cain, you set one foot out of this door, boy, and you’re going to have problems because the sin nature works and waits to grasp you and therefore you have to deal with this Cain; you’ve got to deal with it in your heart while it’s still there, before it’s exploded into a paroxysm of violence. But Cain didn’t listen to this divine advice and wound up being the first murderer in history. We see, therefore, that the sin is vicious.

Now as the Bible traces history further we watch an interesting development. Up to this point we’ve noticed the sin nature in its ugliness and its violence on an individual basis and we are all quite familiar with our sin natures, it’s always conceived as individual. But as the text of Scripture proceeds we begin to get into the idea of the corporate sin nature of man; total depravity race wide and with this we encounter a very interesting principle of history, one that’s very, very practical, and that is that the sum of the part is greater than the whole. In other words, if we take five sin natures and we put them in a group of people we don’t get a sin power that’s simply five times that of an individual person; we get a sin potential that’s greater than five times the sin power of the individual.

This has been an interesting phenomenon of history, as the Russian novelist Tolstoy, who first really argued this problem of why it was when you get a group of people together collectively they will do crimes which none of them individually would dream of doing. What is it about the mob, what is it about the crowd, that generates a ferocity of violence and crime that isn’t there when just the individual is there? An example on a very practical plain is what happened two weeks ago in Lubbock when the farmers, a group of them, apart from the overall group which was very orderly, decided they were going to block the A.J. which is a violation of local city ordinance and the Lubbock police were called to the scene to prepare the way for the morning delivery of The Avalanche Journal. And when the farmers refused to open their blockade of The Avalanche Journal our police chief backed off, got reinforcements and came in again, even to the point of drawing a gun on one of the farmers and then he was castigated in the press by certain spokesman as having (quote) “over reacted” to this riot around the newspaper office. On the contrary, our police chief did a very excellent professional job because in conforming and dealing with a riot you always have to present a deterrent and one or two policemen are not adequate deterrents for a riot. Of course you have overwhelming force; of course it was right for the chief to back off until others came to aid and then with one overwhelming force, to apply it at the precise location like a surgeon’s scalpel, to break a hole in the barricade around The Avalanche Journal; this is scientist handling of a riot situation. The principle is, as police officers know who are trained in this, is that when you have a mass of people, good people, together in a group they are capable of things you wouldn’t dream of doing. You simply endanger your own men to bring them in one or two at a time; you show up with such overwhelming force that it never occurs in their conscience to argue, simply to obey the law and go nicely on their way.

This is a practical lesson on the street level of the concept of the corporate sin nature of man that we’re studying in the rise of Canaanite civilization. It was Arthur Custance in his book, The Virgin Birth and the Incarnation who said this: “Most of us are persuaded that some men are more wicked than others. We may all agree in our more truthful moments that we are not very good, but we would be reluctant to admit ourselves capable of doing anything very wicked indeed. Scripture, however, does not encourage this view at all. Scripture has gone out of its way to show that it more depends upon opportunity than upon any supposed goodness on our part.

You see, the old sin nature on the individual level is surrounded by the pressure of circumstances. It’s walled in by external circumstances, and it’s not inherent goodness that keeps us from doing things. Apart from the restraining ministry of the Spirit it’s simply external lack of opportunity that keeps us from doing things. Now remove that by placing a whole bunch of sin natures together so that like a battery in series we’ve got a lot of power to beat back the external and then watch what happens. Watch what happens during a time of national catastrophe, to what good people do in communities when they go on the rampage and rape and pillage and destroy. Watch what happens in war when the social fabric is ruptured and people are let loose, and then see if we have any arguments with the picture that is given here in the Scripture of Cain and the corporate sin nature.

So the group is worse than the sum of the individual. That’s the lesson in the rise of the antediluvian civilization we are about to study. The Bible gives four civilizations in history. The first one is the antediluvian civilization that began at creation, ended with the flood. This will be the object of our study for the next four or five studies. We’ll study a lot of features about the antediluvian civilization which will surprise many of you, the high level of technology before the so-called Stone Age, the high level of use of iron, bronze, smelting, the level of mathematics that was involved to do certain kinds of mapping, and so on. Then after the flood we’ll work with the postdiluvian civilization that began after Noah’s flood, continues till the return of Christ, then for a short time the millennial civilization, and then the civilization of the eternal state. Those are the four great groups of men. The first two groups are living in a fallen world with basically uncontrolled sin. The third group, the millennial civilization, is limited somewhat, and then of course the eternal civilization, in the New Jerusalem, there is no sin and there’s a perfectly orderly society.

Now we come to the rise of the antediluvian society, and in Genesis 4:9-13 we have Cain’s expulsion from Eden. We’re going to study why Cain is expelled from Eden and why the rise of the antediluvian civilization took the form it did because they were expelled from Eden. God speaks to Cain after the murder has occurred, “Cain, where is Abel.” Now it’s an interesting question, “Where is Abel?” God knows where Abel is, why does He bother to ask Cain that? It’s simple, He wants Cain to think in terms of death and eternity; after all, Cain could give a simple answer and say well, you know Abel, he’s lying out there between the third and fourth row, see the blood out there in the field, that’s where Abel is, want to go out to see him, take his picture. That could have been an answer that Cain gives, a physical response. But then God could have asked him another question: Yes, Cain, that’s where your brother’s body is, but Cain, where is your brother? He’s there. No, that’s his body, where is your brother? And then Cain would be forced to think, what does happen to people after death; because remember, this is the first human being who died. They’d never seen death happen before to a human. And so this is a question that man has to be asked. So God forces Cain to think of eternity and death, “Where is your brother, Abel?”

And then he gives a smart aleck answer, which shows you again the sin nature once removed from the fall; remember Cain is only one generation away from the fall. Adam and Eve then Cain, and so Cain, and the tone of his answer, I don’t know where he is, am I supposed to be “my brother’s keeper?” A direct answer to God, a flippant answer, a smart aleck answer. Now the answer is a very famous question often spoken of in literature, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” And the answer to the question is no; the proper answer is no, I’m not my brother’s keeper and God doesn’t ask me to be my brother’s keeper. The word “keeper” means guardian, it means to follow around like a nursemaid. This question is a sarcasm. All God asked was, do you love your neighbor and your brother as yourself, but the answer He got back is that God’s requirement was too weighty, it was like being a nursemaid to my baby brother.

And so now God gets specific. Genesis 4:10, “And he said, What have you done?” Notice this is a data gathering question in counseling, I want the specifics of the act. Never mind now the sin nature, never mind now the mental attitude that led up to the over act, all that is passé, what we want now is what was the behavior, what was the specific act, what happened, what did you do? And then in a very strange figurative language God speaks of the earth as the mother. The first time earth is spoken of as a female, here in Scripture, with a mouth, Genesis 4:10-11, “The voice of thy brother’s blood is continuing to cry unto Me from the ground.” The word “cry” in the Hebrew language is a participle; it goes on crying and crying and crying and crying to Me from the ground. [11] And now you are cursed from the earth, the earth which has opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand.”

Now this is not just a simple poetic imagery; it’s not just a little isolated example of a figure. Turn to Deuteronomy 21 you’ll see how later on, centuries later, this was developed with great finesse in Mosaic legislation, the concept of blood crying from the ground, shed blood crying from the ground, shed blood is the violence, the blood shed in murder, it’s not just talking about somebody bleeding and the blood drops on the ground. This is talking about a life that has been lost, the part for the whole, the blood standing for the life, but it’s done with very concrete imagery. When someone is killed, they bleed. Several years back when the detectives of the Lubbock police department was shot on the sidewalk, I’ll never forget the picture in the afternoon edition of the A.J., the photograph showed this girl looking down at the sidewalk at the pool of blood of the man who had died just minutes after she’d walked by that spot. And it was a very interesting photographic study of the reflection on the girl’s face as she realized that blood was the blood of a man who gave his life for this community. And the idea that blood shines forth, or shouts forth from the ground is one that goes on and on in Scripture. It’s a little sobering for those of us who live in a murderous society, to realize this.

Notice in Deuteronomy 21:1, a little section of the Mosaic Law that deals with civil authority’s responsibility to unsolved murders. “If one be found slain in the land which the LORD thy God gives thee to possess, lying in the filed, and it be not known who has slain him, [2] Then thy elders and thy judges shall come forth, and they shall measure unto the cities which are round about him that is slain.” So, for example, if we have a situation of a murder that takes place and there are three cities, city A, city B, and city C, and say the body is lying out in the field; each representative from city A, B and C, that is the elders and the judges were the civil authorities, the city council, the mayor, they would have to send a representative out with some sort of a measuring device and measure from that corpse over to the location of the boundary of their city and based on that measurement or that survey of the scene, then the city that was nearest the location of the dead body, assumed responsibility for the crime. And so the sphere of city A’s jurisdiction extended to include the corpse.

Now the next step, after determining the city and its responsibility. Notice, by the way, the complete different approach than today’s law. In today’s law an unsolved crime is simply a never finished piece of paper which we drop in the basket after the statute of limitations has expired, and yes, it’s recorded in newspapers but it’s never solved. Or recently we have let’s reimburse the victim for the crime and this is interesting, there’s nothing non-biblical about that, in fact, it could be very biblical. But more than that, God isn’t interested in reimbursing the victim of the crime; God is interested that vengeance be taken. This is going to be a theme of the Canaanite civilization, the theme of vengeance, and you’re going to discover, much to your shock, that vengeance is good; what is bad is who executes it, but vengeance is godly. And so the elders and the judges come forth, and they measure.

[Deuteronomy 21:3] “And it shall be, that the city which is next unto the slain man, even the elders of that city, shall take an heifer, which has not been wrought with [worked], and which has not drawn in [borne] the yoke.” So this is a particular sacrificial heifer. [4] “The elders of that city shall bring the heifer down into a wadi,” really, a wadi of continuous flow is the proper meaning of this, “which is neither plowed nor sown, and shall strike off the heifer’s neck there in the valley. [5] And the priests, the sons of Levi, shall come near; for them the LORD thy God has chosen to minister unto Him, and to bless in the name of the LORD; and by their word shall every controversy and every stroke be tried. [6] And all the elders of that city, that are next unto the slain man, shall wash their hands over the heifer that is beheaded in the valley. [7] And then they shall answer and say,” and this is an official statement by the city officials of the jurisdiction, the urban area of jurisdiction for this crime, they shall wash their hands and they shall talk to God, “Our hands have not shed this blood, neither have our eyes seen it.” The last phrase, “neither have our eyes seen it,” means that we cannot run the court system in this situation because we don’t have eyewitnesses to the crime, we don’t have evidences so we can’t use our courtroom machinery to execute Your vengeance.

So then they cry out, [8] Be merciful, O LORD,” the word is kaphar there and it’s the word for atone, cover it, literally, “cover it, cover it, O Jehovah, unto Thy people Israel, whom Thou has redeemed, and lay not innocent blood unto the people of Israel’s charge. And the blood shall be covered for them. [9] So shalt thou put away the guilt of innocent blood from among you, when you shall do that which is right in the sight of the LORD,” and “that which is right” is defined to be this little ritual that the city officials have to go through for every unsolved crime. Why is this? Because the fourth divine institution bears responsibility for God’s vengeance and when, because of lack of data and lack of circumstantial evidence, etc. etc. etc., this machinery can’t go into function, then atonement must be made. And this is to remind the city officials that blood has been shed, and it is to remind that vengeance from some quarter must be executed. So much, then, for the concept of the responsibility of the city officials.

But in Cain’s day there was no city official; the fourth divine institution, or the state, hadn’t been created yet in Cain’s day. Therefore what happened? Well God says to Cain, “your brother’s blood shouts from the ground.” The concept of shouting from the ground can best be visualized if you turn to Deuteronomy 32:1. When you get there hold the place and turn to Isaiah 1. In Deuteronomy 32 Moses gives charge to the nation Israel and he’s saying that Israel, you’ve got a sin nature, you’re going to do these kinds of things and God is going to have witnesses that are eyewitnesses to the crimes that you commit in history. And so these witnesses are commissioned to be witnesses at this point. Deuteronomy 32:1, “Give ear, O ye heavens, and I will speak; and hear, O earth, the words of My mouth.” Now you can visualize a thousand eyes and a thousand ears listening to the soil of the ground under your feet, and if you visualize this then think of what it must be like to those thousand eyes and those thousand years every time a shotgun goes off and someone’s killed, every time a 7-11 is ripped off and somebody’s shot who’s working their way through college, and think of the thousand eyes and thousand ears that see and hear this, the earth is hearing the crimes of men. Think of what a tape recording… think of what the human race sounds like, think of what the human race looks like to the earth under our feet; we who are created to be its lord, but we who defy our Lord and listen to what the earth has to hear.

Isaiah brings this back when centuries later he enforces these convictions against the nation Israel. He goes back to the Torah, to the standards of the Torah, and he says all right, I bring you to lawsuit, and in Isaiah 1:2 he goes to those commissioned witnesses and activates their testimony for the courtroom hearing. “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth; for the LORD has spoken: I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me.” He calls on the thousand eyes and the thousand ears for a testimony.

Turning back to Genesis 4 that’s the picture here; the earth has a thousand eyes and ears, and it’s heard very clearly the sword thrust into Abel’s throat and it’s felt Abel’s blood drop upon it. And this is why in Genesis 4:10 God makes a point of mentioning mother earth, “The voice of thy brother’s blood keeps on crying,” not once, it “keeps on crying.” The picture you’ve got is a call for vengeance. The blood cries vengeance, vengeance, vengeance, vengeance, vengeance, over and over. This is the theme of Revelation 6 when the martyrs are pictured before the throne of God, that are beheaded for the testimony of Christ and they gather around the throne and they say: How long, O Lord, will You not take vengeance upon our blood? Vengeance is godly and vengeance is good and so the Bible says God responds by saying: Not yet, wait for a time until My plans are fulfilled, then I will take vengeance.” And in a great, great, great and powerful imagery the book of Revelation has God, as it were, gathering all the incense and the prayers of the saints, the idea is you kind of collect these like you would tape recordings, and He collects them and He says here is My vengeance. And He gathers from the prayers of the saints that calls for vengeance, these become the cause of the Second Advent and the judgment pertaining thereto.

And so when God executes vengeance He does so in response to the call for vengeance on the part of His creatures and part of the calls of vengeance is not just the saints beheaded but it’s the earth itself. In other words, the Bible presents man and nature in a synergism, divinely created to work together under God’s law and when nature keeps bearing testimony that man is a sinner, man is a sinner, man is a sinner, he has slaughtered, he has slaughtered, hear God, look at the bloodstains, crime was done here. A very powerful thing, when we hastily dismiss it and say ho-hum, tell us another news story at 6:00 o’clock.

Verse 10 indicates God’s attitude toward it and now His response in Genesis 4:11, an extension of the curse. “And now Cain, you are cursed from the earth,” and with this we have the third phase of the curse. Genesis 3:14 the serpent is cursed; Genesis 3:17 the ground is cursed; and now in Genesis 4:11 Cain is cursed. What is this extension of the curse? Going back to the doctrine of suffering, why do we suffer? Because of the fall, category one; because of further rebellion against God, category two, this is category two type suffering and what does category two type suffering always result in? That extension of God’s damnation. So therefore because God extends His damnation He extends the curse now to include even Cain, and so Cain now receives it.

And to add further imagery to it he says in verse 11, “you are cursed from upon the face of the earth,” the earth, mother earth, “which has opened her mouth to receive your brother’s blood from thy hand. [12] When you till the ground,” and this is a picture whenever you do, be it today or tomorrow, “whenever you till the ground it’s never going to yield unto you her strength again.” It’s as though you fed the earth the wrong thing, you should have cultivated it and fed it fertilizer; instead you fed it shed blood and the earth is going to reward you Cain, because when you plant your seeds now they’re never going to grow; when you go out to expect a harvest you’re going to find weeds and thorns and thistles. That’s your reward for desecrating the earth. Maybe another imagery would speak more to a modern person. Imagine if you had a very expensive carpet in your living room and someone came in and dropped paint all over it, you’d be [can’t understand word]. That’s the picture, the earth is God’s carpet and He doesn’t appreciate our blotches all over it. And so this is what He does to Cain.

And notice the direction of the curse in Genesis 4:12; where does the curse strike Cain? Notice the consistency of the Word of God. Where do we say the female is cursed? In her childrearing and childbirth. And where is the male cursed in Genesis 3:17-19, where does every man experience the most of the curse in his life? In his calling, in his job, when he goes to till and it resists him. And where does Cain get damned? He gets damned on his job. For what, in Genesis 4:2 is Cain’s calling? He’s not the rancher; he’s the tiller of the ground, he works the ground, that’s his job, that’s his occupation. And where does the curst strike him? In the center of it; now Cain, when you go back to your occupation you’re going to find yourself out of a job because you’re never going to be worth producing anything in that calling again, and now you’re going to change your job. Cain, you were formerly employed as a farmer and now you’re going to be “a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth.” I will see to it that no ground gives it food to you.

So we have now the rise of the wanderer and we have a phenomenon known in history and borrowed by our humanist evolutionary friends as one of the keys in the so-called evolution of man: nomadism. The fairy story that you were treated to in school was that when we, our ancestors, gave up their bananas and tails and dropped down to the ground, that then they managed to nomadically wander across the face of the earth searching for food with their clubs and their caves, and then finally sometime in the Mesopotamian fertile crescent, the cradle of civilization, they discovered the seed and they discovered you could plant seed and you had the rise of agriculture. Nomadism preceded and was prior to the development of farming. Notice how the Bible refutes that; farming came first, then nomadism.

Nomadism is degeneracy; nomadism is the result of the curse. People are nomadic when they can’t raise food in one location; people are nomadic when they can’t live with a group of people. Nomad, generally speaking, mirror a degenerate lifestyle. Think, for example, of some of them. The Plains Indian, held up by ecologists as those who worked in harmony with nature were not in harmony with nature at all, they were nomads and degenerate. Think, for example, of the Gypsies, particularly in the east coast and the area, the Gypsies are degenerate; they come from one neighborhood to another ripping you off. I can remember as a boy remembering as the Gypsies would move from suburb to suburb the news would go out the Gypsies are coming and everybody would lock their doors. Why? Because they’re thieves, they’re degenerate. Later on, even in our own west, part of the country/western music is an exultation to the degeneracy of the wandering cowboy; the wandering cowboy is a nomad, patterning his lifestyle after Cain, he’s rootless. That doesn’t mean all cowboys are, the ones who have proper ranches and execute their job, that’s fine, but the wandering ne’er-do-well, he’s a degenerate.

Another example would be the hippie hitchhiker; all these degenerate lifestyles are characteristic of the same thing, they are people who can’t plan for the future, people who have no resources, people who have no strong family link, people who never can stay in one community and develop relationships over many years duration; people who are culturally impotent. They usually spread as a disease and plagues, from the plagues of the Gypsies to the VD of the hippie hitchhiker. All of these are the modern versions of the degeneracy of Cain. So remember when you see nomadism in your evolutionary fairy stories that it is not prior to the rise of man, it is after man fell that he became a nomad and a degenerate.

But now in a larger way less we get to Pharisaical about the degenerates of nomad, let’s understand that in a larger sense we are all nomads. Turn to Hebrews 11; in this great picture of faith the author of Hebrews uses the image of a pilgrim and a nomad and he says that all humanity, basically, are nomadic. He says in Hebrews 11:13, “These all,” speaking of the great saints of the Old Testament he cited, “These all died in faith, not having received the promises but having seen them afar off … and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. [14] For they that say such things declare plainly that they are actively seeking something,” that’s a difference, incidentally, between a nomad and a pilgrim. A nomad doesn’t know where he’s going; a pilgrim has an idea of where he’s going. [15] “And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to return. [16] But now they deserve a better country, an heavenly one; wherefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared for them a city.”

Cain is a nomad, he doesn’t know where he’s going; the pilgrim, on the other hand, since we are men of faith, we’re looking for a city. We realize that our roots aren’t here, too much disease, sin and confusion. This can’t be the eternal home of man so we look to the future for a change and our root is in the future, so we’re pilgrims here but with a purpose, we’re waiting for God to build us a city. That’s the purpose of Hebrews. We’ll see next week what Cain’s answer was to God’s city.

Let’s turn back to Genesis 4:13 and watch Cain’s response to this announcement. His profession was going to be changed, from a farmer to a nomad. Now verse 13, Cain’s complaint; “And Cain said unto the LORD, My punishment is greater than I can bear. [14] You have driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from Thy face I shall be hidden; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that finds me shall slay me.” Cain isn’t concerned about his sin. Cain is only concerned, as all of us in our sin nature apart from grace would be, he’s only concerned with the result of his sin, not the sin itself. He’s concerned with the punishment.

And so Genesis 4:14 describes, “You have driven me out this day from the face of the land; and from Your face.” Now what does this refer to. Here we’re going to finish that map that we’ve been drawing very patiently over the last five or six weeks and I said if you paid attention to the details of this map as it develops it will remind you of an Old Testament institution. We’re going to get the answer today. Here is a schematic of Eden; here is a schematic of the Garden. Conceivably there was the holy mountain of God on the western side from which flowed this water which then flowed out in a diffluent zone here. There’s two rivers to the north, the original Tigris-Euphrates River, it doesn’t correspond to the modern ones in the postdiluvian civilization, and then the Pishon and Gihon Rivers flowing south. That was a picture of the garden. We added elements to this as we carefully watched the story; this is not a myth, this is a literal place, prior to the flood, on the face of the earth. And on the east side we begin to enlarge details of it. We said here’s the boundary around Eden; here’s the boundary around the garden.

The garden had a boundary because Adam and Eve were thrown out the east gate and it was guarded by a cherub. And so we imply that the rest of the garden must have been fenced with some barrier of some sort. And so as they were ejected from the garden this area right outside the east gate of the garden was characterized by water, this diffluent zone, and then beyond it there was some sort of an altar area because this is where Cain came and Abel came to offer their sacrifice, before the east gate. And then at this point we can add a further detail, Cain is ejected outside of Eden; Adam, Eve, and late on Seth and various brothers and sisters, we’ll still get to the topic of Cain’s wife later, Cain was put out of Eden, they stayed in, and that implies that Eden had some sort of barrier around it. Notice the barrier is always on the east side.

And now notice the progression of the story. At first we had man created, and then he was put in the garden, east in Eden. And then after he sinned he was put out the east gate; and Cain had to be kicked out of Eden and go to a land in the east. That’s what’s in verse 16, “And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.” Notice the progress of man, as man goes east when God is in the west. You see, geometrically man is leaving the presence of God as well as spiritually. And so as this progress continues and we add elements it suddenly dawns upon us that this is a most marvelous picture of the Old Testament tabernacle.

Notice how this Old Testament tabernacle was constructed. There was a fence outside the outside with only one gate on the east side. And notice after you entered this gate you encountered first the altar and then there was water where you washed, and then prior to that you entered into the holy place, and on the west side you had the Holy of Holies. Let’s look at the model we have, some slides of this model and let’s look at some of the detail. This was the center of worship in the Old Testament; it was portable because by Old Testament times man recognized officially his nomadic pilgrim nature, and this was a portable thing that moved from place to place. Here you have an idea of the boundary around it; no man can come in except through the east side. Immediately upon entering he encounters the brazen altar to the east of where God is. And then you have the place where the water is to wash, picturing regeneration and confession of sins, and then this is the way it would look heading west, going toward the presence of God, and because it was a tent the top came off and was stripped off in layers, until you get down and you can look inside and see this kind of thing. You come in the east side of the holy place and you’d find the altar of incense, this is a picture of prayer; the table of showbread and the lampstand. In behind the Holy of Holies where no one except the high priest could go you have the Ark of the Covenant. Inside the scene would have looked like this had we been able to walk into it and in back was the Ark of the Covenant with two cherubs pictured here in an abstract way because we don’t have any real hard data on what the cherubs looked like. All right, so there’s a correspondence.

The correspondence goes farther than even that because in Hebrews 8:5 this pattern, or a blueprint for the tabernacle, God said is a picture of the heavenly tabernacle. In other words, this is a replica of all the principles of worship; this is why this tabernacle pictures the ministry of Jesus Christ in many, many ways. And while later on Jesus Christ calls the Church, because the Church is indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and so the Church is a tabernacle. Anyway, this is a constant theme. Isn’t it interesting, one speculates, was Eden the original tabernacle and in the new heavens and the new earth in Revelation 22 will this be recreated again because there we know about the water that comes out of the throne of God and goes to the trees that give life and the tree of life is once again present in the new heavens and the new earth. We show you this only to give you confidence that there is a continuity of the Bible; it’s not a disjointed book with a little opinion here and a little opinion there but it’s sown together with no seams; one theme.

Now man, going back to Genesis 4, Cain has a choice. Let’s look at the choice that Cain has. He can be a nomad or a pilgrim, faced with the fact he must wander, faced with the fact that he can’t establish any temporal roots; he can go with the pilgrim idea, yes, I will wait patiently for my God and He shall provide for my every need. But we know Cain won’t do that because Cain is the thankless male, the man who gets his profit and afterwards pits God; he’s not thankful that God is going to provide him anything and so he becomes a nomad, and instead of waiting for God city Cain goes ahead and establishes his own; we’ll see the significance of the name of the city next week.

Genesis 4:14-15 are necessary before we get to Cain’s city because they are a comment on the quality of life of the antediluvian civilization. In verse 14 Cain complains that he will be the object of vengeance. That tells us something interesting. That tells us something about our God-consciousness, that as creatures made in God’s image we have this God-consciousness and this God-consciousness mirrors for us something of the attributes of God’s righteousness and justice. We have this thing called the conscience. What is the conscience? You can try to explain it materially and fail utterly as behaviorists have done. You can be an existentialist and deny its importance and a lot of the pop psychology literature on your newsstand does that well for you. The conscience can be only explained as an internal thing or an internal sense of God’s character. And Cain’s brothers and sisters when they would walk by him they would think you murdered our brother, and the thought would go through and would burn within them vengeance; crime and sin call forth vengeance. The conscience cries for vengeance… vengeance; vengeance is good because vengeance is a sign the universe is moral. Show me a world without vengeance and show me a world that doesn’t give a damn about anything. Vengeance is proof that people have values. If people have no vengeance people have no value worth being vengeful for.

So vengeance, then, is a sign of God’s justice and righteousness, and Cain knows this; he knows his brothers and sisters have this and he knows he’s going to become the object of it. And so in Genesis 4:15 we have a very interesting thing; God prohibits man from exercising vengeance. “[And the LORD said unto him,] Therefore whoever slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.”

Now here’s a question that is not answered at this point in history; it is later but it’s not answered here. Why, if there’s crime, and crime is injustice, remember crime is not what we call pathological behavior that has to be rehabilitated, that’s a humanist view of crime. Crime is something against God’s being and anything against God’s being requires vengeance, and it’s the conscience within us that says vengeance, vengeance, vengeance, vengeance, vengeance. Crime can’t exist without some sort of righting of the scales of justice and that righting of the scales of justice is vengeance. But God says here in verse 15 no vengeance. Why does God say this? No vengeance! Because vengeance is God’s. The Bible is misinterpreted by your sentimentalist friends who argue oh, now the God of the Bible loves everyone and every thing; He blesses all the snakes of the world, love everything. This is a wrong interpretation. God does not love everything, He hates and He is the vengeance exerciser but on His terms He will exercise vengeance. And so therefore He says it is not for man to do this.

Now this is true for the antediluvian society that ended with the flood. After the flood He set in motion a fourth divine institution; He added one to the previous three. Before the flood we had responsibility, that’s one that’s forgotten about today; two, marriage, the sex part of that is very much remembered; three, family. These were all pre-fall institutions. Now those didn’t evolve, those are not the result of fifty-one and a half people’s opinion. Those are the result of God’s love that operate inevitably in every culture, Christian, non-Christian, Hottentots or anything, all have to submit to this. This is just built into our being. But after the fall we have God add one, and that is the state, and what is the essence of government? Now the word “government” in the English language means to organize and to administer and that’s why it’s really a wrong term to use here because if you’re a husband and a father you are a governor, because you govern you home, and so you have a government that’s of the family. There is family government.

So we have to qualify; by the fourth divine institution we don’t mean government as such because we have government in our families. So therefore we have to use another word and we use the word “state,” not one of the fifty states but “state,” the institution of the state. Now here we begin to get into some pretty deep stuff as far as you as a Christian citizen looking out on your society around you. Already you’ve learned something. What is the essence of the state? Is it the Constitution? No. Is it just wealth? No. Is it the power to tax? No. Well, what is the essence of the state? What is the basis, the sine quo non, without which you can’t have the state? The state is defined in the Scripture as the authority delegated to man to take life in vengeance. The state is an instrument of vengeance. It is never an instrument of welfare. The instrument of welfare is the family and this is what is so screwed up. The fourth divine institution today has been interpreted as a family; “Big Brother” is going to take care of you from the cradle to the grave. The modern saint declares give me security or give me death, the cry for modern government. Well, this is what’s happened; the fourth divine institution, from the Christian point of view, is the only area in life where vengeance can be executed.

Now let me show you what happens when all these institutions get sand in their gears and grind lose and reap the bad results. Turn to the New Testament to Romans 12. In Romans 12:14-21 we have what is considered by many to be one of the more sentimental maudlin passages of Scripture, a sort of Christian idealism that never really works, a sort of people read this with a condescending tut-tut. Let’s see why people have the condescension toward this passage. The passage is talking about overcoming, verse 21, evil with good. It’s talking about the situation when someone persecutes you; it’s not talking about the fact that you’ve been some sort of a criminal and now the state’s getting after you. This is unjust persecution. And the Christian response is given beginning in verse 14.

“Bless them which persecute you; bless, and don’t curse.” “Bless” here means to pray for their needs. [15] “Rejoice with that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep,” and so on, and it comes down to verse 17, “Recompense to no man evil for evil.” In other words, as an individual under divine institution one, divine institution two, divine institution three, we cannot still, even as far removed from Cain as we are today, we still have no authority to execute vengeance, under divine institution one, divine institution two, divine institution three. “Recompense to no man evil for evil.” Instead, positively in verse 17, it says, “Plan things honest in the sight of all men.” That’s an interesting thing if you have trouble in this area.

The Bible gives a very practical piece of advice in Romans 12:17. It says one way of breaking that habit is plan ahead your response when it comes because when you’re in the middle of it and someone gives you the lip or something, you are emotionally involved and you’re not going to think straight. So that’s two late, by the time the things happened; think ahead of time what, in kinds of situations, am I likely to encounter so that when these situations happen I’m prepared and I think through what I’m going to do. Some of you women that drive your cars, single, late at night, God help you if you haven’t thought through what you’re going to do if someone tries to attack you while you’re in the car or getting out of the car and so on; you’ve got to think these things through. What are you going to do? When it happens it’s too fast. You freeze, you’re paralyzed, you’ve got to think out ahead. Yeah, I don’t like to think about it. Well, what do you want to do, just wait until it happens and then think about it? No, you think ahead of time; if this happens I know I’m going to do this. If this happens then I’m going to do this. And every once in a while you just review that so when it happens you respond quickly. Nine times out of ten you won’t have any trouble because you’ve responded and whoever it is that’s trying to mess around gets the message real quick that you’ve thought through this thing and there are easier targets around town than you. Well, the same thing here; “Provide” for things means to plan things, plan your responses.

Romans 12:18, “If it be possible, as much as lies in you,” within your divine institution one, two and three, “live peaceably with all men. [19] Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but give place unto wrath; for it is written, Vengeance is Mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.” So here we have vengeance not denied; vengeance is good, it’s the exercise of the vengeance that’s the problem. “I will repay, saith the Lord.” Okay, and people always stop and the read verse 21 and they say oh, that’s so good, they overcome, ah-ha-ha-ha, and then they stop. What they never do is simply read the next verse, Romans 13:1, what is it talking about. There’s your framework, why you can act the way you act in verses 14-21. You give place unto wrath, “I will repay, saith the Lord,” how does God repay? Romans 13:1-4, through divine institution four, that’s how He pays.

So when you have divine institution four functioning the way it’s supposed to function, by executing vengeance, then you can have individual … say well, all right, I’m just going to let the system take care of it. God set up the state to do this, not me; I am no authority on my own person to do this; no room for vigilantism. But what happens in history when your civil servants don’t function as avengers? Vigilantism always happens. Why? Because the human heart has what in it? Conscience. And what does conscience say? Vengeance, vengeance, vengeance, vengeance, vengeance, there’s got to be vengeance. And so therefore if the government doesn’t do it in this case somebody else will do it. And God help the society when you get vigilantism started, but that’s what’s going to happen. And that’s what’s going to happen in America if the civil authorities, particularly those in judicial circles, don’t get their theories straightened out and get back to basic functions of executing vengeance. It’s not wrong.

Now let’s look at vengeance in the eternal mode. Vengeance is executed in an absolute mode and a relative mode. In an absolute mode vengeance is executed by God, so God alone exercises this and God exercises it perfectly and that’s His eternal judgment. Relative mode—divine institution four, and to a lesser degree from Matthew 18 and other passages the church; the local officials of the church have one way they can execute vengeance and that is excommunication. And you never see that today because it doesn’t do any good, you excommunicate someone for something and they just walk down to the second church and join down there so it doesn’t do any good; so we’ve effectively neutralized the whole operation of vengeance within the church. But at least the fourth divine institution ought to function.

So that’s Cain’s situation back in Genesis 4; vengeance has been prohibited his brothers and sisters, because they along with Adam and Eve, probably in deep sorrow over their son and over their dead son, oftentimes it’s interesting to talk to the parents of the criminal as well as to talk to parents of the victim. Think of what Adam and Eve were, in fratricide the same parents or the parents of both the criminal and the victim. So it was a tragedy of parenthood at this point in history of Adam and Eve having to stand there watching the blood of their son, and knowing their other son was the murderer. And what is God saying? Adam and Eve, leave him alone, I have excommunicated him, as it were, to Nod. He’s going to be a wanderer and I’m going to let him live. Why are you going to let him live, he murdered our brother, he murdered our son. And God’s reply, as we can develop theologically from history, is because evil must run its course; I must demonstrate for all time and eternity when evil is allowed to grow, the tares must grow with the wheat, Satan’s plans must mature so everyone will see how discredited he is.

So now we have, then, as a choice and a response to our own nomadism, which we’ve inherited in part from Cain, our nomadism can be transformed to pilgrimism by the faith technique, are we going to respond to God’s promises or are we going to reject God’s promises and try to build our own city as Cain does in verse 17. Remember what Hebrews says; they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly country, wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God for He has prepared for them a city.

We’ll close with a hymn,