Clough Manhood Series Lesson 5

The Struggle of Fallen Man: Cain and Abel – Genesis 4

So far we’ve stated several basic principles; these are starting principles. This series will attempt as the evenings go by to answer questions that men have sent in on the feedback cards and, by the way, if you have some more questions, keep on sending them in because this gives me an help in helping you and my job, the only justification I have for standing up here is that I can devote hours during the week that you can’t to study the Word of God, and therefore the results of my studying ought to be spiritually helpful to you and if they’re not, we’re both not doing our jobs. So the feedback performs a good service to maintain the accuracy of this particular purpose.

We came to various conclusions so far. We said that the man and the woman are both made in God’s image and the mandates to subdue the earth is given to them both; the phrase, “dominion man” stands for both the man and the woman. Then we said that the sexual differentiation of Genesis 2 is looked upon in Scripture as only a temporal thing; a temporal feature. This is why it’s successfully rendered and cut down to size in Scripture. You’ll see this as we go through the Law, as we go through many of the Old Testament stories. It’s a drastic thing that hits us in the face in what we’ll call a sexually risk society as our own. The Bible seems to be very mundane about the whole thing; it recognizes that sex is there but cuts it down to size, that is, in other words, realistic. Then we found out that the man the wife subdue basically through the family unit, and that everywhere in Scripture where you see success or failure, it’s usually described in terms of the family, not in terms of the man’s lone job and we began to answer the question handed in by several men: what is the right proportion between my job and my wife.

And one of the basic axioms or ground rules for answering the question is to ask the question the right way. And this question that so many men ask is often motivated by the fact that they see, and this is a human viewpoint piece of fly paper again that’s stuck onto us, they see the wife and the job as inherently competitive, sort of two ends of the see-saw that has to be balanced, and that you’re always in the middle here trying to juggle them. If that’s your picture, then that’s not a biblical picture that you have because the wife and the job were to be part of the same entity of subduing the earth. The wife, of course, to generate the family and to train that family for its use of wealth in the future, and the job was to acquire wealth so that family might use it in the future. We commented at that time how anti-family our whole society is, when welfare is directed to the individual rather than the family unit; when we have inheritance taxes and other unbiblical things operating.

Then we drew some conclusions about Ephesians 5:25, the address to the man to love his wife as Christ loved the church, and at least two features come out of that reference: the need for a directive kind of loving and the need for a supportive kind of loving. The idea that the wife is weaker spiritually, shown by Eve’s temptation, but yet some men, we said, react against that by not listening to women period, and that’s unbiblical, because David was very open to women’s advice when the women’s advice corresponded with Scripture. So men get very arrogant once in a while when they want to put women down, just categorically dump them out, and of course this is wrong, and that’s an extreme, and that shows some man doesn’t have his spiritual stuff together. The issue is whether the woman’s advice meets the Scripture, that’s the whole point; not that you tune her out completely.

The second thing was that the man is to be a shield between his wife and the outside world. In other words, she has her job in the family unit and there are some things that she can’t grapple with as successfully as a man, and the man ought to step in and operate in those situations. We concluded with the fact that men throughout the Scriptures, and I gave three examples of this, men throughout the Scriptures have felt the pressure of the impossibility of being a biblical man and in despair have cried out to God. And in the situation God has rewarded them. And so the helplessness of fulfilling the biblical role is there in Scripture, the Bible is realistic and it just simply says it’s impossible in the energy of the flesh.

Tonight we come to Genesis 4 and this will be the first time we’ve approached a case study, an actual historical incident of one man and how he functioned and how he thought, not that in every case we’re going to deal with the failure but we can learn as men a lot from the failures of other men in the past. And this is the first example, the biography, of one of the greatest autonomous males who have ever lived, Cain. We’ll divide Genesis 4 into three parts; verses 1-7, the rise of Cain and the fate of his autonomous attitude. Cain is a remarkable man; he’s a brilliant man, but he’s a man who was totally disoriented with the grace of God and as a result we’re still paying for Cain’s mistakes. It shows you the power of the man; the man is not erased in history, he’s extremely powerful and the fruit of his apostasy often persists and will persist to the end of history.

In Genesis 4:1-7, “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bore Cain, and she said, I have gotten a man with the LORD,” or “from the LORD. [2] And again she bore his brother, Abel. And Abel was a keeper of the sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. [3] And in the process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Yahweh. [4] “And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. But Yahweh had respect unto Able and to his offering; [5] But unto Cain and to his offering He had no respect. And Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell. [6] And the LORD said to Cain, Why are you angry? Why is your countenance fallen? [7] If you do well, shall you not be accepted? And if you do not well, sin lies at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, but thou must rule over him.”

And this is the start of the struggle of every man, it’s the struggle of every woman in this sense but since this is the manhood series we’re going to constantly slant it from the man’s point of view. And so this is the heart of the man, Cain and his mental attitude. In verse 1 certain information is given; certain information that tells us how this man was raised as a boy in that family. He was given the name “Cain,” from Qayin, it comes from the verb to acquire, to buy or to acquire. Eve looked upon this, her first-born son, as part of the answer to Genesis 3:15, the protoevangelium, the promise that Jesus Christ, in the garden of Eden, gave Eve.

It was this promise, by the way, that had Adam, that caused Adam to name his wife, Chavah [?]. See, Eve was not known as Eve at the fall; up until the fall she was Ishah, meaning wife; and before that Adam was Ish, sometimes he was known as Adam. Now Eve got her name only after Jesus Christ preached the gospel to that couple. After the couple fell in the garden Christ came into that garden and he gave a promise which is Genesis 3:15 called protoevangelium, meaning the first announcement of good news. As a result, after the curse, Genesis 3:20, “Adam called his wife’s name,” remember whenever you see calling the name it means Adam discerns there’s something in his wife’s nature and he looks at his wife and he calls her Chavah; now Chavah is the Hebrew word for life. Now why does Adam change his wife’s name from Ishah to Chavah. Because he is trusting that the sign of his faith in Jesus Christ, that through Eve shall come the seed; the seed which will eventually crush Satan. And so the woman is placed in a position right at the start of history as being the one means through which salvation comes into the world. This is why on our monthly communion we always have a candle or candles and we ask a woman to read Scripture and to light that candle. Before the communion can ever begin a woman must light the candle, because it is the woman through whom light must come into the world, the virgin Mary.

Now in Genesis 4:1 the first son is called Cain, from “I have acquired,” and she is happy about this firstborn son. And it would tend to suggest, then that Cain had a better childhood than the second boy mentioned here, because the second boy is named Habel, Abel to us, but Habel in Hebrew, the significance of this word is that Habel equals vanity; it’s the same word used in Ecclesiastes and it expresses Eve’s frustration with life. By the time she has… and we don’t know it’s the second boy, apparently it is, but later on they had many, many brothers and sisters, by the time she came to her second child, Chavah knew what it was like to life in a fallen world, and now she’s dejected. And this shows some disappointment with her second son, and it, if anything, shows that Abel was raised under less auspicious circumstances than Cain.

And again once again shows from the very beginning of history your family environment does not determine your future course in history. If your mother dropped you on your head when you were a baby that might have caused brain damage, and if so you have a medical problem. But if you’re just angry because grandmother dropped you or something, or mother didn’t look at you right, then you are wrong; you are unbiblical and if you don’t get over the attitude you’ll be a loser the rest of your life. You cannot permit your family background to dominate how you look at the future. It’ll be there, always rubbing in the background, you can’t deny that, but you have to do your best to look out and say my environment does not determine it and I know it because God’s Word says so. And here’s one of the great things where Cain evidently had favorable family treatment and Abel, his brother, had unfavorable treatment. We can infer that from the nature of the name and Eve’s attitude toward her two sons.

But now the sacrifice, Genesis 4:3-4. Cain brings of the fruit of the ground and his brother brings of the fruit of his flock. Oftentimes it’s mentioned, and probably in the long range it has significance, that Abel’s sacrifice is a blood sacrifice. But in the immediate context there doesn’t seem to be any emphasis on the fact that Cain brought fruit of the ground and Abel didn’t. The more the emphasis is that little word in verse 4, “the firstlings of his flock” and “the fat thereof.” That little addition shows us, that in fact, a whole mental attitude is being shown us in that detail.

Turn to the New Testament commentary on this incident in Hebrews 11:4; the author of Hebrews knows very well that this little extra detail in fact tells us a lot about what was going on in the heart of these two men. These men had reached God-consciousness at least by the time Cain offers his sacrifice and Abel, they are at least in their late teens; they have attained God-consciousness, they are males who are worshiping God on their own. And in Hebrews 11:4 we have the divine commentary. “By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts,” now “by faith” it says. See, that identifies very clearly that Abel was looking to God and responding to God, thanking God for something God was going to provide him with. What was that? Well, it’s obvious that he was looking forward to some atonement for his sins, and he had an attitude that responded to God’s gracious gift. Cain was a religious man but he frankly could give a damn about the core of grace, he just went through the motions and that was that. So we have defined two attitudes of these men; one who is a grace oriented man and the other just the usual religious crowd.

All right, let’s go back and see, since Hebrews tells us definitely it’s a matter of faith, even though the Genesis text tells it’s only a matter of works, let’s go back and see what happens. And in this we have one of the great problems that basically every man faces at some time or another in his life. And it all begins with this sacrifice.

In Genesis 4:5 God did not accept Cain’s sacrifice [can’t understand words]. Now the point is that outside in the creation there are certain laws of God; in this case we’re not using the word “laws” like we did this morning, here we’re using the word “laws” to be a label for the Word of God. And therefore the outside world, the external world is run by God’s laws. If I am going to be a man who is going to produce in X, Y, Z profession, or I’m going to be over here and produce in this profession, I have to bow my knee to the authority of laws in those realms; laws I didn’t set up, society didn’t set up. God set them up. If I’m going to be a craftsman I have to respect the laws in that field. If I’m going to be a pastor-teacher I have to respect the canon of Scripture; I have to respect the fact that you can’t be a pastor-teacher overnight, you have to study, study, study, study the Word of God, doctrine and theology in the original languages, otherwise you aren’t qualified. And those are simply laws that I have to follow if I am to be successful in my profession. And every man has to realize those laws are out there and the quicker we realize them and bow our knee to them and accept them, and move within the framework of God’s laws the more we’re going to produce and the happier we’re going to be producing.

But Cain doesn’t like this. What Cain tries to do at the very beginning is in his autonomy, he will decide what the laws of his profession are; he will go into his profession, if the laws are there too bad, Cain will rewrite the laws; if people are there and their laws, too bad, Cain will walk all over them. Cain will decide who is right and who is wrong. And here’s the spirit of autonomy that before this chapter is done will erupt in murder, violence and so on. It will erupt also enlarging the first civilization. So Cain, the autonomous male, is offended deeply when he comes against a sovereign God. That’s the collision of verse 5, an autonomous male and a sovereign God and the two meet head-on. And then the trouble begins. This autonomous male came and refuses to bow his knee, and therefore two things are described of him in verse 5. It says he was “very angry,” but the Hebrew is more picturesque than that; it’s just the Hebrew word to burn, he is burned up. And “his countenance fell,” that shows the psychological effects of sin, depression; that’s an idiom for depression.

Now look at this and notice carefully what happens; negative volition is assaulted by the sovereign laws of God and instead of bowing it goes on in negative volition second stage, and in that second stage you begin to spew out all sorts of problems, mental attitude sin, hatred, and you begin to have depression, you begin to have guilt. All of this problem, all of these emotions that are running rampant are not the product of his mother. They are the product of his own behavior pattern. And here’s where Christian counseling and the whole approach toward mental problems in biblical framework is reversed to what the world system wants. You go to Carl Rogers and you get a whole big long jazz about it’s feeling, what we have to do to these people who are having these emotional problems is thus and such, and work through their emotions. There’s nothing wrong with their emotions, their emotions are working fine; the problem is the fact that their conscience is offended, that’s the problem. Not their emotions; it’s stupid to work with someone’s emotions. Why work with their emotions? Their emotions are fruitless.

And here we will watch the second counseling session, the first one was God and Adam, but the second counseling session with an out-of-it male, when God does the counseling. And God is going to answer and show the technique of biblical counseling, and show that, in fact, it does not approach man on the basis of his emotions, it does not say you poor sorry little individual, I see that you have a problem. This is the way some counselors do, you can pay $20 an hour to get this treatment; come in and sit 15 minutes, drop it all on the guy’s desk, and he sits there and he says, yes, you have a big problem. You pay $20 to hear that, isn’t that great. Or you can go the Freudian route, and go back and find out what every little sexually titillating thing in your past, how that contributed to your present mess. Well, that’s great, what are you supposed to do? Take a time machine and go back and straighten out past history? What can you do about past history? You can’t do anything about past history, you have to forget it and move on. So that’s stupid to say that I have a mental problem because of my past history. What I have got to say is I have got a mental problem because of my past behavior that is correctible.

So this is the point that God says to Cain, “Why are you burning up,” why, in other words, do you have these mental attitude sins, Cain, and why do you have depression, your countenance falling, there is no reason for you to be depressed. In all of the years I’ve been pastor here there’s only been one man in the congregation that had cause for mental problems, he got hit in the head with something when he was riding his tractor; now apart from that there is no man that I know of around here that has a basis for mental problems other than rebellion against the Word of God, or some unknown chemical thing or something. But basically what God is saying here is mental problems are the result of bad behavior. How do you change your emotional pattern? Change yoru behavior pattern, that’s how. So verse 7 in a nutshell summarizes the principle, except we have to kind of correct verse 7 because as it stands it’s not very clear. The word “accepted” in verse 7 is the word {?}in the Hebrew and it means lifting; it’s opposite to the word “his countenance fell.” It’s talking about the opposite of depression.

Now he says, “If you do well,” that’s behavior pattern, “If you do well, shall you not be lifted?” That means shall your depression not go away. “If you do well,” not if you sit here and I psychoanalyze you for the next fifty years at $50 an hour, that’s not going to change you. What’s going to change you is you, you are going to decide that when you decide with My sovereign law you are going to bow your knee to My sovereign authority, that’s what God says; and you’re not going to sit around and whine and cry and carry on why God is so bad to you. That’s what He’s saying, now “If you do well,” then you will be uplifted. But “if you do not well,” now a severe warning, because Cain at this point is being approached by God in grace. God knows that Cain is in trouble but God is still being gracious. Now God could look down and say Cain, you’re so full of mental attitude sin I’m going to wipe you out, zap, and there goes Cain. Abel looks around, well, can I have another brother and so on. But God is gracious, He doesn’t want to kill Cain; He protects Cain. Time and time again God is going to be gracious to Cain because God is trying to win Cain to the Lord Jesus Christ.

And so the second is a warning; “If you do not well,” and that means if you don’t change your present behavior pattern young man, you are going to be aware of “sin crouching at the door.” Now this is the first place the word “sin” is used and here it refers to the sin nature. The sin nature is pictured as a wild animal crouching at the door. There’s even more to it than the sin nature. Let’s go back to Genesis 3:15, “I will put enmity,” God said, “between the serpent and the woman, between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head; thou shalt bruise his heel.” Satan is in the background; Satan is the one who will make that sin nature active. There’s not just the flesh but Satan desires to use the sin nature. He activates it, as we have said earlier. What is the relationship between the sin nature and the demonic. I have no way of cutting the mustard to tell which side is what and I don’t know of any Scripture passage that does it either. I’ll show you some in a few minutes. How do we tell the demonic factor from the sin nature factor. The two are so thoroughly interwoven I say it’s impossible. I have looked and I have looked and I have looked and I have looked in the biblical text and I cannot find one verse that separates them. There are certain tendencies, yes, but other than that no.

But the thing is that in this situation Cain is responsible for the satanic influence. Notice the way the phase is written in verse 7. It says Cain, it’s your choice, straighten up young man or… now if you don’t straighten up then “sin crouches at the door,” meaning it’s ready to spring upon you, it’s the picture of the lion, Satan, crouching at the door ready to spring. So who is responsible for a satanic attack in Cain’s soul? Cain is, not Satan, and so it establishes the priority of responsibility. Yes there are demonic factors, yes there are satanic factors but you cannot say Satan made me do it; that is wrong. Or, Satan made so and so do it; wrong! That’s bad theology. It’s just like going out and saying oh, liquor made me do it. Well, how did it get inside? Do you have something to say about this or was it injected, the bartender took a big long hypo and squirted you full of it, is that how it got inside? It did not. You freely chose it. So it’s the same thing here, the priority of human volition to the satanic pressure.

Now let’s see how that principle is reflected in the New Testament, and particularly with Cain. Turn to John 8. In John 8:44 Jesus has paused in His debate with the people to refer to Satan. He says to these people who were professing believers, but who were not really believers, Jesus in verse 44 says, “You are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father you continue to do.” Now look at the title of Satan in this verse, “He was a murderer from the beginning,” now why do you say Satan was a murderer from the beginning? Well, you could say maybe he was a murderer in the sense that he got Eve to sin which caused death. But the first murder we’ve got in history is Cain; Cain is the first murderer of history, and yet here Jesus says Satan is the first murderer of history. And so we have the blending of the two, Cain’s sin nature plus Satan. And you remember a principle we studied, where mothers and fathers have to watch this in the family, we said a warning to Christian parents; Satan will hate your children if you are raising them in the nurture of the Word of God. They are a threat to His future and therefore there will be a particular animosity and you ought to pray for their protection, against the wrong crowd, against physical accidents and so on. It’s your right as a parent to claim protection over your children. Satan hates them and the first murder of history is Satan’s hatred for Abel, that offered the righteous sacrifice, the grace oriented son of Adam who would be the fountainhead of the new civilization. And Satan said I will kill Abel rather than let Eve’s child live.

Let’s turn to Ephesians 2; here’s one of these passages that correlates the sin nature with the demonic. This is one of the most powerful versus in all of the New Testament, that clearly states unambiguously that the world system is under demonic control; under the sovereignty of God, yes. “And you has He quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins, [2] Wherein in times past ye walked,” notice this, “according to the present course of this age, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who is now,” present tense, constantly “working in the children of disobedience.” Who is it that is working in the children of disobedience? It is the principalities and the powers; it is spiritual forces that operate. Verse 3 says, “Among whom also we all had our behavior pattern in times past,” but then, instead of talking about the demonic, what does he talk about in verse 3, “fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath.” You see, verse 2 is the demonic but verse 3 is the sin nature; they are woven together, there’s no sharp distinction between the two. One inter penetrates the other. The only thing we want to be careful of in our statement of this is that we are responsible.

Let’s go to 1 John 3:11-12 for further background on this situation. This is another commentary on the Cain situation. This also will provide a little review to straighten out what John means when he uses the word “love.” He does not mean this evangelical goo that passes in certain Christian circles for love. “For this is the message that ye hard from the beginning, that we should love one another. [12] Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one,” notice John, the apostle, looking back on the incident says very clearly Cain was of the wicked one, he’s of the seed of the murderer, and who “slew his brother. And why did he slay him?” John’s analysis of the Genesis 4 text. “Because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous,” that’s why. Oh, now we have an interesting lesson about this. God is warning Cain—Cain, straighten up boy, “sin lies at the door.” If you don’t start on positive volition toward the Word of God you are going to degenerate; you will not remain the same, Cain, you are going to down or you are going to go up, but you’re not going to remain the same. And so Cain piles one sin on top of another. Now because he’s negative toward God he hates any person in his environment identified with God. Who in his environment is identified with God? You guessed it—Abel, Abel who receives the authentication, he reminds, in other words, he reminds Cain every time he wakes up in the morning and sees his brother, his brother reminds him of God. And so therefore it’s not a hatred directed primarily at Abel, it’s a hatred for the Lord for whom Abel stands; that’s what makes Cain hate his brother.

Now this is the kind of hate that John is talking about. You can’t have love, incidentally, without hate and the hate here is a hatred, in this case, of righteousness. John is not talking, in John 11:12, about the fact that Abel was kind of a nut and Cain just couldn’t stand his nutty brother. [“Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and killed his brother. And why killed he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous.”] It’s not a personality problem in verse 12; yeah, every family has a personality problem. But that’s not what John’s talking about. John is talking about a deep basic spiritually motivated hatred that goes deep; it’s underneath all personality differences. He hates Abel for what Abel stands for. So what’s the love of the fourth gospel, John. It’s an admiration for God’s Word, regardless of the personality eccentricities of the individual. It’s a basic appreciation or a basic hatred.

So verse 12 summarizes… by the way, verse 12 also seems to suggest how Cain killed Abel. The word “slay” here in the Greek is the word used in the Septuagint for the priest who would take the knife and slit the throat of the sacrifice. And so it suggest what must have gone through Cain’s mind one day, as he looked out and he saw Abel sacrifice, which was a blood sacrifice, and he stood and he watched his brother so open the throat of the lamb, and he got to looking at that and he says that gives me an idea, I think I’ll try that on my brother’s throat, see how it works on him; it works pretty good on the lamb, why not try it on him. And so apparently Cain murdered his brother by slitting his throat; it’s an inference, based on the use of this verb “slay” in verse 12.

Let’s come back to Genesis 4 and watch this young man deteriorate in his autonomy. Choosing to rebel against God… he can do that but he can’t choose to stop at any arbitrary point. See, that’s how God has kind of a self-destructive system built in us all, sort of like that slide at the park. You can start down the slide but you can never stop on the slide. And that’s the way life is; you can go and rebel against God but you’re not free to stop at a point where the results of your rebellion get kind of obnoxious to you; you just keep on sliding and sliding and sliding and sliding and sliding.

And so in Genesis 4 we have the grand slide of Cain. The warning again in verse 7, the last verse of this first section, God says, “If you do well,” adhere to the word, “you will have no depression. But if you do not well,” you’ll have a lot worse than depression, “sin crouches at the door,” he’s insinuating, in other words, Cain, old buddy, you’re about to become the seed of Satan; you’re about to fulfill Genesis 3:16; your mother was right when she named you as you were one of the seeds; she is wrong in which seed, you are about to become the seed of the serpent, not the seed of the woman. Then he adds at the end of verse 7 what every man, every woman too but again what every man must know, “Unto thee shall be its desire,” that’s the sin nature’s desire, the desire of Satan behind the sin nature to destroy you, “but you,” and it should be a “but” here, it’s an adversative, “but you must rule over it.” You must rule over it, it’s a basic command and warning given to Cain; Cain, as a young man if there’s one lesson you must learn it’s that your flesh reeks of autonomy and you must learn to beat it into shape; you must learn to suppress it and to reign over it and not let it get to you in any way. So that’s the first section.

And so we have this at least learned about this young man. We have the fact that the young man’s depression, his bad feelings, his discouragement with life, is caused, not by an innocent set of circumstances but by his own spiritual behavior. We also find out that the longer he persists in negative volition toward God the more dangerous he becomes, until finally he coalesces into a seed of the serpent.

Now the second section, Genesis 4:8-15. Satan becomes the seed of the serpent. This is what happens when he did not take the counsel of God, and he went ahead with his anger and let’s see what happens. [8] “And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and slew him. [9] And the LORD said to Cain, Where is Abel, your brother? And he said, I don’t know, am I my brother’s keeper? [10] And he said, What have you done? The voice of thy brother’s blood cries unto Me from the ground. [11] Now you are cursed from the earth, which has opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand. [12] And when you till the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee its strength; a fugitive and a wanderer shall thou be in the earth. [13] And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. [14] Behold, thou has driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hidden; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, every one that findeth me shall slay me. [15] And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark on Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.”

Cain becomes the seed of the serpent but God is still gracious. Let’s see. In verse 8, Cain began to talk; in the Hebrew, the picture here in the Hebrew, and again we can’t tell, this is all I’m talking about now is the Hebrew tradition; this is not inspired Scripture, it’s just a guess that developed during the history of Israel. But the story that’s amplified in the rabbinic lure is that Cain came up to Abel, and was going to kill him, and Abel knew it, and rather than grieve his family Abel said let’s go into the field. Remember that Cain is the older brother. And so he takes Abel out in the field and he kills him. Verse 8 is the result of a principle; mental attitude unchecked will always come out as overt behavior. When you read these murders in the paper, this boy that was a senior at Tech, for example, that was closing a gasoline station and some two dumb butts came into the gasoline station, held it up, couldn’t get any money so they stuck the kid in the spine so he’ll probably wind up a paraplegic for the rest of his life, when you read things like that just look, those guys that did that had a mental attitude of hatred going on in their minds unchecked by any internal constraint of conscience for months, probably years before that. It probably goes back to their home life, they were probably encouraged that somehow to be a man you have to have arrogance and hatred and violence, that’s how you assert your manhood. And so they asserted it and so now a young boy from Tech will be a paraplegic for the rest of his life; great accomplishment.

So the mental attitude becomes an over action; that’s what verse 18 is teaching us. God warned it in verse 7, the Hebrew emphasized it in verses 5-6. See, this is a very simple story but you get all the basics you need for living out of this. Today our civilization is complicated because we’ve got so many hairy factors that you have to peel them off to get down to the basic simple truths. Here you didn’t have a whole bunch of sociological data to deal with, it was a simple family situation in the first part of the human race. So by looking at these simple stories here’s where we master the basic principles. They’re still with us.

And so now verse 9-10 God comes in judgment, but also in grace. In verse 9 notice the lie, notice Cain can’t stop sinning, he must cover one sin with another one, and now he has to lie, “I don’t know” where Abel is. And so in verse 10 God challenges his lie, you’ve murdered him, that’s where he is. And in verse 11 God begins to curse the ground further. He’s going to drive Cain from the place where he is. Now we don’t know what the shape of the continents looked like in the antediluvian world but we’re going to draw three zones; zone one, zone two, zone three. Zone one is the garden, which is said to be in Eden; area 2 is Eden; area 3 is going to be called the land of Nod. These are three geographical zones. The first zone is where the presence of God is, the tree of life. This was present up until the time of the flood, and this is why many of your myths you still read about the golden age and so on in the past, when Saturn reigned. Apparently Eve, Adam, Cain, Abel came up to the boundary of the garden; you’ll notice the last verse in chapter 3, Genesis 3:24, an angel is standing there with a multi perimeter sword and he stopped their entrance to that garden. But nevertheless, they apparently came to the garden of Eden.

The garden of Eden is on a mountain in the ancient world. This is why this was remembered all through history; remember those of you who’ve read Greek mythology, where were the gods? They were on Mount Olympus. You read ancient Near Eastern mythology, where are the gods? Mount [sounds like: Gah four]. Why are the gods always on mountains? Have you ever asked that? Because it’s a silent memory in the human race to those days back before the flood when God met men on the mountain, the great mountain of the garden of Eden. And so we have the men coming to this place, but when Cain kills, this zone too cries out against him, the ground absorbs the human blood and God says out. So he’s relegated to zone three, and it’s a picture literally and physically of the male as he persists in his rebellion against God’s law being progressively excluded from God’s presence.

But even in this exclusion from God’s presence, verse 13, Cain complained. Cain said, “My punishment is greater than I can bear.” And yet here the man shows no sign of repentance; he’s just fussing about the pressure. And this is typical, typical of people who have hardened knees that will not bend before God’s authority, they will fuss, they will cry, and they will whine. They will even suffer great mental problems, terrific psychosomatic problems brought on by their own bad attitude, tearing their body up with ulcers and all sorts of other things because of their bad attitude. And what happens? God still calls to them. And what do they do? Shake their fist in His face, I’m in pain. And God says why don’t you repent. I want release of my pain, give me an aspirin. And God says I give you Christ. I want an aspirin. And that’s the choice, and it’s the same thing here.

And so God says, in verse 15, to protect Cain, thinking well, we’ll give Cain further chance; Cain wants an aspirin to solve his pain now, but maybe later on Cain will want to repent. And so in verse 15 he puts a mark on Cain. We don’t know what that mark is, it’s not the black race by the way, so don’t say that the black race began with the mark of Cain. The black race is one of the sons of Ham, it has nothing to do with the mark of Cain. The mark of Cain, we don’t know what it was but it was a substitute for the future fourth divine institution. You see, in the days before the flood, from the fall to the flood there was no fourth divine institution; that is, there was no state, there was no capital punishment; Romans 13, Genesis 9. There was nothing like that to avenge by human beings injustice, and so therefore it was thought that well, people are going to take vengeance on Cain. God said no, there will be no capital punishment in antediluvian society. God prohibited government. If there was ever an experiment run that proves at least one human viewpoint theory of government is wrong, it’s the pre-flood antediluvian world. Anarchism reigned here; extreme libertarian doctrine reigned here, and it failed. And God protected Cain. Verse 15 is grace, grace toward Cain. And God said I will avenge whoever does it “sevenfold,” evidently meaning I’ll destroy him, his family, his wife, and his children, if he bothers Cain. We’ll see just what happens to that curse.

That’s the second section of Genesis; Cain has now become the seed of the serpent. He hasn’t repented, he’s sorry and he’s hurt and he stings and he fusses and he complains and he gripes but there’s no repentance and he becomes more [can’t understand word] defiant of God so that now he’s excluded from the place where they could worship.

And now Genesis 4:16 to the end, verse 25, we have the man in his final autonomy, and it’s interesting because this shows us what a man will do in his final autonomy, the tendencies inherent in all men, verses 16-24, a profile of the male’s sin nature and what the male will do when he defies God. “And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod,” the word “Nod” in Hebrew is the land of wandering, “on the east of Eden. [17] And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bore Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch. [18] And unto Enoch was born Irad; and Irad begot Mehujael;” Mehujael is… apparently “jael” is the word for Jehovah there, so it shows there was some worship in there, “ and Mehujael begot Methushael; and Methushael begot Lamech. 19] And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of one was Adah, and the name of the other, Zillah. [20] And Adah bore Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle. [21] His brother’s name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and the organ [pipe]. [22] And Zillah, she also bore Tubal-cain, an instructor of every artificer [craftsman] in brass [bronze] and iron,” by the way, he shows up in mythology as your fire god, he’s the one that became known in history as Vulcan. “… and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah. [23] And Lamech said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech; for I have slain a man who wounded me, and a young man for hurting me. [24] If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.”

And thus we have the rise of the seed of Cain, the seed of the serpent. Now notice several things here as we go through these verses. Notice this man; he thinks that he’s autonomous, negative volition male. But we know better; we know that though he’s rebelling against God and though he chooses to defy God he can’t choose… because God’s flypaper kind of sticks to him, he can’t choose the way his rebellion shows up. And even in his rebellion he fulfills the mandate of God. What was the mandate? To subdue the earth. How was the male to subdue the earth? By marrying, and through his family have a seed that would be sort of a micro civilization, and through that is how he dominates the earth. Cain fulfills the mandate; he fulfills it in defiance against God, and out of this you have the list of the early wisdom things, the early arts of civilization.

Now we’ve all been taught about the stone age and then we have the age of bronze and then we have the iron age and so on. That is a recovery from the flood. That’s true, there was a sequence of civilization but that’s just man recovering his tools after the holocaust of the flood. But from the very beginning society in the antediluvian world, which has all been destroyed, in the morning service when I go through this I’ll show you pictures where we’ve found, apparently, evidences of the antediluvian civilization in very old rock strata, pots, we find pots in coal seams, well, coal is supposed to be 250-300 million years old, what was man doing then. Well, obviously it’s not 250 million years old. The coal seam is the produce of antediluvian vegetation and when God sent the flood it just destroyed the civilization an encapsulated parts of it in these coal seam. So we have pieces of this. So this picture is not just some weird thing that the Bible thought of by itself.

Notice the skills, verse 21, “Jubal: he was the father of … the harp and the organ,” musical instruments. Notice this, this is within two generations of creation, two or three generations of creation. We already have the rise of musical instruments in the human race. There’s no living in cave and have King Kong that comes dropping out of the tree with a tail or something. That’s not the picture of early civilization we read here. Jabal is the father of ranchers, and that may indicate that they defied God in the area of their diet, they may have been raising meet here against God’s command; that was authorized only after the flood. Verse 22, “Zillah, she also bore Tubal-cain,” here’s metallurgy, and notice, brass and iron, not a stone age, from the very beginning of history the human race knew how to refine iron ore, “and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah” and so on, it goes on to describe.

All right, Cain, because he can’t be totally autonomous, winds up producing the seed and some of that seed is good, even though Cain means it for evil. Even though Cain means to be totally isolated from God he can’t help it, he’s God’s creature. And the result of even Cain’s civilization is a development of the art forms.

But let’s look and see what else happened. Cain, in verse 16, “went out from the presence of the LORD,” now you would suspect on the basis of verse 15 that Cain would have said something like this: well, thank you God, I’m going to trust in Your promise. Now that would have been repentance, I’m going to trust in Your promise to protect me. But what does Cain immediately set about to do? To try to get what he can only get in God’s presence, and that’s security—peace and security. And so he begins to do two things; he has sex with his wife, he “knew his wife; and she conceived, and bore Enoch: and he built a city,” now it wasn’t a large city, it’s probably a small tent city at this point, but it’s a city. The first occurrence of the word city: urban culture. Bible-believing Christian, urban culture’s founder was Cain, the murderer, the apostate who was fleeing from God’s presence. And this gives us insight into urban culture all the way down into the 20^th century. Urban culture is not wrong but down through history it has always been motivated by a spiritually apostate desire. And what is the desire? Security, I want to get what I ought to get in God’s presence but I don’t want to pay the price of getting into His presence so I will autonomously build my city. I’ll build walls around myself to protect myself and I’ll get my security, it won’t be God’s security but I’ll get my security. That’s the spirit of the city and that city will not be undone until the New Jerusalem in the final end of history. So urban culture was founded by Cain, the murderer.

And then what does he name his city? After he and his wife conceived, he names the city Chanok, the word Chanok is one that you’ve seen this week, Hanukah, the Jewish feast at Christmas time; if you’ve had some Jewish friends, you’ve read the paper, you’ll see the word Hanukah, that’s the same word used here for Enoch. And do you know what it means? Dedication; it means the fact that Cain has dedicated his city to be the new world; he is going to remake his world with his city. It’s a picture of the autonomous male. See the arrogance of the autonomous male? The women in all of this text appear as the helpers, the ‘ezers. But they’re not the leaders of it; the leaders of it are the apostate men; the men are the builders of the city, it is the men who defy God and it is the men who say we will build our new world. So when you see the word “Enoch” it means initiation or dedication to the new era. I will build a new era says Cain.

And then Genesis 4:18 skips over many generations, to a man by the name of Lamech. Now why is there this skipping? God wants to show us cause/effect in history. And when you live at one moment of time you can’t really see what the long-term effects of your actions are. That’s what’s wrong with a lot of this pro-abortion legislation. Sure it’s bad for a girl to get pregnant, but the point remains, what is the long-term results of liberalized abortion. What is that going to mean 120 years from today? Only God has the perspective and so when we try to answer a question like that what do we have to do but go back to the eternal perspective of the Word of God, and so verse 18 skips down: Irad’s generation, there’s one; Mehujael’s generation, that’s two; Methushael, three; to Lamech the fourth. And now the Holy Spirit says I’ve quickly taken you on a time machine from one moment of history down four generations and we will study the spirit of Cain and his urban culture and how it is produced and what it has produced.

And in verse 19 what do we find? Lamech beginning polygamy. And his two wife’s names are interesting; it tells you what’s on his mind; the criteria for his women is physical beauty, lust for Adah; Adah is the word to mean adorn; Zillah is dark and beautiful. And so they both are words, and including the other woman that’s listed there, the word at the end of verse 22, Naamah, they’re all Hebrew words that draw attention to physical beauty. There’s nothing wrong with physical beauty; Eve was the most beautiful woman probably who ever lived, but the point still remains is that’s not the criteria, it’s the woman’s soul that ought to be the concern. Remember what the definition was when we said the single mail ought to ask himself, when he looks at a girl, is this woman the one that I want to choose to be the one through whom I participate in the future of the human race. Is that woman the kind of woman through whom I want to participate in the human race and raise a godly seed in a micro civilization of my own home? Does she have the character to hack it or is she going to be a weight to me? And so Lamech didn’t ask the question, he just acquired women; he acquired women on the lust principle and so he had polygamy.

And then he began, in Genesis 4:23, to sing him a song. Look back at Genesis 2:23 notice the two spirits in the two songs that the men sing to their women. In 2:23 Adam meets Ishah, he sees her fresh from God’s fingers as He’s created her, and Adam rejoices and he sings a song to his bride. Now she’s “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh,” in the context he recognized his wife’s character. He looked into her soul and he knew her soul, and that was the basis. Sure she was a nice looking doll but that wasn’t what Adam’s emphasis was, it was on the soul of Eve.

Now come over and look at the attitude of Lamech toward his women; notice what’s been lost; notice what four generations of male autonomy has done? He threatens his women, they are things for him and he dominates them. By the way, that’s what’s going to happen any time you mess up the home, I don’t care what women’s lib does or anything else, the male is naturally stronger, the women are always going to turn out to be the losers. And so here we have the women the losers, “Hear my voice; you wives of Lamech,” he treats them like his harem, they are things for his household, he has furniture, animals, he might as well have a few women around too. “… hearken unto my speech.” This is a principle now, it’s not a man that he’s slaying, it’s a defiant principle: I slay a man to my wounding, a young to my hurt. for I have slain a man who wounded me, and a young man for hurting me. “If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.” He’s saying to his wives if anybody hurts me, I will hurt him seven times seventy fold and you’d better know that. That’s the spirit that he addresses his women. It’s not a love, it’s not a kindness, it’s not a graciousness toward the woman any more, the woman is a sexual plaything to be dominated cruelly by the man. That’s what four generations of an autonomous male has done to womanhood in that civilization.

Notice something else: Cain had a genuine mark of protection. What has the autonomous male done? He has amplified and escalated the violence and now we have two of the basic biblical characteristics of the male sin nature, a sexual domination and physical violence, the two most popular ways that men show their sin nature. And this is the heart of the male when he’s out of control, when he’s rebelling against God, he shows himself most prominently this way.

Then there’s something else that’s interesting about verse 24, it’s a mere image of a statement by the Lord Jesus Christ. Remember one day Peter was asking the Lord something, and the Lord said see, you’ve got to forgive the person. Remember what Peter said? Well how many times Lord, seven? And the Lord said “Seventy times seven,” exactly the word used here for Lamech; the exact reverse, the gracious spirit instead of the vitriolic vindictive spirit of Lamech.

We’ve come to the end of this section of the Scripture and their portrayal of the male. Let’s summarize what we’ve learned about the man and learn some things that the man can do and God’s attitude toward the man. First of all, we’ve seen that the autonomous male begins with this mental attitude sin. He wants to get around God’s law. And what will happen is that his wife will be submerged in his apostate stream. You know, there’s something interesting about Lamech singing the hymn to his women. Why do you suppose he brags to his women? It’s using the woman in a principle that she could have been used for in a righteous way. Remember what the Bible says; the woman is an ‘ezer. What’s that mean? She reflects the man’s character. Remember that passage in 1 Corinthians 11, the woman reflects the glory of the man. Now why is it that even in the apostasy the male wants to brag to his woman? To get a response from her. He wants to drag the women down so they aid him in his autonomy; he wants a cheering section from the female side to cheer him on in his apostasy, and that’s why the hymns are being sung to the women, these violent domineering hymns. He wants the women to adjust their response patterns to his autonomy.

Secondly, we’ve learned that the male’s psychological depression, his so-called mental illnesses, the chaos in his home and in his city, comes about because of his defiance of God. “If you do well,” you’ll be uplifted, you’ll be encouraged, but if you don’t then it will become worse for you and your family.

And finally, a third point that we just made about the male, the key areas of the male’s sin nature are physical violence and domineering sex. All through this, though, we’ve seen God’s grace; we’ve God protect Cain; we’ve seen God counsel with Cain; we’ve even seen God’s laws still begin to work through Cain’s seed and so there’s still some good; music comes out of it, metallurgy comes out of it; ranching comes out of it. God still retrieves good out of it but woe to those people through whom that good is come.

Next week we’ll continue some of the profiles of the great men of history and we’ll begin to study Noah.