Cain and Abel
Understanding the story of these two brothers is as easy as understanding Luke 18:10—
Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.
Even though both men enjoyed the same privileges and opportunities, they were very different. There is a real lesson here for us today: Christian privileges do not make a person a Christian. Let’s consider some points in the story of these two brothers.
1. Self will is rejected, verse 5. Although God looked favorably on Abel’s offering, He did not look with favor upon Cain’s offering. The offerer must himself be acceptable before his offering could be. Cain’s offering was rejected because he himself guilty. Christ was without spot when He offered Himself, but the “way of Cain” was his own way (Jude 11). In other words, Cain sought to approach God using his own methods. Man’s own way is to seek acceptance with God without confessing guilt and without changing his ways. When we try to deal with God on our terms, both our offerings and ourselves will be rejected.
2. Faith is accepted, verse 4. The Lord accepted, “respected,” Abel’s offering. The New Testament sheds some light on why this was a good offering:
By faith Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did. By faith he was commended as a righteous man, when God spoke well of his offerings. (Hebrews 11:4)
The offering and the offerer stand or fall together. When by faith we lay hold of Christ and His righteousness, there is no way we or our offerings will be rejected, because Christ has already been accepted by God and every believing offerer is accepted in Him. Faith in Christ is always acceptable faith.
3. Anger is manifested, verse 5. Cain was angry because God rejected him. Cain was religious in appearance only, but his heart was far from God. He had the form of godliness yet was a stranger to its power. The church of Jesus Christ is full of folks just like Cain; full of folks who have gone the way Cain: they are content with ceremony and outward show, yet not interested in a relationship with the living Christ. Our churches are full of people who have never touched the heart of God because they’ve never been close enough.
4. Mercy is revealed, verses 6, 7. In His great and boundless mercy, God explains to Cain that the only way of acceptance as a sinner is through a sin-offering. Christ, our sin-offering, bore our sins in His own body upon the Cross. This sin-offering lies at the door of every sinner. That is how close the Savior’s perfect sacrifice is: just outside the door of the heart.
5. Righteous way hated, verse 8. Cain hated the righteousness of God as seen in his brother. Just as Satan despised the image of God in Adam and Eve, so we see the same sin in Cain. To this day this self same sin plagues every person, even believers. That’s why John warned his readers not to act like Cain in 1 John 3:12. He said, “Don’t be like Cain, whose actions were evil and his brothers righteous.” What actions do you suppose John was referring to? John was referring to all of them, not just the murder of his brother. Approaching God the wrong way, being jealous of his brother, all these are reckoned as being evil. The worldly mind of man would rather destroy the light of God in his brother than to acknowledge his own sin. And that’s exactly what Cain did. Christ was the Righteousness of God and His people yelled, “Crucify Him, Crucify Him!” The loved the darkness rather than the light and sought to extinguish the light.
6. Wickedness is judged, verse 11. God had to reject the offering and the curse followed. Rejecting Christ as the sin-offing means there is no escape from the wrath of God and the curse of God on sin. We see in Cain a stark fulfillment of John 3:18—
Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
7. Justice in vindicated, verse 13. Cain knew his punishment was hard but did not beg for mercy. Cain complained bitterly to God about his punishment but never once asked for forgiveness or mercy. There is an old saying: “There is mercy at the eleventh hour,” but what if your heart has become so hard that you will not even yield long enough to seek mercy. Jeremiah once wrote, The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9). Those who approach God their own way are delusional. God can never accept them. False worshipers: take heed of the doom of Cain.
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