Nothing to say, yet
Transcription
The speaker is excited to continue studying the book of Genesis. They read and analyze the first 10 verses of Genesis chapter 4, focusing on the story of Cain and Abel. They discuss the Hebrew word for "knowing" and its significance in intimate relationships. They also mention God's knowledge of his people before they were born. The speaker then talks about the concept of spiritual death and the fallen nature inherited from Adam. They refute the idea of humans being born innocent and discuss the instinctive sinful tendencies in children. Okay, tonight we're going to continue our flow in Genesis and I'm really thrilled to get back on track with this because we had so many things going on in our body over the last period of time and I'm eager to continue to kind of move through the book of Genesis. I feel it's so important. Tonight we're going to be looking into the first verses of Genesis chapter 4. By the way, I thank Michael, and Mark isn't here, for teaching in my absence. I did get a chance to hear the message last week and I was really thrilled by how well that went. But I'm going to read the first 10 verses of chapter 4 and then we're going to kind of go back and helicopter over these verses. And I really encourage you to pay close attention because there's a lot in this. Now when Adam, starting at verse 1, now Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord. And again she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain a worker of the ground. In the course of time, Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground. And Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of the fat portions. And the Lord regarded Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry and his face fell. The Lord said to Cain, why are you angry? And why is your face fallen? Or why, in the literal Hebrew, why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. His desire is contrary to you and you must rule over it. Cain spoke to Abel, his brother, and when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, where is Abel, your brother? He said, I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper? And the Lord said, what have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. Let's pray. Father, we ask you to open our hearts and our minds to understand with the heart of a disciple what you're speaking to us in this portion of scripture. Help us to have astute understanding, Lord, that we would grasp the underlying principles that you're giving us through this amazing story. We thank you for it, Father. We thank you that these events actually happened and that we can draw much wisdom from them. We receive it now in Jesus' name, and they all said, Amen. Now, revisiting verse 1 and 2, let me just read this part to you. Now, Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived. I want to point out that the word knew there is the Hebrew word yada, and it doesn't just simply mean that Adam looked over at his wife and goes, Oh, oh, yeah, I know you. And then she got pregnant. The word knew carries with it in Hebrew a much more significant meaning. It means to have intimate relations with her. And as you go through the Bible, you'll see many, many instances where the term knew his wife, or Amos knew his wife, or Adam knew his wife, or you'll see it in the patriarchs and so on and so forth. And what is this knowing? It is having intimate relationship. Now, we'll see that in the New Testament because it also applies to our spiritual life in Christ. And I'll allude to that a little bit later as we get into it. There's that spiritual sense of knowing, God knowing his saints before the world began. God knew us before we existed in the natural. He knew us. We know from Scripture that he had intimate knowledge of us. And I want to read just a few verses that kind of allude to this. Jeremiah chapter 1, verse 5, Now the word of the Lord came to me, saying, Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Again, that Hebrew word yada is being used there. I intimately knew you. And before you were born, I consecrated you. Now does that just apply to Jeremiah as a special case? I do not think so. We have many, many other examples of this throughout Scripture. In Psalms 139, verse 13, David was saying, For you formed my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance. In your book were written every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. This speaks of God's intimate knowledge of David and of all of his saints, each one of us. It's hard for us to mentally conceive of this, but God knew each person in his family from before time began. In fact, Ephesians also says this, and I'm not sure I wrote that down here, but let me just look it up here real quick. I'll come to it in just a minute. Now there's a negative sense to this knowing or not knowing that we need to be aware of because in, where was the reference, Matthew 7, 22, on that day many will say to me, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and cast out demons in your name and do many mighty works in your name? And then I will declare to them, now this is Jesus speaking, I never knew you. Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness. Now this is a very sobering scripture. These were clearly people who thought and believed that they were following Christ. In many wonderful works we did, we cast out demons in your name. And he said, depart from me, for I never knew you. Now was Jesus just not aware of who they were? He didn't know their names, he wasn't aware. But this contradicts what we know about God, doesn't it? Because God is infinite in knowledge, he's omniscient, he knows everything in the universe down to the tiniest atom, everywhere, all at once, because he is omnipresent. And so there isn't anything hidden from his eyes. There's nothing past, present, or future. We've gone over this in the past when we talked about the attributes of God and the fact that everywhere in the universe he is present. And everything that is going on is something that he is fully aware of. And in his sovereignty, he is entirely in charge of. Now this is, again, it's hard for us to grasp because we're limited by our human experience and our human minds. We can't fathom that kind of a being, that he knows what that bird is singing out there. He's aware of it. He's in a moment that he knows what's going on in your mind, that he knows every thought, he knows everything, from the furthest reaches of the universe to the present moment. And in fact, I would say he is omnipresent in time, otherwise he couldn't know the future with perfection. He's omnipresent in the past, he's omnipresent in the present, he's omnipresent in the future. That's why he could, in such precise detail, give his prophets details about, for example, the crucifixion of Christ and the circumstances around every aspect of that event. And if even one of them were out of place, God would not be God. He would not be omniscient. So it's something to keep in mind as we read through this, and I'll point it out as we go. Cain and Abel personify the two spiritual natures of the righteous and the unrighteous. Now there are going to be some things I'm going to share with you that are going to be hard to understand, but again, I want you to bear with me because I believe the Scripture is really pointing this out. Cain was born with a fallen nature. Why? He was one generation away from dust, but he was only one generation from his father, Adam. Adam was told that if he ate of the forbidden fruit, he would surely die in that day. But he didn't die physically, did he? He lived 930 years after he was created. So we know that it wasn't an immediate type of death. So the question we have to ask ourselves is, is God wrong? Or did he mean something even more profound as a death than just a physical death? It was a spiritual death. His nature fell. His pristine, righteous nature, his ability to understand spiritual things, perhaps, fell in that moment, and death entered him. And as Paul teaches us in Romans, through Adam, death spread to all men. Now, a few verses. Psalms 58, verse 3, the wicked are estranged from the womb. They go astray from birth, speaking lies. You know, there's a popular kind of false teaching going around in evangelical circles that there's a supposed age of accountability. And what that means is that a person doesn't become a sinner until they sin the first sin and consciously do it. I want to tell you that that's a false teaching. Because it assumes, as the Pelagians believe, that people are born innocent before God. But the fact is, we are doomed from the womb to the tomb unless we get born again. And this is, again, it goes against natural wisdom because people like to assume that humans are basically good, that we're born good, that children are born perfectly innocent. I heard somebody say not too long ago that the reason that God made children small and tiny in the beginning was that way they wouldn't easily kill us in our sleep while they were growing up, until we could drain them. Because we're born from the womb with that fallen, adamant nature within us. And we have to be trained not to sin. No one ever has to train us to lie when we're young. We know instinctively how to lie. We know how to steal. We know how to bear false witness. We know how to give place to our flesh and our own selfishness and pleasure. Those things do not have to be trained into a child. No parent ever sits down and says, now, I want you to learn, lesson one, how to steal toys from your brother or sister, or I'm going to teach you how to hate God, or I'm going to teach you, you know, how to lie. You know, if I ask you a question, I want you to tell me the exact opposite. No, you don't have to train any of that. That's instinctively in a child. Ecclesiastes 9.3, truly the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil. Madness is in their minds while they live. And after that, they go to the dead. Not terribly flattering. You know, I heard Dr. Stephen Lawson talk about a visit he made recently to the memorial to Ronald Reagan, and he was commenting on the fact that there's a placard there, a quote from Ronald Reagan, where he's extolling the basic goodness of man and how good humans are innately if we only encourage them in the right way. And this is humanism. This is the wisdom of the world. The idea that we can somehow make people good if we just control their environment and give them enough knowledge. Then they'll be good. But even Jesus, when someone came to him once and said, good teacher, and he said, why do you call me good? There is none good but God. He was good because he was born without sin, but there are none good but God. I alluded to Ephesians 2.1 earlier. And you, he's speaking to believers, he's speaking to Christians here. He said, and you were dead in trespasses and sins in which you once walked following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. Who would that be? Satan. Satan, the devil. Among whom we all, he's including himself here, once walked in the passions of our flesh carrying out the desires of the body and of the mind and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind. We were by nature. That's why Jesus said to Nicodemus that night, you must be born again. And of course, this is very puzzling to this man. He understood it later. But the point that he was making is that the nature is fallen and no amount of, you know, you can put, like they say, a golden ring in a pig and it's still going to be a pig. You know, you can put one in his snout and it's still going to be a pig. The fact is, we are all, without Christ, wicked. And under the same pigs, okay, we're under the same condemnation as the world. Now Christians who have a kind of a humanistic bent and have gone to churches where the pastor told people what they wanted to hear. And, oh, you're all basically nice people and we're all nice here. And, oh, isn't it great that we have, you know, some verses of scripture that we can talk about. But to call people sinners in many congregations is to get fired. You know, we are we are saved by grace. We're not saved by any merit on our part. But people get very upset sometimes when you tell them things like we're all sinners. Yeah, we're all sinners saved by grace. Because the next verse after this, verse three in Ephesians says, But God, who is rich in mercy, even when we were dead in trespasses and sins, made us alive together in Christ. Made us alive together. Not we made ourselves alive in Christ. He made us alive in Christ. Jesus told his own disciples, You did not choose me, but I chose you. I chose you. Now, that's hard for some people to receive, because we like to think we bring something to the table, that we give God something that he admires, you know, like our obedience or our good deeds or something that we do to catch his attention. But the Bible's clear that our righteousness is as filthy rags before God. The filthy rags referenced there are unmentionably filthy and stinky. Continuing in Genesis, an Eve bore Cain, saying, I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord. Now, Cain sounds very much like the Hebrew word, khanim, which means, basically, gotten. And again, she bore his brother Abel, which comes from the Hebrew word havel, which means empty. Now, Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain was a worker of the ground. Now, a lot of times names in the Bible have another meaning or an application to that individual. I think you gave a teaching on that one time, that certain names identify that person, that names were not just casually given to children, but very often they were given by inspiration. And so, apparently, we have here a case where Cain basically means gotten or he was obtained, but Abel was empty. And I think that's kind of important to key into, because who is it that God blesses but those who are humble of heart, that they empty themselves, that are not full of themselves? And as we'll see here in a minute, Cain was very full of himself. All right. Now, some commentators, by the way, think that Cain and Abel were the first twins in the Bible, because if you look at the way the verse is actually given here, in other cases, Adam knew his wife and she bore, Adam knew his wife again and she bore this child, and Adam knew his wife, and so on and so forth. In this case, it's only mentioned that Adam knew his wife and she bore. And apparently this could be, and it doesn't matter one way or the other, but they could have been twins. You might say, well, how long did they live before they became keepers of sheep and Cain killed Abel? Some theologians think they were about 130 years old, maybe older. We don't know. We're not really told. We do know that they lived at a time when it was common for people to live to be 900 years old, that Adam lived 930 years, their father. And Cain and Abel were one generation from Adam, one generation. Now, that's significant because if they had lived maybe three or four hundred years before Cain killed Abel, they would have had hundreds of years to sit at the feet of their father and mother and hear the story of what happened in the Garden of Eden, that they would have heard the entire story. So they couldn't ever claim ignorance of what had happened. Now, we come to the why. Why did Cain murder Abel? This is important. Some people say, well, you know, God didn't like vegetables and he only wanted meat, you know, whatever. But really, the meaning of this is something a little bit more significant. There was a battle between two religions going on here. A battle of two religions. Why do I say that? Because God had established previously that when Adam and Eve fell, what did he do to cover their nakedness? He killed an animal. He shed blood. Blood was shed to cover their sin and their nakedness before God. And that was an establishing of something, because we are told elsewhere in the scriptures that without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin in Hebrews. And so we know that there was a component there. They had offered fig leaves to cover their nakedness. God gave them animal skins. And so there's a deep significance there. Now, as they pondered that and as they worshipped, you know, all worship requires sacrifice, true worship. What do we give as a sacrifice? The sacrifice of praise, the sacrifice of worship. It's a sacrifice to set aside time, to spend time with God, to worship him. You don't come before the presence of God anywhere in the Bible where you don't offer him something, that you don't give him something. And what can we give him that he hasn't already received? Except that we give him our adoration, we give him our praise, we give him our worship, we offer up the incense of our prayers. And this is a key thing. Now, as we read further, there was a battle between two religions. Man's religion doesn't like that bloody stuff. You know, they want something a little more sophisticated, you know, something a little nicer. And so it seemed to Cain that if he could offer up vegetables to God, that would be good enough. And what was he basically doing? He was making up his own liturgy. He was making up his own way of interacting with God. And this is the problem that we had from Eve. She disobeyed God in favor of wanting something that would give her the knowledge of good and evil, thereby being like God. So she wasn't following the established means by which God wanted to relate to them. And so it is down to this very day that people want God according to their terms. They want to worship God the way they think that God wants him to be worshipped. They want to choose their own music. They want to choose their own verses. They want to choose their own holidays. You know, there's a lot of ways that people move toward doing things according to their own understanding. And I want you to know that that is the way of Cain, OK? All worshippers must bring sacrifice. Now, let's read further in Genesis. In the course of time, apparently they had times of worship. They had times of sacrifice. In the course of time, Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground. And Abel brought the firstborn of his flock and their fat portions. What would that require? Killing the animals. Shedding blood. And that blood symbolized what? The eventual sacrifice that would be paid for the sin of the world. The blood of the spotless, sinless Lamb of God. So these things were being established even back then. God sets the standard of acceptable obedience, not man. How often have you heard somebody say that they're doing something or it's pointed out to them that they're doing something and they'll say glibly, oh, the Lord will cover it. You know, God will grace it out. You know, just glibly sort of, the Lord will cover it. And we tend in our natural human nature to go toward what is pleasing to us. What makes us feel good. What makes us feel warm and fuzzy. Instead of sticking with the Word of God, which is sometimes arduous and difficult. And it's that human nature. It's humanism basically amalgamating itself into our faith. Didn't he offer his own works? Well, he brought his own works, but he did it his way. Just like Frank Sinatra saying so many years ago, I did it my way. You know, you know, it's this kind of spirit that's come into our times in such strong measure that people are flouncing their flagrant rebellion against God. With Pride Month and, you know, things that, what is there to be proud about? But yet people are flagrantly sneering at God, mocking Christ, mocking Christians. And that's not going to end well. Cain ignored the established pattern set down by God in the first shedding of blood. He seemed determined to innovate and practice sacrifice according to his own standards, his own standard. He was setting his own standard for how he would approach God. Did God like that? Not so much, not so much. OK, if we engage in extra biblical religions or even unauthorized or neglecting duties and embellishments, we get ourselves in trouble with our Heavenly Father. And let me just ask you this, OK? If something grieves the heart of God, should it not grieve us? If something is displeasing to our Heavenly Father, should it be displeasing to us? Why would we make alliances with the world and conform ourselves to the world's standards, either in worship or in observation of holy days or in anything else whatsoever? How can we then go before our Father and say, well, look, I know you're not excited about that, but you'll grace me out because I'm going to go ahead and do this because everybody thinks I should. No, it doesn't fly. It doesn't fly. When we see extra biblical religions in the world, what is the one thing about Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, all the other isms that are in the world? They're all based on works. They're all based on, I give God something, God gives something to me. I pay in, He pays out. If I'm good, He's good to me. If I give Him what He likes, then He will give what I like. And it's not the way He set things up. That's not His way. This rejection of God's biblical patterns, you know, today is so flagrant in sexual immorality, in lack of ethics and business and so many other ways that people compromise. Has anybody ever heard the term syncretism? Syncretism? It basically is a sin that the church has been committing for many, many centuries where the church is kind of trying to synchronize with the world so that we're not too odd. We syncretize ourselves into the world's standard of music or synchronize ourselves into the world's standards concerning, you name it. And you know what? We're supposed to stand out. We're supposed to be different. The world's supposed to look at us and say, who are those oddballs? You know, they aren't doing what everybody else is doing. And yet, so often we see people compromising. The giving of the laws, one example, when God told the children of Israel, okay, Moses, I'm going to give you the law. I want you to come up into the mountain. Tell the people, don't even touch the mountain. Don't even come near the mountain. Don't you dare try to come up here and look at me. And later, as I won't take time to read the whole thing in Exodus 19, but I urge you to read that chapter because it really reveals how, when Moses finally went back up into the mountain and got the Ten Commandments and came back, the people made up their own religion. They made a task. Moses was a little late getting back. He wasn't running on their schedule. And God wasn't running on their schedule. And so they made their own religion. And it cost thousands of them their deaths because God was very angered about this whole thing. So there's a concept also called strange fire. Anybody ever heard of strange fire? Yeah, do you? In Leviticus chapter 10, verse one, I'll just read this verse to you now, Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, I want you to remember who these people are. These are two sons of Aaron who was the spokesman for Moses and traveled with Moses out of Egypt. Okay, yeah, well, that was Miriam's brother, and very close to Moses, I believe. But he had two sons, and it says he each took his censer, an object to burn incense, and put fire in it and laid incense on it and offered unauthorized fire before the Lord. Probably saying to themselves, the Lord will cover it. You know, he'll grace us out. What happened? And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed them. Now, think of the gravity of this. They brought strange fire before the Lord, they made up their worship, they made up what in their own eyes, comprised proper worship. And this is how seriously we should take this. Fire went out from God and burned them alive. Aaron, it's not told here, but you can imagine, Aaron probably heard his sons screaming in agony as the fire of God burned them to death and consumed them. It was not something any parent would ever want to see their child go through. Then Moses said to Aaron, this is what the Lord has said. Among those who are near me, I will be sanctified. And before all the people, I will be glorified. And Aaron held his peace. He said nothing. He didn't say, why did God do that? My sons were sincere. They were trying to worship the Lord. They were trying to do the right thing. They were trying to offer sacrifice of praise and worship. But it wasn't the way God told them to do it. And God killed them. Now, someone will say, well, that was the Old Testament. We're in the New Testament. We're in a dispensation of grace now. God doesn't do that stuff anymore. Well, I would only remind you of what happened in the book of Acts. When Ananias, who was that? Ananias and Sapphira came in and lied to the Holy Ghost. And what did God do to them? He killed them. It wasn't the devil that killed them. I've heard people preach, you know, well, they allowed the door open for the devil. And the devil came in and killed them right in front of everybody. No, God killed them. He took the breath of life right out of them. Now, this is sobering stuff. This is serious stuff. And we should take it very seriously. Back to Genesis 4.3. In the course of time, Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground. And Abel also brought the firstborn of the flock and their fat portions. And the Lord had regard. For Abel and his offering. Now, again, remember, in Hebrews 9, it said, that without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins. There is no forgiveness of sins. You can bring a ton of vegetables and fix God a salad, and it's not going to do any good. Okay? He's not interested in that. Don't ask me why. But it's just how it is. But notice here, it says, but for Cain, in his offering, he had no regard. He did not accept that sacrifice. As sincerely, I don't know, maybe Cain was weeping before God. The best carrots in the world. This is the biggest cabbage. He may have been very sincere in offering up his vegetables. And God would not accept it. Because sincerity has nothing to do with this. Emotions have nothing to do with this. Okay? Cain's offering was insulting, offensive, and blasphemous. He knew that he had to bring a blood sacrifice. From conversations with his parents and everybody else, he knew the story. He knew clearly what was going on. And he was aware that he was doing something wrong. But he thought, well, I'll do it my way. This was the problem. This is the problem we have now. Okay? Did Cain repent? When God said, I don't accept this, did he repent? Did he fall down on his face? Did he cry out and say, oh, I'm so sorry. I blew it. Forgive me. Let me have another chance. No. What did he do? He doubled down on his anger and his rage and his arrogance. So Cain was very angry and his face fell. The Lord said to Cain, why are you angry and why is your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? By the way, this sounds like works-based salvation. If you do well, I'll like you. And if you don't do well, I won't like you. But what this is actually saying in the Hebrew is, if you do well, your countenance will be raised. Your countenance will be raised. Yeah. If you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it. The spirit of this age is rebellion, hatred of God and arrogance. Arrogance. That's just ignorance of God. But arrogance. Now. What upsets God, as I said before, should upset us. What hurts the heart of God should hurt our heart. What displeases him and grieves him should grieve and displease us. The world around us is pressing in with its standards to try and force us to accept lies. To accept standards that have nothing to do with the Word of God. You know, I'm in the midst of building an electric fence up on the hill. Maybe some of you noticed as you came in. And as I've been building that thing, you know, like in everything else that I do, I get spiritual lessons. You know, God speaks to me while I'm working. And I'm out there putting posts in and I'm pressing into putting these wires up. And it occurred to me that I'm building a barrier around predators. To keep predators out. Around my chickens. I'm trying to prevent what is precious to me from being devoured by predators. And it occurred to my heart, you know, the Lord says, you know, you should have a shield of faith. To withstand, Paul said, the fiery darts of the wicked. The lies of the enemy. And I would ask you, do you have a fence around what's precious to you? A barrier? Do you have a wall of righteousness that you can retain behind and you can remain safe? You know, this lesson is over and over again in the Old Testament, but here's the thing. Electric fence will keep out predators. Wolves, bears, mountain lions, whatever. If it's done right. But it has to be maintained. I can't just go up there and throw wire down on the ground and plug it in and, you know, just willy nilly and not maintain it. And a lot of us, you know, we have sort of a pseudo kind of barrier or force field around us that we're not maintaining. We need to maintain our walk with the Lord. Paul said, be vigilant, be sober for your enemy, the devil, goes about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. And as I was standing within the perimeter of this thing and I was looking at it, I was realizing that, you know, that bear is going to come back someday and want more food. And it's my job to maintain that fence, to make sure it's clear, to test it, to make sure that it's operational. Because I don't want to kill the bear. That would just be an emotional reaction. But I want to train the bear that he does not want to come to that fence. The idea is to zap him and make him poo his pants. The idea is to discourage the enemy. Now, who do you think the devil is seeking whom he may devour? When he looks at your life, does he say, hmm, I don't see much of a fence there. Yeah, that person is not really into the word, you know, very much. Yeah, they're kind of weak in their walk with the Lord. Yeah, I think I see an opportunity there. And he can make your life hell, even though you're on your way to heaven. And how many Christians do you know that live a life of unhappiness and misery because they've allowed their walls to fall down? They have not been like Nehemiah, holding a sword in one hand and building the wall with the other hand to keep the enemies of God out. This is what we learn here. Cain let his wall down. You know, we need to be kind of like, you know, Star Trek, you know. Shields off, Scotty. Get the shields up. The Klingons are coming. And they want you. They want to fry you. They want to hurt you. And we can hear Scotty down in engineering saying, she'll blow for sure, Captain. I'm giving her all she's got. We have to maintain our defenses. We've got to weed it. We've got to repair it. We have to test it. We have to make sure it's operational. And for the unbelievers, they're totally given over. The sons of darkness hate the sons of righteousness. Have you noticed it? They hate righteousness. John 8, 44. Jesus was being confronted by these religious freaks of his time who were not born again. They were sons of the devil. They were very religious, knew the Bible backwards and forwards. And he said to them, you are of your father, the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks of his own character for he is a liar and the father of lies. Now, we come to the portion in Genesis that is so sobering and sad. Genesis 4, 8. Cain spoke to Abel, his brother. Many translations say Cain said, come into the field with me and I will show you something. And the Hebrew, the Septuagint and the Vulgate say, let us go out to the field. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up and killed him. Now, this is the second generation from Adam that Cain premeditatedly murdered his brother. Now, I was trying to think about how that operated in my mind because even after the fall, people were living well over 900 years. Abel was probably very vital. He was very strong. Even if he were a few hundred years old, he was probably very hard to kill. So, this had to be up close and personal and vicious that he would kill and murder his brother, the son of his father and mother. And he had given his heart over to envy. He hated God and he hated the righteous. He hated his brother. Then the Lord said to Cain, where is Abel, your brother? Now, do you think for a moment God didn't know where Abel was? He knew precisely where he was. You see, many times we read these verses and we tend to think as some of our open theist kind of brethren think, I don't even know if they're brethren, that God was trying to figure out what had happened. He was a detective and he was just taking clues down, trying to figure out what had occurred. He was writing down facts. Now, he knew exactly what had happened. He said, where is Abel, your brother? And what did Abel say? Cain, rather. Cain could have been honest at that point. But he said, I do not know. I do not know. He lied to God. I do not know. And then he compounded his sin by saying, am I my brother's keeper? I mean, here's God listening to this arrogance, this fool, this son of darkness, this son of darkness. And the Lord said, what have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground. Now, this is something that will lend itself over to allusions in the New Testament about the blood of Jesus that now speaks better things. That now speaks better things. Better things. That the blood of Christ still speaks righteousness before the Father. There's something about the blood that is very, very sacred. And God said that the voice of Abel's blood was crying to him from the ground. These ten verses should cause our hearts to grieve. And yet we know that God's promise of complete redemption is sure. I'm going to end with Matthew chapter 13. And I want you to just ponder this because we see here a war between two warring religions. The religion of man and what man makes up and what God demands. In Matthew 13, 37, he answered and said to them, he who sows the good seed is the son of man and the field is the world. The good seeds are the sons of the kingdom, but the tares are the sons of the wicked one. The enemy who sowed them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age and the reapers are the angels. Therefore, as the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so will it be at the end of this age. The son of man will send out his angels and they will gather out of his kingdom all things that offend and those who practice lawlessness and will cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their father. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. This speaks of a rapture, but not as we typically think of it. A lot of dispensationalists believe that the rapture of the righteous will be will be taken off the earth and then the whole world will be turned over to the devil. It'll become hell on earth. I no longer believe that. Oh, I think we'll be caught up to be with the Lord in the air, but it won't be to escape anything. It will be a welcoming party. It will be a greeting. It will be a victory. I am looking forward to a rapture where God will take the tares from the earth. I am looking forward to a rapture where God will take the tares from among the wheat by his hand and by his angels and they will be destroyed. You look around the world today and you see people that are flaunting their rebellion and flaunting their sin and calling for pride month. And now they're calling for a pride year to flaunt their arrogance. And you are seeing that unless the Lord draws out one or more of them from that darkness, just as he did us, they are doomed. They're doomed. And they're going to be plucked off the earth. Why? Because Jesus said the meek shall inherit the earth. The meek shall inherit the earth. Praise God. Lord, bless the hearing of your word. Bless our minds and our hearts to understand this event that actually happened in history. That Lord God, this first murder took place because Cain decided that he had a better idea and he wanted to do things his way. And we see that so prevalent in our own midst, Father, in our own lives that we prefer to do things our way. Help us to submit to your word, submit to your counsels. Rise up and live big within us and teach us that which pleases you, that which honors you, that which makes your heart glad so that we can rejoice in those things as well. For we ask it in Jesus' name. And he said, Amen.
