Text:  Genesis 4:1-16; Hebrews 12:18-24                                                               2^nd Lent Midweek

Blood Talks

            In the name of him who is the Mediator of the new and better covenant, dear friends in Christ:  Last week when we began this series of Lenten meditations on the Law and Gospel in Genesis, we saw how the difference between these two crucial theological concepts was vividly displayed already in the Garden of Eden.  As a matter of fact, it was growing there in the very center of the Garden in the form of the two specially mentioned trees.  The Gospel, that is, that which has to do with what God does for us, we found to correspond to the Tree of Life.  This tree was a pure grace sort of thing – all one-way in the relationship, from God to man:  eat the fruit and live forever.  The Law, on the other hand, that which has to do with our obligations to God, we found built into the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  In this tree we discovered a duty to perform; we found requirements and prohibitions:  “Thou shalt not eat”; and also conditions:  “For in the day that you do, you shall surely die.”  We saw too that God gave both trees to our first parents as expressions of his love; and how the latter tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, served as a vehicle for Adam and Eve to express their love for the Lord – specifically they showed their love by leaving it alone and not eating its fruit.

That was the initial set up, anyway; but we also heard again how this happy state of affairs didn’t last. Due to Satan’s deception and their own misguided ambitions, they chose to violate the only law they had.  They chose to love and trust themselves more than they loved and trusted the Lord.  As a result, they lost their state of being in God’s image, and they brought upon themselves the curse of death and hardship in this world.

In our meditation this evening, we’re going to pick up right where we left off, and continue to investigate the scriptural tension between the Law and the Gospel as it is revealed in events that followed.  And as we do, we need to remember that we’re starting at a different point than last time. In the initial state in the Garden, the Law was friendly to man because he hadn’t yet broken it, and there was free and easy access to the Gospel.  But now, in the fallen world, the Law is hostile to man.  It condemns him; and every day in a hundred different ways he’s reminded that he lives under its curse.  Nor can the man get to the Gospel as easily as he might like.  Angels with flaming swords guard the way to Tree of Life. They show us that the only way to get to the Gospel is through death.

            It is into this fallen world that Adam and Eve bring their first child.  In the process, Eve experiences that exquisite pain that is part of the penalty she bears; but then, her labor passed, she’s filled with the joy of having given birth to a healthy child.  There’s a Law-Gospel message in that too:  by it God reminds us that in this fallen world, new life only comes through pain and suffering.  It’s a picture of death before life, and so it’s a foreshadowing of the coming Savior that our first parents were promised, and how he too would experience suffering and death to give new life to all of us.  But getting back to the story, Eve is so pleased with her child that she gives him a name that shows her thankfulness to God for the gift. She names him “Cain” which means “received” or “gotten”.  In fact, the text seems to indicate that she believed that she got more than just a baby boy.  In the original language the words “with the help of” do not appear.  So what she actually says is, “I have gotten a man:  the Lord”.  It seems that she and Adam may have believed (or hoped) that this first child was already the Savior the Lord had promised them.  As it turns out, they were disappointed – and it wouldn’t be the last time. Instead, they spent the next decade or two quite literally “raising Cain” – though we have no indication that Cain was an especially difficult or mischievous child.  But we do know that Adam and Eve had quite a number of other children, including their second child, Abel, whose name very aptly means “vapor” or “breath” – as in the sense of something that doesn’t last long and vanishes rapidly—which will indeed be the case with him. 

            We read that the boys grew into men, Cain becoming a worker of the soil, and Abel becoming a keeper of sheep.  (And maybe it’s in this is story that the old animosity between sod-busters and cattlemen began.  I don’t know. What we do know is that) there came a day when the two men brought their offerings to the Lord as an act of worship, and that the Lord accepted the offering of Abel, and rejected that of Cain.

We’re not told exactly why; but because we all incline toward seeing the Word of God more as Law than Gospel, it’s most often supposed that God rejected Cain’s offering because there was something wrong with it.  Perhaps he scrimped on it somehow, giving less than whatever it was he thought was required, or that he chose some of his crop that was of inferior quality because he wanted to keep the best for himself, or maybe it was that he gave with a reluctant and unwilling heart, begrudging the Lord his due.  Or say it another way:  Cain’s offering was rejected because he broke the law about offerings.  He failed to properly perform his duty.  It’s usually further supposed that Abel’s offering was looked upon by the Lord with favor because he gave the very best he could offer with a glad and willing heart – that is, he obeyed the rules, and so God rewarded him accordingly.

But the story doesn’t say anything like that – it’s only arrived at by conjecture because we don’t seem to have any other obvious reasons why God would reject one offering and receive the other.  But rather than take wild guesses and make things up, let me suggest that it’s more profitable to look deeper into the story to see if the reason for the difference doesn’t become clear.  Let’s let Scripture interpret Scripture.

When we do that, we find that answer is pretty well spelled out in the preceding chapter.  Recall that part of the curse that fell on Adam because of his sin was that he would have to work hard to earn his food.  He’d have to till the soil, sew the seed, reap, harvest, thresh, and grind … by the sweat of his face he’d eat his bread. Before that, with very little effort, he had the whole garden full of fruit trees planted by the Lord to eat from. God did all the heavy work.  All Adam had to do was make a selection when he got hungry.  Living was easy.  Now, working the soil was a constant burden required to just survive.  With that in mind, we see that Cain’s offering of grain represents the work a man does to sustain his life.  He brought to the Lord the fruit of his hard labor.  And far from supposing that he held back somehow, I rather think that he went all out:  he probably put forth best effort, choosing his first fruits and highest quality grain, bringing more than he thought would be enough, with the genuine desire and expectation that the Lord would be pleased with his gift.  That’s why he became so angry when it was rejected: he put forth his very best effort and still the Lord turned it down.  He’d have had no reason to be angry if knowing he’d done poorly he was rejected.

So then, what was it about Abel’s offering that caused it to be accepted?  No surprise:  here too we’ll find the answer in the preceding chapter.  Recall that when Adam and Eve sinned, the first thing that happened was that they became aware of their nakedness and they were ashamed. They tried to cover up with leaves – which did a pretty pathetic job of it.  Leaves just don’t sew together too well.  They weren’t fooling anyone.  And, of course, leaves don’t very last long as active fashion wear either.  They get dry and crumbly in a few days – which means you’d have to keep picking off more of them to stay covered up – to hide your shame.  Here again is a picture of what we’re like when we try to cover our sin and shame by human efforts.  It’s work, work, work all the time and even then, the best you can manage is an incomplete, shoddy, and short-lived job.  But the Lord responds to their shame problem by providing garments made of animal skins.  That’s the Gospel – it’s what God does for them – and we find that when God does it, he provides a covering that’s comfortable, durable, and completely adequate.  Ah, but there’s a price attached to it.  When you start in sin, there’s just one to get to the Gospel – and that’s always through death. In this case, it’s animals that have to die—that’s the only way to get animal skins.  So some animals die to cover the shame of Adam and Eve.

And what we have here is the concept of substitutionary sacrifice being established – the idea God allows something else – or someone else to die to cover your sin and shame.   That’s the kind of sacrifice Abel brings to the Lord. And here’s the difference:  both offerings are saying something.  You’ve all heard the expression, “Money talks”, right? It means money has the power to influence people and get things done.  Well, the same is true of sacrifices:  they talk.  Cain’s offering is grain, it’s the fruit of hard human effort, and it says, “Look what I’ve done for you Lord, aren’t you pleased?” And the answer is always, “No, the works of sinful man can never please God.”  But Abel offers blood, and blood really talks.  It says, “I understand that I deserve to die for my sin.”  It says, “I’m sorry – I repent.”  It says, “God be merciful to me a sinner.”  Blood shows that the Law that demands death for sin is fulfilled and it pleads for mercy.  It looks for God’s favor in Gospel rather than Law.  That’s why Abel’s offering is accepted and Cain’s is rejected.

But then we witness Cain’s anger and struggle with the situation.  It’s not fair, he thinks.  My offering was good – I put my very best into it. And that little weasel Abel who hardly does anything except lead his sheep around to where the grass is growing gets the Lord’s favor and blessing.  And this is the way it always is:  those who try to live by the Law lash out at those who live by God’s grace and Gospel. Remember how the Pharisees criticized Jesus for associating with sinners.  It wasn’t right, they thought, that we who work so hard to be righteous are being treated worse than those who have done nothing – no, who have been openly contemptuous of God’s Law.  All they have to do is believe and repent!  Nonsense! The Gospel is an offense to them:  they want to take pride in their own works and not have to be dependent upon the mercy of God.  This is why they ultimately killed Jesus – and why Cain killed his brother Abel.

            And notice what he does next:  after he kills his brother in the field – which just happens to be, not coincidentally, the place where Cain works – apparently he tries to hide his brother’s body in the ground.   See what’s going on here:  he’s trying to hide his sin of murder in his work. It’s like his parents trying to cover their sin with leaves.  It’s the old thought that there’s something I can do to hide my sin or make up for it in my own work.  He still hopes his work will speak favorably for him before the Lord. But there’s something he’s forgotten – or rather that he never understood:  and that’s the blood talks too.  And unfortunately for Cain, blood talks more convincingly and louder than any work he might do.  In this case it calls out for justice.  It literally cries out to the Lord from the very ground Cain labors in.

            The true attitude of Cain’s heart is revealed in his answer to the Lord’s question about Abel’s whereabouts.  “What? Am I my brother’s keeper?” Understand that Cain imagines that he’s essentially good inside – that’s why he thinks his works should please God; but a heart filled with goodness and love could never ask a question like that, for such a heart would be bent on doing everything in its power to uphold, protect, and enrich the lives of others – especially a brother.  One who is good – truly good – knows that he is above all else his brother’s keeper.  To think otherwise only proves that your heart is filled with sin – that it loves self more than anyone else.  And there’s no such thing as a neutral heart:  if you are not your brother’s keeper, then you are his murderer.

            But fortunately for us the Lord extends his mercy even to murderers.  We see it first in the fact that he warned Cain before he killed his brother, and secondly in that he came to him even after he had committed his terrible crime.  Like he did for Cain’s parents, the Lord enters the scene to seek and to save his child lost in sin.  And he does it, as always, by first putting him through the death of repentance – it’s the death of pride; the death of the sinful flesh that thinks it can go it alone. And notice how he does it:  the Lord curses the ground that Cain works. No longer will it yield its crops for him.  You see what he’s doing?  He’s taking away from Cain the very thing he formerly thought earned him God’s favor. The Lord takes this from Cain not to destroy him, but rather to bring him to repentance.

And it works.  Cain cries out, “My punishment is more than I can bear!”  And at last he understands.  That’s where the Law always brings us:  to a punishment that is more than we can bear.  Cain’s mistake was thinking that he could bear it – that he could work it off on his own.  So the Lord increased it – turned up the heat as it were – to the point that he understood what his brother did:  that the punishment for sin is more than any of us can bear.  We need a substitute to bear it for us.  We need a Savior.  We need a Savior whose blood will speak for us in the court of divine justice saying, “The punishment for sin has been carried out.  It is finished.”

And having brought Cain to repentance, the Lord did not take his life as the Law would have demanded. Instead, he forgave Cain’s sin (now we’re talking Gospel) and he placed a mark on him to show everyone that his life was protected.  You are probably aware that throughout history evil and foolish people have taught that this mark on Cain was some sort of curse – and they’ve used it to justify everything from racism to wars of conquest against dark skinned peoples. Clearly, from the context of the passage, that’s a total misunderstanding and abuse of God’s Word. The truth is that we do not know what the mark was on Cain – but whatever it was, far from being a curse it showed God’s love and mercy for him.  It reminded everyone – including Cain himself – that he had been moved from trying (and failing) to live under the Law to a life under the Gospel of God’s grace, that he had been forgiven, and that the Lord meant to preserve his life in the future.

Now, I sure wouldn’t mind having a mark like that, wouldn’t you? The fact is that the Lord has given us such a mark:  we call it Holy Baptism.  It’s in the water of Baptism that God calls the self-righteous, murderous, unloving Cain in each of us to repentance and death, he washes away our guilt, and he marks us with the cross of Jesus.  This baptismal “mark of Cain” that we bear reminds us and everyone else that he’s moved you out of the old covenant of Law that made demands you couldn’t keep and issued penalties you couldn’t bear, and that he’s placed you under the new and better covenant in which the blood of the Savior speaks on your behalf.  And I’d encourage you to think of your Baptism as your “mark of Cain”.  That way, when you’re troubled about your sin and you feel that you have to hide it or make up for it somehow in your work for the Lord, look instead at the mark and think about the story of Cain.  It’s not about what you do; it’s about what you have received.  You have gotten a man:  the Lord – and his blood speaks for you.  In his holy name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!