According to the Scriptures

Guest (Male): With the value of learning from life's experiences, good and bad, here's Pastor Damian.

Damian Kyle: Not only do I learn a great deal in my life from doing things right, but then doing the wrong thing and then dealing with the pain of it, and of course learning these things and what to avoid in life, no more important or more critical than concerning spiritual things.

Guest (Male): Well, you've no doubt heard of the school of hard knocks. While it's one way to learn, there is a better way and it's less painful, I might add. Join us today for According to the Scriptures and hear all about it. We're in a series called Gleanings from Genesis and the focus of late has been the life of Cain. Now you might think of this as a great opportunity to learn from his mistakes. Here's Pastor Damian Kyle in Genesis chapter four.

Damian Kyle: Genesis chapter four, verse one. Now Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived and bore Cain and said, "I have acquired a man from the Lord." And then she bore again, this time his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. And in the process of time, it came to pass that Cain brought an offering of the fruit of the ground to the Lord. Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat.

And the Lord respected Abel and his offering, but he did not respect Cain in his offering. And Cain was very angry and his countenance fell. So the Lord said to Cain, "Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it."

Now 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 killed him. And then the Lord said to Cain, "Where is Abel your brother?" He said, "I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper?" And he said, "What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground. So now you are cursed from the earth, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand.

When you till the ground, it will no longer yield its strength to you. A fugitive and a vagabond you shall be on the earth." And Cain said to the Lord—this guy's got a lot of nerve. He even makes me stop reading here through the passage to say that—he said, "My punishment is greater than I can bear. Surely you have driven me out this day from the face of the ground and I shall be hidden from your face. I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth, and it will happen that anyone who finds me will kill me."

And the Lord said to him, "Therefore, whoever kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold." And the Lord set a mark on Cain, lest anyone finding him should kill him. I do want to read to you from the book of Jude, verse 11. "Woe to them for they have gone in the way of Cain, have run greedily in the error of Balaam for profit, and perished in the rebellion of Korah." So Jude speaking of the way of Cain.

We saw as we studied this same portion of scripture in looking supremely at the sin of Cain, or again as Jude puts it, the way of Cain in his short epistle. And we looked at the way of Cain, the sin of Cain, at its most fundamental, at its most foundational. And how it is that the way of Cain refers to any attempt by man to come to God and to make ourselves righteous before God, to make ourselves acceptable to God on the basis of our own good works, on the basis of our own human effort, on the basis of our own man-made ideas.

As opposed to approaching God in the way that Abel did, and that is on God's terms, on the basis of his word, that is on the basis of faith in the sacrifice that God requires of us. And all of which, as we saw, was a picture of the coming of Jesus Christ and his sacrifice as the sole means by which sinful man can approach God. Jesus, who as John the Baptist declared concerning him, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."

And what Cain teaches us is that we must approach God on his terms and we must approach him his way, and that he will not accept—absolutely will not accept—any means of our devising. We remember that when Abel approached God on the basis of sacrifice, and the sacrifice that God had demanded, that the Lord respected Abel, verse four, and his sacrifice, his offering. When Cain attempted to approach God on the basis of a sacrifice of his own devising, we're told that the Lord did not respect Cain and his offering.

And as we saw, "did not respect" literally means he wouldn't even look at it. Not only did God not respect Cain's offering, but we're told that he did not respect Cain as well. In other words, this is a total rejection by God of what Cain is doing. Not only a rejection of his offering, but a rejection of his person, of anyone that possesses the heart or possesses the attitude that would presume to think that I can approach God on my own terms, independent of a faith in Jesus Christ.

And I think that to anyone who would protest at God's treatment of Cain and kind of the weakness of our current hour in American history and look at all of this and say, "Well, that doesn't seem very loving of God," a C.S. Lewis quote comes to mind. Famously he wrote, "You asked for a loving God? You have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the Lord of terrible aspect is present. Not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests.

But the consuming fire himself, the love that made the worlds. Persistent as the artist's love for his work, as despotic as the man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous and inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes." And candidly, the fact that the God of the Bible has a backbone, so to speak, that he is both loving and righteous, to me is very, very refreshing.

And I think I'm not alone in that as we watch the world around us define love as never doing the hard thing, never saying the hard thing, never demanding a difficult thing of anyone, and then congratulating ourselves on how loving we are while we watch people then destroy their lives in a thousand different ways. Now the way of Cain, this way that Jude warns us away from even as Christians, has other aspects to it than what we've just reviewed here as it's revealed in our passage.

Cain's life is a complete disaster. It is a disaster from the moment we meet him in scripture to the moment that he passes off the scene. And we're intended to learn something, as Jude's mention of him multiple times he's mentioned in the New Testament, there's something that we're to learn from him even as Christians who have approached God in the right way and been saved in the manner of his demanding. I don't know about you, but in life, if you look back on the years of our lives, I would say that fully perhaps even half of what I've learned in life, even as a Christian, I have learned by watching people do things right, watching role models within life.

But then fully at least half of what I learn in life, and probably you learn as well, is watching people do precisely the wrong thing in any and every circumstance and then watch it crash and burn and then say to ourselves, "Note to self: never do that because you will not have a different end. That sin or that decision will not have a different end in your life than in what you just witnessed." And so so many of the people that are brought before us in the scriptures, they are there to teach us, not from the angle of being a role model, but to teaching us from the other side of the learning curve and seeing how disastrously things work out and then determining to avoid that.

I do remember being on a bike ride one time and I passed a pickup truck and it had a sticker, a bumper sticker in its rear window, and the bumper sticker said, "Stupid should hurt." But I loved the clarity of it and I can testify firsthand from my own life, that sticker is absolutely true. It does hurt and it should hurt, again, because not only do I learn a great deal in my life from doing things right, but then doing the wrong thing and then dealing with the pain of it and of course learning these things and what to avoid in life, no more important or more critical than concerning spiritual things.

We notice first, I think, Cain's astonishingly inappropriate response to God's refusal of his offering there in the latter part of verse five. He became angry and "he became angry" hardly encapsulates what he was feeling. The idea in the Hebrew words that are used to describe it is that he is burning in anger. He is absolutely seething at God's rejection of how he has chosen to approach God.

And so instead of confessing his sin, his wrongdoing, asking God for forgiveness for that sin, repenting and then learning what he ought to learn from that failure and that experience between God and then committing now to do the right thing the next time, which is the proper way to handle those kinds of situations, he got angry with God. He ought to have been angry with himself. But instead, this is a guy that can't do any wrong in his mind, and that person exists in every one of us.

Instead, he gets angry at God as if God had done something wrong in all of this. We're also told that his countenance fell. So he became downcast and he became bitter, he became filled with self-pity and he begins to pout as if he is the victim in this circumstance, in this situation. And when, of course, he's nothing of the sort. I think again it's good for us to stop and allow all of this to search our hearts as we live in the victimhood epicenter of the universe called the United States of America.

Everybody else is to blame for everything that has happened in my life and again to just allow this to search our lives. And how many people are today like Cain who want to claim victimhood and shift responsibility away from themselves, blame other people, even blame God over the consequences of their own decision making, the consequences rest solely in the decisions that they have made. Decisions that are made in complete defiance of the teaching of God's word, decisions made in the face of the warnings of many, many other people in their lives.

And so to ask ourselves, very much in the privacy of our own hearts, but are any of us brooding in anger, angry at God, bitter towards others because of the blessings that they enjoy and that they enjoy simply because they obey God's commandments and they love God and manifest that love in obeying his commandments. Or angry at everyone but yourself or myself for the messed-up life that I live or the messed-up circumstances that I find myself in when I have only myself and my own disobedience and my own disobedient decision making to blame for it.

And if that attitude toward God and towards others is even present in the smallest amount within our lives, we have to be very careful of it as we look at this teaching concerning Cain because you have no idea where those emotions and that kind of thinking will ultimately take you. It can take us even to the place of murder or some other act of violence. And you look at our jails and our prisons, it doesn't represent everyone in a prison population or a jail population, but it represents many, probably a majority of people in these institutions. They are filled with people who thought they could hold onto those kind of attitudes, that kind of thinking and somehow safely manage them only to find out that in a moment they couldn't.

And so the importance of stopping blaming everyone else for the consequences of our life that has come about solely because of our own decision making and rebellion against God. And instead if I am not a Christian to repent of that sin, put my faith in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins and be born again by the Holy Spirit and be given a capacity to live a life of obedience to God and to walk with him.

Now thankfully God doesn't shun Cain. God knew exactly what Cain was thinking in all of this, he knew exactly what Cain was feeling. And in God's grace he approaches Cain. He knows Cain isn't going to approach him. So God—and you just think about the condescension, the humility of God, if you allow me to speak of it in that way, that is represented in his approaching Cain in this condition. Even as it is that he would add the voice of his spirit to the teaching and the passage here to reach into any of our hearts and to call us out of this kind of a way.

And so God approached Cain and instructed him as you see there in verses six and seven. And you notice his warning, you notice his instruction concerning sin. And here you have something that's invaluable. I remember when I was a new pastor—and I would covet it even today—but as a new pastor to be able to, I mean, everything's new to you and there's all kinds of new things that are still coming up, but not in the frequency as when you're brand new. And you begin to counsel people biblically related to all kinds of situations that are brought before you.

And one of the things that you realize early is that, "Wow, I need all of the help I can get on this side of the one-on-one ministry of the word to problems and situations or decision making or perspective in a person's life." And so how invaluable it is to be able to sit in on a counseling session of someone who is skilled and experienced in that area and learn from them not only in what they say but how they say and how they go about and how they listen and all of those things. And here we're given a glimpse at a counseling session with the finest counselor that exists between God and Cain here. Invaluable. God is a very good counselor.

And the first thing he does in verse six is he confronted Cain concerning his anger and his bitterness. And so he confronts Cain concerning how he was feeling and about what had just happened, how he was processing God's rejection of his disobedient offering. In other words, God is letting Cain know that this isn't the way to deal with sin, God's correction in his life. Then God proceeded to instruct him on how to handle things properly in verse seven. The first thing he did is God told Cain to do the right thing.

Cain's sin wasn't ignorance. Once again, it wasn't something that he tried to do his best and then found out subsequently that this was something that displeased God. He knew all along that God wanted a sacrifice that involved blood brought before him and not the plant life that he brought, the work of his hands and the sweat of his brow. And so he told Cain, "Do the right thing." Cain knew fully what God expected of him and so his problem wasn't ignorance, it was disobedience. And God is just simply calling him to obey what he already knew.

And that is again to offer a sacrifice, the sacrifice that God required. But this counsel that God gives to Cain is applicable to every single area, area of sin or rebellion or disobedience in any of our lives. He just comes in after the crash and burn and says, "Now, do the right thing." And infuses hope into the situation in doing so. The solution to God's rebuke in my life concerning sin isn't to mope around and to pout or to claim victimhood on it or feel sorry for myself. The solution is to get right with God and then do the right thing now in that area of life and move forward. Nothing complicated about it.

Anybody can do that. Certainly any Christian can do that. And again, as I said, this introduces hope into the situation. In other words, Cain could look at it and say, "All right, I don't have to endlessly or hopelessly stay in this cycle in which I find myself in now. I can bust out of this orbit, I can bust out of this pull of this thing now by simply doing the right thing." And so if God had said to Cain, "Now listen, I've seen this before, and step number one is to get your PhD in nuclear science," well, his heart would sink, wouldn't it? All of our hearts would sink because that's not something all of us are capable of doing.

But all of us can simply do what God has told us to do in opposition to what it is that we had done that got us into the doghouse. The second thing that God does is God gave Cain a promise. That if he did well, what God required of him, that he would be accepted. And so God instructs us in every rebellion against him, in every sin that we commit against him, that if we would do well, we will be accepted. And just do in that situation in your life what my word tells you to do in that situation and things are going to be okay between you and me.

God is infusing all kinds of hope into this situation. Old Testament talks about giving us a future and a hope. I mean, he's really doing this with Cain. The third thing—and he does it with us too—the third thing that God did is he warned Cain, though, that if he continued in his sin and rebellion, that his sin and rebellion would ultimately come to destroy him. And in one of the most graphic pictures and necessary pictures of how to view sin for anybody, whether they're saved or unsaved, certainly to recognize it as a Christian. God likened Cain's sin to a dangerous animal crouching at Cain's door, waiting here to make a prey of him. And so we can all picture the imagery within our mind. We've all seen the nature shows on television where you have the lion who lies in wait for just that moment of vulnerability from some animal within the herd or some kind of a creature and it waits patiently for that just the right moment to then rise up and destroy its prey.

Guest (Male): A very vivid description on the dangers of sin from Pastor Damian Kyle on According to the Scriptures. More next time. Interested in a copy of this message? Here's where to reach us for the ordering details. In the 209 area code, it's 545-5530. That's 209-545-5530. You can also listen online at accordingtothescriptures.com or oneplace.com. I'm delighted to say that you can also stream and watch Pastor Damian's studies through Roku and Fire TV. Look for the Calvary Chapel Modesto app in your favorite app store. If you appreciate According to the Scriptures and you'd like to see it continue on this station and others like it, there's a place to donate at accordingtothescriptures.com. We'd also like to hear how the Lord is using the program in your life. You can write to According to the Scriptures, 4300 American Avenue, Modesto, California, zip code 95356. Or you can email us through our website, accordingtothescriptures.com. Pastor Damian Kyle will present more Gleanings from Genesis next time on According to the Scriptures, the daily radio outreach of Calvary Chapel Modesto.