According to the Scriptures

Guest (Male): Sin is not your friend, but a ferocious beast. Here's Pastor Damian Kyle.

Damian Kyle: No child of God should ever accommodate any deliberate sin or rebellion in our lives, knowing that it is watching, it is waiting, it is seeking our destruction with every bit the cold-bloodedness of a lion. And that's a sobering thing to realize. We can convince ourselves that sin is a friend to us. God says no.

Guest (Male): It's been said that sin has the devil for its father, shame for its companion, and death for its wages. Many a Christian under its employ. What relationship do you have with sin? If you're not sure, stay right here. And welcome to According to the Scriptures with Pastor Damian Kyle.

We'll be continuing our series entitled Gleanings from Genesis as we're looking at the life of Cain. We'll be endeavoring to learn from his mistakes. Here now with Genesis chapter 4 is Pastor Damian Kyle.

Damian Kyle: Then God proceeded to instruct him on how to handle things properly in verse 7. The first thing that 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. So he told Cain to do the right thing. Cain knew fully what God expected of him, and so his problem wasn't ignorance, it was disobedience.

God is simply calling him to obey what he already knew. That is again to offer a sacrifice, the sacrifice that God required. This counsel that God gives to Cain is applicable to every 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." He 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. As I said, this introduces hope into the situation.

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 the pull of this thing now by simply doing the right thing."

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," 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. 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.

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. The Old Testament talks about giving us a future and a hope. He's really doing this with Cain.

The third thing that God did is he warned Cain that if he continued in his sin and rebellion, that his sin and rebellion would ultimately come to destroy him. In one of the most graphic 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. 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 and it waits patiently for that just the right moment to then rise up and destroy its prey.

God wanted Cain and he wants us to view sin and rebellion to his commandments in exactly the same way. No one in their right mind would ever keep a lion close to them or keep a lion around the house, a lion intent upon their destruction.

God is saying so too. No child of God should ever accommodate any sin, deliberate sin, or rebellion in our lives, knowing that like that lion, it is watching, it is waiting, it is seeking our destruction with every bit the cold-bloodedness of a lion. That's a sobering thing to realize.

We can convince ourselves that sin is a friend to us. There's a lot of things we can convince ourselves of concerning what God has prohibited in his word and that we add to our lives. God says no. You would never keep a lion right outside your front door and walk past it coming in and out of that front door.

What you would never do physically, why do you feel free to do spiritually? He speaks this to Cain and then he tells Cain concerning this sin and its destruction, its desire is for you. In other words, that's exactly what sin wants to do to you.

A couple of New Testament passages immediately come to mind on all of this. Peter writes in 1 Peter chapter 5, verse 8, "Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour." James writes wonderfully and famously in James chapter 1, verse 13.

He said, "Let no one say when he's tempted, I'm tempted by God." This is victimhood. "For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he himself tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin."

When sin is full grown, that is allowed to mature and become full grown in our lives and take its course in our lives, sin when it is full grown brings forth death. It always fascinates me that James followed this exhortation with a warning. He said, "Do not be deceived, my brethren."

It's important to realize that any sin that I allow to continue to live in my life, to grow in my life, is always quietly working for my destruction. To destroy me physically, spiritually first, and then ultimately to destroy me physically.

If I coddle some willful sin with the belief that somehow I'll be able to keep this small, I'll be able to keep this manageable, it won't grow, it won't become a full age, it won't mature and ultimately destroy me, it won't ultimately bring forth death, then I have bought the very lie that James warned me against when he said, "Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren."

That capacity that we have to convince ourselves to be fully aware. Cain was fully aware that what he was doing was fully wrong. And yet we can find ourselves in exactly that place and say, "I can manage this. I can contain this. I can compartmentalize this in my life."

Now just to prime the pump in terms of what those kinds of sins might be. It is easy to talk about sin in some kind of an obscure way. Paul in his letter to the churches in Galatia gives us a smattering of what he calls the works of the flesh. He said, "Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are..."

So here are the things that we want to be careful that we're not protecting within our lives. Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, speaking of sexual uncleanness. Sometimes people say, "Well, I'm not fornicating with her or with him," but we do everything else. It's a Bill Clinton thing that's included here and it's forbidden in the scripture.

Lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, that is partying, and the like, of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

These are the kind of things that we want to remove from our lives. I don't want to leave this subject without adding Paul's voice to it because it's an important subject. Paul wrote in Romans chapter 8, verse 13, "For if we live after the flesh, you shall die, but if you through the spirit do mortify the deeds of the flesh, you shall live."

He talks about mortifying the deeds of the flesh. That's sin. And the word mortify means cold-blooded murder. That's ruthlessness. To be absolutely ruthless concerning any sin within our lives. You say, "Why does Paul use such strong language talk about dealing with sin?"

He understood fully what God warned Cain of here. That is that sin will show no mercy to us. And so we must not show it any mercy within our own lives. It's literally a life and death decision. We will either mortify sin or it will ultimately destroy us. Cain makes the wrong decision and it's a disaster for him.

For us, just to make sure that none of us make the wrong choice, whatever the sin might be, just take responsibility and choose repentance concerning any sin and then choose life. It's one of the images that is very important that it's burnt into my mind, the imagery of sin.

Always see every sin in our lives as a lion in a doorway just waiting for the moment when it can rise up and destroy me. Making myself vulnerable to such an attack. That imagery helps me. I don't know if it helps you, but it helps me.

Sometimes we look at this and we say, "I know we're dealing with subject matter here that's pretty common within the scriptures." God repeats it an awful lot and I just wonder why. Only he knows. In this congregation and any congregation of Christians meeting anywhere in the world today, what percentage of our lives live habitually and long-term in the place of Cain?

He does repeat himself a lot because even if we don't stay in that place, things attach to our lives even on a weekly basis that we look at and go, "Whoa, okay, that's attached recently and I need to cut that away from my life." The fact of the matter is there are no secret sins, as we'll see in just a moment.

God tells Cain a fourth thing here: "But you should rule over it." In other words, God tells Cain there's absolutely no need for you to become a casualty of sin. No need for anyone that knows God to become a casualty of sin. So unnecessary.

Again, I think it reminds me of that encouragement of the Apostle Paul when he wrote to the church at Philippi and he said, "For it is God who works in you, both to will and to do of his good pleasure." How it is that God supplies us both the will, the desire, the motivation to do the right thing and then the power to do the right thing.

We must choose to exercise that. God speaks to Cain and says, "But you should rule over it. There's no need for you to become a casualty or to continue on this path that you're on, Cain." Cain's response is there in verse 8. He murders his brother. Not very teachable.

Evidently, he didn't believe this was any kind of a danger to him. And so he takes Abel out for a walk somehow, some kind of an innocent walk in a field, and then he kills him. I wonder how he killed him? Have to get the CSI units on all of this. We know it wasn't a pistol or a sword or a spear. Had to be something primitive.

Just stop, put yourself in a field with Cain and imagine. This is your brother. Really any human being, but this is your brother, and he kills him out in that field. What's required of a person's heart and their mind to do that to another human being?

Here you have the very first murder in human history. You think about how many murders have occurred since the time of Cain. Cain is just totally despicable in all of this. Not only in his premeditated violence against his brother, but his murder of a human being who's almost infinitely superior to him.

It is almost continually the case by virtue of the committing of murder. Always the lesser taking the life of the greater. But it isn't merely the act of violence against Abel. He does this in defiance of God. The Apostle John gives us insight into Cain's motivation for doing so in 1 John chapter 3, verse 10.

He said, "In this the children of God and the children of the devil are manifest. Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is he who does not love his brother. For this is the message that you heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. Not as Cain who was of the wicked one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him?"

We're on the edge of our seat, aren't we? What was the motivation for this? Why did he murder him? "Because his works were evil and his brother's righteous." In other words, he murdered Abel because Abel's obedient life exposed the wickedness of Cain and exposed Cain's disobedience to the word of God, to his rebellion against God, and made him responsible for continuing in that wickedness.

Every Christian, every righteous person that lives the life and walks the talk and talks the walk in life, that person is a living advertisement for the fact that the Christian life as it's described in the word of God can be lived.

What it does to a Cain is it removes all of their blame-shifting and excuses for failing to live that kind of life. A Cain is forced with one of two choices: to either join the way of Abel in walking righteously with God, to come into the light, or to put out the light.

That's exactly what he chooses to do. That's what he was putting out. It was Abel's light and what it communicated, what it exposed about Cain and Cains all through history. Rather than repent himself, he decided to destroy Abel.

It's important to recognize this in the account. This is not just the first murder in human history, but the first murder in human history involved bloodshed associated with religious persecution. The persecution of the righteous by the self-righteous.

The persecution of those who know that a relationship with God is received on the basis of grace through faith in Jesus Christ, but choose now to approach God in some other way. Cain's anger, this is the first mention of human anger in the Bible. It is in the context of God confronting a man concerning his sinful condition and the inadequacy of his self-righteousness in approaching God.

Sad to say, this kind of thing did not end in the murder of Abel. It continues in the murder and the persecution of Christians all over the world today by those who are determined to approach God independent of Jesus and to do so whether on the path of secularism or to do it on the path of some works-based religious system.

It has never been more dangerous to be a Christian in human history around the world than it is today. More Christians are being persecuted and dying for their faith at the hands of secularists who refuse to believe. You want to really steam some people in life? Tell them the words of Jesus that there is only one way to God and that is through a faith in Jesus Christ. He is the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father but by me.

You want to see a person become enraged and even murderous, to see their anger raised and their countenance changed toward you? But that's the message that we carry because that's the message of truth concerning salvation. Every other religion in the world is a works-based religion.

It is, "I do this and I gain acceptance before God." Christianity stands not only as an individual like Abel, but it stands as a people as the body of Christ within the world and it communicates to the world that this is the way and that this life can be lived, that we can please God not only in how we're saved but then in how we live following the fact that we are saved. It is that persecution, it is that light, it is that uniqueness of Christians in the world that makes it the target of modern-day Cains who now number in the hundreds of millions around the world.

Guest (Male): Pastor Damian Kyle on what the Christian is up against. We'll conclude this teaching on the dangers, deceptions of sin, along with the death that follows next time. We'll learn what God will do about the Cains of this world as well. Thank you for joining us here for According to the Scriptures.

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Well, that's all the time we have today. Join us next time here on According to the Scriptures when Pastor Damian Kyle offers up more Gleanings from Genesis. This program is presented by Calvary Chapel Modesto.