Gen 4 — Cain and Abel: Offspring in Conflict

We have finished the first three chapters of Genesis. Genesis 1–3 present an amazing panorama of God’s purpose for creation and show how, in spite of the fall, God will accomplish that purpose through a second Adam who will crush the serpent’s head.

Last week we saw that God made a covenant of grace with Adam and Eve. We saw that Adam expressed and confessed his faith in the promise of God by calling his wife’s name Eve, which means life, the mother of all living. And then God gave Adam and Eve garments of skins to clothe them.

Of course, the garments of skins point us to the work of Christ. How do you achieve garments of skins? It is only by offering a sacrifice. An animal had to be slain. And the garments of skins then were the result of that sacrifice that were clothed upon Adam and Eve. Remember, after they sinned, they realized that they were naked. And their sense of guilt and shame caused them to hide from the Lord. But the Lord is making a covenant of grace with his people, covering them with the righteousness of Christ and clothing them and giving them hope.

Even though they are sent away from the Garden of Eden, yet they are sent away in hope that the coming of the Messiah will one day restore them to the tree of life.

The Immediate Division of Humanity

Now we come to Genesis 4, which shows us the initial fulfillment of the first promise made in Genesis 3:15. I will put enmity, I will put conflict between you and the woman and between your offspring, that is the serpent’s offspring, and her offspring. And right away we see these two offspring in conflict. The firstborn son of Adam and Eve is Cain, and he turns out to be the offspring of the serpent. And the second son that they have is Abel, and he turns out to be the offspring of the woman. And there is conflict then between these two offspring, between Cain and Abel.

Our text tells us that Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain, a worker of the ground. Both of them are continuing to fulfill what God had said. Remember after the fall, God said to Adam that he is going to continue to work the ground, but it is going to be a cursed ground, and in pain he will eat of the ground all the days of his life. There will be thorns and thistles that will come up from the ground. But the implication is that there is still going to be human cultural activity and working the ground. And that can be done in more than one way.

Abel, for example, is working the ground indirectly. He is not literally working the ground like Cain. Cain was a farmer and he produced the crops, but Abel is working the ground indirectly in that second level. Because the sheep are eating from the fruit of the ground. And so Abel is a keeper of sheep, but he is still working the ground in that broader sense of bringing out the potential within creation. In order to obey God, as he commanded Adam and Eve to do, even after the fall, to continue to do that work that God gave them to do.

Worship and Murder

Now it says, in the course of time, in verse 3, that phrase, in the course of time, is ambiguous. Does that mean a short time? Does that mean a long time? We do not really know. Perhaps it was a longer time than we might think because we know later on in the text that there are other people in the world. It mentions there after Cain is being punished by God, he is afraid that whoever finds him will kill him. So perhaps there has been a little bit of time here. More and more people have begun to populate the earth. Some time has passed. At the beginning, it was not clear. That Cain is going to be the bad one and that Abel is the good one. But in the course of time, the true nature of their heart and their spiritual state becomes manifest.

Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground. And that makes sense, he is a farmer, so he is going to bring some of the fruit of the ground to the Lord and offer it to the Lord as a sacrifice upon the altar. But Abel, he brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And this is the statement here that Cain is the one who brought the firstborn of the flock and of their fat portions is what distinguishes these two sacrifices. The distinction is that not one is the blood sacrifice of an animal and the other a grain sacrifice from the produce of the earth, but that Abel brought the best. He brought the firstborn of his work as an agriculturalist, and their fat portions, the choices, the best part. He brought those to the Lord, whereas Cain’s offering was not.

The implication is that Cain did not bring what would be for him the firstfruits. The firstfruits would be the parallel to the firstborn of the flock. Cain did not bring the firstfruits. He did not bring the best to the Lord. And so, the Lord, it says in verse 4, had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering, he had no regard.

What does that mean, that the Lord had regard for one but not for the other? Well, apparently there was some kind of visible indicator that God was pleased with Abel’s sacrifice but not with Cain’s. Perhaps it was something along the lines of, later on in the Bible, in 1 Kings, when it talks about that controversy between the prophets of Baal and Elijah, the prophet of the Lord, remember that whole controversy? And the prophets of Baal were, Making their sacrifice and waiting for God to answer and for their God, Baal, to come and bring down fire from heaven to consume their sacrifice. But Baal never showed up. And Elijah mocks him and says, maybe he is on a journey. Maybe he is occupied with something else. Maybe he is on the toilet. But no, it was the sacrifice of Elijah, the prophet of the Lord, that God responded to and fire came down from heaven.

Perhaps it was something like that. Fire came down from heaven to show that God was pleased with Abel’s sacrifice, but not with Cain’s. We do not know exactly what it was, but there was some indicator that God was not satisfied with Cain’s sacrifice. And he was not satisfied with Cain’s sacrifice because it was not the best. And so there is something wrong with the offering, but there is also something wrong with his heart. It shows that his heart is not right with God. He is not seeking to give to the Lord the firstfruits and the best portion of what he has to offer. He is holding back in his love for the Lord.

And so it says there in verse 5b, because the Lord had regard to Abel’s sacrifice but not to Cain’s, Cain was very angry and his face fell. He was very angry.

Have you ever noticed this, that whenever you get angry or somebody else gets angry, it usually flows from a sense of entitlement. That person feels like they deserve something and they are, Their desire to receive what they deserve has not been satisfied. Cain is feeling angry because he feels that he is entitled to the same response from the Lord that Abel received. Now at this point, there is still an opportunity for Cain to repent and make things right. The Lord even says to Cain, why are you angry? And why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? You could go back and get the best offering and give it to me. If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door and its desire is, it should be translated, its desire is to have you. Its desire is to overpower you. But you must rule over it.

So now it becomes clear that Cain’s fundamental heart attitude of not wanting to offer to the Lord the best, like his brother did, is reflective of a deeper problem, that sin is crouching at the door, that his heart is not right with God. He is not only envious of his brother Abel, because Abel’s sacrifice was accepted, but he also has this entitled mentality that he need not offer the best to God. That should be sufficient.

This reference here to sin crouching at the door is significant because it sort of sounds a little bit like the serpent back in Genesis chapter three, does it not? This idea of the evil one who is close at hand, who is tempting Adam and Eve, who is also now tempting Cain. At this moment, he has a choice to make. He could repent of his sin and be reconciled to God by offering the right sacrifice, Or he is going to give in to this growing resentment that he has against God and against his brother. And the evil one is at hand. He must overcome the evil one.

But of course we know that he does not. In verse eight it says, Cain said to his brother, you have to look at the footnote there. Cain said to his brother, let us go out to the field. That statement, let us go out to the field, is found in other versions. In the footnote there it says that the Hebrew and the Samaritan and the Septuagint and the Syriac and the Vulgate add, let us go out to the field. So I think it is correct to add that phrase. Cain said to Abel, his brother, let us go out to the field. He is enticing him to a place where he can attack him. So he has not mastered this sin that is crouching at the door. He is about to fall prey to the evil one.

And when they were out in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. Here now we see the conflict between the two offspring coming to a climax. And it is not just simply, do not just think of this merely in human ordinary terms of two brothers fighting. This is a spiritual battle that is happening here. This is a spiritual conflict, the conflict between the serpent and God, between their offspring, between the offspring of the serpent and the offspring of the woman.

Cain rose up against his brother and killed him, not only because he was envious of him, but in an expression of persecution of the righteous one. He was persecuting Abel, because Abel was the righteous one who was offering the right sacrifice, and whose heart was right with God. This is the first moment in the Bible of the wicked persecuting the righteous. Abel is the first martyr in the Bible. There are many other martyrs in scripture where God’s people are being persecuted by the evil ones. The evil ones are the wicked. They are the ones that are inspired by the serpent and his hatred of God.

Cain is not only attacking Abel, he is attacking God himself. He is rejecting God himself. He is manifesting that same spirit of the evil one that was manifested at the beginning in his rejection of the authority of God. The evil one cannot attack God, so he attacks God’s people. And that is what is happening here in our text. This is the first martyrdom in scripture. And it has to do with worship. It has to do with proper worship. And worship not only in the sense of offering the right thing, Abel offering the firstborn and the best, versus Cain not doing so. Not only the objective thing that is done in worship, but has to do with the heart of the worshiper. The heart of the worshiper is reflected in that which they offer. And God sees that. He sees that in Cain. And Cain now is finally manifesting all of that sin and evil in his heart. His heart was not right with God and now it comes out and it expresses itself in this ultimate act of evil. In not only killing his brother, but killing the people of God, persecuting God’s own people.

This is the conflict. The rest of the Bible continues to show us this conflict. We see it over and over again. We see it with Pharaoh persecuting the people of God in Egypt. We see it with the Canaanites in the land, with the Philistines persecuting the people of God. We see it all the way into the New Testament. We see it with Christ himself being rejected by those that opposed him. This is the conflict that is the ages. The whole sweep of redemptive history is this conflict between the two offspring. And this is the first moment of it. Abel, in a sense, is also a type of Christ, because Christ himself is rejected by his brothers, is he not? Just like Joseph was rejected by his brothers. And he was killed as well because of the people of God having envy and hatred of the Messiah.

The Divine Trial and Civil Justice

So we have the first part here, the first paragraph, verses one through eight, is showing us that this conflict between the offspring is coming to a head. But then, amazingly, for the rest of the chapter, well, not quite the rest, but from verse nine up until verse 24, We have this long section that deals with Cain and his descendants and what they go through. And we do not return again to the people of God until verse 25, when Adam knew his wife again and she bore a son and called his name Seth. For she said, God has appointed for me another offspring instead of Abel, for Cain killed him.

But before we get to that, which is the note of hope that in spite of the fact that Abel has been murdered, God is going to continue to raise up the godly offspring that will lead ultimately to the Messiah. Before we get to that, we have this long discussion here of what is going to happen to Cain and what happens to him as he continues to have children of his own and they go about and build society and build cities and so on. What is this all about? What is going on here? What we would expect is something completely different. What we would expect is that God would judge Cain right there on the spot. Cain deserves to die, does he not? He has murdered an innocent man. And so he deserves to be executed and killed. But God does not do that, at least not right away. God holds back and he even gives some degree of protection to Cain. So it is an amazing thing here that God protects Cain, says that if anyone tries to kill him, that he is going to get vengeance upon his murderer, and he allows Cain to have a family, to have children, and to engage in all of these activities of cultural work, building cities. His offspring are going to be various entrepreneurs and inventors, inventing musical instruments and so on. Why is God doing this?

Well, this is a key thing to understand about the way the whole Bible unfolds, is that God is delaying the final judgment. The final judgment is not going to come right away. We saw the same thing happen back in chapter 3. Right after Adam and Eve sinned. Adam and Eve sinned, so that should have been the end. They should have been judged right there. God said, in the day that you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will surely die in that very day. So they should have died. But then that would have been the end of history. The Bible would be a very short book. It would just be a couple of pages. And in fact, there would be nobody to even know because we would all be, we would not exist. There would be no human race. There would be no historical unfolding.

But the reason why there is a historical process that continues is because God delays the final judgment. This is called common grace. Whenever God delays judgment, He is doing so purely out of His grace. Cain deserves to die. Adam and Eve deserve to die. But in His grace, He restrains the judgment. He puts in place the principle of common grace in order to provide a historical unfolding for the purpose of His promise of grace. The promise of the gospel in Genesis 3:15 that there would be a coming offspring who would come and who would bruise and crush the serpent’s head, although he himself would have his own heel bruised in the process, that this coming offspring would one day come.

It is because of that purpose, because God had ordained before the world was even created, before Adam and Eve sinned, He had already ordained that he was going to make a way of salvation for his people through the coming of Christ. And so God ordains this principle of the delay of judgment and setting up the principle of common grace in which he allows even the wicked, like Cain, to enjoy the benefits of this life, to enjoy the benefits of family and children and building society and civilization and having restraint upon judgment. The judgment will come. But for a time, the judgment is being restrained in order to provide a historical process. There would be no history if God did not do this. And so to provide a historical process for this plan of salvation to work itself out in history. And it is going to take time.

One of the key things that we see in Genesis 1 through around 9, Genesis 1 through 9, is this whole idea that judgment is coming. Judgment will come. But God is going to use that in order to provide the fulfillment of his grace.

What we are seeing, what I am referring to is the flood. The flood is coming up in the next few chapters, beginning in chapter six. It says that mankind became even more corrupt. The corruption got so bad that God said, okay, this is it. This is the end of history. Now, of course, we know it is not the end of history, but it is a preliminary picture of the end of history.

And God raises up Noah to be the deliverer. And through Noah, who is like a second Adam figure, he himself is not the Christ, he is not the second Adam, but he is like a second Adam figure. God saves his family, he saves the elect, and he brings the people through the waters of judgment out the other side into the new creation.

God is an amazing God of grace. His special grace for his elect people, like Abel and later on Seth and so on, but also his common grace even for the unrighteous. God establishes this common grace order. Cain is afraid that this world is going to be an unrestrained world where anybody can go around and execute vengeance. There is going to be escalating blood feuds that will never end.

So God puts a mark upon Cain. We are not sure exactly what the mark is exactly. Maybe something visible. Maybe Cain himself is a symbol of God’s restraining of judgment. Whatever it is, God is putting in place a restraint upon mankind and upon the judgment. In order to allow for the purpose of salvation to continue.

After the flood, this mark of Cain is going to be replaced by the institution of civil government. After the flood in Genesis 9, what does God say to Noah? He says, for your lifeblood, I will require a reckoning. From every beast, I will require it, and from man. From his fellow man, I will require a reckoning for the life of man. So murder is going to be dealt with, but how? Genesis nine, verse six. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. So in Genesis four, we have the first murder, and then Cain being afraid that he is going to be killed by people that will try to satisfy their blood feud upon him, but God says, I am going to execute vengeance upon those that try to kill you. But then after the flood, God takes that process of restraining this blood feud process from escalating too bad, and he assigns it to man. In Genesis 9 verse 6, whoever sheds the blood of man by man, shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. He is ordaining the civil government to have the power of the sword, the power of life and death, to restrain this, to restrain murder from escalating to the point where it just becomes a bloodbath.

God is putting in place these structures. Civil government itself is part of the common grace structure that God is establishing in the world in order to restrain sin so that man does not become as evil and as wicked as he possibly could be. To provide some degree of order in the midst of the chaos. But all for the purpose of providing a historical process to unfold so that God’s plan of saving His elect people through the coming of the Messiah might be accomplished.

The City of Cain

One interesting thing that we see in our text is that after Cain is sent away from the presence of the Lord and he settles in the land of Nod, east of Eden. And we see this development of human civilization. We see that things are getting worse and worse. What are some of the things that we see there? That whole description beginning in verse 17 down to 24. It is a little bit strange, it is a little bit odd, but what is it describing for us? It is describing how even though God in His common grace is allowing the wicked to continue to live and to have children and to build cities and so on, yet we also see that in spite of that, in spite of God’s restraint and common grace holding back man from becoming as sinful as he could be, yet we still see that things are getting worse. We see how humanity is getting worse. What are some of the things that we see? Well, we see number one, we see polygamy happening. In verse 19, it says that Lamech took two wives. So the corruption of the marriage institution becoming worse. Things are getting worse and worse. Polygamy is beginning to proliferate in society. Another thing that happens in verses 23 through 24 is that violence is escalating. Lamech boasts that he killed a man, not for murder, but for a mere wound, just a slight. And so he is boasting of the fact that he is killing somebody else for something that was very minor. And then in his hubris, he says, well, if Cain’s revenge is sevenfold, that is what God had ordained, that if Cain was killed, that God would seek revenge upon the killer sevenfold. But he says, if Cain’s vengeance was sevenfold, mine is going to be 77-fold, 77 times. And so this is the hubris of man. He is going far beyond what God had ordained, seven times, and he is setting himself up as God. He is saying, I am the ultimate authority in this world. I have the power to set myself up in this high position and to even kill people just for a mere wound and a mere slight. So we see how sin is getting worse and worse.

So we see this interesting tension. We see God in his common grace preventing sin from becoming as bad as it possibly could be. And we see God allowing even murderers like Cain to live and to exist and to have children and so on. So God’s common grace is providing a playing field, is providing a context for the work of redemption to occur. But at the same time, we also see that Sin is escalating and getting worse and worse. And this of course is a foreshadow of Genesis 6. In Genesis 6, where God saw the wickedness of man, that it was great upon the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually, and so God determined that it was time to bring about the flood. We are already seeing flood-like conditions. We are seeing the humanity is becoming more and more corrupt, that it has to be dealt with through the final judgment of the flood. Of course, the flood itself is not the final judgment, but it is a picture of it. It is a picture of the end. When Christ returns.

Common grace is real. Common grace allows mankind to continue to exist and to enjoy even earthly things like engaging in agriculture and even in music. It talks about the lyre and the pipe and all of these things. God’s common grace allows both the righteous and the unrighteous to enjoy these common benefits of the world around them. And yet at the same time, the godly are looking at the world around them and they are seeing how things are getting worse and worse. They are seeing that there is an escalation of sin and corruption and that conflict between the two seeds, the two offspring, is getting worse and worse. Already at the beginning, we have seen the first martyr in that conflict, Abel himself. So overall, it is a mixed picture of what we are seeing here in our passage.

The Covenant Line Preserved

But here is the amazing thing, is at the very end of chapter four, we return again to the godly line, to the offspring of the woman. It says in verse 25, that Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and called his name Seth. In Hebrew, the name Seth sounds like the verb that could be translated as to give or to appoint. His name was called Seth, for she said, God has appointed, God has given me another offspring instead of Abel, for Cain killed him. This is a wonderful confession of faith in the promises of God in spite of this terrible tragedy that has happened here at the beginning of the story. Abel has been murdered. Cain has been allowed to go out and build cities and the ungodly line, the offspring of the serpent is getting worse and worse and becoming very full of hubris and arrogance against God. But the godly people, Adam and Eve, they are trusting in that same promise back in Genesis 3:15. They believe the Lord that he is going to continue to work his redemptive purposes even in the midst of the sin and the suffering and the tragedy.

In fact, Adam and Eve experienced a double tragedy. Their double tragedy is that their, one of their sons was murdered. That is horrible in itself. But the other tragedy is that their firstborn son was the murderer. That is a tragic thing. Can you imagine that? Your very firstborn son becomes so evil that he murders one of your other children. Adam and Eve are suffering tremendously as they see what is happening to their family and to their sons.

But in the midst of the suffering, in the midst of the tragedy, in the midst of the darkness, they are still clinging to the promise of the gospel, the promise of the coming offspring who would redeem the world and save his people from their sins. And so when the Lord provided them a third son, his name was Seth, Eve, in faith, trusted in the Lord that this son is the one whom God has appointed, the one whom God has given, hence the name Seth, which means appointed or given. This is the one that God has raised up for me instead of Abel. She saw that God was providing that God was fulfilling the promise that he had made.

Eve is recognizing, is she not, that not only is Abel gone, but she is also recognizing that Cain cannot be the one. Cain has been disqualified. He has shown himself to be apostate. He has shown himself to be a wicked man, and he has been sent out from the presence of the Lord. So she sees that Cain is gone as well, And yet, she still trusts in the Lord that the Lord will provide. God will continue the promised line until the mother promise, the promise of the offspring to come is fulfilled. And she knows that it is not through her own effort. Adam and Eve know that they are not the ones that are accomplishing it. It is God who appointed this new offspring. It is God who is giving them this gift, pointing ahead to the gift of Christ himself.

When we think about the incarnation of Christ, when God gave his only begotten son, we do not think, oh, we were the ones that produced the Messiah. Mary does not think, oh, I am the one that gave birth to the Messiah, even though she literally was the vessel that God used to give birth to him. It is all a gift of God. It is God himself who gives his only begotten son. The deliverer comes from the outside as a gift of grace from God into this world. Christ is the one who comes to save his people from their sins.

And then in verse 26, it says, to Seth also a son was born, and he called his name Enosh. At that time, people began to call upon the name of the Lord. Here we see the true people of God who are worshiping God. To call upon the name of the Lord is a term for worship. It is to worship the Lord, to honor the Lord. In contrast to the Cainites, that is Cain and his descendants, who make a name for themselves and boast about their authority and their power and their hubris, these godly ones who are experiencing great suffering and tragedy and difficulty in this world, They are calling upon the name of the Lord, trusting in him. That phrase, to call upon the name of the Lord, is used by the Apostle Paul later on in 1 Corinthians chapter one to refer to the church. He says, to the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call upon the name of the Lord, Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours.

The godly covenant community that is still holding on to the promise of the gospel and the Messiah to come. They may not have all these great and glorious cities. They may not have all these wonderful, awesome, technological advancements of the line of Cain where they are inventing how to use bronze and iron and so on and all these instruments and playing the lyre and the pipe. They may not have all these wonderful things. All they have is the promise of God. All they have is worship where they gather together with their fellow believers to call upon the name of the Lord.

And that is like us. We are the Lord’s people, even though the world around us is opposed to us, even though that conflict is raging, even though we may not have all of the glorious advances that the world has, although in God’s common grace, he allows us to participate in those things as well to some degree, but our hope is there not. Our hope is not in those earthly things and building cities and naming them after ourselves. Our hope is in the Lord, in the second coming of Christ.

When we think about Christmas, we think about the first coming of Christ. But we are also to think about the second coming of Christ. And we are just like the people here. We are just like the godly line. We are like Adam and Eve and Abel and Seth, who are persecuted by the world around us, who have nothing in this world that we can call our own. No cities named after ourselves. But we have that hope. We have Christ. And one day Christ will come again. And he will take us to be with himself forever.

What a wonderful blessing that is for us as God’s pilgrim people to live in this fallen world with all of its tragedy and sin and darkness and disappointment. But we do not have the same desire as the world to put all of our hope in the things of this life. We have a life to come. We have a heavenly hope. We have that appointed offspring who is going to come one day. He has already come the first time and accomplished our salvation, but he is going to come again a second time. And He is going to fulfill all that He has done for us through His death and resurrection.

We may be persecuted, we may be small, we may not have all the things that the world has, but we have something greater than all of that. We have the promise and the hope of the Deliverer to come. We have Christ the King and the Lord, and that gives us hope to sustain us in our pilgrimage and in our service to the Lord.