Let's begin again by quoting the entire text (as I have been going over it so far) from Genesis 4:
Now the man had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain, and she said, "I have gotten a manchild with the help of the LORD." Again, she gave birth to his brother Abel, and Abel was a keeper of flocks, but Cain was a tiller of the ground, so it came about in the course of time that Cain brought an offering to the LORD of the fruit of the ground. Abel, on his part also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions.
And the LORD had regard for Abel and for his offering, but for Cain and for his offering He had no regard, so Cain became very angry and his countenance fell. Then the LORD said to Cain, "Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door, and its desire is for you, but you must master it."
Cain told Abel his brother, and it came about when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him.
There are 2 levels of meaning we need to consider in this text:
(1) the meaning it held for the culture which originally produced it
(2) the meaning it holds for us today
As I mentioned in my previous post, this story is part of an oral "encyclopedia" of ancient Israeli culture that was passed down from generation to generation via nothing but the human memory. The use of genealogies, repeated phrases, and concrete, easy-to-understand concepts and imagery all point to a narrative that was intended for memorization and recitation. Hence, in this case, the story of Cain and Abel served a double purpose for the culture that recited it:
1. It established the fact that, as I strongly suggested in my posts on Genesis 3, the line between attempting to be "like gods" and destroying everything around us that lives is very, very slim. Whether or not we believe that the story represented in Genesis 4 was the human race's first murder, it is important for us to respect the fact that the ancient Israelis believed it. Therefore, it is of great concern to us that, for them, the story appears only one generation (and barely a dozen verses) from the human race's first sin.
As we see all too often today, dictators (like Hitler, Amin, and Pot) who attempt to grasp the throne of godhood often overwhelm their cultures and eras in tides of blood. After all, one who assumes the "moral authority" of godhood must, by necessity assume to oneself the right to decide who is worthy of life and who is not--hence, for one reason or another, almost every war that has been fought between cities and civilizations has been termed a "moral" war in which the "enemy" is "evil" and worthy of extermination in the name of "justice."
However, no war, including World War II, has ever deserved this claim. Those who assert that World War II was a divine judgment against Hitler's Nazi regime are, I think, quite right--after all, the Bible does point to the downfall of regimes at outsiders' hands as the judgment of God on evil--but the self-interest which spawned the United States' contest with Japan, as well as the Allies' embrace of the depredations and imperial ambitions of Joseph Stalin, give the lie to the perspective that our "side" was "holy," "just," or even "good." Moreover, as we will see, the Bible describes a God who evaluates the instruments of his judgment as closely as he evaluates the targets of his judgment.
2. For the ancient Israelis, this narrative underscored the importance of following God's strict prescriptions regarding the form and nature of ritual sacrifices. This is a point which is virtually lost in all of the evangelical Protestant sermons and literature on this text, and yet it is of singular importance, because it provides the "why" behind the laws recorded in Exodus and Leviticus regarding ritual sacrifice for sin. Cain's offering is not approved because he did not ask the Lord how it should be given--it is as simple as that.
Cain's rebellion, then, echoes Israel's rebellion from God, recorded in far greater detail later in the Old Testament--it is, essentially, his mad act of defiance against a God who, in his opinion, is unjust for even asking him to follow a prescribed plan for sacrifice in the first place.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, leads me to my final point:
We are as guilty in Christian circles of this brand of rebellion as Cain was.
From Christianity's beginnings, it seems that there has been a push from within to abandon the simple doctrine of obedience to Christ for something more flashy, worldly, and more importantly, the way we like to do things. We take God's grace, evidenced in the cross of Christ Jesus, as a sort of "getaway car" we can use to allow the worst sorts of sins, evils, and abuses of scripture to manifest themselves in our lives, families, and churches.
The ancient culture in which this story was produced, for example, would have shuddered at the very notion that God would, in any way, be "happy" with a 60% divorce rate amongst his chosen people. As we will see, this was a society which was taught to stone to death anyone who was caught in adultery--and which viewed marriage, and sexuality, as deadly serious business. The institutional Christian culture, however, which attempts to trace its ancestry to that which produced the Bible, would have been considered worthy of stoning and extermination by its "forbears" on this basis alone.
I am not saying this to condemn anyone--but I am saying this as a warning, that the God we so often invoke in our prayers and our church services is, as the Bible strongly indicates, a God who has every one of our heartbeats in his fingers. Dare we, then, to presume that he will overlook our attempts to establish our own mode of worship and sacrifice?
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