safe approach to a holy God. But there comes a time when they
are grown and as it is written, therefore a man shall leave his
mother and father and be joined to his wife and they shall be
one flesh. There's a time when children
remove themselves from their parents' household And at that point, I mean, this
is true in all aspects of life, they're allowed to make their
own decisions. They can decide where they work, they can decide
what they wear, they can decide where they live. And humanly speaking, it is then
their privilege or right among men to choose how they will worship
God. Now, I'm not saying, you know,
I'm not trying to act as though freewillism, the theological
concept of freewillism, is true. I'm just talking about when a
child's out from under the parents, they get to make the choices,
humanly speaking. And Cain and Abel were at least
that old. Now, it's obvious that Adam and
Eve had taught them. Adam and Eve had taught them
that there is a God, and had taught them who that God is. And Adam and Eve had doubtless
explained to them the things that happened in the first three
chapters of Genesis. How that God had called the universe
into existence through a period of about six days. And he made
Adam. And then from Adam he made Eve.
Both of them made in the image of God. And he gave them pretty
much one command. He said, you can have, I give
you everything to eat. All the vegetation of every sort
for you to sustain yourself. Now I've put one tree here right
in the middle of the garden. called a tree of the knowledge
of good and evil. Now, don't eat from that tree. We don't know whether it was
a unique tree. Everybody talks about an apple.
We don't know if it was an apple tree. Some kind of fruit tree.
It produced something that looked like it would be good to eat.
And there may have been many others just like it in the garden. There was nothing magical about
the tree. There was no power of life or death in the tree
itself. Rather, it was there as a symbol
of God's authority. He said, I give you everything
except that. That's my tree. Don't touch it.
Actually, I don't know if he ever said, don't touch it. He
said that God had said, don't even touch it. But all we see
recorded is that God said, don't eat the fruit of it. She ate some of the fruit, and
here's an interesting thing to note. When she ate the fruit,
nothing happened. But when Adam ate it, it said
the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that
they were naked. I don't think that's the first
time they realized they weren't wearing clothes. It's the first time
that their nakedness brought shame to them. And nakedness
is used in the scriptures quite often as a symbol for one's sin
being exposed. They knew that they were naked.
They felt the shame of it. And what did they do immediately?
I said, when Eve ate of the tree, nothing happened. Why is that?
Because Eve was not the head of the human race. Adam was. Adam stood as the head and representative
of all of us, such that whatever he did has been charged against
all of us, as though we ourselves did it. So when Eve eats of the tree,
nothing happens. When Adam eats, at that very
moment, death passed on all of us. Not only that, the very principle
of death and decay, things falling apart and all that. According
to Paul, the whole creation was made subject to vanity, corruption,
breaking down, because of what Adam did. I'm sure they told
that to Cain and Abel. I mean, that's a pretty important
aspect of their lives. And I'm sure they told Cain and
Abel, how that God had come into the garden in the cool of the
evening and had sought them out and confronted them. And there they were with their
coverings made up of leaves. Well, you know what happens to
leaves once you pull them off the tree? They shrivel up. Eventually, They'll get brittle,
fall apart. They tried to cover their nakedness
with vegetation. But the moment that they cut
that vegetation from whatever plant it came from, it began
to die just like them. If the whole day had gone by,
if they'd eaten of the trees in the morning, and the Lord
comes in the evening, well, even by then they probably were noticing
these leaves are starting to turn. Leaves are getting dry. And you know, any covering we
try to make for ourselves, just like those coverings of leaves,
it will shrivel up, crumble up, and leave us naked again. That's why people have to, the
people that try to approach God by the works of their own hands,
they've got to keep doing, because they've got to keep making new
clothes. That's why they like going after
every new religious thing that comes down the pike. because
they try something and for a while they're excited by it, but then
the glitter's gone or whatever had attracted them, it begins
to fade and they begin to know their sin once again and feel
that, so they go to something else and into something else.
And that's why religion is constantly making up new stuff. If there is any testimony to the fact that this congregation
is a congregation of the Lord. It's the fact that we haven't
gone after anything else. When we first gathered, what
was our message? It was Christ and Him crucified.
That's what we preached. That's what we sought. And having
found it, we were satisfied with it, and we haven't looked for
anything else since. During this time, Many religious
fads have come and gone. By the grace of our God, we haven't
chased after any of them that I'm aware of. But the world has to keep going
after these fads, making new clothes. But the Lord came into
that scene, and what did he do? He did something that had not
yet been done on the earth. He killed conscious animals. As near as we can tell, no animal
died before sin. Nothing aware of its own existence
ever died. Blood had not been shed. But it was that day. It'd be
many, many years before the writer of Hebrews said, without the
shedding of blood is no remission. But that's exactly why God killed
an animal, skinned it. Actually, it says animals, plural. Skinned it, and God made a covering
of skins. And that indicates two things.
First of all, animal skins will last longer than leaves. Kind
of indicating the permanence of this clothing to cover their
nakedness. But the primary aspect of these
animal skin clothes was that they could not be obtained apart
from the shedding of blood. Something had to die to cover
their nakedness. And that's a picture of our Lord
Jesus Christ. We, in our self-righteous nakedness,
let's face it, that's what it is. Everyone, until they come
to Christ, is walking around like Adam and Eve were doing,
and they were walking around, were walking around clothed in
leaves, clothed in something we've made of our own. And we keep having to renew it.
Where I went to church, you know, you'd come to the end of the
service, and of course, what they wanted more than anything
was for people to, quote, get saved. And they thought it was
all by a simple decision of praying the sinner's prayer and that
kind of thing. So they'd sing a song, as many verses as they
thought the people would sit still to listen to. And they'd
beg people to come down. I remember one, it was near Christmas
time, and the preacher was trying to get people to, you know, quote,
get saved. And I remember he said, you husbands,
why don't you give your wife a Christian husband for Christmas? As though this thing's in our
hands anyway. But you know, if they didn't
get anybody to come down to be saved, you know what they'd do?
Anybody want to rededicate their lives? Got to do it over. They wouldn't call it salvation
again, but they'd get people worked up into a religious...
frenzy's a word, but they weren't looking that way. The church
I went to was pretty sedate. But they'd get them to come down
for that. They'd just keep lowering the bar until somebody came down. That's the way of works religion. You've got to keep doing it over.
One time, God killed animals, made coverings from Adam and
Eve, blood was shed, and that's a picture of our Lord Jesus Christ,
and we are clothed in Him. It was interesting that when
Jacob the deceiver, as his name implies, was going to steal a
blessing from Esau. Isaac had called Esau in and
he said, you go out there and you hunt that game that I like,
and that stew you make out of the game you catch, oh, I love
that. You go make me some of that,
you bring it to me, and I will bless you. And you get the impression
from the stories of Isaac and then his sons Jacob and Esau. Isaac really liked Esau. And
you can understand why. He was a man's man. He was the
kind of son that a man would want to have. It says Jacob dwelt
in the tents with the women. But Esau said he was hairy, just
covered with hair. But Jacob was smooth, not much
hair on him. So Esau goes out, gonna get the
game, make the stew, take it to dad, get the blessing. Be officially recognized as the
firstborn of the household, an heir of the household. But
Jacob's mother preferred Jacob. And she says, tell you what,
I know the recipe for Esau stew. I'll make some, and you go in
and you pretend you're Esau, and he'll give you the blessing.
And Jacob said, wait a minute, Esau's a hairy man. I'm not. Dad will be able to tell the
difference. And so she took some skins of, I can't remember, I
think it was a goat, I'm not sure, whatever it was, put it
on him, at least in the appropriate places that would be showing,
to make him appear hairy. Now Isaac was, it said, nearly
blind. So when Jacob went in there, now what he actually did
in order to get the blessing, he went in before his father
as Esau. He didn't say, it's Jacob. He
comes into his father's tent, his father says, who's there?
He says, it's Esau, your son. Oh. And he said, well, it's the smell
of Esau. Because with those animal clothing
on and such, Isaac said, you know, it's the smell of the field
and all this. Smelled like Esau. Felt like
Esau. Why? Jacob was clothed in Esau. He said the smell is Esau, the
voice is Jacob's. But you know what happened? Jacob
got the blessing clothed in Esau, the rightful
firstborn. And so we go to the Father clothed
in Christ. And to the Father, the smell,
that sweet-smelling savor of Christ and His sacrifice, the
smell is Christ, though the voice is us. But God blesses us. You know,
when Esau came back in and Isaac realized what's happened, he
says, I've given him everything. And Esau, whose only hope lie
in this world, of course, he was distressed. He's lost everything.
He says, don't you... First of all, he said, that snake
Jacob, he stole it from me. Give it back. And Isaac said,
no, what I have done, I have done. And now the father, of
course, he's not deceived by us. These are just illustrations.
But the point is, we come to him dressed in Esau, yet with
a voice of Jacob, and we plead for his blessing, and he gives
it. And having done it, he will never
retract it. But Adam and Eve, I'm sure, told
Cain and Abel about God making them clothing out of skins. We
know that they had been taught that the only way to approach
God is through a sacrifice. You can't just go into the presence
of God. And so these two men made a sacrifice to God. Now,
I don't know that you can distinguish between these two men according
to their character. I don't know that Abel was any
better a man than Cain, so far as his day-to-day conduct. Cain may have been a fine fellow
up to this point. I don't know that you would have
been able to detect in either one a greater level of devotion
to the religion of the God of their fathers. Because it says,
in the course of time, or strictly it's in the course of days, so
evidently they had set aside times for worship. And when it
came, on one occasion, when it became time for them to go to
worship, both these men went. And the only difference between
these two men was the sacrifices that they brought. Both of them
had a sacrifice. Now, Cain was a man of the field. That is, he was a crop farmer. And so he brought vegetables. Don't know which ones, it doesn't
matter. But he brought those as an offering to the Lord. And
then Abel, who was a shepherd, he killed one of the firstborn
of his flock. And it's said that he rendered
or gave to the Lord the fat portions. And I'm not exactly sure what
that means, but I suppose I know that, you know, if you grill
some meat, you better get some that's well marbled. That's the
best stuff. Otherwise, it's tough. And I
know that in Old Testament sacrifices, there was often mention of the
fat portions. Now, we've been trained in our
day you shouldn't eat so much fat, you know, it'll give you
a heart attack or whatever. But in ancient times, even being
what we would call fat, overweight, was supposedly a sign of a certain
amount of wealth and a certain amount of blessedness from God. And so these fat portions were
the choice portions of these animals, and Abel offered them
to God. And the result was this. God looked upon Abel and his
offering with favor. But he did not look on Cain and
his offering with favor. Now, we haven't been trained
in the things of God, particularly as they're demonstrated in the
gospel. We know what was wrong with Cain's
offering. There was no blood involved.
Now, some have said, well, it doesn't say that he was bringing
a a sin offering. Maybe he was just bringing an
offering to the Lord to show, you know, he's willing to sacrifice
for the Lord, something like that. No? If that were the case, Genesis
4 wouldn't have made a big deal out of the different sacrifices.
In Hebrews 11, it says, by faith, Abel offered a better sacrifice
than Cain. Now some say, you know, the only
difference was is that Abel believed and Cain didn't. It didn't have
anything to do with their offerings. But the way the book of Hebrews
describes it, indeed, Abel was a believer, Cain was not. But because Abel was a believer,
because he believed God, he came to God in the way God said to
come to him. You know, when James says that
faith without works is dead, this is the kind of thing he's
talking about. He's not talking about works
of righteousness or good works. If you really believe God, you
will approach him the way he said to approach him. Cain didn't
believe God. Cain thought he had some good
ideas. Cain thought, why would I want to get myself all messy
and bloody, cutting up an animal? Look here, I got a wheelbarrow
load of corn and beans and all this kind of good stuff. Surely
the Lord will like this. Nothing to say against a good
steak, but you know, you gotta have your vegetables too. He
went and offered God something thinking that he was doing God
a favor by offering it. And he evidently did not understand
his own sin and the need for blood to put away sin. And you
know, people without faith, they can come up with the most ridiculous
ways of trying to approach God. And it's simply because they
do not have faith. They don't believe what God has said. Abel
believed, so he brought a sacrifice of blood. An animal died. And the picture of it is, you
know, the animal's life for mine. That's what's being pictured
there. Well, It says that Cain became very
angry and his face was downcast. Now, I don't know how God revealed
to Cain that his sacrifice had been rejected. The Scriptures don't tell us,
but evidently Cain realized that. I think one way that it may have
been revealed to him is that his sacrifice didn't work. In his conscience, in his inner
mind, he knew himself still to be guilty in the sight of God. A perfect sacrifice, it will
put away sin. It'll put away guilt. And Cain offered the Lord his
best, and the result was his conscience was still guilty in
the sight of God. And the result was that Cain
got angry, and his face was downcast. So
the Lord said to Cain, why are you angry? What are you upset
about? Why is your face downcast? Why
are you going around with a grumpy look? Now, everybody outside
of Christ is a legalist, but here's one thing you'll notice
about legalists. The more legalistic or obviously
legalistic a person is, the more sour their disposition, and it'll even show up on their
face, especially when they worship. You won't find a smile. They've
got nothing to rejoice over. But the Lord said, why are you
angry? Why is your face downcast? If
you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do
not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door. It desires
to have you, but you must master it. Now here the Lord says, Cain,
if you do what's right, You'll be accepted. Our Lord was not
saying, if you'll obey laws, if you'll behave yourself, if
you'll quit what we normally consider to be sins, you will
be accepted. Why do we know that that's not
what the Lord meant? Because we can't do what is required
to be accepted by our own efforts. Can't do it at all, can't even
begin to get it done. What he's talking about doing
right is approaching him the right way. He said, if you'll
come to me according to the method I have prescribed, you'll be
accepted just like your brother was. You don't have to stand
there on the outside. There is a way into my favor.
It is through the sacrifice of blood. Come that way, you'll
be accepted like anybody that comes that way. But if you do not, if you do not, he said, then
sin's crouching at the door. I read in one commentary some
years ago that in ancient civilizations, Many of them would have a kind
of little statue of some hideous-looking thing that supposedly represented
sin. It'd be right at the entry of
the door, and it was crouching down. And I don't know what it
was supposed to symbolize to them, but it was like sin might
jump out and get you at just any minute, I guess. But I know this, the Lord does
not mean that sin, as actions you do, or they desire to have
you. Rather, as we have pointed out
from other scriptures, when it talks about sin, it is personifying
it. And it's personifying not just
the sin, but the guilt and condemnation that it brings us into in the
presence of God. And he said, it's waiting for
you, it's crouching for you, and the day will come when it
will spring and destroy you. You must master it. Now, if any legalist reads this,
that is, somebody that's got a legalistic mindset of how to
approach God, and maybe Cain, that's how he picked this up,
they would read this as, oh, my sinning, you know, if I don't
stop my sinning, if I don't gain mastery over my conduct, sin's
going to spring out and destroy me. And they would use this to get
people to act according to the way, you know, the preacher thinks
they ought to act. Because they would think that's how you master
sin. But here's the problem. Sin's already at the door. If,
from this moment on, I could gain the mastery over my conduct
and my thoughts, such that I never thought evil, desired evil, or
did evil, if I could accomplish that from this point until I
died, Well, it would do you some good, but it wouldn't do me any
good in the sight of God. I'm already condemned. Sin's
already at the door waiting to devour me forever. So it's not the individual transgressions
that are being addressed here. It's the whole concept of sin
and the fact that sin brings us in a state of condemnation
and the guilt that it pours out upon our own consciences. alienates
us from God. It's all that, and one day it
will spring and destroy. How are you going to gain mastery
over things that have already happened? How can you gain mastery over
a divine concept of judgment and condemnation? That's a pretty big, pretty big
ask, pretty big demand. Master? sin, in all its ugliness
and power and destructive abilities, how can anybody do that? If you turn over, I hope I wrote
it down, I think I know where it is, but, well, let's take an adventure,
Romans 8. If I didn't get the reference
right, I'll just tell you what it says. Verse 13. For if you live according to
the flesh, our translation says sinful nature, but the actual
word is flesh. It says if you live according
to the flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put
to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live, because
those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. communicated His truth this way,
that a person without faith will twist these scriptures, will
take them up to mean this. Boy, if you live in a fleshly
manner, if your lifestyle is fleshly, you're going to die.
But if by the Spirit you put to death all your sinning, well,
then you'll live. Well, then may I ask you, is
there anybody that's going to live? Not according to that system. The truth is, the word translated
live here, we get our word zoo from it, but it's talking about
life itself. We use the word to live, we use
our English word live to talk about the way a person lives, your lifestyle. He lived an evil
life. or he lived a good life. You
need to be careful how you live. But, near as I can tell, the
Greeks never used this word to describe your conduct. What he's saying, if you live,
if you believe that your eternal life will come to you by what you do in the flesh,
the strength, power, and conduct of your natural selves, he says,
you will die. See, that's the way of natural
man. He always thinks that life comes to him according to how
he walks from day to day. And actually, the word walk is
what the scriptures use to describe the conduct of your life. The
Bible says we should walk worthy of our calling. Doesn't say we
should live worthy of our calling. Well, if you live, if you think
that you have life, or will gain life by your conduct because
that's the fleshly way, The result is you will die. But if by the
Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live, because
those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. Now they'll
say, yeah, if by the Spirit you'll stomp out your sins, you'll quit
doing them. Nope. That's true, we're lost.
How do you put to death the misdeeds of the body? If you're led by the Spirit,
and where does the Spirit lead every time? To Christ, and Him
crucified. If the Spirit is leading, that's where you're going. How
do you put to death your sin? How do you put to death all that
unacceptable conduct? All that transgression? How can
you put it to death in the sight of God? How can you put it to
death in the sight of your own conscience? Well, you follow
the Spirit who points you to Calvary and says, you take your
sin, you nail it right up there. That's all you can do with it.
By faith, you call upon the name of the Lord. Which is, in essence,
to say as one hymn, I lay my sins on Jesus, the spotless Lamb
of God. If you want to kill your sins,
the only way to do it is nail them to the cross of the Lord
Jesus Christ, and there God will deal with them. You say, wait
a minute, didn't he already deal with them? I know, but you've
got to understand the way the scriptures speak. Even though we're 2,000 years
removed from those events, the experience of those events within
our lives, it's right now. Yes, God laid our sins on Christ,
but you know, in the old covenant economy, when they would have
to offer sacrifices, they would bring the sacrifice to the priest,
but before the priest killed the sacrifice, they would lay
their hands Whoever was bringing the sacrifice, he would lay his
hands on the head of that sheep and confess his sins upon the
sheep. That was laying his sins on the
sacrifice. And God has laid the sins of
His people upon the Lord Jesus Christ and dealt with them there.
But we, when the Spirit of God works within us, we, as it were,
bring that sacrifice and we lay our hands on it and confess our
sins. We lay our sins on Christ, and in doing so, we have put
them to death, because Christ is our sacrifice. And he was
put to death for our sins. And if our sins were on him when
he died, our sins died with him. All those misdeeds of the body,
as Paul describes it here. All that Cain had to do to be just as accepted and pleasing
in the sight of God as his brother was to give up his vegetables and bring to the Lord the sacrifice
he demands, the blood of a spotless lamb. If he had believed God, if he
believed the testimony that his parents had taught him, and God often uses parents to
speak to their children, if he'd have just believed and offered
the appropriate sacrifice in faith, he would have been just
as accepted as Abel. The problem was not that Cain
was a worse sinner than Abel. The problem was that he came
to God with a useless, bloodless sacrifice. Now, you know, you
and I don't have to sacrifice anything. Rather, we look to the sacrifice
that's already been made. We look to Christ, the spotless
Lamb of God. We call upon Him. And in so doing,
it is spiritually speaking, we have laid our sins on Him. And in so doing, they have been
put to death. And the book of Hebrews says,
actually it says that the Old Covenant sacrifices because they
really didn't put away sin in its ultimate sense. And the way
that you could know that is they had to be offered every year.
But not only that, it never made the person who offered it perfect
as pertains to conscience. That is conscience before God.
If they really brought those sacrifices thinking that dead
or sacrificed lamb was going to take away their sin, then
they were offering a lamb without faith. Faith sees in that lamb
the promised one. And they were looking forward
to the promised one. We in faith look back to the promised one
who has come. And we plead his blood to put
away our sins. And that's how you master sin.
Whether it really referred to one of those little ugly statues
or not, the idea was sin's waiting. And its day will come and it
will destroy you unless you master it. And the only way to master
sin is to kill it by nailing it to the cross of Christ. So don't be like Cain. Don't
let yourself get angry because God doesn't accept your efforts. Follow the example of Abel, who
came with a blood sacrifice, and God looked with favor on
him and on his offering. Heavenly Father, bless your word.
For the sake of Christ, make it glorious in the ears of those
who have come. I say what I can, Lord, to the
best of my understanding, but only you can make the words of
a man be powerful in the hearts of others. So pray, Lord, that you would
indeed take what has been spoken and make it powerful, make it
living, pierce hearts with