and begin to talk about this. And I tell you what, beloved,
I don't know that I'll finish this sermon this morning because
there's so much here. I just know it's going to take
a minute. So if I say, oh, all right, let's pray. And it's not
complete. That's why. We as a body have been meeting
for 10 years. in a few weeks. You know, all
of us who are from the beginning have always said the Lord has
brought us together. And the Word of God teaches us
that our covenant is stronger than trials, our covenant is
stronger than fears, our covenant is stronger than blood. God has His way and His purposes.
even when they are not what we want, to not thank Him for them
is blasphemy. And that's what our flesh does.
And I will say that in all the years of my ministry experiences,
this has been one of the best ten years of my life. It's been amazing. It's been
hard and it's yet to become easy. God has seen us through literally
hell at our doorstep. God has seen us through brothers
and sisters who have decided to go their own way and to sin
and to refuse love, to refuse correction, to refuse intimacy. And these things keep me up at
night. These things destroy my body.
These things bother my brain. These things wreck the intimacy
of my own household. These things disorder the function
of my ability to think and pray and live. And sometimes I wonder
how Moses stood it. And we who are parents, we know
what it's like, right? How Moses stood it. Moses didn't stand
it. Christ stood for him. And that
is what brings us together. The standing of Christ, the foundation
of who He is. He is the God of all things,
and now He is the God-man who has satisfied God's wrath for
us. So when we stand fast, it is
because we are sitting still on the bedrock of our hope. Now through the years, I've been
taught by a lot of men ministry stuff, okay? ministry stuff. And I remember some of my first
few weeks in ministry, you're taken aside and they say, okay,
young man, you know, full of God and zeal and talent. They're thinking, this guy's
gonna make me famous. But it was always infamy that
came. Always infamy. Not because of
things that I did or things that I said, but because of Christ
alone. And I've always wondered, and
I've been taught, this is what a pastor's supposed to do. This
is what a pastor's supposed to be. You hear people say that.
And I'm a note taker. I take notes. I take notes every
single day of my life. I write down everything that
I think, everything that I've heard, everything that I've been
experiencing, and everything in and out of it. And beloved,
when I die, I pray those files never see the light of day. And I'll tell you there's one
thing that's remained constant. There's several things that have remained
constant in my ministry, in my life as a pastor. Let's put it
that way. I'm a sinner, and Jesus Christ
is my righteousness. Those have remained constant.
And the same is true for the rest of the body. We are all
sinners, and Jesus Christ is our righteousness. And there
have been a lot of things that I've been taught through the
years about how to do ministry that have been absolutely wrong. The good
news is that God has been patient and has taught me as well as
some of you that His Word is sufficient. That means that what
He prescribes is absolutely enough. Now, you have heard me say these
things nearly every Lord's day for ten years. And what am I
saying? The same thing I've been saying.
Read your Bible, study your Bible, learn your Bible. Read the Scripture. Read what God is saying to His
people. That way when our conversations
are about theological things, it is the Scripture that we're
talking about, not anyone else's ideologies. That way, when we
come to the word, beloved, you won't believe how many hate mails
I get in a weekly basis online. Imagine waking up every Monday
morning with five to ten emails from people that you know in
the world telling you that you are a godless, wicked devil. And not only have they said that
to you, they've said that to a hundred other people. Imagine receiving
in the mail a letter from a saint in the body from a beloved church
member who says, the worst thing we ever did was to call you as
our pastor. Imagine receiving a handwritten
note in the offering plate We don't pass an offering plate,
probably for this reason. It's PTSD. And it's saying, I
should call the authorities, you are an abusive manipulator. And this is the record. And I
keep those. Why do I keep those things? Why
do I store that stuff? I don't know. It's not just started,
it's been that way my entire life. And beloved, if you have
any exposure to a large number of people, you also, if you just
stand on the simplicity of grace and the simplicity of the authority
of God's Word alone, you will get these same problems. The more people we minister to,
the messier the pen. The more sheep in the pen, the
messier it is. When we first got married, we
had a cat. And then a couple of months later, we had another
cat. And then some months after that, we had 10 cats. You can't let 10 cats live in
your house. You can't put 10 cats in a cardboard box. That's
nasty. It's a mess. It's not easy to
keep clean. Now, I've got a buddy down the
road who has a couple of hundred sheep, and they're nasty. There's a reason that the Lord
chose sheep as the image of the believer. Because they're dumb
animals. They run and go places based
on fear. The way you get them where you
want them to go is you put a dog behind them. Scare them where
you want them to go. We're dumb, scared, and nasty. We can't fend for ourselves,
feed ourselves, shear ourselves, clean ourselves, worm ourselves,
or even give birth ourselves. For the grammaticians, just ignore
that. We're sheep. But the one good
thing is, is that there is only one true shepherd. There is only
one true shepherd. And that is Jesus Christ our
righteousness. And the shepherds of God's church
hold to Jesus Christ our righteousness and His Word, and when we depart
from that with our thinking, we are wicked. When we depart
from that in our teaching, we have gone astray. When we try
to impose burdens of things on top of other people, based on
assumption, we are not doing our job. What is the job of an
elder? To teach Christ, and to oversee the joy of His people,
and to draw them back in and point them back in to the Scripture
alone. To submit and obey to the instructions
of God. from the apostles so that our
joy may be complete and that God's promises may be fulfilled.
That's what we've been learning. That's what I've always taught.
And so, there's a huge, huge problem, isn't there? Genesis
has opened up some cans of worms for people. I mean, there have
been some people who have just gotten their feathers ruffled
because I don't teach Genesis biologically. It's not written
that way. If it was written that way, then
Moses would have understand DNA. Moses would have understood the
genus of species. It's not the point. Can we see
all that and go, wow, look at that, God's amazing? Sure, but
we want to see what the Scripture's teaching. And the Scripture here
in the short and broad narratives that we've seen already is that
God created Eden out of nothing, the world out of nothing. From
death, darkness, and chaos came life with God. God created man
distinct from other things. And then from man, who was alone
and helpless, He gave Eve out of Himself. This is a picture
of Christ. One flesh. Marriage is one flesh. Then the fall. Why is the fall
necessary? Because it is the point of the
gospel promise. The good report of God as the one who is the
only one who has the power and the promises and the provisions
to create and sustain and establish righteousness in life. He is
the one who purposed the fall. He is the one who decreed the
fall. God didn't intend on Adam not eating the fruit. He intended
on Adam to eat the fruit, yet He commanded him not to. And
Adam, in his free decision to listen to, not God, but to his
own flesh, well, I thought it was Eve, his own flesh, to listen
to himself, the two are one, fell. Failed. Because that is what God is showing
in creation. He alone can do the work. He
alone can sustain it. He alone can preserve it. And
that anything that is created, if it gives any effort whatsoever
to sustenance of life or to salvation, you will fail. So what happens? The gospel,
the fall that brings the gospel promise is the example of that
we see in the destruction, the division, the flesh of desire,
the unruly humanity. And then all of a sudden we're
going to see it all the way up through the end of chapter 11, and then we're
going to see God destroy the earth, and He's going to save
eight people, and He's going to have Noah build a boat for
a century that will only house and provide for eight people.
So the preaching of Noah was like, get on the boat or die,
get on the boat or die, get on the boat or die. What would have
happened if 100,000 people had come to him and said, I'm here.
Oh, it wasn't God's intention to save the world. It was God's
intention to save His eight people. That story used to horrify me
as a child. And I remember crying over my
grandmother's dramatic reading of that text in Genesis. And
then she would say it with just her perfect grammar. And she
was a journalist for a while and some other, and she'd say,
and then God shut the door and the rains came. I'm like, you
know, she should have been Darth Vader's voice. She's very good. And I would just weep. Why? Why? Why didn't they get on the boat? And the answer was typically, because they hated God's provisions. And there wasn't any room. There was no room on the boat,
son. But they didn't want to get on there anyway. See, the Scriptures are showing
us God's power. Genesis 1 through 4 specifically
are outlining the entirety, 1 through 3 are outlining the entirety
of the rest of the Old Testament, specifically the Pentateuch.
Yet we've been taught as Americans to just story after story after
story after story. You know what? I want my child
to be like Joseph. I want my child to be like David. I want
to be like this. I want to be like that. And we speculate,
we assume, and we establish our own righteousness by effecting
some instruction. Now, is it bad to say, hey, look
what Joseph did? Not really, but it's bad to say,
why don't you do likewise? It's just like the knuckleheads
around the world today who feel like they have the authority
and the right to cause havoc amongst the church and to call
out every known sin that's ever been done when Jesus Himself
says, do not call out one sin from any person whatsoever in
the freedom of all the universe until you get the tree out of
your own eye. What does that mean? Until you
are sinless, don't say a word. I don't care what the sin is.
Church discipline which is correction is the only instrument that God
established to correct people in their sin. And the point of
it is restoration. I am sorry for what I did. Then
you are forgiven. Hallelujah. Let's have a party.
That is it. You don't get recompense in correction. I mean, if your arm's broken,
they don't break it the other way. Well, you broke your arm,
dummy. Give me the other one. And every
time it heals, they break it again? No. They bond it up, they
set the bones, put it back as close as they can to the original
place, hold it tight, care for it, so it can heal. That's what we do when people
fall into sin in the church. And ultimately, the promises
of God in the Bible, especially here in Genesis, is to show that
Abraham, who was now The prodigy, I'm not the prodigy, the progeny
of, you know, the lions here, of sinners, is worshipping idols, yet God
deals differently with Abraham than He did with any other idol
worshipper. What did He do with other idol worshippers? He destroyed
them. Now here's Abraham and God says, that's my man, I'm
gonna call him out. That's my child, I'm gonna call him out.
And He gave Abraham the same promise He gave Adam and Eve,
and He's talked about the seed of a woman, He talked about the
seed, He talked about the son of promise, the unconditional hope, the finished
work of God and redemption, and ultimately it boils down to the
seventh day, which is never going to end. The Sabbath. That's why
we're here. For Sabbath rest. That's why
we're here. This is not the seventh day,
this is the first day, by the way. The calendar starts on Sunday,
goes to Friday, goes to Saturday. Saturday, Sabbath. The point of the Old Testament
scriptures is to show the pattern of the promises of God and the
purpose of God by the power of God for the people of God, period.
There's a bunch of Ps there. It just comes naturally, I'm
sorry. Any person with a cognitive mind
can read the Bible and see the story and can see the pattern.
A lot of academic friends of mine can see the pattern, but
the losses of ball and eye weeds, the losses of goat on the side
of a mountain, they cannot tell you what it means, but they know
the pattern. They know the theology. They
know the doctrine. They understand election. They have all sorts
of knowledge and emphasis and understanding of all these things,
beloved, but if they're not resting in the promises of God, they've
not been born again. I want you to hear me. A testimony is one thing, but
saving faith is the fruit of it. Sealing the Holy Spirit is
that, you know what? I might not get it all, or I
might know it all, but it doesn't matter what I know, and it doesn't
matter what I've got. I know Christ. According to the Scripture,
He saved His people. And I know that I'm safe. And self-righteous people will
say, that's not enough. That's okay to say, well, can
you go a little further? What do you mean? Well, the scripture
will tell us what we mean when we say what we say. And we'll
believe the scripture according to its teaching because the spirit
of God in us will cause us to have a hope and have understanding
and resolve. Even if we have to say in our
flesh, and I've had many people say, I don't like that, but I
cannot deny it's true. The full counsel of the Word
of God is to believe the truth concerning God and do the things
commanded by God, that both are equally established for His people. So if I say I believe the gospel
but I refuse the instruction, I'm not believing the gospel. Abraham was a prime example of
that, wasn't he? Believed God, and God credited
that faith as righteousness. But how many times was Abraham
unfaithful? So it's not our faithfulness
nor our obedience that establishes up before the Father. It's Christ's
faithfulness. It's His obedience. It's His
death. It's His life. It's His resurrection.
It's the atonement for the people of God. This is the good report. This is the gospel. Believing the gospel is not an
intellectual exercise. It is a divine power. It is not about... I mean, I
can argue the logic of the arguments of the New Testament narratives
or the New Testament teachings and anyone with a logical mind
can agree or disagree. It doesn't mean that they believe. So we're always going back to
the Sabbath. As we get here in chapter 3, we see the curse. We see that Scripture teaches
us that God has cursed the ground. God has cursed parenting. God has cursed work. So we'll revisit the curse real
quick as we move into chapter 4 today. Labor pain is the suffering
and grief of childbearing, including childbirth, including what? Childrearing. childbearing and the provisions
thereof. We see that the desire shall be contrary to your husband,
or for your husband, and your husband shall rule over. These
are both negatives. They are both results of curses. You'll
want to run your husband, and your husband's going to want
to run you. The husband doesn't give a positive... That's not
positive in the context of teaching. That's negative. You want to
be in charge, and he wants to be in charge. Guess what? Neither
of us are in charge. We're one flesh. How are we in charge of
ourselves? I did get a positive email or
a positive report on that sermon. A lot of wives enjoyed that sermon. But yet, that's not what the
culture says. That's not what history says.
I don't care what history says. I don't care what any dead man
has ever had to say about anything they've ever read in the Bible.
I really could care less. If I cared less, I'd go to sleep.
But I care when other people tangle the church up in these
things to the point that historically now for a hundred years, we treat
each other differently based on some authority we think God
has given some gender. Oh, that's a liberal out there.
No, it's not. That's hyper conservationists. That's exegetical realities. Love your wives as Christ loved
the church. Shut your mouth and die. That's
what Jesus did. He shut His mouth and died. I
don't want to oversimplify it, but that's what He did. Husbands,
love your wife as the church, as Christ loved the church. What do these negative things
deal with? Marital conflict of authority. Both are negative
results of sin, revealing the death of the picture of relationships.
Sin broke the relationship between man and God. Sin broke the relationship
between husband and wife. Sin broke the relationship between
parent and child. Sin, as we're going to see in
just a second, breaks the relationship between brothers. And sin has
been breaking the relationships between the body of Christ since
the very first day. God has promised reconciliation,
even temporally, if we submit to His promises. When we see
reconciliation not take place, it's because somebody's refusing
to be where they need to be and hear what they need to hear and
do what they need to do. And that is seen in marriage,
that is seen in business, that is seen in the body. And we're
all experiencing that. We've all experienced that, haven't
we? The man is now the slave to the
dirt, instead of the dirt being a slave to the man. He was going
to rule the earth, but now the earth rules him. Now to the text, Genesis chapter
4, or Genesis chapter 3. Verse 20, the man called his
wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.
Let that ring in your ears for a minute. And the Lord God made
for Adam and for his wife garments of skin and clothing. We understand
that. We've already taught this. It just needs to be in our hearts
and minds when we get to chapter 4. Then the Lord God said, Behold,
the man has become like one of us, and knowing good and evil,
now lest he reach out his hand and take also the tree of life
and eat and live forever. Therefore the Lord God sent him
out of the garden to work the ground from which he was taken.
He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden he placed
a cherubim and a flaming sword and turned every way to guard
the way of the tree of life. Verse one of chapter four, now
Adam knew his wife. I'm gonna read this slowly. And
she conceived and bore Cain, saying, I have acquired a man,
and I'm gonna correct this translation, who is Redeemer, the Lord. I don't understand that, with
the help of the Lord. That sounds just like the Pharisee.
Well, she's had the same attitude, I'll show you. I have obtained a man with the
help of the Lord." And again, she bore his brother Abel. Now,
Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a worker of the ground,
just like his father. In the course of time, Cain brought
to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel
also brought of the first fruits of his flock and their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel,
and his offering. But for Cain and his offering,
he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his
face fell. And the Lord said to Cain, Why
are you angry? And why has your face fallen? If you do well,
will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin
is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you.
The same language that God said for the man and wife. Its desire
is contrary to you, but you must rule over it. Cain spoke to his brother Abel,
and when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother
Abel and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, Where
is your brother Abel? He said, I don't know. Am I supposed
to keep up with my brother? And the Lord said, What have
you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the
ground, and now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened
its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. When you
work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength.
You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth. And Cain said to
the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. But behold,
you've driven me today away from the ground, and from your face
I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer
on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me. And then the
Lord said to him, not so. If anyone kills Cain, vengeance
shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord put a mark on Cain,
lest any who found him should attack him. Then Cain went away
from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod,
east of Eden. Cain knew his wife and she conceived
and bore Enoch. And I'm just gonna stop right
there. Because that's the conclusion
of that thought. the segue of these things. Adam knew his wife. Beloved, the whole idea of foreknowledge,
the idea of knowing, the idea of knowledge in the Old and New
Testament has everything to do with love. And in this sense,
in a practical way, it has everything to do with conception. We'll
leave it there. They became one flesh, and she
conceived and bore Cain, and then she says, I've gotten a
man with the help of the Lord, says so many translations. So
here is the giver of all life, which is her namesake, and now
she thinks she's able to preserve life. You know, the Lord told me that
through my seed the serpent would be crushed. Here it is! Look
what I've done! With the help of the Lord. But
I will tell you that just in a little deeper study of both
the Greek and the Hebrew, not that it matters, but it was conflicting
to me. What is it that Eve is trying
to say here? She doesn't say, the Lord has given. She is saying,
I have made. I have made. I have given. The help of God is not in the
original text. That's what we call translational
imposition. In other words, what we think
it means, we're going to write that down. It's better to have it
be odd and we go down and study the context and figure out what
it is. Eve is saying, this is the one who will preserve life
and restore life. Here he is. Look, I have beheld, I have brought
forth my seed. Here is my deliverer. But boy was she wrong. She had
not birthed the Christ, she had birthed a murderer. I often think about that in some
of my crazy interests when I read about serial killers and things
like that. The mother is always on my mind. What did I do wrong? Nothing. This man, who she called the
Redeemer, the Lord, was supposed to be the crusher of the serpent
in her mind, but he was not. He's the one who hated God. And
verse 2, and again, she bore his brother Abel. They weren't
twins. They weren't born at the same time. It's just saying she
had a son named Cain, and then later she had a son named Abel.
And these boys had become men responsible for their own harvests,
responsible for their own livelihood, responsible for their own families,
and they were working. Abel kept sheep. Cain worked
the ground like his father. They both worked. Labor is necessary
for food and life. And then it must continue. We must continue to labor. We
must continue to produce. We must continue to have wealth
that we might eat and live. And while there are
distinctions made between the work and the offerings, which
we'll talk about, the ground and the blood and et cetera,
the whole idea here is to understand God's separation, God's working,
His purposes in the picture and the story of Cain and Abel, showing
His promises. Beloved, we are not promised
that all people will come to see Christ. but we are promised that all
who belong to Him will never be cast away. And some of us who are middle-aged
and older may not see the salvation in a temporal sense of our loved
ones, but we will see it in an eternal sense, if it be the will
of the Lord. So worship. These two boys worshiped. As Paul would say, worship is
the manner of life we live. We give our lives as an offering
to the Lord. We give our hearts and thoughts.
But these offerings are not what makes us acceptable. Whether or not we're acceptable
makes our offerings acceptable. And in verse 3 it says, in the
course of time, came, brought to the Lord an offering of the
fruit of the ground." Now see here, we have this in the course
of time. We don't know how much time,
but they were obviously men. They weren't six-year-olds out
there slaying stuff. I mean, just don't think too
hard in it. These men were responsible for
their own livelihood, were responsible for their own food, working together
in families, in a familial way. And Cain brought to the Lord
an offering of the fruit of the ground. I want you to think about this
for a second. Notice the perfection of Cain's labor. Cain worked
hard and worked against the curse to produce fruit and vegetation
in order to produce a great bounty of which he took some of and
brought it to the Lord in splendor. This life-giving food, a harvest,
that actually reveals God's glory, does it not? In Romans 1, that
the creation reveals God's glory. Does not the vegetation, the
trees, and the birds, and everything else reveal God's glory? Psalm,
the psalmist would say, the handiwork, the work of your hands. Yet the
fruit of man's labor, even by God's providence, never produces
life. I want you to hear this. The
picture here is for us to see that even though Cain worked
hard and did well and produced from God's providential care,
great harvest that would feed Him and His family and offered
it as a sacrifice, the work of men, the work of men's hands,
the work of man's ministry, the work of man's wisdom, the work
of man's intelligence, the work of man's understanding, the work
of man's trying and striving and hoping and desiring and affection
and worship will not produce life. Nothing we do in any way produces
life eternal. It is God alone who can do that. And to God, man's worship and
wisdom are not impressive. I remember when I first started
studying church history and historical theology. It is a separate subject
altogether than Scripture. Though it has the same subject
matter, it's not the same subject. To study the Bible is to study
the Bible. To study my thoughts on the Bible is to study James.
Tippets. To study my philosophy is to
study my thoughts. This is what it means. And my
thoughts could agree, but if you want to learn the Bible,
read the Bible. Study the Scriptures. Test what I'm saying by the Word
and where I sit. That sits before you, we have
it right here. And I used to think, man, I bet,
gosh, what it would have been like to just have that kind of
mind. What it would have been like
to be able to be alive in those days. What it would have been
like for God to have granted me that type of understanding
so that just gospel truth could have been just expanded more
and more and more and more. So impressive. I remember saying
that one time. This is so impressive. These
people. He wrote thousands of, thousands
of, thousands of pages of stuff about one verse. So impressive. It's not impressive. It's not
impressive. Our knowledge is not impressive
to God. And you might think, well, where are you getting that?
1 Corinthians chapter 1, number 1. I mean, we can see it everywhere. He's not impressed. He's not
impressed by my way. He's not impressed by my preaching.
He's not impressed by my dedication to the ministry. He's not impressed
by our clarity. He's not impressed by our emphasis
or our zeal. He's not impressed by us. God
is not impressed by His creation. He made us! I mean, God didn't go into a
trance and wake up with stuff and creatures and go, Wow! Look
at me! I didn't know I could do this! What a God I am! I picked the
right title because I am the highest of all things if I can
do this. Wow! That's not the God of Scripture.
God wasn't impressed with our religion. God doesn't want anything
we have. Nothing can a man bring to God.
Nothing is acceptable outside of God's promises and provision
of life. And then Abel, verse 4, did the same thing. He brought
of his work The firstborn of his flock and their fat portions.
Now that has significance. I don't want to bog down on it,
but it does have significance in the Old Testament itself. The fat portions are the prime
meat. We know that the firstborn is a representation of Messiah,
of the firstfruits. So now here while Abel provided
an offering of his work, his work was different because it
pointed to something else theologically. It pointed to something else
prophetically. He had no idea. It wasn't like Cain should have
gone to his brother and said, hey man, can I get a lamb so I can sacrifice
a lamb and give to the Lord? That's acceptable worship. No,
Abel's worship wasn't, I mean, Cain's worship wasn't acceptable
because Cain wasn't acceptable. But yet in the story here, the
reason the Lord parsed it out this way and purposed it this
way is so that He could show once again the very thing that
He's already promised. Only through death can life exist. And only through the death of
the firstborn, the only Son of God. This points to the shed
blood of Christ, the promise of God, the shadow of the seed
of the woman that Eve thought was Cain. That Sarah thought Ishmael would
be. The Joseph brothers, who knows
what they were thinking. Both acts of worship were grand.
Both acts of worship, I think, were sincere. But for one, it
was humanistic and the other was prophetic. The firstborn
and its worth and its taste and its savory portion is to taste
and see that the Lord's promises are good. Neither of these offerings made
the giver pleasing before the Lord. And this is where many
expositors part ways. They put the emphasis on the
person offering rather than the one receiving. God is not swayed by our worship. He loves us or He doesn't. And the Lord had regard for Abel
in His offering, but for Cain in His offering He had no regard.
Now I want you to know what the opposite of love is. You know
what the opposite of love is? Indifference. So did God, was God indifferent
to Cain? I would say that even God hated Cain's offering. Why? Because it wasn't righteous. Is Cain reprobate? We don't know.
This is a temporary situation here on the earth. It has spiritual
points and spiritual prophetic purposes, but the scripture hasn't
taught us the eternal destiny of either of these men. But it
points to the picture. The Lord chose here. The Lord
divided here. The Lord separated here. He chose
to picture election. He chose to reveal His promises
again. He chose to show the counsel of His own will and He does not
disclose how and why except that He shows it. God is not desiring
anything except what He does. God does not desire the salvation
of every human being in the world, because if He did, He would produce
it. Beloved, I want you to hear that. Proclaiming the finished work
of Jesus Christ for the elect of God is a declaration of God's
promises to His people. And all manner of things go into
our hearts and minds when we try to affect it to ourselves. His choice, His will, His acceptable
redemption. See, man's reaction to the Lord's
grace without conversion is always self-help. It's always, what
else can I do, or let me work harder, or let me do more. It's
always self-discovery. Without being converted, without
being born of the Spirit, we're not sitting still resting. We're
exercising our will and volition in an attempt to try to work
out our salvation in a way that's not trusting in Him who is faithful. As Paul would say. Man's reaction to the Lord's
grace without conversion is self-help, self-discovery, intelligence.
Opulence, we love to make it grand for God, don't we? We come
in, I want everybody to be very, very quiet. Light the candle. Dim the lights. Cue the fog. It's like the Holy Spirit. And
it's funny, but it's what we do. You know what? I mean, how
many times have you heard people say, you know, the Lord was really
there? Because of the environment. If the Lord shows up, it's going
to be a tempest. Not a treat. It's gonna be a
trick. Religion. And I'm not talking
about the discipline of submitting to the word, the discipline of
being in the assembly as a command, the discipline of having to understand
the wisdom of God, the discipline that if we ignore any of those
things, God will not hear our prayers, much less answer them.
He will not answer them. He will not hear them. If we
don't obey the simple things about what we should be doing,
where we should be, and how we should be relating to each other,
He will not hear our prayers. He will not answer them because
that is to ignore God's promises. Oh, I love the Lord and I'm going
to show Him in my grand way. I'm going to create all this
lifestyle. I'm going to have the bumper
stickers and the devotions books and the Bible studies and all
this stuff and the prayer vigils and everything. And I don't really
like so-and-so." Well, good luck with that. Good luck with that. It's a moot
point. But that's what we do. And eventually all this stuff
combined, if we put one label on it, it's called rebellion.
And then what happens when we get called out in our rebellion,
in our fleshliness, we get angry. We get angry. And then the Lord
asks, in verse 6, He says, Why are you angry? Why has your face
fallen? And beloved, you've got to be
careful with this text. You can know what a man thinks about
what the Gospel is by how he preaches this text. If you do
well, will you not be accepted? How much better could he be?
What does Jesus say concerning the Pharisees in the context
of His ministry there in the Gospels and the Synoptics? When
He's talking to the crowds and they're listening to Jesus teach
the Scripture, And all these people are just longing to know
how it is that they can become acceptable to God. And Jesus
turns to the Pharisees whose livable morality and righteousness,
and they weren't all charlatans, folks. Self-righteous people
sometimes are charlatan, but a lot of times they're just helpless,
blind, and deceived. Thinking they're spiritual. Nicodemus
was not a haughty man. He was a very concerned man,
he was a very caring man, but he was unconverted and he thought
that all that he could do was just to worship and to study
and to pray and to sacrifice and serve the temple and that
one day God would come down and he would be found worthy of the
presence of God through his submission. That's not holiness, it is self-righteousness. Self-righteousness most of the
time, 99% of the time self-righteousness is enveloped in this great piety
and humility and often tears. Most self-righteous people weep
over the things of God because they don't know anything else
to do. But weep. Hoping that at the
last moment that my sadness, Burden would appease God's wrath. And they don't see it. Thank Him. Praise Him. Tears of joy. But none of these
make us acceptable. Cain got angry. He says, if you
do well, won't you be accepted? If you do not do well, sin is
crouching outside your door. And every time you walk out into
the world, it is going to come after you, and you must rule
over it. Now there's a lot here, and I
don't have time to answer all of this. But God is asking a
question to Cain that He cannot answer. This is not a request
for Cain to change his method of sacrifice, or change his offering. This is not a request for Cain
to change his worship that God would accept him. Yet, it is
just a gospel proclamation. Let's put it in Jesus' words
in the New Testament. or labor, all who are weary,
come to Me. All who are thirsty, drink. All
who are hungry, eat. I am the bread of life. What
must we be doing to do the works of God? This is the work of God, that you believe on the Son whom
He has sent. that you rest in the promise
of God's life. Commentators cannot keep straight
this stuff, because they reduce this narrative to an ideology
about Cain's part and choices, and if he just straightened himself
out, he'd be acceptable to God, which is antichrist. Sin is crouching
at the door of Cain because he was doing the right thing without
faith. Obedience to the gospel is believing. Believing is sitting still, motionless,
powerless, effortlessly. In the hand of Christ who carries
us out, who snatches us out of darkness, who snatches us and
draws us with great force, forcibly, against our will and against
our nature and against our countenance, against our cognition. And He
holds us and He embraces us like a python would crush its prey. Christ reaches around and grabs
us and holds us and squeezes the very flesh life out of us.
And in that holding, He gets on the cross and as He dies,
we die. And as He is raised, we are raised. And we no longer squirm. We don't
try to wipe His face or wash His feet. This is faith! And it's God's work. This is
not something man can muster. Free will and choices and decisions
and propositions and all these other... Oh, if I could pick
up this podium. These are the evils of the serpent.
Who are they? is always looking to devour God's
little lambs. Faith is God's doing because
it rests in God's doing who finished redemption as He promised in
the first place. And doing well is resting by
faith in the power and the promises of God. Resting is a work of God. As long as someone is effectually
conditioning their rest on anything that's in themselves, in their
mind, in their understanding, in their thinking, in their knowledge,
in their actions, in their doctrine, in their transformation, they
are not resting, trusting, living by faith in Jesus Christ. And
God says that is not doing well. It's idolatry. God is not in
the business of supernaturally bestowing information into the
brains of people. He's in the business of redeeming
His people by the Spirit, giving them faith as they hear the words
of Christ. Not to become scholars and experts
in their grasp of all these things and all the outside possibilities
of their intentions, but to simply sit and savor the glories of
our Lord. People call that easy believism,
I call it salvation. Yeah, but! A yeah, but is a bullish
sheep. Stop it. Get here and then as
brothers and sisters we can talk about and clarify and clean up
anything else. I believe there's an idolatry
of salvation. I've said this a thousand times if I've said
it once. People have a love affair with their salvation experience
and most people think when they read the right doctrinal books
and came to an understanding that they were born again. You're
not born again reading history. And the labels that we carry
are no more impressive to God than the glasses on my face.
The very fact that I wear these shows that I'm a sinner. in many ways because my eyes
are decaying and they cost way too much money. I mean, it's true. I could have
fed my family for a month for what glasses cost. It's progression. What does that mean? Indebtedness? Labels are easily placed. People
can feel comfortable with them and sometimes they're necessary
and they're not evil, but we need to know what everyone is
saying. So let us know the truths that the error may be made clear
as scripture reveals and establishes by the power of God. But I'm
here to say to you, beloved, in addition to that, is that
I think most of the labels we carry are erroneous. Because
they don't display the simplicity of God's power. Cain and Abel
had the exact same information. What was that information? The
promise of the gospel. God will save us from this serpent's
mess through the seed of my mama. So maybe Cain thought he was
something special. Maybe your brother. He did give us some clothes until
then. That's about what they knew. But the Sabbath rest is God placing
them in the garden. making them from nothing, breathing
into them life, and putting them in the garden. That's what regeneration
is. That God in His Spirit made you
out of death, breathed into you the life of Christ, and put you
in the garden. He placed you into Christ. Christ is the garden.
And Christ's life and righteousness is counted as your own, though
it is not your own. It is not ours, beloved. It's
imputed to us. It's just like the serpent came
around testing Eve and testing Adam. There's a lot of fruit
police out there in the world, evil serpents looking to devour
those who are not quite like them, who, in their own eyes,
are just like God. Cain spoke to his brother. What
happened? Cain spoke to his brother Abel. Now I want you to picture
this for a second. The scripture there is showing
us that Cain went out and had a conversation like he always
does. Hey, Abel, what's up, man? How's your day going? It's good
to see you. Come out here for a minute. Let's go walk. Let's go to the range. Let's
go have a coffee. Pow! Knocked him in the head
and killed him. Cut his throat. I don't know what he did. He might have insulted him to
death and he just died. I don't know what he did, but he struck his
brother and he killed him. He rose up and killed him. This
is Cain's response to the gospel. If you believe in me, you'll
do well. If you do right, if you rest in me, you'll do well.
What does Cain do? I hate my brother. I'm going
to go get him. Cain's response to the command
to do right is to kill the righteous, to kill the right one. Cain lured
his brother out to kill him and Cain spoke to him as a brother
and then turned on him. He used familial intimacy as
a moniker to his suspicion to lure his brother into a place
where he could get rid of him, to get him out of the way. And
that even maybe then, he wouldn't have to deal with the fact that
his offering was a lesser offering. Because I think in the mind of
Cain his offering was greater. And Paul tells us why, doesn't
he? John tells us why also. John says, don't be like Cain
and murder your brother. And why did Cain murder his brother?
Because his acts were evil and Cain's acts were righteous. So the question I have to myself
often, and I've confessed this to you and I'll continue to do
it, is am I a murderer? And the answer to that is yes,
I am a murderer. You are murderers as well, beloved. I've never struck a man to the
point of death, but oh, I've struck a man. And I really wanted to strike
a man to the point of death. And to
say that you haven't means you haven't related to a lot of people.
When someone's in your face and they're spitting in your face
and they're poking you in the chest and they're bruising you, it doesn't
matter when the flesh rises up. And I started thinking, do I
hate? Do I despise? Do I consider other people lesser
than me? Do I consider other believers a lesser believer because
of their ignorance or their sin? Do I listen to the testimony
of others about other people? Do I condition God's work for
other people's salvation by what I hear, or what I see, or what
I know, or what I think I know? Do I speak of others in ways
that diminishes the love of Christ for them? You know, when we murder
each other and we speak in ways that are murderous, that means
anything that's not edifying outside the presence of that
person is murder. There is no warrant in the entirety
of the Scripture that gives us the privilege to speak about
anyone who is not present in the hearing of what we say if
it is not positive. Got to warn them, though. No,
you don't. You don't have that warrant. You do not have that warrant. Because to do that is to drag
the Lord Jesus into the mire and to spit in His face. And to say, well, that's not
my brother, so he's not in Christ, is to pass judgment on a man
that you don't know could be the sheep of Christ. And pagans treat their enemies
better than that. I don't have to listen to that
because that person's not telling the truth about such and such.
It doesn't matter. If a cat meows this instruction, we obey the
cat. Because we're not obeying the
cat, we're obeying Christ. When we belittle or malign, even
if it's true, any sibling in Christ, we are literally spitting
in Christ's face, destroying His very name. And because we
are found in Him, we destroy our very name. Murderers hate
truth. And our flesh hates the truth
when we're confronted with it sometimes. Then murderers question
God's message and messenger and word and prescription and promises.
In verse 9, look here. And then the Lord said to Cain,
Where is Abel your brother? God didn't have to ask the question,
because he already knew where he was. He knows all things. And then Cain, like a smart aleck,
How am I supposed to know? Am I supposed to keep up with
my brother? Am I his babysitter? Could you imagine saying that
to your mama? They'd call me toothless Tippins if I had said
that to my mama. Or brain damaged Tippins. No
way, saying it to God, it's hubris. And the Lord said, what have
you done? The voice of your brother's blood
is crying to me from the ground." I'm going to talk more about
that in depth next week. But the heart of the murderer
here in this text is indifferent to God's Word. The heart of the
murderer is indifferent to life. The heart of the murderer is
indifferent to God's prescription of redemption and reconciliation
and joy and life and hope and happiness and order. The heart
of the man in its flesh cries out to question God and then
to lie to Him through the questions. God questions Cain and Abel's
blood reveals the answer to the question. It cries out from the
grave for justice, which is the opposite of grace, of mercy. God knows Abel loves Abel, approves
of Abel, and will vindicate Abel, his beloved child, just as he
vindicated his beloved son. And the heart of a murderer basically
establishes a new law by which God speaks and forsakes the clarity
of what is already spoken on the claim of conscience. See, Cain and his conscience
was justified in what he was doing. Why? Because that's what
the heart does. The heart is exceedingly wicked
and deceitful. Beloved, we cannot claim conscience
when the Bible actually tells us to do the exact opposite. Respect your parents. Well, I've
got a reason not to respect my parents because X, Y, Z. Love
your spouse. Well, you don't know who I live
with. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Do this. Do that. Honor this. Serve that. We don't get to choose
how we listen to the Scripture. We don't get to choose how we
filter God's Word and decide, well, my conscience doesn't bear
witness that I should not be in assembly, yet the Bible commands
you to. The Bible commands you not to
leave your spouse, no matter what you may feel, like you wish
you had done something different, and so on and so forth. It's establishing a new law. So there's a test of the conscience.
Does God's Word permit what I am doing, or going to do, or thinking,
or wanting to think about what I am burdened with? No, then
it cannot be done. Beloved people literally offer
murder to God as sacrifice, thinking that He's pleased with it. But
God will not be mocked. What do I mean by that? Well,
I'm doing the Lord's work, but actually we're murdering And now you are cursed from the
ground, verse 11, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's
blood from your hand. And when you work the ground,
it will no longer give you its strength. You shall be a fugitive
and a wanderer in the earth. This curse deserves more time
than I have for it today. But the earth will be a part
of God's discipline to Cain and punishment. It will not feed
him anymore. Cain will also be alone. There'll be no family
for him, no land for him, no security for him, no life of
intimacy. Cain will be fearful throughout
his entire life, which is anti-gospel, against the mind of Christ, which
is the mind of peace. Cain will be suspicious of all those around
him and always on the lookout for those that are trying to
do him harm. Yet in God's providence, as a part of God's punishment,
God would not permit someone else to kill him. Listen to that. Part of God's punishment is that
God would not permit someone else to kill Him. Why? Why not
just let Him have His way? Because God's purpose of redemption
has nothing to do with Cain. It has everything to do with
Christ. The saints, even when dispersed,
are at peace, but not for Cain. This is a picture of being out
of Eden, out of the presence of God. And further, no work
and no desire and nothing you do will ever afford an agreement
with God, a place of rest, or a fruitful yield. Rebellion against
God's promises is death. And all these pictures point
to the dreadful state of the loss for the wages of sin is
death. But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus
our Lord. So Cain said, this is too much
for me to bear. It's too much. I can't. I can't
do this. You've driven me today away from the ground, and your
face I shall be hidden from your face. I shall be a fugitive and
a wanderer in the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me."
And the Lord says, Nope. Anyone who kills Cain, I'll take
vengeance on them sevenfold. And the Lord put a mark on Cain
so that those who saw him would not attack him. And Cain went
away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land
of Nod, east of Eden. And then the scripture says,
what? Cain had a son named Enoch. This is why Cain did not die. This is the gospel again. Not
for Cain's sakes, but for God's sake, for God's people's. Why
did God keep him alive? Well, it's the providential care
of Cain because of the elect. Through Cain shall come Enoch.
Through Enoch shall come Methuselah. Through Methuselah shall come
Lamech. Then Noah. If he killed Cain, then God's
purposes in Cain would have been finished. But God's purposes
in Cain was to redeem the world in the picture of Christ in the
flood. It wasn't about Cain. But we did
read out of the Psalms today, you know, people cry out for
mercy, God gives mercy, even if it's temporally. Because in that state, even in
the flesh, it's a plea of sanity, if you will. I can't do this,
I need your help. God is filling the earth with
His elect children and with the reprobate, and how He does that
is His business and His plan. But He's clearly shown this division
here. The reprobate eat of the portions
of God's kindness in order that the promise of Messiah would
come. Messiah came through lines of reprobate people. How many times have you seen
pagan families unbelieving generation after generation and all of a
sudden out of nowhere comes this gospel heralder? It's not about bloodlines. It's
about God saving His people. The judgment of the reprobate
is certain like the promises of God for the elect are certain.
Judgment is certain for them. Salvation is certain for the
elect. So, beloved, we are to rest and to rejoice in the promises
of God who, in this text, shows us that He authors everything
perfectly on the earth for His glory and for the joy of His
people. How and why? Because Christ has
satisfied all things necessary for salvation in His body and
in His blood. Let's prepare our hearts to take
the table together in that reality. Father, we thank You for this
truth, for the gospel. Lord, for the peace that comes.
Lord, to put away the flesh and to stop trying to work so hard. Lord, we desperately need continually
prayer and encouragement from each other, and ministry, and
Your Word, to be trained, to be taught, so that we may be
full and we may be fruitful. not by our efforts, nor our desires,
nor our affections, nor our transformative things, but, Father, by Your
power and promise alone. For it is the gospel of Christ,
in whose name we pray. Amen.