Bad Blood Over False Worship

The world is full of stories about brother against brother. Most famous from Antiquity was the Roman myth of Romulus killing his brother Remus. That is how Rome supposedly got its name: the “eternal city” founded on bad blood between brothers. Augustine drew the connection between that pagan narrative and our text today. Our movies from Hollywood are still filled with the scenes of petty rivalries between blood relatives. And in fact, “brother against brother” is more than a story. It is also a slogan used especially in the context of civil war—people willing to go against the old adage that “Blood is thicker than water.” 

But what if I told you that all this bad blood always goes together with bad worship? I do not mean any subjective opinion about “worship style” or anything like that. I mean something that God Himself must have made very clear from all the way back in the beginning of the Bible.

Coming to our story today, in Genesis 4:1-16, we will recall that Adam and Eve are now removed from the Garden of Eden. Sin is in the world. The curse is in effect. And in this text we have bad worship and bad blood together between the first two brothers.

• Bad blood presumes God’s blessing.

• Bad blood despises God’s worship.

• Bad blood murders God’s image.

• Bad blood experiences God’s exile.

Doctrine. Since bad blood follows false worship, we must seek a true worship from a better blood.   

Bad blood presumes God’s blessing.

Look first at what Eve does here: ‘Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, ‘I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD’ (v. 1). So Cain is the new hope. We remember the promise from Genesis 3:15. There would be a Seed: an Offspring of the woman. Well, here he is! That’s a perfectly understandable conclusion by Eve. But notice how she expresses this joy in the midst of the fall. I HAVE GOTTEN a man … with the LORD’s help. Commentators notice presumption here. God helps those who help themselves—so we are told in our day. Cain’s name means “acquire” or “gotten,” whereas Abel’s means “vapor” or “breath,” signaling to us the shortness of his life. And to Eve? We don’t really know. Maybe Abel was only an afterthought. Maybe in despair over the fall, she put a lot of thought into it. It is still presumption. But it is not the only presumption.

As readers, we might have a presumption of our own. We might get the idea that this is the way God always does things. He passes on the covenant blessing through family ties and first-born sons. Don’t we believe that? Yes, we do. But the Bible tells us to believe more than that. Read on in Genesis and beyond, and you will see that the same God who passes on his blessing through bloodlines also has a knack for upsetting the natural birth-order, with an Isaac over Ishmael, a Jacob over Esau, a Judah over the three elder brothers, and a David over the older, more impressive sons of Jesse:

“But the LORD said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7).

Since bad blood presumes God’s blessing, we should look closer into the promise—in past the outward appearance.

Moses moves quickly in the story again. The two boys grow up. ‘Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a worker of the ground’ (v. 2b). You may remember that David was a shepherd, and he was despised among his brothers. This story doesn’t give us many details inside the brotherly rivalry of Cain and Abel, but it is pretty clear that the offering in this story was the last straw. Something that characterized their whole lives came between them.

This bad blood very often goes all the way back to our presumption. But presumption doesn’t just lead to wrong answers on tests, or in other more trivial matters. When we are talking about God promising you life when you’re dead, to presume upon your own nature and your own doings is not going to end well in the rest of life. Nothing is more presumptuous in all the world than a sinner in relation to God. There is no blood that boils more deeply, as Paul called all sinners “haters of God” (Rom. 1:30).

Bad blood despises God’s worship.

Before we get to murder (the ultimate in relationships going wrong), at the center of this passage is actually worship gone wrong. There has never been a time or place on planet earth where the specifics of worship didn’t matter. Notice that this is long before the moral law is unpacked at Sinai. This is not the tabernacle worship of Israel.” In other words, we can’t say about right worship in the Bible that specifics were only for the Old Testament Jews. Not so! Way before the law of Moses, for all mankind, over this bad blood, God is specifically declaring BAD WORSHIP! But how so? What was so bad about this worship?

Some people think it was in the blood. Well I think it was in the blood, but not in the way they mean it. What some people mean is that the reason God accepted Abel’s sacrifice and not Cain’s was that Abel’s was the sacrifice of an animal. He brought blood. That represents the sacrifice of Jesus. Cain’s sacrifice was less like the gospel. So there you have it.

But there are three reasons to reject the view that it was the comparison of the literal blood brought by Abel versus the absence of literal blood brought by Cain. First, the New Testament verses that refer to this don’t go there; second, there were other offerings in the Old Covenant worship system — other than the bloody sacrifices of animals. And then there is a third reason that can be gleaned directly from this text.

‘In the course of time Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions’ (3-4a). The suggestion is that unlike Abel, Cain, the firstborn, doesn’t give his firstfruits. One commentator calls the problem “Tokenism”1 — in other words, the leftovers. Like another firstborn later on, named Esau, Cain had come to despise the promises of God.

So this bad blood wasn’t over the good blood in Abel’s sacrifice. There wasn’t any. The author of Hebrews tells us that “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (10:4). Abel’s sacrifice wasn’t Cain’s problem. God’s pleasure in Abel wasn’t Cain’s problem. Cain’s physical things were not even Cain’s problem. Something boiling in Cain’s heart was the problem.

We can zoom in even closer, as the Hebrew for “killed” may be rendered as “in the same way killed.” An evil irony! Abel was made a sacrifice. In a sense, Cain would be saying, “Oh, you don’t like my sacrifice—here’s some blood for you!” As wicked Caiaphas unwittingly made his plot a prophecy of Christ’s work, so Cain unwittingly made his brother a type of Christ’s work.

Bad blood murders God’s image.

“We should not be like Cain,” John says, “who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous” (1 Jn. 3:12). That was the New Testament magnifying glass on history’s first murder. God had a direct, immediate, high-powered, looking glass into Cain’s heart on the spot. In the act, on the eve of destruction, in the spiritual cells of the bad blood as it rushed toward its target of rage. And does God sit back at the sight of his creature rushing headlong in this way? No. Verses 6 and 7 give us God’s searching magnifying glass of conviction—and we already looked forward to these two verses. Now let’s look back.

“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, but you must rule over it” (vv. 6-7).

Sin is personified. It is animated in crouching (think of a tiger stalking its prey), but then there is an intelligent design in that it has “desire.” That makes this a great enemy within. It is sin that wages “war against your soul” (1 Pet. 2:11).

So what is the connection? If this bad-blooded enemy is sin inside of us, then it was inside of Abel too. And yet we read of “the blood of righteous Abel” (Mat. 23:35). It would take a massive book, I think, to make the case that bad worship boils the blood that is already bad. But do I really mean to say that the consequences of falling away from the true worship of God are so bad that they lead us to murder the image of God? Really? There is a statement in John’s letter:

“If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 Jn. 4:20).

If we lose sight of God, we lose sight of the image of God. If our hearts grow cold toward God, our hearts grow cold to the image of God. If we would think nothing of stealing glory from God, then we would think nothing of stealing life from our brother.

Cain’s premeditation is evident here, since the presence of the LORD returns to ask the question, and then Cain’s impertinent response is all we need to see the depths that his heart had sunk. Pure hatred against both God and man. The two are inseparable. Another link can be seen when we study the form of the Ten Commandments and those places in the New Testament that draw attention to it, most notably the words of Jesus when asked about the Greatest Commandment:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. ” (Mat. 22:37-39).

When our violations of the first table of the law (what we owe directly to God) spill over into our violations of the second table of the law (how we treat our brothers) we get exile. We get kicked out of the land of the living. But even getting sent packing has its purpose in God’s story.

Bad blood experiences God’s exile.

Adam and Eve were already in exile. Cain made it worse. That reminds us that it actually can get worse here in this world! Cain is cut off from his work, his home, and his God. It is just like his parents, Adam and Eve, when they disobeyed God. They were punished by being cut off from their work, their home, and their God. And just as Adam and Eve did not physically die on that day, so Cain lives on in this life. The Scripture says “The soul who sins shall die” (Ezk. 18:4). And yet, there is a stay of execution. There is a time to repent. Did you ever notice that you were not utterly destroyed by God the very first time you sinned? And haven’t you noticed that you were not killed by Him each time you sinned after that? That “his mercies … are new every morning” (Lam. 3:22, 23).

Cain is punished by exile — Nod means “wandering” — but it is a merciful exile. But what is Cain’s focus?

Cain said to the LORD, ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have 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’” (vv. 13-14).

What a totally inappropriate pity party! This from the man who asked if he was his brother’s keeper — now he looks for a keeper of his own! This is not true repentance. And yet, God still does not kill him right then and there. A kind and patient exile. Yes — a curse — but a chance to turn, perhaps, one day. And so we should always take note, Paul says, of “the kindness and severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness. Otherwise you too will be cut off” (Rom. 11: ); and “God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance” (Rom. 2:5).

PRACTICAL

If we see that bad blood and false worship go together, and if we get out of that that we must seek a true worship from a better blood, what do we really mean by this? Three things:

Use 1. Exhortation. Since bad blood despises God’s worship, we should give God only our best. Abel did; Cain didn’t. Again, this is more than what we call “the worship wars.” Like Abel, we should worship the right way by faith. Listen again to the author of Hebrews.

By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks (Heb. 11:4).

So, Cain isn’t the only object lesson here. Abel’s action “still speaks,” the Bible says. What was his action? Ultimately, faith. By faith we bring God our best. We believe in God’s promises to the point where we do not withhold anything that God deserves or anything that God commands. When we do withhold those, there is a lack of faith. We cling to “our things” or to “ways of doing church” because we don’t trust God for the results. Hopefully now we can see the connection between God-pleasing faith and God-pleasing worship.

Use 2. Admonition. Since bad blood murders God’s image, we should guard against our violent hearts.

Use 3. Consolation. Since bad blood wanders God’s world in exile, we should always use this time to repent.

Like Abel, by that same faith that offers, we should look past even our offering to Christ’s offering. that is exactly what the author of Hebrews says, when we come “to Jesus … and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (12:24).

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1. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary, 97.