Welcome to the Moore College Podcast, a podcast of biblically sound, thought-provoking
and challenging talks, sermons and seminars for Moore theological college, delivered by
Moore faculty and ministry workers from Sydney, Australia and beyond.
Join us as we open the Bible together and share a life-giving, Christ-centered message.
In the last episode of the Moore College Podcast on Genesis chapter 3, Mark Thompson, Principal
of Moore College, outlined the Bible's diagnosis of the very human problem of sin.
In Genesis chapter 4, the deep consequences of humanity's sin are in full view with the
first ever murder and the stories of Cain, Lamech and Seth.
In this episode of the Moore College Podcast from a chapel service held on Friday 30 August
2024, Mark Thompson draws out significant lessons about hope, life and faith and how
the decision to turn aside from God's work has terrible repercussions for those who fail
to trust God.
Mark continues his series in the Book of Genesis and reminds us that the only remedy for extravagant
evil is extravagant grace, the grace found as a cross of Christ.
We hope you find the episode helpful.
Good morning.
You made it to the end of the term.
Well done.
Let's pray together.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word and we pray that this morning as we think
on it, you might guide and lead our thoughts, but more than that, that you might move our
hearts, that we might hear what you have to say and live faithfully in the light of it.
For this we ask of you in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Friends, don't you think that one of the saddest commentaries on 21st century culture in the
West is how much our entertainment is associated with murder?
The television ratings would seem to suggest we've been fascinated with murder and have
been for a long time.
Just look at one or two of the popular streaming services and you find "Death in Paradise", "Death
in the Dorms", "Death in Holy Orders", that'll interest you.
"The Killing", "My Killer", "The Murder Room", "Only Murders in the Building", "Murder in the Village",
"Murder in Suburbia", "Murder in Provence", "The ABC Murders", "The Magpie Murders", "The Pembrokeshire
Murders", "Midsummer Murders", and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Now I love a good murder mystery as much as anyone, but I can't help wonder how healthy
it is to feed our minds with this stuff.
Does it over time harden our hearts, enure us to the horror of it, make murder so common-
place that we just skip over it on the way to the fun bit of who done it?
This morning as we return to Genesis we come across the very first murder.
It's not a whodunnit, we know right from the start who done it.
Instead what we find here are very significant lessons about hope and life and faith and
the deep, deep consequences of the simple but terrifying decision made by the man and
woman in the garden that we looked at last week.
And they're lessons which have a particular resonance in our world where escape from boredom,
frustration, fear, or the frantic busyness of life has so often led us to dangerous distractions.
So will you turn with me to Genesis chapter 4?
Now Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived and bore Cain saying, I've gotten 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.
In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the first fruit of the
ground and Abel also brought of the first born of his flock and of 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.
The Lord said to Cain, why are you angry? Why is 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 for you but you must rule over it.
Cain spoke to Abel his brother 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 Abel your brother?
He said, I don't know.
Am I my brother's keeper?
The Lord said, what have you done?
The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground and now you're 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 at strength.
You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.
Cain said to the Lord my punishment is greater than I can bear.
Behold you've driven me today away from the ground and from your face I shall be hidden.
I shall be a fugitive and wanderer on the earth and whoever finds me will kill me.
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 anyone 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.
When he built a city he named the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch.
To Enoch was born Irad and Irad fathered Mehujael and Mahujael fathered Methushael and Methushael
fathered Lamech.
And Lamech had two wives.
The name of one was Adar and the name of the other Zillah.
Adar bore Jabal.
He was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock.
His brother's name was Jubal.
He was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe.
Zillah also bore Tubal-cain.
He was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron.
The sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah.
Lamech said to his wives, Adar and Zillah hear my voice you wives of Lamech, listen to what
I say.
I've killed a man for wounding me.
A young man for striking me.
If Cain's revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech's is seventy-sevenfold.
And Adam knew his wife again and she bore a son and called his name Seth.
She said, God has appointed me, appointed for me another offspring instead of Abel for
Cain killed him.
To Seth was also a son born and he called his name Enoch.
At that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord.
Well as we turn the page from Genesis 3 to Genesis 4, the birth of a son to Adam and
Eve should fill us with hope.
After all hadn't the Lord promised that the seed or descendant of the woman would be the
one who would undo the damage done by the first man and woman in the garden.
So is Cain the deliverer?
Is he the one the Lord had in mind?
Sure they'd only been waiting a little time by then, as much time as it took for the two
boys to grow into grown men.
But a first time reader of this story might start to get their hopes up and those hopes
are brought crashing down by the events of this chapter.
For Cain is not the deliverer, he's a murderer.
And the only other candidate was the brother whom he'd murdered.
This is not going to be over quickly.
For there are deep and enduring consequences of the decision in the garden to order life
in God's world without reference to God.
To turn aside from God's word and to establish their own.
The way God had made the world was good.
It nourished life.
It fed healthy relationships of harmony and joy, free from shame and free from frustration.
But life on the other side of the fall, our side of the fall, is almost entirely the opposite.
And if we saw the first hints of that with the behaviour of the man and the woman immediately
after they'd eaten of the tree, then it all comes out into the open in this chapter.
There are three parts to the chapter which are marked by three births.
The birth of Cain, the son of Adam and Eve in verse one.
The birth of Enoch, the grandson of Adam and Eve in verse 17 and the birth of Seth, the
third son of Adam and Eve in verse 25.
We're going to look at each of these but almost all the time it's going to be spent
on the first one.
Let me warn you.
So firstly, anger, violence and unbelief, the story of Cain.
You see you can't attempt to order life without God in God's world without disrupting the
order God put into the world in the first place.
Adam and Eve hid from God.
They were ashamed and embarrassed in front of each other.
They made every attempt to shift the blame for what they'd done and maintained themselves
as the innocent victims in all of this.
She gave it to me.
He deceived me.
The idyllic picture at the end of Genesis two is very different from the picture of
life at the end of Genesis three.
And even though a judgment is delivered against the serpent, against the woman and against
the man, it really is just a hint of how bad things were about to become.
Life outside the garden will be genuinely terrifying at points.
Not always and at every moment but genuinely so at points.
We might not have expected the explosions of anger, violence and unbelief that we find
in Genesis four, so a minute ago we might have every reason to believe that we will
see the promise in the midst of the curse begin to be realised as first one son and
then a second is born to the man and woman.
But it doesn't take long to sense that there's something wrong, does it?
The birth order of the brothers is quickly reversed in verse two.
And then when both brothers bring an offering to the Lord, how they knew to do that, I don't
know, perhaps it was just a spontaneous act of thanksgiving for what the Lord had given
them.
In some way we're not told about.
It is clear that the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering
he had no regard.
We're not a why in Genesis four.
It's not spelt out for us.
Why did God regard Abel's offering over Cain's?
But there is a hint though in those words in verses four and five, but it's an interesting
way of putting it, isn't it?
Regard for Abel and his offering, no regard for Cain and his offering.
You see the problem Cain faced lay not so much with his offering, but with him.
And the rest of the Bible leaves us in no doubt about that.
The writer to the Hebrews makes clear by faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice
than Cain through which he was commended as righteous.
Nothing to do with the costliness of one offering compared to the other or of blood offerings
rather than grain offerings.
The Israelites will one day learn that both are acceptable at different times.
It had to do instead with their hearts and specifically with faith.
For Cain's offering was a sham.
It was play acting.
If any one of us had been watching, we most likely would never have recognized it.
But what he did did not proceed from faith, from a genuine trust in God's goodness, his
generosity and grace, and Abel's did.
The true worship of God, the proper recognition of God's worthiness and of our utter dependence
upon him, trust in him together with an acknowledgement that we have received from his hand what we
could never have deserved.
That kind of worship is a matter of the heart.
Jesus made that clear.
God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.
The Apostle Paul wrote, present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable
to God, which is your spiritual worship.
True worship is not a matter of how orthodox your liturgy is, how loud you sing the hymns,
how eloquent are your prayers, or how high your hands are raised.
It's a matter of the heart.
It's a matter of faith.
And God knows the difference.
If you're just going through the motions or your focus is on how you might impress those
around you with your piety, or you're simply in a rush to get onto the next thing and this
is just something you must endure, God knows.
God knew it in the case of Cain and Abel, and it was clear to Cain that God knew, and
he hated Abel for it.
And the echoes of the garden are almost audible, aren't they?
It couldn't be my fault.
God's just being unfair, playing favourites.
The brother that you gave me, he's the real problem.
He's the real threat.
The obstacle to me being rewarded the way I deserve.
Friends, there's a real warning here that the apostle John brought to the surface in
his first letter.
We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother, and why
did he murder him?
Because his deeds were evil and his brother's righteous.
The anger and frustration that exploded out of Cain had its roots in more than just sibling
rivalry.
It had its roots in unbelief, a failure to trust God.
And it's important for us to recognise that.
For similar explosions are happening all around us at the moment in major Christian denominations
in the West, set off by other religions such as secularism in Europe, America and Australia,
Islam in Africa and Asia, communism in China.
So the warning in 1 John 3 is to us, we should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one
and murdered his brother.
It's possible for us to see others, even our brother or sister, as a threat that somehow
needs to be removed if I am to receive the reward or recognition that I deserve.
And so I nurture hatred rather than faith in my heart.
The kind of hatred Jesus warned about in the Sermon on the Mount.
Well the catastrophe of Genesis 4 unfolds in a single verse, verse 8.
There's just a hint that Abel is totally oblivious to what's going on in his brother's heart.
He goes out with him to the field.
And then Cain rises up and kills him.
Abel becomes, as Jesus made clear in Matthew 23, the first in a long line of righteous
people whose blood had been shed by those without faith and in fact opposed to the purposes
of God.
And that hatred and violence and unbelief we know came to a crescendo on the first Good
Friday.
In the interrogation that follows, there's not the slightest hint of repentance on Cain's
part.
I hope you noticed that.
Am I my brother's keeper?
He asks.
Of course he was.
Of course he had a responsibility to care for his brother, to value his life and to do
all that he could to protect him and rejoice in his success and flourishing.
But he was still focused on himself.
And now he says out loud what he had kept bottled up inside, that God is being unfair.
Just like his mother in her conversation with the serpent, he adds to God's words to make
them sound harsher than they actually were.
I shall be a fugitive and wanderer on the earth and whoever finds me will kill me.
So God corrects him immediately.
Not so.
The deadly corrosive effect of sin that began in the garden has taken such a hold of Cain
that he will not return to God, will not take God's advice, will not be comforted even in
the midst of judgment by the offer of life.
In the end it's the incredible value of human life, every human life that makes murder so
horrific.
It's why those who pursue it can only really do so by dehumanising the object of their
hatred and fear.
And now or other, even if just for a moment, they convince themselves that this person
does not deserve to live.
The flip side of the command, you shall not murder, is the positive, you shall do everything
you can to preserve the life of your neighbour.
Faith in God, his goodness, generosity and grace shows itself in the way we treat those
around us.
By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain and he was willing to
go with his brother out into the field.
But without faith Cain killed him.
Well I said we spend most of our time on the first of the three stories but I do want to
simply touch on the other two.
So the second is life in a world without faith, the story of Lamech.
The third birth in Genesis 4 but the second that begins a new element in the story is
the birth of Enoch, Cain's son and Adam's grandson.
In the verses which follow the line of descendants from Cain begins to unfold.
These are they who inherit God's judgment on Cain and Cain's decision to go away from
the presence of the Lord.
There's no turning back to the Lord in the generations that follow Cain.
The ugliness of sin just becomes more apparent.
The depth of its hold on those who refuse to repent becomes even more terrifying.
The critical expression I'll show you noticed is Lamech, Cain's great great grandson.
Four generations after Cain and only five after the fall the value of human life is
so debased that murder can be a cause for boasting and laughter and blasphemous mockery
of God.
One act of murder born of long resentment and hatred now becomes a cavalier pastime
which is rehearsed in order to threaten domestic violence.
Lamech boasts to his wives of how easily he's done it, how trivial was the pretext, how
he's such a man and how untouchable he is.
If Cain's revenge is sevenfold then Lamech says seventy-sevenfold.
These are words designed to intimidate.
How degraded human life has become and how cheap are the lives of those around him in
Lamech's eyes.
It is as one writer calls it extravagant evil and the only remedy will be extravagant
grace.
The kind of grace that bears the full force of human cruelty and hatred and fear and violence
on the cross.
The kind of grace that is reflected in the human relationships of those saved by that
cross who are called on to forgive not seven times but seventy times seven.
The only real answer to extravagant evil is extravagant grace demonstrated on earth
in unfettered, unconditional and unwarranted forgiveness.
The story of Cain was horrifying, the story of Lamech is sickening.
But the third story, the story of Seth and his descendants shows it doesn't always have
to be that way and that as sin has amplified and spread so has grace.
I love the way one man puts it, the decline of humanity seen in Cain's family is not
inevitable and it's not the final word.
There's another word.
So three, calling upon the name of the Lord, the story of Seth.
The note of hope in this rather dark chapter is sounded in the story of Seth.
There are not only murders in the building.
All mention of the Lord God had vanished when Cain went away from the presence of the Lord
in verse 16.
He's not mentioned at all in connection with the descendants of Cain, especially Lamech.
But now in the final two verses of the chapter the Lord is in centre place again.
He recognizes that the son to whom she gives birth after the murder of Abel is a gift from
God.
God has appointed me another seed offspring.
It's the same word as in Genesis 3.
Instead of Abel, for Cain killed him.
And even more wonderfully it's during the lifetime of Seth's son, Enosh, that people
began to call upon the name of the Lord.
What does that mean?
It's certainly something positive.
Perhaps it means that the growing number of Seth's descendants began to meet together
regularly to pray.
No longer would they hide from the Lord as Adam and Eve had tried to do in the garden,
or walk away from the presence of the Lord as Cain had done.
Two generations after the fall there was a recognition that the Lord God is their only
hope and calling upon His name gives voice to that hope and is a demonstration of faith.
God has not given up and that's why there's hope.
Even in a chapter dominated by violence and murder.
The end of this chapter and the chapter that follows are forward looking and hopeful.
God has not given up and that's why there's hope.
Even in a world where the edges are fraying, things appear to be falling apart, mere anarchy
is loosed on the world and it seems that the centre cannot hold.
We mustn't lose our horror and revulsion at the devaluing of human life, especially vulnerable,
supposedly non-economically productive human life, and murder in its various forms.
But we mustn't lose hope either.
Hope that calls on God and waits on Him and brothers and sisters as heirs of the resurrection,
we have that hope.
Violence and death do not win in the end and so we live by faith, faith like that of Abel,
washed by a blood that speaks a better word than his.
Will you pray with me?
Heavenly Father, as we look at these horrific events and are reminded of the truth of Your
grace that exceeds our wickedness, we pray that You might bring Your Word to our hearts
and shape our lives by it, for Jesus' sake.
Amen.
Thank you for listening to the Moore College podcast.
Our vision as a college is to see God glorified by men and women living for and proclaiming
Jesus Christ, growing healthy churches and reaching the lost.
We invite you to attend any of our upcoming events, including this one that is taking
place at Moore College.
The Mark drama is a simple yet powerful performance of the story of Jesus using the words of the
Gospel of Mark.
In the Mark drama, you will watch every incident and hear nearly every word spoken by Jesus
as recorded in Mark's Gospel and all in the space of a 90-minute theatre-in-the-round
performance.
As you watch, decide for yourself.
Is Jesus just another guy with imaginative ideas about God or is He truly the King of
the Universe?
The Moore College community will be presenting the Mark Drama on Friday the 20th of September
and Saturday the 21st of September at Moore Theological College in Newtown, Sydney, Australia.
Tickets are available for just $10 per person with discounts for groups and they are available
from the Moore College website.
You can find out more about our events and register by going to the Moore College website.
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Until next time!