Bible Commentaries

Genesis 4:3-5

We perceive that both these brothers recognized the duty and obligation of religious worship, but when their offerings were brought God did not receive them both alike.

I. From the nature of Abel's offering, through faith, he presented a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain. There is every reason to believe that the offering up of animals in sacrifice to God (which was the ancient way of worship) was no idea of man"s; man would never, probably, have thought of such a thing had he not been taught to do so by Divine instruction. Adam, after his fall, was probably instructed in this, for the animals from whose skins they were clothed must have been slain, and as God did not then permit the eating of animal food, these animals will doubtless have been slain in sacrifice; the slaughtered animals being types of a crucified Saviour, the skins types of Christ's righteousness, in which every saved sinner must be clothed.

II. Still the reason why Abel was preferred to Cain was not merely the nature of his offering, but the spirit, the frame of mind in which he offered it. He had faith or belief in man's fallen condition, he believed in the entrance of sin, he believed in death, he believed in that Saviour in whose blood he himself and all others who would be accepted by God must alone be cleansed. On the other hand, Cain by his offering shows that he had no faith in the promise of a Saviour, that he did not believe in the fall—no faith in the entrance of sin, no faith in the promise of a Saviour, that he did not believe in the cleansing blood of Christ.

—E. J. Brewster, Scripture Characters, p1.

Reference.—IV:3-16.—A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture— Genesis 4:4

Abel personified something which did not pertain to any special age, something which was cosmopolitan and therefore everlasting. By that cosmopolitan quality Abel was kept alive—alive amid the changing environment, alive amid the traces of the dead; he has a present voice—he yet speaketh.

I. What is this quality of which Abel is the inaugurator, and by whose inauguration he lives? He is the representative of all the great who die young. The Picture is meant to declare that no really great work is ever interrupted.

II. Its simple features show that Cain is a child of the dust! Abel is a product of the Divine breath. Both the brothers are religious, so far as the form of worship is concerned, both offer a sacrifice. The difference between the dust and the divinity does not lie in the diversity of these men's gifts, but in the diversity of their spirit.

III. The offerings are made, and each brother retires to his home. Time passes; and by and by there happens a strange thing. These brothers meet with opposite destinies. Abel has a splendid year. For Cain the wheel of fortune has turned the opposite way, and he is filled with indignation. His is the anger of a man defrauded. To him the aggravation is not so much his failure as the fact that he has failed where his brother has succeeded. Cain has begun with covetousness and has developed into envy. The sin of the garden has become procreative. Adam had been content to say, "All these things shall be mine"; Cain has reached the darker thought, "They at least shall not be my brother"s".

IV. In the view of the early spectator, Abel has not finished his work of sacrifice. It is only a germ-cell that has appeared when he is called away. His was a protest in favour of the higher over the lower life; a protest against utilitarian worship, against buying and selling in the temple of God. But it was his own higher life that he vindicated.

—G. Matheson, The Representative Men of the Bible, p45.

References.—IV:4.—G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p376. IV:5-7.—J. Oates, The Sorrow of God, p81.

Jealousy

Genesis 4:5

This cannot be considered too weak a motive to carry so enormous a crime. Even in a highly civilized age we find an English statesman saying: "Pique is one of the strongest motives in the human mind. Fear is strong but transient. Interest is more lasting, perhaps, and steady, but weaker; I will ever back pique against them both. It is the spur the devil rides the noblest tempers with, and will do more work with them in a week than with other poor jades in a twelvemonth."

—Marcus Dods.

Cain—Worship

Genesis 4:6-7

Sin came into the world with Adam and Eve; then its fatal seed was planted in human nature.

I. Cain's sin was not only the sin of murder, but it began as all sin does, in disobedience to God. All sin is against God because it is breaking God's law.

II. Ever since the time of Cain there have been two ways in which people have worshipped God—either according to God's revealed commands or according to their own private opinion. There are a great many people who will tell you that it does not matter how you worship God, so long as you are sincere, but the Bible shows us again and again from the time of Cain right through its whole history that God will not accept worship which is founded on self-will and disobedience.

—A. G. Mortimer, Stories from Genesis 4:7

"Amongst the proverbial sayings of the Welsh, which are chiefly preserved in the form of triads, is the following one: "Three things come unawares upon a Genesis 4:8-16

"In a famous picture in the Louvre, the painter shows us—amidst wan lights—pale crime fleeing, pursued by Truth and Justice. They hover as avengers overhead, armed with the torch and the sword. The criminal does not see them, perhaps, but the restless anxiety on his forehead tells us that he feels their threatenings—I might almost say that their breath burns him. Human punishments are not always certain, for God reserves His hour; but the sinner, even if he does not always lose health, fortune, life, honour, feels none the less at his heels the pursuers who threaten to plunge him into the abyss where all is lost and broken. That fugitive, if we like, is Cain, the eternal image of the sinner—even the sinner who is unknown to men—the image of all those unknown Cains who have trembled, who tremble, or will some day tremble, at the mighty voice of God.... It was no fiction which Victor Hugo invented in his poem on "Conscience". It is the Bible he is transposing, it is the history of the sinner he is symbolizing when he represents him to us in his verses as "dishevelled, pale in the midst of tempests—Cain, who is fleeing before Jehovah!" While his weary family are asleep, he can take no rest. He is haunted with the vision of the look of God, of conscience, which penetrates the thickest darkness.

Au fond des cieux funbres

Il vit un ceil tout grand ouvert dans les tnbres

Et qui le regardait dans l"ombre fixment.

Vainly does he pursue his sinister flight. Even if he went to the world's end, he would find there the same gaze and the same terror. Neither the canvas of tents nor the precincts of towers—neither solitude nor the whirlwind of pleasure—can tear the sinner away from himself; neither life nor the grave can tear him away from God. Against God, against remorse, we cannot wall up either the gate of cities or the gate of hearts. That ancestral criminal, that first homicide, the murderer of Abel, symbolizes all the others, not alone those who have shed blood, but those who have soiled their souls with more wicked murders or have dragged into evil the souls of others, their innocent brothers. For them as for him, under some dark vault, some lurking-place beneath the earth:

L"ceil tait dans la tombe et regardait Cain!"

Jules Pacheu, Psychologie des Mystiques Chretiens, pp47-49.

Reference.—IV:8.—A. Phelps, The Old Testament, p137.

The Evangelization of the World

Genesis 4:9

I. Your brothers! where are they? Ask Jesus Christ. Did He not say, "When I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all men unto Me"? They are everywhere: they are not merely those who love and respect you, but those who despise and hate you, friends and enemies alike.

II. You are the guardians of your brothers. Their interests are your interests, their welfare yours. This general truth presents itself under two aspects. Man is twofold by nature. He has a body and a soul. He suffers in both. Hence arises a double mission, at once to relieve temporal miseries and to save souls.

(a) You ought to compassionate and alleviate the temporal distresses of your neighbours.

(b) If, however, you comprehend the true dignity of the soul, the spiritual life and its immortal destiny and bliss, will you not desire to awaken others to the higher realities and possibilities of this being?

III. The love of souls! All the time the Church has lived the life of the Master it has more than felt this love; it has been penetrated by it. This is why there is in the new age and in modern life a fact unknown to antiquity, a fact peculiar to Christianity, to wit, missions. Christianity alone could give birth to them. You may be disposed to disparage them, but have you ever seriously reflected what civilized Europe would have given to pagan populations if Christian missionaries had not been there? Rifles and other fire-arms wherewith to destroy each other: brandy and opium, to brutalize and to degrade!

IV. But souls to save are not only in the far distant plains of earth. They are in your family, in your dwelling, at your hearth. They are in your streets and fields and workshops. They ply your Christian calling. Whilst therefore you endeavour to cherish a love which would embrace the whole earth, let those whom God has given to you be yet the first recipients of that love.

—J. Miller, from the French of E. Bersier's Sermons Literary and Scientific, p202.

Home Missions

Genesis 4:9

God's question! Man's answer! It is not God's first question, for He had already addressed to Adam—as to the representative of the human race—that personal inquiry which the Holy Spirit still brings home to every heart convicted of sin, to every man when he first realizes that he is naked before God and longs to hide himself from Him: "Where art thou?" No! this is God's second question, "Where is thy brother?" And just as the first question was addressed to man upon his first conviction of sin, so this second question is addressed to man after his first struggle with his fellow-man. It is asked of the victor concerning the vanquished in the cruel competition of life, "Where is thy brother?" Cain's answer, "I know not," was a lie, as most selfish answers are; but the important point occurs in the latter part of his reply, wherein he embodied, in the form of a counter-question, the great principle which God had so far only implied. In doing so he sent ringing down the ages a question, the answer to which must, to the latest chapter of earth's history, divide men into two classes.

I. This Question is of the very Essence of the Gospel Principle.—It is at the very centre, and not at the circumference of spiritual things in the system of Christ. It is absolutely fundamental in the new or Christian covenant: for whereas the Law asked a man the question "Where art thou?" the Gospel passed on at once to the more far-reaching question, "Where is thy brother?" It made a man essentially his brother's keeper, and the principles of spiritual citizenship were enunciated by our Lord with the express purpose of bringing home to each one of us, His followers, this responsibility, and enabling each one of us to discharge it.

II. What is the very First Principle of Heavenly Citizenship as laid down by Christ Jesus our Lord upon the mount? "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." And what did He mean by it? Surely that the first condition of heavenly possession is the absolute renunciation by the human spirit of all claim to personal ownership of any earthly possession, whether it be property or time, or talent or opportunity, with which it may have been entrusted by God. And what said He next? "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted." What did our Lord mean by this but that the second great principle of His kingdom is this: that it is an impossibility for His true follower to be really happy as long as some one else is sad; that even the enjoyment of the Gospel is to be considered imperfect as long as there be those who know not of it, or have not accepted it; that the heavenly citizen will feel his brother's sorrow, his brother's pain; that he will mourn for his brother's sadness. Are not these the two principles which have been ignored or slurred over by the modern Church of Christ? Do not we feel that we need their Genesis 4:9

You remember the connexion in which these words were asked. They were the words of a man as he stood forth in the presence of Almighty God with his hands red with the blood of his murdered brother. It was an excuse which fell from the lips of a man who knew perfectly well that he was his brother's keeper, and it is the same excuse which has risen to the lips of men and women from that day forward—men and women who have been false to a charge which has been given to them, to the souls and bodies committed to their care, who have disgraced their humanity by neglecting those whom God has put it into their power to help.

I. Who is my Brother?—"Am I my brother's keeper?" Who is my brother? Think of Calvary and of the outstretched arms of the Saviour, and see there the answer to the question—who is my brother? Those arms stretched wide, that He might embrace the whole world. He teaches us, even though upon the cross, that all men are His brothers. And so when we ask "Who is my brother; of whom am I the keeper?" the answer Genesis 4:9

It is a commonplace that responsibility places man in his true position in the scale of Creation, neither too high nor too low. The fact of his responsibility proves man's possession of an intelligent mind, a moral sense and will-power which he is bound to exercise deliberately and for the benefit of others. Thus, when a ship is wrecked and human lives are lost, we do not blame the winds and the waves. These blind forces of Nature simply carry out the laws imposed upon them. But we have a right to blame the captain if by neglect or incompetency he has run the vessel upon the rocks. When the lightning strikes the haystack and destroys the collected produce of the year the farmer must accept the inevitable. No other course lies before him. But if tramp or labourer has dropped a burning match among the hay the farmer is justified in expressing indignation for gross neglect of necessary precautions. Yes; man's place in Nature is too high, his power for good or evil too great, for him to attempt to shirk his unique responsibilities by classing himself with the beasts that perish. And yet, high as he is in the scale of Creation, man is not supreme. Above him stands God, the righteous Genesis 4:9

"How sin gains dominion over human nature."

I. Among the ties which bind men together what is stronger or more enduring than the sense of consanguinity? Nothing can abolish a man's duty to the brothers who were boys with him in one home.

II. But we leave home, and go out into a world of fierce competition. And competition encourages us in selfishness. Can we honestly cherish brotherly feelings for our successful rivals? One chief secret of Christianity is that it puts Divine power and meaning into human brotherhood. Christ binds us to our fellow-men by binding us to Himself. The life of self-sacrifice has its origin and fountains not in Genesis 4:9

Humanity is one great body, and we as individuals are all members of that body.

I. Man is united to Genesis 4:10

The famous preacher, John Geiler of Kaysersberg, used this text in an unusual way. As cathedral preacher in Strasbourg from1478 to1510 , he was often called upon to deliver funeral orations for great men. His custom was to make the spirits of bishops and others speak in their own person, as it were, and to utter admonitions whose sternness the living preacher might have feared to imitate. Geiler's chief French biographer, the Abb Dacheux, remarks on the truly apostolic freedom with which he was thus enabled to pour forth warnings. One of his most striking sermons was founded on the text quoted above. "He effaced himself and made the dead speak in his own person. "Listen, my brothers," he said, "to the voice of your brother.... It says remember, "Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return"." Borrowing the words of Job , he told, in the mournful accents of Holy Scripture, of our days which are so short and yet so full of misery; he showed the transient shadow, the scarce-opened flower which was already trampled under the feet of those who pass by. He reminded his hearers of the dread mysteries of the grave. "I have said to corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister.""

Among those who listened to Geiler of Kaysersberg were the nearest relatives and successors of bishops and other cathedral dignitaries. His pulpit method may be compared with that of Bossuet and Massillon.

The Arabs have a belief that over the grave of a murdered man his spirit hovers in the form of a bird that cries, "Give me drink, give me drink," and only ceases when the blood of the murderer is shed. Cain's conscience told him the same thing; there was no criminal law threatening death to the murderer, but he felt men would kill him if they could. He heard the blood of Abel crying from the earth. The blood of Christ also crieth to God, but cries not for vengeance but for pardon.

—Marcus Dods.

References.—IV:10.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol viii. No461; ibid. vol. xii. No708. IV:15 , 16.—R. S. Candlish, Book of Genesis , vol. i. pp86,108. IV:23 , 24.—H. Rix, Sermons, Addresses, and Essays, p18. IV:26.—E. A. Bray, Sermons, vol. ii. p354. G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p381. IV.—J. Monro Gibson, The Ages before Moses, p116. V:1.—J. Parker, Adam, Noah, and Abraham, p35. V:2.—J. Laidlaw, Bible Doctrine of man, p98. V:3.—G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p382. V:21-24.—J. Bannerman, Sermons, p24. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxii. No1307. V:22.—C. Maclaren, Expositions— Genesis , p32. V:23 , 24.—E. A. Bray, Sermons, vol. i. p157.