So last week we looked at the aftermath uh of the first sin in the Garden of Eden, how God’s created king and queen, Adam and Eve were banished from paradise. So, continuing on in the chapter we’re looking at this morning, we see that that freshly applied epoxy of human society already beginning to set because in the 16 verses that Alex read this morning, we have the Bible’s first references to sex, to the birth of children, first occurrence of the word sin, first reference to people making an offering uh to the Lord. See the first act of violence resulting in the first human death. really there’s there’s not many storylines about our lives and our world that doesn’t trace back somehow to the story of Cain and Abel. That first family, they’re feeling their way outside the garden. We see three things that we’re going to look at in our passage this morning. One is how sin cunningly stalks all human beings just waiting for an opportune time to pounce. Second, we see how when we yield to sin, it deforms and it twists us and it unmakes our relationships with others. Finally, we’ll see how the blood speaks to and ultimately brings justice to our world and defeats the power of sin. So, how sin stalks us and how sin deforms us and how blood brings justice and defeats sin. Maybe maybe we should begin by acknowledging the fact that even mentioning the word or concept of sin in our society can seem pretty primitive and anacronistic. I’ll bet if you uh think through your week this past week that uh there were probably no interactions with anyone in your life where that word sin was ever uttered because sin it’s a church word. You know, it doesn’t often come up in any conversations outside these walls. Modern people still believe in right and wrong. They believe that some behaviors and expressions are out of bounds. They need to be restrained or punished just for society to work. But when it comes to analyzing or categorizing those out-of-bounds behaviors, a lot of terms are used but not often the word sin. I mean there are some people who are very strict materialists like the atheist Sam Harris and he says free will is a delusion and uh no criminal should ever be held accountable because he has no real choice in anything they do. They’re strictly determined by their past experiences, what’s going on their head, their neurological impulses. So he says there shouldn’t be any accountability really for anyone. and people other people they don’t go as far as Sam Harris but they say well people have dysfunctions they come from disadvantaged backgrounds they have psychological difficulties uh maybe they’re part of an oppressed group in society they might suffer from addiction and mental illness they make bad choices based on poor upbringings and poor sociological factors beyond their control and of course all of that is true but are those causes sufficient in themselves to explain all that humans do and why they do it. You know, I was having lunch with Ryan Gordon this week at PAL’s just over here and our meal was interrupted by a a series of crashes that almost sounded faintly like gunshots. And so along with other people in the restaurant, we we went to the window and we looked out and saw that the sounds were caused by a man walking down the street smashing the windows of parked cars one after another with a length of pipe. How do you adequately explain behavior like that? More importantly, how do you ever correct behavior like that? There’s a prominent psychiatrist named Carl Meninger wrote a controversial book in the 1970s called Whatever Became of Sin. And in it, he argued that Western society has made a mistake by eliminating the language of sin and guilt and personal responsibility. He said that in doing that, it hasn’t liberated people. It’s made them less capable of dealing with evil both in themselves and in society. redefining wrong by speaking of it only as illness or maladjustment or dysfunction or blaming it on environmental or social influences. It wasn’t doing all it could do to help people. Now, Menager, he never denied the reality of genuine mental illness. In fact, he spent his career as a psychiatrist treating it. But he was concerned that every human action was being explained without admission of personal responsibility. He reasoned that if evil was simply biological or chemical, a result of bad conditioning or bad luck or genetics or family history, then no one could ever change it. No one could ever take responsibility or repent or be forgiven. So these are mener wrote the assumption that there is sin in it somewhere implies both a possibility and an obligation for intervention. Hence sin is the only hopeful view. When evil appears around us and no one’s responsible and no one’s guilty and no moral questions are asked, then there is in short nothing to do, so we sink to desparing hopelessness. Therefore, he says, I say that the consequence of my proposal to recover the idea of sin would not be more depression, but less if the concept of personal responsibility and answerability for ourselves and for others were to return to common acceptance, hope would return to the world with it. So, it’s that notion of hope and healing. That’s what makes the biblical discussion of sin so helpful and so healing in our lives. The Bible’s unapologetic in talking about sin. Talks about its consequences, its solution. But maybe nowhere in scripture is sin spoken of more viscerally than in our passage this morning. Because we see these two brothers, the older brother Cain, the younger brother uh and the younger Abel, born to Eve, the first human mother. And when Cain, the older brother, was born, Eve seems to cry out in astonishment and delight. She says, “With the help of the Lord, I brought forth a man.” And that little baby Cain seemed to be the apple of her eye. That was the cherished firstborn child on the earth. And then in a very condensed narrative, we have the two boys now grown. They’re making offerings to God. One from the field, one from the flock. We read that God Oh. I think we’re stuck there with there it is. We read that God looked with favor on Abel, the younger brother’s offering, but on Cain and his offering, he didn’t look with favor. Asel Cain was angry. He was mad. He was depressed. He was downcast. Lord intervened, saying to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what’s right, will you not be accepted? But if you don’t do what’s right,” and here we have this most striking, visceral metaphor for sin. And if you don’t do what’s right, sin is crouching at your door, desires to have you, but you must master it. So it says sin comes crouching, makes itself small, makes itself unobtrusive, tries to remain unnoticed. That’s how sin approaches our lives. Temptation to sin, it’s subtle, it’s hidden, it stalks us as a predator stalks its prey. You know, I’ve mentioned before Oh, you’re going to have to do this for me, Brian. I’ve mentioned before the riveting account of of a jazz musician named Henry Threadgill who in his autobiography he describes one pitch black night when he was on sentry duty in Vietnam. His bunker overlooked a dense vegetation in the dark he had a sense of being watched and that feeling would come and go, but his nerves were on a knife’s edge and he didn’t know if his mind was playing tricks on him. He thought he saw once or twice or maybe a third time a pair of eyes looking at him. He thought he saw a figure, but what was it? A human, an enemy soldier, an animal, more than one. He and his sentry partner had orders that they couldn’t turn on the spotlight because it would give their position away to the enemy, but the eyes moved closer until they were no more than 15 ft away. Threadgill says he knew by then that there was there’s definitely a mass out there, a body, and he was increasingly sure that it was not human. And finally, at the very breaking point, he implored his partner to flip on the light for a second. And he writes, “When he threw out the light on it, that’s when it came up. It had been crouching on the ground, dragging itself gradually on its belly. Now it stood all the way up. It was right in front of me, and I could see that it was a huge tiger.” Says, “In a single motion, the cat stretched out the full length of its body into a majestic leap. In the sudden glare of the light, it extended into the air. We could just We could see how large it was. Extended. It was easily more than a dozen feet long. It didn’t jump at me. It leapt to the side. It seemed to hang there, suspended in the air. A fearful vision framed in the light. The tiger then sprang to the side back into the shadows. My partner tried to swing the light to follow it, but as soon as it hit the bushes, it was going gone. And as it jumped to the side, the tiger turned and looked over its shoulder. right at me and its eyes delivered the universal message of the predator to the prey after a miraculous escape. I’ll catch you next time. So God tells Cain that sin is crawling and it’s crouching on its belly. It’s toward him like a tiger. And that’s what sin does in all of our lives. It makes itself small. Doesn’t dare show us how large it is and what kind of damage it’s going to do in our lives. Intellectually, emotionally, we think, well, it’s not a big deal. It seems like a fairly small thing. It’s just a little lie. It’s a minor deception. It’s a small infraction. It’s a hidden grudge against someone that we’ve nursed for maybe years. It’s a word that we share that was given to us in confidence. It’s a speck of dishonesty. It’s it’s a website we shouldn’t be spending time on. And at the start, it all seems minor and quite containable. In his famous book, Mere Christianity, CS Lewis said that something used to puzzle him when he would read Christian authors. He said they seem to be so very strict at one moment and so very free and easy at another. He says they talk about mere sins of thought as if they were immensely important, and then they talk about the most frightful murders and treacheries as if you only have to repent and all would be forgiven. CS Lewis says, “I’ve come to see that they’re right. What they’re always thinking of is the mark that the action leaves on that central self which no one sees in this life but which each of us will have to endure or enjoy forever. He says one man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands. Another so placed that however angry he gets he’ll only be laughed at. But the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both. Each has done something to himself which unless he repents will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage next time he’s tempted and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it. Each of them if he seriously turns to God can have that twist in the central man straightened out again. Each is in the long run doomed if he will not. The bigness or smallalness of the thing seen from the outside is not what really matters. So CS Lewis is saying that even what appears to be a small sin, crouching, easy to overlook, when it leaps, it drags its claws across our soul. It does serious damage. It leaves a mark that unless it’s dealt with through sincere repentance, it’s going to become infected and it’s going to start spreading through our bloodstream. Theologian William Shed said that sin is the suicidal action of the will against itself. meaning that every time we sin, it’s like we’re stabbing ourselves and wounding ourselves and we make it diff more difficult for us to resist the next time we get weaker. Sin has a power to it that we just don’t notice from the beginning. So in his appeal to Cain, God tells him, you still have agency. You can still master this temptation to sin. God is really, he’s pulling for Cain to succeed and to resist the temptation. Sin’s crouching at your door, desires to have you, but you must master it. And in the early stages, all of us have control over the temptation to sin that’s crouching around us. We can still master it, but if we allow it to uncoil and come at us with its true hidden power, we lose any mastery over it, it gains mastery over us. When we give into sin, it becomes this enduring presence with a life of its own in us. And we start, we start by just doing sin, but then sin starts doing us and we change and admires us. It it it devours us. And if we don’t use the tools that God puts at our disposal of maintaining a sensitive conscience and of conviction and of repentance, if we don’t take up those tools at all, then that infection of sin is just going to spread like gang green through our bodies and souls. Do you notice how generous God is with Cain? He warns him about the approaching danger. Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what’s right, won’t you be accepted? But if you don’t do what’s right, sin is crouching at your door. It desires to have you, but you must master it. You know, there’s this mistaken stereotype that the God of the Old Testament, oh, he’s all judgment and fire and brimstone, and God only gets nice in the New Testament in the person of Jesus. But that’s simply not true. Here’s God coming to Cain early early in the Bible really as a wonderful counselor with deep fatherly concern for Cain’s well-being. Rather than withhold acceptance, God offers Cain full acceptance if you’ll just do what’s right and don’t let this sin master you. Cain’s offering was not viewed favorably by God. And we’ll look at why that was the case in a moment. But though his offering was rejected, it’s not like God’s rejecting the man. So what was going on there? The offering Cain had brought to God was not favorably received. His little brother’s was made Cain furious enough to want to kill his brother. And then he went berserk and he actually followed through and he took his brother’s life. How is it that Cain became so twisted and deformed that he would even consider such a thing? And what was the difference in the offerings brought to God by the brothers? One got the stamp of approval, the other one got a rejection notice. get a little hint in the New Testament uh in the book of Hebrews chapter 11 chapter is all about faith verse 4 this a little surprising for us to read it says by faith Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did by faith he was commended as a righteous man when God spoke well of his offerings and by faith he still speaks even though he’s dead now it sounds odd because both brothers believed in God they didn’t doubt God’s existence Cain was no atheist. He conversed with God. Both brothers believed in God. Both brothers wanted to please God. Uh both brought an offering uh related to the work they were involved in. Abel kept her. He offered animal portions. Cain farmed the uh he farmed so he brought the fruits of the soil. And that was all this is all long before God gave any instructions about sacrifices and offerings and that kind of thing. So both brothers were doing what they felt was right in presenting their offerings to God. Why was Abel’s sacrifice better? How is it that he said to have offered it by faith? I don’t think the answer lies in what they brought to God, but something was going on in their hearts. Abel, the younger brother, he seemed pretty happy in simply giving something to God. Cain seems to have had the attitude of giving, expecting to get something back from God. And we’ll we’ll look at that in a moment. But we could put it this way. Abel was making an offering in response to the favor of God, the salvation of God. Cain’s offering was given to obtain salvation and favor. So Abel wanted to give something to God. Cain wanted to get something from God. Now, how do we even know that? The text doesn’t specifically say that. I think we infer it from the fact that Cain became so angry and ballistic when he saw his younger brother’s offering being accepted while his was rejected. Theologian Miruslav Wulf said that as the firstborn, the apple of his mother’s eye, Cain always saw himself as a somebody. He was better than Abel. Wolf says Cain understood himself as significant because he was superior to his brother. When Cain favored Abel, Cain faced two possibilities. He could revise his understanding of himself or he could eliminate Abel. His internal reasoning was essentially if Abel truly is the person that God regards him to be, then I can’t be the person that I’ve always understood myself to be. So Wolf says Cain’s violence, it wasn’t an act of irrational explosion. It just followed the distorted logic of a self-determined nation to preserve an identity that was built upon superiority. Cain was thrown into an identity crisis. Maybe we’d think of it as older brother syndrome. Now, it’s a syndrome I know quite well. I’m an older brother. I love my younger brother. He’s a friend. Not only a blood brother, he’s a brother in Christ. But he’s done things in in his life that I think are really punk moves. you know, one one was to become competitive in tennis against me. And when that happened, you know, we’re we’re grown men, we’re married, we have children, we’d have an annual summer tennis grudge match, and it was life or death for me to want to beat that little kid, you know, at tennis. And worse was when he began to match me or get better than me at basketball because that was a bridge too far, really uncalled for. He had no right to do that. And I taught I modeled everything that that kid ever knew about basketball. And it was okay for him to be good at that. Good at it. I could take pleasure in that. It was never okay for him to be better than me. You understand that? Don’t How many are older brothers here? You understand that? If you’re an older brother, they don’t deserve to get ahead of us. We do the hard work. We set the pace. We blaze the trail. All a young younger brother has to do is slide in behind us and follow our path. And they certainly don’t deserve to get ahead. Now, really uncomfortable for older brothers to read the Bible, especially the book of Genesis because in every generation of the patriarchs that we read, the younger brother gets something that the older brother doesn’t. Ishmael is sent away so little Isaac can get ahead and and uh Jacob steals the blessing from his older brother, Esau. And don’t get even started with Joseph. He’s that privileged little punk kid. And all of his older brothers hated him. So Cain killed Abel. Not much different. Esau wanted to kill Jacob. Joseph’s brothers tried to do away with him. They wanted to do away with Joseph. In the Bible, it’s those ridiculous younger brothers that somehow always seem to come out on top. So you take things one step further and Jesus told the story of two brothers in Luke 15. Younger brother was a disaster. He ruined his life. He squandered his money. Only came home when he’d lost everything. He had nowhere else to go. What did the father do? He threw a party for him. And the older brother stood fuming outside in a scene very much like God counseling Cain. Father said to the older brother, “You know, I love you. You’ve always been with me. Everything I have is yours, but come inside and celebrate with your little brother’s return. You know, he was lost, but now he’s found.” And the story ends there. We don’t know if the older brother ever wins inside the house. We know his attitude though because he said he told his dad, “I’ve slaved away for you for years.” A word that speaks volumes about his actual relationship with his dad. He said, “I’ve slaved for years for you. I’ve never disobeyed.” Indicating he felt he deserved everything he got. But his little brother had wrecked his life. He didn’t deserve anything. Certainly not a welcome party home. So that older brother syndrome, I know it well. It doesn’t seem to understand grace very easily. Why was Abel’s offering offering better? Because he was somehow able to offer it in faith. Both brothers had faith in God. But Abel had a natural faith that went deeper into the grace of God. If we know that we’re sinners, then we’ve been saved by grace. Anything else we receive in life, it’s just a bonus. We’ve been saved through no merit of our own. Younger brothers, it seems, can e can more easily receive and inhabit grace as a gift more easily than the older brothers can. So after he attacked his brother in the field and killed him, says God went to Cain and said, “Where’s your brother Abel?” God God wasn’t looking for information there, but where’s your brother Abel? And you see how sin first came to Cain. It was crouching down and made its leap. It overpowered him. It left those claw marks on Cain’s soul. And Cain began hardening from the poison of that wound. God God the creator went to Cain and Cain essentially said to God, “Mind your own business. Leave me alone. Am I my brother’s keeper? Get out of here.” And ominously at that point, God said to Cain, “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from under the ground. Your brother’s blood cries out to me from under the ground.” You know, if you look on the side of that communion table behind me, you’ll see a small plaque stating that that little piece of altar furniture is dedicated to the glory of God in loving memory of Mary Anne PL 1942 to 1971. 55 years ago, Mary Pled, her husband Jake, their two sons, aged 8 and five. They’re part of this church, part of the Evangelical Free Church family. And at the time, Maryanne was 29 years old. her husband was taking courses at the UFA and uh she’d been working as a real estate agent. She’d done pretty well at it. She had a listing on an acreage just east of Bulmont and twice she’d taken this prospective buyer named James Cooper out to see the property. September 15th, 1971, she left her White Avenue office, take Cooper out for a third time, picked him up as she had before at Barney Mall, never returned. Her car, her husband, Jake, you he was missing. She didn’t come home. He and the real estate people went out to the acorage and they did a search in the dark and in the rain, but they didn’t find anything. They went back to the real estate office, which was just on White Avenue and 105th Street. And at 11:00 p.m. he saw his wife’s car driving slowly past the office with a man at the wheel. Of course, he ran out after it and they got in a car and tried to give chase, but they couldn’t catch it. The car was gone. A car was found two days later just down White Avenue at Don Weaten Chevrolet and there was some ominous blood evidence inside it. Neither Mary Anne nor that mysterious James Cooper could ever be found. Knox Church folks, real estate people, they went out and they searched and searched and helped with the uh police investigation. And about six weeks later on October 30th, some hunters stumbled on Maryanne’s briefcase near Fort Cine and that’s over an hour and a half northwest of the city and they searched for more evidence for a few days and then the snow came and they they just weren’t able to continue the search. So, it was long winter for the family, long winter for the church. Snow melted. They found more of Maryanne’s possessions near where the briefcase had been found. April 19th, 1972, it was 7 months after her disappearance, Maryanne Plet’s body was found. And that mysterious James Cooper, the murderer, no one knew what he looked like. No one knew what his real name might have been. Never been brought to justice. So like Abel’s blood, Maryanne Plet’s blood still cries out for justice. And where’s that going to come from? Where’s that justice going to be found? Again, we go back to the book of Hebrews and in chapter 12 and we read this. We read, “You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that is burning with fire, to darkness, gloom, and storm, to a trumpet blast, or to such a voice speaking words that those who heard it begged that no further word be spoken to them, because they could not bear what was commanded. If even an animal touches the mountain, it must be stoned.” The sight was so terrifying that Moses said, “I’m trembling with fear.” But you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You’ve come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You’ve come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant. And here it is. And to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. Sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. So the contrast is you’re going to Mount Si where where God’s people received his law. It was it was terrifying to have God as as lawgiver and judge. Great standards, absolute standards against sin. And but there also exists mount Zion in the city of the living God. Thousands of thousands of angels in joyful assembly. Jesus stands as mediator between God and people. He brings them together. Told that his sprinkled blood speaks a much better word than the blood of Abel. And how’s that? You know, Abel’s blood cries out for justice. Jesus sprinkled blood cries out for justice at a much higher volume. There’s a sermon once preached by old Welch pastor Martin Lloyd Jones and he said, “If Jesus Christ has shed his blood for you, and you’ve asked God to forgive you because of Jesus Christ shed blood, God could never ever ever condemn you because that would be to get two payments for one debt. And that would be unjust. And therefore, the justice of God now demands that there’s no condemnation for you as long as you live and that you’ll never perish.” And he goes on to think that uh it’s not as if Jesus is standing before the throne of God and saying about us saying, “Oh God, father, give them one more chance. Show them some mercy. I know they sinned again. I know they said they wouldn’t do it. They’ve done it again. Give them one more chance.” And God the Father says, “Well, all right, fine. I suppose.” But that’s not how it works. Jesus isn’t appealing for mercy on our behalf. He’s demanding justice. The penalty for our sin was fully paid on the cross. And when we place our faith and trust in him alone for salvation, there’s no trace of debt remaining as a result. There’s no no way that sin can ever acrew again to our account. By the sprinkled blood of Jesus, Jesus demands that we be released, restored, and given permanent citizenship in heaven. Blood of Abel cries out for justice, that his murderer be punished. sprinkled blood of Jesus cries out for eternal justice and demands that sinners like us be released to the eternal enjoyment of Mount Zion. So when you when you approach this table in the future to take communion, know that reflected in that plaque on the side, there’s this silent witness to sin that can even take the form of murder. It crouches. It attacks. Sometimes we master it, sometimes we don’t. When we don’t, it leaves a claw mark on our souls makes it hard. Uh we’re less we’re more we’re less resistant to sin in the future. And only confession and repentance can soften that leather of our hearts and keep it soft. When we come to this table on the basis of the sprinkle blood of Christ, we can be assured that even murderers can be forgiven. Even the worst of us can be eternally redeemed. You know, you note at the end of our passage just how gracious God is toward Cain. He’s the murderer. At the end of our passage, the consequence of of his murder is that Cain’s going to be a fugitive. He’s going to be a wanderer. Cain worries if I go out, everyone’s going to want to kill me because of what I’ve done. But God places a mark of protection on him so that won’t happen. God shows grace even to the murderer. You know, at Maryanne Plet’s funeral service wasn’t held at our church because so many people wanted to come. They had 900 people come and it was held a bu Alliance instead. And her husband Jake made the uh difficult decision to try to say a few words at her funeral. And he said afterwards, he says, “It’s not easy to speak at your wife’s funeral.” He didn’t want to sound presumptuous. He talked to other family members beforehand about what he felt he needed to say. So he faced all these gathered mourners. He said he wanted to thank God for 10 wonderfully happy years of marriage. as a family. He said they wanted to thank God for relief from seven long months of agonizing uncertainty. And then he said this. He said, “We give we give God thanks that we did not become bitter and that he has enabled us to pray for the one who has burdened his own conscience by being responsible for the snuffing out of the life of one deeply loved and sorely needed by the family. We want him to know that God loves him and that when he calls upon God’s forgiveness, he’ll deliver him from guilt and give him the hope of eternal life. That’s the sprinkled blood of Jesus talking. Can you imagine saying something like that? Only the sprinkled blood of Jesus could say could say that and bring us forgiveness. So, let’s pray about a few of these things this morning. Let’s let’s pray specifically about any crouching sins you know that regularly stalk you and ask that you’ll learn to master them. Ask God just to reveal any that that maybe haven’t been dealt with yet. Pray that there’d be a natural appreciation of God’s gra God’s grace that would grow in your heart and you just resist any notion of earning God’s favor or even comparing yourself to anyone else. and thank Jesus that his sprinkled blood has spoken to you and set you free to enjoy the favor that he bestows on other people. This is just your personal time with God. I’ll close us off in a few moments.