This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
Lesson 3: “Cain And His Legacy”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- Speculative analysis of Cain and Abel’s gifts add to Scripture and detract from the hearts of Cain and Abel with a plethora of philosophical explanations.
- Genesis 4-5 describe two lineages from Adam: those of Cain and Seth. The lesson ignores this division that led to the preservation of the holy seed on one hand and the march to the flood on the other.
- The lesson makes a moral lesson out of Cain and Lamach’s sin, stressing freewill and asking readers how important is it to eradicate sin?
This week’s lesson opens with the typical Adventist analysis of Cain and Abel’s offerings. Using Ellen White’s remarks in Patriarchs and Prophets, the author tells us that Cain refused to offer the animal sacrifice that God had said must be offered. It also said that Abel did not neglect offering the vegetable offering in addition to the animal.
In the Bible, this distinction between plant and animal offerings is never made. In fact, contextually, the issue with the offerings is not WHAT they were but the hearts of the worshipers. Cain offered fruit from his own work, and Abel offered from his own work. The description of the offerings emphasizes that Abel’s was thoughtful and generous, the best of his flock, while Cain merely brought “an offering of the fruit of the ground”.
Cain’s offering was perfunctory; Abel’s reflected his true worship of God. He brought God the best he had. The text tells us that God accepted Abel’s offering but rejected Cain’s, and Cain became murderously angry. There is no hint in the biblical text that God’s acceptance of Abel’s offering was because of WHAT that offering was. Rather, God accepted it because Abel had a heart that worshiped God. Cain, on the other hand, did not.
In fact, Cain’s anger emphasizes that his offering was perfunctory. He didn’t bring God a heart of worship—and we learn that God calls Cain to repentance for his hard heart and warns him that sin was seeking to devour him. Instead of repenting, Cain murdered Abel.
God banished Cain, but in response to his plea that God protect him from the murderous antipathy he expected to encounter as he lived in exile, God put a mark on him to prevent anyone from killing him. Meanwhile, righteous Abel’s blood called out from the ground for justice. Hebrews 11 says that Abel’s blood is calling out from the ground, but Jesus’ blood speaks a better word than Abel’s.
In other words, righteous Abel’s shed blood was a perpetual reminder that unjust death demands justice—and Jesus’ blood answered that call. Jesus’ blood settles the issue of a just payment for human sin. Abel’s blood met its answer in the Lord Jesus whose blood provided justice instead of merely crying out for justice.
Two blood lines
Genesis 4 and 5 reveal that two lineages developed from Adam’s sons. Cain’s lineage included Lamach whose murderous personality is described in Genesis 4:23, 24 when he boasts about killing two people. In other words, Cain’s legacy was generations of men with murderous and fleshly hearts.
At the end of chapter 4, we learn that Adam and Eve had another son: Seth, and Eve recognized him as God’s provision in place of righteous Abel who was dead. Significantly, in 4:26 we learn that Seth had a son name Enosh, and “then men began to call upon the name of the Lord.”
Significantly, Cain’s legacy was murder, but Seth’s lineage resulted in people beginning to call on the Lord! We learn in chapter 5 that Adam’s legacy through Seth resulted in a line of men that included Enoch who “walked with God, and he was not, for God took him” (5:24). It also included Noah whose name, significantly, meant “This one will give us rest from our work and from the toil of our hands arising from the ground which the LORD has cursed” (5:29).
Noah was a type of Christ, the one who rescued people from destruction which was God’s judgment on intractable sin.
From Seth came the godly Seed, protected by God through the generations. We learn that from Noah came Shem, Ham, and Japeth, and Shem became the father of the semitic people from which Abraham came—and the children of Israel and the Son of Judah, the Lord Jesus!
The significance of the Lord’s provision for His own promises to Eve and to Adam began to be revealed in the first five chapters of Genesis—and the lesson misses the significance of this provision.
Moralizing does not counter sin
The lesson makes much of the offerings of Cain and Abel and assumes that they each were to bring both animal and vegetable sacrifices. The Bible never makes this point about their offerings. The issue was the sin Cain harbored in his heart, and his refusal to worship God and believe Him.
God spoke directly to Cain and told him sin would devour him if he indulged it—and instead of believing God, Cain indulged sin—to his generational ruin. The fruit of Cain’s unbelief yielded generations of men who trampled on other men for their own gain. Lamech became an example of unchecked sin perpetuated from generation to generation.
Seth, on the other hand, was the beginning of the godly seed which God Himself protected through centuries. When his son Enosh was born, people began to call on the name of the LORD—in stark contrast to Lamach’s multiple murders and his shameless boasting about them. To be sure, not all of Seth’s offspring were righteous men; when Noah came on the scene, only he and his three sons and their wives were saved in the ark.
Nevertheless, the holy seed God was preserving came through Seth’s descendant, Noah, and the coming Messiah was in the loins of Shem.
Nothing in Scripture tells us that Seth’s descendants were “good” men on the whole, and nothing tells us that Noah earned God’s trust. Rather we learn that God appointed Noah and that his birth was marked with the declaration that he would give his people rest!
God is sovereign over all. His purposes cannot fail, and He completes what He begins. The lesson leads the reader to contemplate the need for strong self-control to eliminate sin from their lives, and it even makes the point in a “thought question” in Tuesday’s lesson that God respected “free will” and did not force Cain to obey!
The issue here is not free will and God’s gentlemanly ways. The issue here is that God intervened in Cain’s life, but Cain refused to BELIEVE GOD. Seth, Enosh, Enoch, and Noah, on the other hand BELIEVED God.
We can never double down hard enough to remove sin from our lives. Unless a person is born again, he or she cannot escape sin. The issue with mankind is not self-indulgence; it is that we are, like Seth, born in Adam’s image (Gen. 5:3). We are born dead in sin. Our need is not to eliminate sin; it is to BELIEVE God. On this side of the cross, when we believe God and trust His Son, we are born again and sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise (Eph. 1:13–14). In Christ we are literally made ALIVE—and that life is our true need. That life is what was lost through Adam; only in Christ will we be made alive.
This lesson misses the significance of all of these early accounts in Genesis that lay the foundation for a worldview grounded in truth and reality. The issue for every person ever born is this: do we believe God? Do we receive His revelation of Himself and believe that He is? That He has a divine nature and eternal power (Rom. 1:18–20)? Do we believe that He sent His Son to be a propitiation for sin (Rom. 3:26)? Do we believe Him whom the Father sent (Jn. 6:29)?
Once again, the lesson reinforces the physicalist worldview that leaves Adventists convinced that their own gifts of analysis and perception provide the insight they need to understand Scripture as they read it through the nearly-invisible lens of their prophet Ellen White.
The real lesson from these chapters of Genesis is this: believe God! Trust His revelation of Himself in His word. Believe what He shows/tells us about our true natures, and believe God’s promises which are all “YES” in Christ (2 Cor. 1:20). †
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