Abel: Faith Filled Worship, Part 1 (Hebrews 11:4)

Hebrews 11 and the Meaning of Faith

Hebrews chapter 11. We're gonna read together, beginning one verse prior in chapter 10, verse 39, and we'll read through the end of verse seven. Hebrews 11. Now faith is the assurance of things, oh sorry, verse 39.

I called that out and then I don't know what I was thinking. But we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul. Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

For by it the men of old gained approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible. By faith Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain, through which he obtained the testimony that he was righteous, God testifying about his gifts, and through faith, though he is dead, he still speaks.

By faith Enoch was taken up so that he would not see death, and he was not found because God took him up. For he obtained the witness that before his being taken up, he was pleasing to God. And without faith it is impossible to please him, for he who comes to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of those who seek him.

By faith Noah, being warned by God about things not yet seen, in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, by which he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.

Let's pray together. Our Father, it is our desire that you would speak to us through your word as we have just sung. It is our expectation because you have promised that your word, when it is accurately and rightly proclaimed that your voice is truly and powerfully heard, we pray that that may be the case today, that you would use your word to soften our hearts, to encourage us in the truth, to comfort us, to convict us, to encourage us and equip us, and to reprove us and rebuke us as necessary.

We pray that in the course of our study here that we may see clearly the provision that you have made in the sacrifice of your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and all that that means for us and for our worship.

We ask your blessing upon this time in Christ's name.

Amen.

Abel as the First Example of Faith in Worship

Hebrews 11 has for us numerous examples of men and women who with faith and through faith accomplished great things and saw the blessing and approval of God in their lives. And what is remarkable about Hebrews 11 is not only the numerous people that are there, but the variety of people, the variety of kinds of people, the variety of their experiences and their cultures and the things that actually they accomplished for the Lord.

And what we see in Hebrews 11 is that faith in the life of a believer is seen in a number of different ways. Here just in this chapter, we see that faith pleases God, it does good works, it obeys God's word, it looks forward and anticipates heavenly promises, it trusts God, it conquers obstacles, it turns its back on the wealth of the world and the approbation of the world and actually endures hostility.

It does all of those things. Faith is so ubiquitous in the life of a true believer that it is applied in so many ways. It is seen in every corner of their life and in every element and aspect of their life.

That is what we should expect, that just as we have received Christ Jesus, we would walk in Him and that in every area of our walk, we might see our faith demonstrated and we would see our faith rewarded.

It's easy to apprehend that or get that with the mind. What is more difficult is to apply that in the heart so that we're actually living according to faith in our day-to-day walk. And this journey through Hebrews chapter 11, I think, is going to help us to see what that looks like in various areas of our life.

In the example of Abel, we see a man who was worshiping in faith, whose faith was informed or whose worship was informed by his faith. We see a man who applied faith and trusted God even in the midst of his worship and his sacrifice and that is in fact what pleased the Lord with Abel's sacrifice as opposed to Cain's sacrifice.

The very first example in this series of men that is presented to us in Hebrews 11 is Abel. And the author goes all the way back to the very beginning, Genesis chapter four, and gives us him as an example.

And you'll notice what the author says at the end of verse four, that Abel through faith, though he is dead, he still speaks. That is something that can be said actually of everybody in Hebrews 11. All of these men and women are dead and yet their example still speaks to us.

The lessons from their life still speak to us. But there is something about Abel, there is a way in which Abel speaks to us that is unique in ways that the other people mentioned in Hebrews 11 do not speak to us.

And we're gonna get to that not this week, but we're gonna get to that next week and it has to do with Abel's death and his prophecy and his role as a prophet because Jesus called him a prophet. But that will be next week.

Today we're looking here in Hebrews 11, we're gonna be turning back in a moment to Genesis chapter four, but I just want you to recognize that what the author of Hebrews says in Hebrews 11 verse four, that Abel, though he is dead, still speaks.

This is a lesson for us and there are a number of lessons from the life of Abel. You've heard the old adage that dead men tell no tales. Well, all the dead men in Hebrews 11 still speak. They have plenty of tales to tell us and they have plenty of lessons to learn and may God grant us ears to hear the lessons from Hebrews chapter 11.

So Abel is the very first, what the author calls in verse two, the man of old. He's the very first man of old that the author presents to us. And by going back to creation in verse three, by faith we understand that the worlds are prepared by the word of God.

The author is already indicating that he's going back to the beginning and he's going to now give us a chronological approach to the Old Testament where he cites various men and even women throughout the Old Testament and the examples in their lives of faith.

And he wants to show us that living by faith is not a uniquely New Testament reality. We tend to think that, that we tend to make the mistake, or Christians tend to make the mistake, that you look at the Old Testament saints and it was their works, their deeds, their mighty heroicism that was the basis upon which God accepted them and that is not the case.

It is faith, it has always been faith. No man ever is accepted by God on his own terms or the merits of his own life, never. It has never been that way, at no time since Christ died and at no time prior to the death of Christ.

All the way back to the very beginning, men were accepted by God on one term and one term only and that is faith. And by taking us back to Abel, he's giving us that example, he's demonstrating that. Now, Abel is notable and remarkable for a number of reasons, I'll give you three of them.

First, Abel is the first person in Scripture whose faith is explicitly demonstrated in his actions and whose faith was explicitly commended by God. Now, we may say that there are some things that Adam and Eve did earlier which implicitly showed a faith or a belief, but Abel is the first person in Scripture whose faith is explicitly demonstrated in his actions and whose actions in faith is explicitly commended by God, the very first one.

Others may have had faith prior to him, but he's the first example offered chronologically in Scripture and he is an example of a worship that informed, of a faith that informed his worship. Now, this is significant, remember, for the original audience of the book of Hebrews.

What was the issue for the original audience.

Of the book of Hebrews?

They had come out of the temple worship and now they were worshiping God under the parameters of the new covenant in keeping with the demands of the new covenant, having abandoned the sacrifices and the priesthood and all of the forms and the rituals of the old covenant, and now their worship has entirely changed.

It is an entirely different kind of worship than what they had grown up with. Having been used to hearing the bells and smelling the smells of all of the temple worship, now they come together and they gather together as a New Testament, new covenant community, and there's no smells, there's no bells, there's no lowing of the animals and the sheep and all of the stuff that they were used to hearing when they went up to the temple.

So now their worship is radically different in so many ways that it affects all of the senses, actually, of their worship are affected. And so now the question for this new covenant community is, what does it mean to move forward and worship in faith in the new covenant, having abandoned all of the forms and features of the old covenant?

How am I to worship in faith? How am I to approach God in faith if I can't go to a physical priest that I can see and hear the words of that physical priest and see the animal offered on my behalf? How does faith now inform my worship?

That is an issue that's all the way through.

The book of Hebrews.

And so the question that they had to face was, would they go back to that or would they press on in faith to the preserving of the soul? So Abel is the very first one whose faith is explicitly demonstrated by his words.

Second, Abel is the very first one to suffer as a result of his faith. Now having just come out of the chapter 10 where these to whom the author is writing had endured a great conflict of sufferings and been made a reproach and had endured tribulations and affliction and where even though they had not suffered to the point of shedding blood and resisted to the point of shedding blood, if the trajectory continued, we could expect that they were going to eventually shed their own blood for their faith.

So the example of Abel is an example of one, he's the very first one who suffered for his faith. In fact, he suffered the very worst thing that he could have suffered and that is death. And he suffered death not at the hands of a complete stranger, not at the hands of somebody out in the world, but somebody that he had Thanksgiving, well, they didn't have Thanksgiving dinner, somebody he had dinner with.

It sat around and they'd been raised together in the same home. They had enjoyed the same benefits and the blessings, had conversation with the same parents, sat around the same dinner table and enjoyed conversation together.

And these early Christians to whom the author of Hebrews is writing and speaking, these were people who had been ostracized from their believing community, sorry, from the Judaistic community and having embraced the believing community under the new covenant, they were now experiencing this type of hostility and opposition, not just from their own countrymen, but sometimes, in some cases, from their very own family members.

Abel is the perfect example of one who suffered, who suffered the worst suffering possible, death, and he did so at the hands of his own family member. This would just ring, this would just ring in the ears of this believing community.

Third, Abel is the first person to ever die. Though other blood had been shed prior to this, it was animal blood, Abel is the first person to ever die. He is the first person to be murdered, he is the first person to be martyred, he is the first human to shed his blood, and that makes him also the first person to step into heaven in the presence of God.

Now, you and I get to step into heaven, there's gonna be a lot of people there, but when Abel died and he stepped into the presence of God, it was just him and the Lord and the multitude of angels. That's lonely, and if we are to read the record of Genesis, we might expect that it was a lot of years before somebody else stepped in to join him in heaven.

He's the first person to die, not the first blood to be shed, but this is important, the first human blood to be shed, and since his is the first human blood to be shed, it becomes something of a type of foreshadowing, a picture of ultimately a blood of a righteous man who would be shed in terms of a sacrifice, namely the Lord Jesus Christ, and we'll get to that more again next week.

So there are three notable features, if you're looking at verse four, three notable features of Abel's example. Abel is an example to us in his sacrifice, that we would say his worship, in his righteousness, and in his testimony.

His sacrifice, his righteousness, and his testimony. You see them in verse four. By faith, Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain, through which he obtained the testimony that he was righteous, so sacrifice, his righteousness, God testifying about his gifts, and through faith, though he is dead, he still speaks, that is his testimony.

So we're gonna look today at Abel's sacrifice, and then next week, we'll be back here in Hebrews chapter 11, looking at his righteousness and his testimony. To look at his sacrifice, let's go back now to Genesis chapter four, back to Genesis chapter four.

We're gonna look at the account that we read at the beginning of the service, Genesis chapter four, though we're not gonna go through the entire chapter, we are gonna go through the first five verses of that, to just look at the sacrifice and why it was significant.

And before we jump into the text, I want you to understand that what you're about to read is real history, real history. This is not an allegory, it's not a myth, it's not an Aesop's fable, it's not some story that's told to communicate some higher point or some symbolic reference, it's not an allegory telling the events through the course of millions of years that bear no resemblance to the text.

This is literal history, not the kind of history that is invented in the minds of atheists and evolutionists who rewrite their tales weakly and invent scientific fact out of whole cloth by the dozens, whose story is constantly changing.

This is actual real history. There was a literal creation out of literally nothing by a God, and there was a literal garden, a paradise, with a literal Adam, a literal Eve, a literal temptation, a literal snake, a literal tree, a literal fall, a literal curse, a literal exile from that garden, literally cherubim at the entrance of the garden, this is all real history.

This is human history taking place roughly about 6 ,000 years ago. So this is not an allegory or a myth. We're gonna treat this as history because it is, in fact, history. Now I say that not so that you might wonder how it is, why it is that I didn't make the word literal the word of the day for the kids today, but just so that you understand how we're going to be approaching this and what our position is on the book of Genesis and the early chapters of Genesis.

Genesis four, verses one through two, let's read it together. Now the man had relations with his wife, the man being Adam, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain, and she said, I have gotten a man child with the help of the Lord.

And again, she gave birth to his brother Abel, and Abel was a keeper of flocks, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. Now this takes place after the curse. The fall is in Genesis chapter three. Genesis one and two is the creation of the world is perfect.

God pronounces it very good. The fall happens in Genesis chapter three, and after that, the Lord curses the man, curses the woman, curses the serpent. And there is a curse upon all of creation in Genesis chapter three.

Adam and Eve are exiled from the garden. They're kicked out, and two cherubim are stationed at the entrance of the Garden of Eden so that they could not come back in. They would not go back into that paradise.

They were completely exiled from that garden paradise. That all takes place in Genesis chapter three. Now we get to Genesis chapter four, and Adam and Eve begin to do what God had commanded them to do at the very beginning, which is to be fruitful and multiply.

So now they start having children, and it would become very apparent very quickly that their children were just as ravaged by the fall and just as cursed and just as wicked and corrupt and broken as Adam and Eve ever hoped that they would not be.

They're just as corrupt as it was possible to be. Their children are gonna end up being just like them. And the fact that this fall happened before Cain and Abel were ever born or Adam and Eve had conceived children indicates that it was likely something that happened very quickly after creation.

So we don't have the creation week unfolding and then millions of years before Adam and Eve fall. We have the creation week unfolding and then very quickly Satan sweeps in with his plan to destroy humanity and to destroy what God has created, and he tempts the man and the woman and they fell into sin.

So this happens very early on. We're not talking about a long period of time. Then they began to have children, and I want you to think of something. This occurred to me this last week, and I don't know that I've ever thought of this or heard this presented in this way.

But Adam and Eve would have been uniquely able to remember what it was like to walk with God face-to-face. This is something that Cain and Abel, because they were born after the fall and conceived after the fall, this is something that Cain and Abel would have known nothing about.

But Adam and Eve alone, out of everybody who has ever existed, would have known what it was like to stand in the presence of God and to see him face-to-face and to walk with him in innocence, in purity, in holiness, and in righteousness.

They would have known that. They could only have described that to Cain and Abel, and I would expect that words would be a little inadequate to describe what that is like when you're trying to express to Cain and Abel, your children, what it was once like before you ruined everything.

What it was once like, it would have been almost impossible to put that to words, would it not? But they would have had that memory. This is something that Cain and Abel would have never known anything about.

So she names the firstborn Cain. His name seems to be quite intentional, as is obvious from the words that she says when she says in verse one, I have gotten a man-child with the help of the Lord. Those words are a description of why she named him Cain.

The name Cain means gotten, received, or acquired. So you'll notice in verse one, she says, she's explaining, giving commentary on his name. I have gotten a man-child with the help of the Lord. That's her explanation.

Now, if you have a translation that does this, you might notice that there are some italics in that verse where she says, with the help of, with the help of, those words are in italics. So when she says, I have gotten a man-child with the help of the Lord, with the help of, is in italics, meaning that it's not in the original manuscripts.

It just literally reads, I have gotten a man-child, Yahweh. The Lord is the name for God. I have gotten a man-child, Yahweh. Now, that is most likely an expression of Eve's own faith in believing what God had promised back in chapter three, verse 15, when he says to the woman, or to the serpent, and I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed.

He shall bruise you on the head and you shall bruise him on the heel. That's what we call the Proto-Evangelion, the very first proclamation of the gospel. This is a gospel prophecy. Even in the garden right after the fall, in the curse upon the serpent, which Adam and Eve would have heard these words, God promised that one would come through the woman who would end up reversing the curse and destroying the serpent and undoing everything that they had done in the fall.

That was the promise, that was the prediction. And so Eve, as she gives birth to that first child, she may have been thinking back to that time in the garden when the Lord said that one would come from a woman who would undo this and destroy the serpent.

And so she finally says, I have gotten a man-child,.

Yahweh, the Lord,.

Meaning that Eve probably would have understood that whoever it was who was going to come through the woman, and because it's the seed of the woman, that's a very odd construction. It's a prophecy also of the virgin birth.

Whoever this one who was coming from the woman would need to have been God in human flesh. She would need to be the God-man in order to destroy the serpent. Eve would have understood that. Eve would have been looking to that.

And so she names Cain, Gotten, maybe thinking, and this is speculation, but maybe thinking that this child that she was bearing was the one that the Lord had promised back in chapter three, verse 15. Eve was correct in thinking and believing that it would need to be the God-man who would come to conquer, to destroy the serpent.

But if she thought Cain was that Messiah, she was woefully mistaken because Cain ended up not being the Messiah, but a murderer instead. It probably wouldn't have taken her more than a couple weeks to figure out that Cain wasn't the fulfillment of this promise, right?

How long does it take parents to realize that their newborn child is a wretched, vile sinner? Not very long at all. Not very long, which may explain why it is that she says, and when she names Abel, she gives Abel the name that she does.

She names him Abel, the secondborn. And that word is translated as breath or empty or vapor. It kind of carries the idea of something being short and brief. In fact, it is the same word that is translated as vanity in Ecclesiastes.

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. And I don't need to give you PTSD by going back to Ecclesiastes, but that's the very word that is used. Breath, vapor, pointlessness, emptiness, brevity, shortness. What a name.

To be named vanity? And not vanity, I mean, there's no good, there's no good take on that name. Name's in breath. Now, Abel's name ends up being probably a more apt name for Abel than Cain's name was for him, right?

If Cain means gotten, I've received the fulfillment of the promise, swing and a miss, just a bit outside on that one. So probably realizing that Cain was not going to be that, the second child's name is vanity or brevity, his name ends up actually becoming a very good description of his life.

It was short, it was very short, especially considering the length of days in that era. The additional detail in verse two, and Abel was a keeper of flocks, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. There's obviously a gap between those two sentences.

It didn't come out of the womb, a keeper of the dirt, and a tiller of the ground, a keeper of flocks. So there's a gap there in between those two sentences. We're obviously fast-forwarding in the text.

Abel found an occupation as being a keeper of flocks, and Cain acquired the skill and discipline of tilling the ground. One raised animals and one raised vegetables. Now, this is going to come into play in terms of the sacrifice that they give, but not in terms of the morality of each man's occupation.

This is something to keep in mind. There's nothing inherently sinful or wrong about tilling the ground and raising produce. That's hard work, and it's noble work. In fact, one may even say it was necessary work, since everybody back then was vegetarians.

None of them were meat-eaters yet. So what Cain ended up doing was for the very sustenance of humanity at the time, tilling the ground and working that cursed ground as it was to provide food for people, probably his family as well as others involved in some sort of commerce, I would imagine, that that ends up being a very noble occupation, and it is good, and it is also noble to keep flocks and to be involved with that.

God's rejection of Cain's offering, his sacrifice, is not a commentary on the nobility or the holiness or the righteousness of Cain's occupation at all, because God's rejection of that has nothing to do with the occupation.

It is all entirely based upon the sacrifice and what was expected by that sacrifice. So Abel was not raising flocks for the sake of eating them. Keep that in mind as well. How do we know that? Because men didn't eat animals back then.

It's not till after the flood. All men were vegetarians. In the garden, they were naked vegetarians. After the garden, they were clothed vegetarians, but they were still vegetarians nonetheless. So why was Cain, why was Abel then raising flocks?

The precedent is set back in Genesis chapter three, verse 21, the Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. God killed an animal and he took the skins and he clothed them so that every day, Adam and Eve woke up and they put on themselves a reminder of the curse, of the fall, of their sinfulness, of what they had lost in innocence.

God killed the animal and shed the animal's blood. This was the first blood that was shed. But Adam and Eve would have seen that and saw that God was killing an innocent victim to cover them and this sacrifice in Genesis 3, 21 ends up becoming a foreshadowing of a later sacrifice where one would die in order to cover the sins of his people and to take them away.

So they would have seen the sacrifice and they would have then repeated that sacrifice because we can expect that Adam and Eve would have known very well that God cannot be approached except through a blood sacrifice.

An innocent victim has to die so that they can approach God because of their sin. They would have learned that in Genesis chapter three and that would have been carried on further. So we can conclude that Abel would have been a keeper of the flocks for the sake of providing two things.

Number one, animals for sacrifice by which they could worship and number two, clothing for humanity. Those were the two things that Abel's occupation would have provided. Cain's would have provided food.

So you had food, clothing and an approach to God, a sacrifice for their sin. All of that right here in the beginning portion of Genesis. Now let's look at the sacrifice, verse three. So it came about in the course of time that Cain brought an offering of the fruit of the Lord.

Sorry, let me try that again. So it came about in the course of time that Cain brought an offering to the Lord of the fruit of the ground. Abel on his part also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions.

And the reference to fat portions there indicates that he's not bringing live animals. He is bringing sacrificed animals or he is sacrificing an animal at this place of worship. And the Lord had regard for Abel and for his offering but for Cain and for his offering, he had no regard.

So Cain became very angry and his countenance fell. Now we can discern from the record of Genesis that there was some structure and regularity.

To their worship.

You can see the phrase there in verse three. So it came about in the course of time. That phrase is literally is translated in other places as at the end of days or at the end of an appointed time or the fulfillment of days.

And it indicates that there was a course set, a number of days. And when it came to the end of those appointed days, then they came to offer a sacrifice. There was some sort of structure, some sort of schedule or calendar that they had that meant that at the end of the days, they would both bring their sacrifice.

The fact that they both brought the sacrifice on the same day and at the same time and to the same place tells us that this was something that was done with regularity. And if we can assume that Adam and Eve, and I think this is a safe assumption, if we can assume that Adam and Eve understood that approaching God required a sacrifice and that this was something that their family regularly did because of their sin, that there was some sort of a calendar, some sort of a schedule, some sort of a pattern that had been revealed to this family so that at the end of this time, at the appointed time, they would come to present their sacrifices.

Abel and Cain both had an appointed schedule for these sacrifices. And the fact that they came at the same time indicates that they both recognized the days had come to a conclusion and now it was time to offer the sacrifice.

I can only presume, and I think this is sanctified speculation, that God himself would have revealed not only the schedule for the sacrifices but also the place in which these sacrifices were to be made.

Because later on in the book of Genesis and later on the Pentateuch, actually, Exodus, et cetera, we see that God appointed not only the days of sacrifices but also the places and, of course, what type of sacrifices were to be made.

I have no reason to believe, we have no reason whatsoever to believe that these men had no idea what they were supposed to be doing. They knew exactly what they were supposed to be doing. And as you're gonna see, that is the point why Abel's sacrifice was accepted and Cain's was rejected.

Not only was there an appointed time but probably also an appointed place. The fact that they arrived at the same place to offer the sacrifice indicates that there was something that they did together.

They both showed up. The intention was that each of them would offer their sacrifice. Of course, they offered different sacrifices but the fact that they arrived on the same day at the same place tells us something was appointed, the time as well as the place.

It has been speculated. Now, this is, I'm gonna say right now, this is sanctified speculation. It has been speculated that the place that they went to offer the sacrifice was back at the entrance of the Garden of Eden.

And here's why. Back in Genesis chapter three, look at verse 24. So he, that is God, drove the man out and at the east of the Garden of Eden he stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.

So they were exiled from paradise and two cherubim were positioned there, cherubim were placed there with swords to guard the entrance so that man could never go back in to the scene of his crime. Now man had known, Adam and Eve had known that it was in the garden that they walked with God.

There they enjoyed fellowship with him and those angels were reminders that they could never go back to that, they could never have that again. They were now separated from God because of their sin. Remember later on in the book of Exodus when God gave commandment to Moses to build the Ark of the Covenant, you had the Ark itself which contained the tablets and the manna and the stick.

What was over top of the Ark?

The mercy seat.

What was on top of the mercy seat? In the middle of the mercy seat was the visible glory of God and over that mercy seat the blood was sprinkled from on Yom Kippur on the day of atonement but where was that blood applied?