10. The Spirit Of Cain

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Welcome to the podcast where we prod the sheep and feed the wolf. This is episode 10, The Spirit of Cain.

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One of the greatest lies in the modern church is that human beings may worship an infinitely holy

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God in whatever way we like. It's as if God has no standards for worship, but is just glad that we took the time out of our busy days to think about him in some mediocre fashion.

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Like a father who has trained their child into thinking that every single scribble is somehow necessarily going to make it onto the fridge, we assume

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God, by nature, has to accept whatever we decide to give him because that's just who he is, which honestly makes us the standard of worship and God somehow beholden to our opinions.

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This is not the way that worship works in the Bible, and we learn that from one of the earliest scenes in Holy Scripture.

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Today I want us to talk about what kind of worship does God actually accept, and I want us to ask the question, even if only rhetorically, is there a kind of worship that God rejects?

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And if so, would we have the courage to change everything if we realized that our opinion on this issue actually did not line up with his?

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Now I know these are tough questions to wrestle through. I've actually wrestled through them myself at the

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Shepherd's Church with Derek and with others, and with that I know, and I'm coming from a position where I know that these things are difficult, especially if you come from a culture of worship that is antithetical to the

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Bible or in opposition to the Bible, so I get that. But what we have to do today is we have to look at what the

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Scripture says, and today I want us to look at the example of Cain, the son of Adam and Eve, to see what the

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Bible actually says about worship, and we will learn much from this passage. This is what it says,

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Genesis 4, 3 through 5. So when it came about in the course of time that Cain brought an offering to the

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Lord of the fruit of the ground, Abel on his part also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions.

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And the Lord had regard for Abel and for his offering, but for Cain and for his offering he had no regard.

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So Cain became very angry, and his countenance fell. This is the word of the

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Lord. Now, the story of Cain and Abel should teach us everything that we need to know about worshiping our

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God. Here we see that Cain offered what he wanted to offer to God, whereas Abel offered what

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God wanted to be offered to God, and that is an important distinction. Cain looked at God and said, you'll be happy with whatever

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I give you, whereas Abel was happy to give God whatever he required. Again, the difference is that Cain gave what he wanted to God, whereas Abel gave what

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God wanted to God. That is the real difference between these two men. One of them pleased the

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Lord with his worship, while the other offended God in his worship. One of them was aligned to the desires of his father and presented effort that was consistent with God's pleasure and opinions, and then the other simply did not.

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At a minimum, these verses dismantle the silly notion that God has no standards when it comes to worship, and that he will simply accept whatever half -hearted musings that we give him.

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That's not true, and he won't, and he does not in this text.

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Read the verses again clearly. God regarded Abel and his worship, but for Cain he had no regard, which teaches us a very simple and fundamental principle about worship that we would do well to understand, apply, and even memorize.

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That principle is that we must worship God in the way that God wants to be worshipped.

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It's all throughout the Bible. Let me just give you an example here to make the point. In the same way that we must conform our etiquette and our dress to the standards of a five -star

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Michelin restaurant—suppose we're going out on a date with our spouse, and there's this really high -end restaurant, maybe we live in San Francisco and it's a five -star

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Michelin restaurant, or we live in New York City, and it's this really high -end restaurant—we have to conform our standards, our etiquette, our dress to this particular restaurant if we have any hopes at all of getting a table.

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God, in the same way, but even infinitely more so, has well -defined standards on how we are to enter

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His courts so that we will have a seat at His table to worship

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Him, and He will not violate His standards to accommodate our ignorance, apathy, or slothfulness.

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He just won't. I want you to think about it this way—scarcity, purity, and value dictate how human beings approach a thing.

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For instance, let me give you an example of a low -end restaurant, and I don't mean this to be critical. I just mean that some restaurants exist at the lower end of the spectrum, and some exist at the higher end of the spectrum, and both may be viable businesses, but they're different.

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So for instance, Dunkin' Donuts is on every street corner in New England. I actually have been to a particular intersection where there was four

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Dunkin' Donuts on each side of the corner, so they're everywhere, which means that they're not scarce at all.

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And because of that, they use suboptimal ingredients, which means they're not pure at all, and because of that, they're attempting to sell products at a lower price point so that everyone can kind of come in and participate, which makes many people feel free to come into Dunk's wearing pajamas with uncombed hair.

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Maybe they haven't showered. I mean, we see this all the time. Walmart is another example.

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People do this because Dunk's is altogether ordinary. There's a lack of scarcity, there's a lack of purity, and there's a lack of value which allows for a particular kind of behavior, but that's not true in a high -end restaurant, which usually exists at a single location.

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They're not franchised, which means that they're scarce. It purchases the highest quality ingredients in the world, which means that it's pure, and it prices those items so that a much more devoted and serious clientele base will have access to them, which means that it has great value.

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So when that happens, when those three things happen in a restaurant, what you'll notice is that people come in with suits and ties, expensive handbags and designer dresses.

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Why? Because we naturally orient our behavior to match our perception of value.

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If we think something is valuable, then we will behave and treat it with value.

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Knowing this, could anyone ever approach the one and only

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God who is infinite in purity, maximal in value, with a Dunkin' Donut kind of worship?

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Would that be befitting to God's excellency and character to approach Him with the same lackluster preparation that goes into a weekend retreat to Walmart?

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Absolutely not. This most certainly is because God has infinite value and worth, and He also has infinite authority to set the terms on how we worship

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Him. Again, unlike the doting parent, God is not impressed with the bare -bones, minimum, misguided effort that we give.

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He gets to determine what faithful worship is and isn't. That is His prerogative and right.

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And like Cain, we don't have the freedom to offer God any old kind of worship that we desire. Like Israel, this is another example.

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We cannot make well -intentioned golden calves because we just like to make God look that way.

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That's Exodus 32. Or like Nadab and Abihu, we don't get to foolishly think that we can bring whatever strange fire celebration into the throne room of God that we want.

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That's Leviticus 10. We do not have the ability to make determinations on how we worship, on when we worship, on who or what we worship, and even why we worship.

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If Cain, think about it this way, was judged severely by God and he did not have the

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Bible, then how much more will we be judged who have God's holy word and His standards, and we know them, and we know

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God's revelation much more fully than Cain ever could have dreamed. Think about the ancestors of Cain who assembled on the plains of Babylon, who participated in false idolatrous worship, making this little step pyramid, thinking that they're going to build a tower to heaven.

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They were punished comprehensively by God for introducing innovation into their worship.

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Innovation, idolatry, man -centeredness, and how much more, even today, are we going to be judged by God for doing the exact same things?

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Introducing idolatry, man -centeredness, innovation into our worship? We don't have the ability to do that.

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Like them, God is not impressed with our little anthills and leaning towers that we bring into the

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Lord's Day worship. When we gather on Sundays and our goal is to make a name for ourself through larger and larger church buildings, brighter

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LED lights, thicker smoke, circus -like spectacles, gyrating hips from female worship leaders—and before you think that that's ridiculous,

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I've seen it, I've noticed it all over evangelicalism, where you get the attractive female worship leader or the attractive young male with skinny jeans on stage making everyone else feel like that this is what it looks like to worship—it's ridiculous.

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When we do that, we're no better than those who assembled in the plains of Babel and participated in false idolatrous worship.

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When we sing seven -fold choruses to lull us into mindlessness instead of active participation in worshiping a

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God that we know and that we are trying to get to know better, when we do that, we not only embody the spirit of Cain, we become just like the impetulant children of Cain whose end is going to be confusion, chaos, and scattering.

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God—and this is very important—not only cares that we worship Him, but He also cares about how we worship

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Him. If we want God to accept our worship, both as individuals and as congregations and churches, then we must make sure that everything we are doing in worship conforms to what

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He has already expressed in Scripture. We have not been given the right to become creative with how we worship

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God. Instead, we have been given the task of worshiping God biblically.

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Now, I want to say a quick word to all my friends who are saying, well, where's the gospel in that? Didn't Jesus set us free?

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Of course. None of us could worship God without the mediatorial work of Jesus Christ, without Christ coming and rescuing us and saving us and delivering us from the hell of sin that we deserved.

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None of us would be able to worship God, but that does not mean that Jesus freed us from our sin in order to allow us to plunge ourselves into mediocrity or apathy or laziness or slothfulness.

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God has standards on how He worships. He died because we could not meet those standards, but He did not abolish those standards in Christ's death.

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That would be like saying Jesus saved us from the law so that we can live lawlessly. That's pure nonsense.

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We must worship God biblically, and how much more so for those who've been given the Holy Spirit of God.

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How much more so should we worship God biblically? Because now we've been given the Spirit of God who aids us and helps us in our sanctification to worship

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God in spirit and in truth. In our

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Cain and Abel passage today, we learn a couple things, and I'm appealing to this as Christians who have

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Jesus, who know Christ, who've been ransomed by God, who've been elect before the foundations of the world and dwelled by the

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Holy Spirit. This passage, this Old Testament passage, teaches us some things about worship that I want us to see.

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The first is it teaches us the proper time for worship. The text says,

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So it came about in the course of time that Cain brought an offering to the Lord of the firstfruits of the ground.

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Many scholars actually agree that when Moses says here the course of time, that that phrase is looking back to God's original establishment of a seven -day creation week with a

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Sabbath day of worship. So it came about in the course of time. Well, what is the course of time?

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The course of time is the time that God established in the beginning. Seven days, six days you work, and on the seventh day you rested.

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So many scholars believe that Cain and Abel are approaching God on the Sabbath.

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And if that's the case, then Cain did well to follow the first commandment in worship, which is, you know, there's an appropriate time for worship that God has set apart, which is called the

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Sabbath. But even while obeying that command, it seems that he wantonly disobeys

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God's command on the kind of worship that he requires. Because God not only requires the time of worship, but he requires the kind of worship.

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That's the second point, and I want us to understand it. Cain and Abel were the children of Adam and Eve, which means that as children of Adam and Eve, they got to hear the stories from the

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Garden of Eden. And every parent does that. We understand that. As parents, we share stories from our childhood so that our children can have a fuller view of the world, and also not mistakenly grow up thinking that somehow life began when they were born.

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It did not. And Adam and Eve certainly shared their earliest moments of life, even though they weren't children in the

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Garden, but they certainly shared the earliest moments of their life with their children. This is especially true in oral cultures, where you pass down your traditions and your stories.

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That's why Moses even had the stories from the Garden of Eden, because Adam and Eve told them to Cain and Abel, and Cain and Abel told them to their children, and eventually you get to Moses, who receives the oral tradition and codifies it through written record.

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Now, in the case of Cain and Abel, a familiar story growing up in their childhood would have been that story where God came down as Eden's great high priest and spared the life of their mom and dad.

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You remember the story well. Adam and Eve were dead to rights in their sin. They had just rebelled against God, they had followed the serpent, and they knew the punishment for disloyalty to God was death, instantaneous, immediate death.

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So when God came looking for them, they rightly hid in terror because they assumed that in that particular moment they were going to die.

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But what Adam and Eve would have been very careful to highlight to their young boys as they were telling these stories to Cain and Abel is how

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God showed them grace on that day, not in an unjust way by just forgiving their sin just because, no,

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He showed them grace by pouring out His judgment on another. They received the mercy of God while another living creature took their death, because like a good high priest,

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God comes down into the middle of Eden and mediates a substitutionary plan of salvation for Adam and Eve where an animal is going to stand in their place.

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God, it says in the text, slaughters an animal to cover their own nakedness.

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It's a life in exchange for a life. It's the shedding of blood for remission of sin.

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They are clothed in the skin of another, Genesis 3 .21. Now, this powerful lesson that Adam and Eve would have taught to Cain and Abel would have taught them that their sin actually is serious and deadly.

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It would have also taught them that there is a cost to grace. Grace is not free. It requires the innocent life of another to be shed in order to perform a covering onto you, to cover your guilt.

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Someone else has to die. And the writer of Hebrews picks this up, actually, in the New Testament where it says, without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin,

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Hebrews 9 .22. Now, knowing this, that one can hardly imagine just how a statement could be even more clear, it's even harder to imagine how

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Cain would have thought that it would have been appropriate to bring God a plate of withered vegetables. The indication from the text in Genesis 4 is that Abel brought the very best of his flock, the very best that he had, and he slaughtered it in a similar way that God had slaughtered the animal that covered his own father,

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Adam, while Cain simply brought a few extra celery sticks that were left over from the field.

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But even more important than that, because I think the text actually leans that direction, more important than that,

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Cain thought his sin was so insignificant and inconsequential that a few radishes and carrots would do the trick.

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That, he mused, would restore him to an infinitely righteous God. His sins could be forgiven without the shedding of blood.

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And you can imagine Cain having this sort of attitude like, well, if God has a problem with that, at least he can say that I remembered the

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Sabbath. At least I remembered to go to church, which that spirit is alive and well in the modern church today, the spirit of Cain.

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You see, like Cain today, we believe that God is pleased with the most mediocre and whimsical of efforts.

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Instead of spoiled beets and outdated cauliflower, men and women today will simply roll out of the bed at the last minute, show up to church for the first time in weeks, if not months, and slip out the door before anyone can greet them, believing that a thrice holy creator of the cosmos has regard for that kind of Canaanite effort.

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It's not just true of congregants. Pastors imbibe the same spirit of Cain when we dress the church up like a prostitute to arouse the affections of carnal men and wonder why

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God is not pleased when we act like Cain. The spirit of Cain is alive and well in the church.

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That is true. And when we finally come to realize that God is not pleased with that kind of lackluster idolatry and effort, many of us, when we understand that truth, when we hear someone speaking about it, maybe we heard it in a sermon, maybe you're hearing it on this particular podcast, but when your conscience is pricked that you have defamed

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God in worship and then you have not held him to the highest standard, you've not held him as your chiefest treasure, your most beautiful possession, the thing that you long to get up in the morning for, you rejoice to go to church for, the one who holds your soul captive.

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When you have not looked at God in that way, but you've looked at God like Cain, like he's a useful commodity to have when you have him, but you don't have to actually follow his standards of worship.

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When you viewed God that way, many of us, when we learn what the Bible actually says, will not respond with humility, but we will respond with anger like Cain, showcasing that the crouching power of sin lurks ever presently at the door of our own heart because all of us by nature's hate

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God and hate true worship, just like Cain. That is the spirit of Cain, is that we hate

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God and that we hate to worship him truly. Now my prayer is that we would sit with texts like these, and there's more, they're all over the

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Bible, that you would sit with the Bible and how it says that we're supposed to worship and that we would understand what it says and repent.

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I pray that even today that we would sit with Genesis 4 and we would look at what it says in verses 6 and 7 and that our hearts would be softened to God.

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It says, then the Lord said to Cain, why are you angry? And why is your countenance fallen?

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If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door and its desire is for you, but you must master it.

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The plain and simple point that God has not left us guessing on is how to worship him.

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His word is filled with all kinds of instructions so that you and I can do well in the arena of worship.

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From being, from texts that talk about the calling us into worship or being greeted in worship, prayers, confessions, singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, celebrations of pardons,

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Scripture reading, sermons, sacraments, benedictions, every element of our Lord's Day worship must be rooted in Scripture.

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And if you're currently participating in any element of worship, especially in the realm of Sunday morning worship, that's not explicitly regulated in God's holy word, then stop.

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Give God and his word primacy over your opinions and God will have regard for your worship.

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If you're a pastor and you're leading your church to feel more like a concert than like a sacred space to worship the thrice holy

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God, the triune God, if you're adulterating him and introducing your own opinions about what worship is, then

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I pray you would repent. If you're a Christian and you're viewing

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God in an inappropriate way, if you're viewing your priorities as higher than his, your opinions as higher than his, your schedule is more important than his, if you're skipping church to go fishing, if you're sleeping in because you're tired, if you view your life as being more primary and important than God, I pray that you would repent.

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I pray that you would have a spirit like Abel instead of a spirit like Cain, and there's some death that comes with that.

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Abel was murdered by Cain, our flesh needs to be murdered by the Spirit. It even says that in Romans 8, 13, that if by the

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Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the flesh, then you will live. Each of us has a responsibility as Christians, as those who've been ransomed by Jesus Christ, of putting to death the flesh.

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The flesh hates God, the flesh hates worship, the flesh is the spirit of Cain, and it must be put to death.

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Again, this is gonna require repentance from God's people and from the pastors that are over these congregations that God has set apart for leadership.

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But I do want you to remember, when we harden our hearts against the truth, it is the most dangerous thing that we can do.

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It's our responsibility as the people of God to know His Word well and to understand what it says about every topic, worship especially, and to have the courage to follow it.

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Not just on Sunday mornings, but whatever we do, whether we eat or whether we drink, that we would give all glory to an all -glorious

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God. If you liked today's episode, I would ask that you hit the like button, the subscribe button, and that you would share it.

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And for a temporary time, we're actually accepting carrier pigeon shares, if you know what that is. So however you might do that, maybe tie your laptop up to a carrier pigeon and let it fly.

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However you do it, let's get this content out to more people so that more people can interact with the truth of God and know what

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God's Word requires, not just for worship, but every facet of our lives. I love you all.