Cain and Abel, pt. 3

The high Sabbath arrived. The great test of truth would now be manifested, “the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth.” (Rev. 3:10). It meant a cleansing of the true church of God, a sifting of the rebels.

Cain had advertised a better form of religion; Abel maintained the original faith given by the Lord God. The contest would determine who was right, and who was wrong; those following Abel, who could continue as before and be scrutinized and further purged by God, and those who were under the influence of Cain and would receive open rebuke from heaven itself.

This day was judgment day; both groups would be judged. The Cainite camp had gloried in its numbers and influence over the children of Adam. The much fewer followers of Abel would be delivered from the oppression of the Cainites.

It was a day like that on Mount Carmel. Both high priests of their respective claims presented before the Lord their respective offerings: Cain, with his clean, glorious vegetables, nuts, grains, and fruits; and Abel with the gory death of a once happy, innocent, spotless, baby lamb of a year old.

Heaven’s fire fell, but not on Cain’s altar as he had so arrogantly boasted that it would. When silence once again settled after the roar from God’s throne, Abel was exonerated and Cain visibly convicted of false worship. The sentence from heaven was more than Cain could bear. Although Abel and his disciples retreated from the altars with everlasting songs in their hearts, their lack of vindictiveness only stirred Cain to greater fury.

A day came that the two heads of religion met in a field of the primitive Earth. Cain remonstrated with Abel in biting tones and undue recriminations. Abel humbly and gently turned the remonstrances back on Cain and in love appealed to his brother to surrender to the God who answered by fire, and who is love. He strove to mitigate his beloved friend’s undue anger toward his Creator in heaven, as he sought to reconcile his brother’s misapprehensions of his heavenly Father. He worked to convince Cain that their parents were greatly concerned with his blatant dodging the redemptive effect from the blood of the coming Lamb of God and his disturbing disregard for God’s express commandment to sacrifice a lamb.

But in a rage of much pent up resentment toward his brother’s perceived insolence Satan drove his victim to rush upon his unsuspecting brother and to forever silence his quiet reproofs. Abel had been great because he had so humbled self into the dust through obedience to the covenant of redeeming grace and truth. His giant character came from his lowliness and loving-kindness. A great man lost his life that day.

Cain, with blood on his hands, was not repentant. He could not say to himself, “I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.” In his satiated pride and wrath he simply sought to ignore the act. No one had witnessed the murder, except maybe God. But Cain was a self-made atheist. Satan had eclipse the Creator in his lost soul, and Cain had gobbled up all that Satan had pushed on him.

A last effort was made by the voice of the Lord God to bring him to admission of guilt. But the true Cain comes out after all of his self-righteous pretense at the altar. By his own lips he condemned himself. Even defending his actions to the Lord God, he said with a Freudian slip of sarcasm, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

But while he wouldn’t mourn his sin, he did bewail his punishment. Unrepentant and stiff-necked toward God to the end, he left the presence of the Lord God never to speak to God again. He convinced one of his sibling followers to be his wife, thus perpetuating his ill mindset toward law and justice. His soul utterly empty of peace and devoid of God, and his heart full of pride and self sufficiency, he turned fully to sensual pleasures.

Satan has always found it most desirous to use a human medium to deceive others, and thus multitudes, nations, tongues and peoples. As he had used Eve to fell Adam, he had Cain fell the whole antediluvian world. Quickly did Cain influence his progeny to the sins of murder and uncontrolled passion and every other expression of his unregenerate heart, until wickedness pervaded the inhabited world.

Rapidly did Cain’s descendents multiply, so that many generations had appeared in the camp of the lawless before the next champions of faith and obedience after Abel were born: Seth and his son Enos, when the race was 130 and 235 years old. Adam and Eve continued to lead their lineage into brokenness and redemption through the death of the lamb.

All the while Cain’s descendants used a form of godliness but never knew the loss of self and conversion and reclamation by the Holy Spirit until violence more and more covered the land. The wickedness of man reached its point of divine retribution. Eventually, the dwindling faithful Adamites slowly joined the joy-riding Cainites, until, except for a very small remnant of true worshippers of the Creator, the whole world followed after the progenitor of idolatry and the grossest evil.