His World, and His Worship. Gen. 4
It is a terrible history of man's hopelessness—the history God has given us in His word. I say history, because we have a setting forth of his sins and failures from the beginning; but then the blessed grace of God is shown forth in it, because it tells of Christ to come.
It is simply that man's heart is evil. This is true; but it has been proved evil in the presence of everything which ought to have restrained its evil. God has given us the history of man's ways, and of His dealings with man (not merely stated dogmas); and in whatever way He has dealt with man, we find the evil of man's heart breaking out, and following its course, spite of all.
Man, having sinned against God, is turned out of paradise (Gen. 3). The next thing we read of is the outrageous wickedness of man against his brother: Cain, Adam's first-born, slaying Abel (Gen. 4). Then comes the flood sweeping away a whole generation of evil-doers (Gen. 7). Mercy is shown to Noah, he and his house saved through judgment; yet immediately afterward we find him drunk in his tent, and Ham his son mocking and dishonoring him (Gen. 9).
God speaks to Israel at Sinai, thundering with His voice His righteous demands on man: yet awful as the presence of God is (and even Moses said, I exceedingly fear and quake), before Moses comes down from the mount the people have made the golden calf, and broken the first link that binds them to the service of Jehovah (Ex. 32), In the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ we see God visiting the Jew, and dealing with sinners in grace in the person of His Son: Him they slay and hang on a tree (Acts 5:3030The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree. (Acts 5:30)). Israel's history (man's under the most favorable circumstances) is one scene of violence and evil all the way through; so that Stephen (in testifying to them after their rejection of Christ and the descent of the Holy Ghost in witness of Christ's glory) says they were but doing as their fathers had ever done. “Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye” (Acts 7:5151Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye. (Acts 7:51)).
Notwithstanding all the dealings of God with man—the voice of God and the judgments of Godman is so hopelessly bad, that the nearer he is brought to God, the more culture there is bestowed upon him by God, only the more is manifested, and that in darker characters, the sin and desperate wickedness of his heart, working spite of all in sight even of God's judgments.
In the sin in the garden we see the character of man's evil as against God; Cain's sin is sin against a neighbor. Of course both are sins against God (all sin being against God); but whilst in the sin of Adam and Eve we see lust and disobedience, in Cain's there is something more—it is sin as exhibited against a neighbor.
Man, as to his actual condition, is a sinner cast out of paradise, already out of the presence of God; and he ought to have the consciousness of being out, and that the only way of getting back to God is through His Son.
We are not in paradise. We have got out of it some way or other; and we are in a world which is under judgment, and where death is staring us in the face. Adam had just been driven out of paradise, and Cain must have had (through Adam) the remembrance that there was a time when man was not out of paradise, when he heard God's voice in the garden without fear, when he had not a bad conscience, and when he was without toil. Saints or sinners (in our own eyes), we have been driven out of Eden, and we are in the wilderness utterly excluded from God's presence. We ought to have the consciousness of being out, and of the misery of our condition. But alas! we have lost all remembrance of the place in which we once were, and have become familiarized to the ruin and desolation consequent upon sin. Still it is true, and we cannot deny it, that we have got out of paradise, and are in a world constantly under sentence. We may try to make the best of the world; but we must all feel that something has come to pass, something that has brought in death and judgment. Happiness cannot be associated with sin, any more than sin can he associated with God. As for man, though he seeks to buoy himself up with his sins, and to delude himself with the lie of Satan, sink he must, sooner or later, under the power of the sin and death already come in. He is just spending his energies to make the world pleasant without God, and himself comfortable and rich in it, to die out of it.
The world he cannot keep. He may build a city for himself, as Cain did (ver. 17), and call it after his own name (Cain called his city after the name of his son); but it will be with him as David speaks, “Their inward thought is, that their houses shall continue forever, and their dwelling-places to all generations; they call their lands after their own names. Nevertheless man being in honor abideth not: he is like the beasts that perish. This their way is their folly; yet their posterity approve their sayings. Like sheep they are laid in the grave; death shall feed on them” (Psa. 49).
Cain did not like the sense of the wrath of God lying upon him. Gone out from the presence of Jehovah (ver. 16), he had become so great in the earth that he could build a city. Man never likes to be in the truth of his condition. Cain shrinks from being “a fugitive and a vagabond,” and he tries to build a city, and he does build a city, in the endeavor to make the world as pleasant as he can without God. It might be said, “What harm was there in building a city?” In the first place there would never have been the necessity for this in paradise. Moreover it was proof of insensibility as to his sin against God; it showed quiet contentment under the effect of that punishment which at first he had felt was greater than he could bear; it was the last expression of total alienation of heart and affection from God.
Driven out from the presence of God, he sets about to establish himself. He seeks for himself a home, not with God in heaven, but on the earth, from which God had pronounced him “cursed.” He makes himself master of a city, where God had made him “a vagabond.”
(To be continued).