Word of Salvation – Vol. 43 No. 03 – January 1998

 

Abel, the Good-for-Nothing!

 

Sermon by Rev. J. Rogers on Hebrews 11:4

Scripture Readings: Genesis 4; Hebrews 11:4

 

Brothers and Sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ.

“Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” Therefore, by faith, without a BSc, let alone a PhD in Palaeontology, we understand the worlds, the visible things, were made out of nothing by the simple command of God and all very good.  For that certainty – about the beginning of the world, the future of the world, and the existence of God and the devil and angels, the saints of the Old Testament received a special commendation from God Himself.

Then begins the list.  And first up, congregation, is Abel.  But surely, there is a mistake here – Abel?!  We all know that names are important in the Old Testament.  They are part of one’s presentation of oneself to the world.  And Abel – that name is not good PR.  It means vapour, breath, unsubstantial, worthless.  It is the word the Preacher uses in Ecclesiastes, when he says, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.”

And apparently, that is just how Eve felt about Abel.  First, Cain was born and she called him Cain because it means ‘acquired.’  “I have acquired a man from the Lord,” she said.  Perhaps she thought this firstborn of hers was the fulfilment of that promise of God to send a redeemer.  But this second son?  Well, the way verse two speaks about the birth of Abel, compared to the way the previous verse speaks about the birth of Cain, shows us that the mention of Abel’s birth is almost only a footnote to the main story in Eve’s eyes.  Maybe he was a bit of a weakling baby to call him unsubstantial.  Maybe she thought he wouldn’t last too long, so she called him ‘mere breath’, here today and gone tomorrow.  ‘Good-for-Nothing’ would be a good translation.

Cain, he built a city and named it after his son – Enoch.  One descendant became the father of a whole tribe of ranchers.  Another was the first orchestral maestro.  Another established Tubal-Cain Steel Limited

But Abel, what did he achieve?  He never got round to having a son.  About the most that can be said for Abel was that he raised a few sheep.  He was, indeed, unsubstantial.  We would say today: he never amounted to much.  As far as the progress of the cultural mandate was concerned, he was worthless.  So far as his life was concerned, he was a vapour which did eventually end as a result of a tussle with his older brother.  But the King of the universe begins the Old Covenant honours list with Abel, the good-for-nothing.

I suppose we do have a kind of parallel in Melchizedek, king of Salem, who came out and blessed Abraham after the slaughter of the kings who kidnapped Lot.  He was here today and gone tomorrow, there is no record of his parents nor of any children.  On the other hand, though, he did have a great name; King of Righteousness and King of Peace.  And he was, after all, great because he blessed father Abraham who had the great honour of being given the promises of the salvation of the world.  And great Abraham honoured him by giving to him a tithe of the plunder.  But what great thing did Abel ever do?  Well, in that question is a clue.  Let us say a few things about that.

FIRSTLY, our text tells us that “by faith Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did.”  That was all Abel ever did.  He believed God.

Abel was a shepherd and Cain a horticulturalist.  Their parents must have taught them to bring sacrifices to God.  After all, in a certain sense, there wasn’t a lot to tell them about the history of the world at that point.  Except for the blessedness they once knew in Eden, their own sin and God’s grace in searching them out and killing a sheep to clothe them with something a bit warmer than fig leaves.

One day, we read, Cain brought an offering to the Lord: the fruit of his farming.  And Abel also brought an offering.  It doesn’t say ‘also’ in the NIV, but it’s there in the Hebrew.  And that is important, because it gives us the idea that Abel is still in his brother’s shadow.  Even in this religiousness, even though it was Abel who had faith, Cain leads the way and Abel also brought an offering.  But Hebrews tells us that Abel’s offering was better than Cain’s.  How?

Some say it was better because it was an offering that shed blood.  Hence it followed the pattern of God’s offering for Adam and Eve that the boys had been taught.  As well as that, meat had not yet been given to man to eat.  That would not be until after the flood.  So a blood and flesh offering would show the sacredness of the offering for God; it was not something shared between God and man, as Cain’s grain was.  And that could all be true.

Others say that Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil, as the NIV says, while Abel brought fat portions from the firstborn of his flock.  They say the words may suggest that Cain just grabbed something out of the granary while Abel carefully chose the best he could find.  Maybe!  After all, Cain was acquired with the help of the Lord anyway, so he was halfway home already!  But Abel, well he was a bit of a ‘good-for-nothing’, so if God was going to receive anything from him, he’d better choose the best he could find.  A bit like Hertz Rental Cars: when you’re No 2, you’ve got to try harder.

In other words, Cain was like the rich man in the temple who threw in large amounts of money.  But because he was so wealthy, it was still no big deal, really.  Whereas Abel was like the poor widow who, out of her poverty, gave the very best; all she had to live on, in fact.  Abel gave his pride and joy, we might say, his best breeding stock – and that, of course, violates the First Commandment of any breeding programme.  I think this idea comes closer to the point because we read in Genesis, “God looked with favour on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering, He did not look with favour.”  In other words, God was taking more notice of the men, and their hearts, than of their offerings as such.

It seems to reflect God’s complaints to His people through the prophets later on: “You trample in my courts but your offerings stink, I hate them because your hearts are far from me.”  Or, paraphrasing the words of Paul, “Even if I give $10,000 to the Church, but have not true love in my heart for the Lord, I’m just a noise; I please God not one whit.”  “Cain, if you do right,” God says, you will be accepted.”  In other words, God accepted Abel and his offering because Abel did right.  As it says in 1John 3; “Cain slew his brother because his deeds were evil while his brother’s were righteous.”

That doesn’t mean that Abel was righteous in himself.  No, the writer to the Hebrews has just said, at the end of chapter 10, that the just, the righteous, live only by faith.  If Abel were righteous in himself, God would not have commended his offering because it would then have been a needless offering.  It would then have been merely the pointless slaughter of a harmless animal and God takes a dim view of that sort of thing.

That Abel was righteous and his deeds righteous simply means that he was up front with God about his sin and his own worthlessness.  He had the integrity of heart that the psalmist speaks about; he was not trying to hide things from God or bluff his way through.

SO, SECONDLY, by faith, Abel was commended as a righteous man when God spoke well of his offerings.  As Proverbs 15:8 says, “The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord; but the prayer of the upright is His delight.”

But now let us ask another question.  Was this commendation as a righteous man awarded to Abel posthumously?  That is, the point the text is making is that Abel has been commended to us but he didn’t know it in his lifetime?  Our translation could give us that idea.  But let us remember that our chapter is all about faith.  Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.  Now Abel is being commended to us as an example of faith through which we now have that assurance and certainty.  Because, afterwards, on the new earth, we live by sight, not faith.

Abel received an assurance in his earthly life that what he could not see, God’s smile of approval, was, in fact, a reality.  He had the kind of assured faith – with which it is possible to please God – which chapter 11 speaks about a little later.

We don’t know how God gave him that assurance.  But Peter tells us that as we add to our repentance and faith a lifestyle of fleeing from sin and a delight in doing every kind of good (LD 33); that is, as we live in righteousness, then God gives us the assurance that we are, indeed, chosen by God.  He gives us the assurance of something we cannot yet see, our names written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.

Maybe God gave Abel that assurance of faith simply by a sense of certainty in his heart that no one else knew about.  We don’t know.  But we do know that God will give that assurance to us, too, as we offer our lives as living sacrifices of obedience to Him.

Then, THIRDLY, brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ, “by faith, Abel still speaks, even though he is dead.”  And so, once again, the strong man is foiled!  Cain thought this would be the end of Abel.  Not so!

Didn’t Jesus say, “if you have faith the size of a grain of mustard seed, you shall move mountains”?  Well, here is this weakling, Abel, who sure did not amount to much in his life on earth, moving mountains.  6,000 years after his death, he is still speaking! – through faith.  But what is he saying?

In Genesis 4, when Abel was dead, God says to Cain, “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”  Cain killed Abel because his deeds were righteous, whereas his own were evil.  In Revelation 6 we read of some others who have been killed for the same reason.  Listen:

“They called out in a loud voice, ‘How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?’  Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and brothers who were to be killed as they had been, was completed.” (Vss.10-11)

Congregation, God is a loving and merciful God to the extreme.  But never for a moment, in His mercy, does He cease being just.  And when the Lord Jesus Christ comes again, Paul tells the Thessalonians, “He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you.  ‘Vengeance is mine,’ says the Lord, I will repay.”

Abel’s blood still cries out for vengeance; that his righteousness be vindicated in the eyes of all the world.  And God will bring that about.  The ninth Psalm tells us that “He who avenges blood remembers; He does not ignore the cry of the afflicted.”  And why?  Because “precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints” (Psalm 116).

Did you hear Abel speaking this morning, people of God?  For he is speaking.  Actually, it is really God speaking through Abel.  And what is God saying?  He is saying to all of us that what we are in the eyes of the world is not important.  What we are in the unseen eyes of the Almighty God is important.

What is Abel?  He is typical of so many in the kingdom of God from his day to ours.  I have a book at home called The History-Makers of the Twentieth Century.  Well, in the edition for Abel’s century, Abel didn’t get a chapter.  He only got a footnote in his brother’s chapter.  As Paul said, “Not many mighty, not many noble, not many great in the eyes of the world are called, for God chooses the weak and foolish things of the world to confound the strong and the wise.”

Abel is here a few years and achieves very little – apparently good for nothing much.  Indeed, he seems a bit timid; he has trouble mixing it with intellectuals or high-fliers in the business world.  He is far from urbane and confident.  And he has an inferiority complex to boot.  But Cain?  Why, he’s a big man, self-confident.  He seems to prosper and go from strength to strength.  Yes, outwardly, he would appear to be the answer to God’s promises.  It is on him, and not this weak, struggling Church that still speaks about such old-fashioned, quaint ideas as sin, that the hopes of the world for peace and happiness seem to depend.

And often Cain is a ‘man of the cloth.’  Or, like the Pharisee in the temple, he brings his offerings – and my, what offerings!  His wallet just doesn’t seem able to empty.  Or again, like the Pharisee, he comes to the temple with his righteousness, his good deeds, having done this and that in God’s name.  Whereas Abel, he comes to the temple with his sin.  He seems to be wallowing in it so often.  And he soon dies without leaving a mark.

But it is Abel who is remembered, congregation, not Cain.  Cain, who seemed to be acquired with the help of the Lord, is gone.  All we remember of him is that he was the first murderer, and his retort to God: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” resounds down the centuries.  But Abel we remember.  God reminds us of him.  Abel, whose mother could not even think of him as an added blessing – as Hannah did about the children given her after Samuel.  His own mother never appreciated Abel until after his death when she gave birth to Seth and she said, with a telling turn of emphasis, “God has granted me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.”

But at first he was just a mere breath, unsubstantial; a bit of a nuisance really, a bother to his own mother, a good-for-nothing.  What a blessing that was, congregation, and all the low self-esteem it must have engendered in him.  For when you’re at the bottom of the heap like that, you’ve got to have faith in someone stronger than you!

Jesus said, “It is hard for a rich man to enter heaven.”  The same applies to the strong man, the confident man.  People like that don’t need faith.  They’ve got it altogether for themselves.  Remember that, people of God.  God works through the inconsequential in the eyes of the world more often than not.  It is to them He gives faith.  And the length of our days on earth and the greatness of our deeds has very little to do with our worth in the eyes of God.  He who is first may, in fact, be last in God’s eyes.  No doubt Jesus seemed pretty inconsequential to Caesar Augustus and Tiberius.  Jesus Himself knew exactly what he was talking about when He said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.  Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure” (Mat.11:25f).

So how do you stack up today?  You don’t amount to much in the eyes of the world?  Praise God for it.  Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor for they shall see God.”  Not that there is any great blessing in poverty or insignificance in itself.  As Tivye ruefully observes in The Fiddler on the Roof, “God, I know it’s no shame to be poor; but it’s no great honour either!”  But it sure does help us to see ourselves for what we really are in the eyes of God.

But there is one last thing we ought to notice.  It is not in our text, but it is very important, and that is what our writer says in the next chapter of Hebrews: there is a “blood that speaks better than the blood of Abel.”  That, of course, is Jesus’ blood.  And why is it better than Abel’s?  Abel’s blood cries for vengeance.  Jesus’ blood cries that vengeance has been paid for those who have faith, for those who see themselves as poor and weak and worthless.

That is where all of these examples in Hebrews 11 really point us.  So God says to us today, congregation, that this is where we all must come, and until we do, there is no hope for us.

Abel’s blood cries out for vengeance.  But Abel’s faith says to all the world that the meek in Christ have indeed inherited the world.  The weak and worthless in the eyes of the world are given high honours by the Almighty, the Maker of this world.  May the Lord God give to all of us the eternal blessedness and riches and honour of Abel, the Good-for-Nothing.

Amen.