Tell The Truth

God asks Cain a question He already knows the answer to, then shows him mercy he never earned. In Genesis 4:9–26 we follow Cain’s line to Lamech’s boast, talk about breaking generational curses, and see people begin to call on the name of the Lord.

Passage covered: Genesis 4:9–26 (picking up at Genesis 5:1 next time)

After some catching up, including a week away from social media that turned out to be pretty restful, we pick up right after Cain kills Abel. God comes asking “Where is Abel thy brother?” and gives Cain a chance to come clean, the same thing He does over and over from Genesis on. Cain answers with “Am I my brother’s keeper?” That’s a smart-aleck reply to the Creator of the universe, and he is his brother’s keeper. Cain’s jealousy leads into a side conversation about God’s jealousy, which is protective: these are Mine, and I will guard what is Mine. Devotion that belongs to Him and goes anywhere else is idolatry, and it ends up dragging us into the weeds.

“The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.” This is the first murder in the Bible and the first human death, and God knows it the moment it happens. We talk about the grief of a father losing a child, how God takes what happens to His people personally, and how much blood must be crying out to Him today. There’s also a personal testimony about being somewhere you know you shouldn’t be and hearing God ask, “What are you doing here?” That conviction is grace. He could bring judgment right then, and He chooses to teach instead.

God then takes away the very thing Cain was good at. The ground was already cursed, and now it won’t yield its strength to him at all. He’ll be a fugitive and a vagabond. The smart aleck is gone: “My punishment is too great to bear.” Is that repentance, or just the fear of a man who got caught? He never asks for forgiveness, and the text doesn’t settle it. His worry that someone will kill him is a clue that Adam and Eve already had a lot of children, since the Bible doesn’t name everyone, especially this early. Genesis 1–4 works like a brief history lesson that lays the foundation for what comes next. These chapters are prophetic too, introducing the enemy, sin, the covering only God can provide, and the Seed that Satan chases through the whole Bible.

And then the mark. God promises vengeance sevenfold on anyone who kills Cain, a huge mercy that’s hard to believe. Maybe Cain’s heart had changed, or maybe God had a plan for one of his descendants. Either way, it’s a picture of what mercy and grace are. Mercy is not getting what you do deserve, and grace is getting what you don’t deserve. We all want justice, as long as it lands on somebody else.

Cain goes to the land of Nod, east of Eden, which raises a fun question: the cherubim guarded the east side of the Garden, so was he looking for a way back? He builds a city and names it after his son Enoch. This isn’t the same Enoch or the same Lamech we’ll meet in Seth’s line in chapter 5.

Cain’s descendants give us the first tent-dwelling herdsmen, the first musicians, and the first metalworkers. Bronze is an alloy, so somebody before the Flood was already working that out. People were sharp back then, and curiosity hasn’t changed much, as anyone who has thrown something in a campfire to see what it does can tell you. Creativity is part of being made in God’s image. The good gold of Havilah, work before the Fall, the jobs we may have in heaven, and Jesus the Creator working as a carpenter all come up here.

Lamech takes two wives and tells them he has killed a man for wounding him. The translations differ on whether it was one person or two, a man and a young man. Was it self-defense, or a response far out of proportion? He seems to reason that if Cain would be avenged sevenfold, he has it coming seventy and sevenfold. Should he really be the one to judge that?

That opens a long conversation about generational sin and how it can be broken, including the story of a friend from a long line of heavy drinkers who came back to the Lord and told his dad, “I love you, but it stops here.” Children raised in addiction, sin, or poverty often think that’s normal, which is why it matters so much when somebody stands up and says it won’t go on another generation. We talk about the responsibility men carry as heads of their households, what an absent father can cost, and Israel’s unbelief and blindness, along with the promise that God isn’t finished with Israel.

Chapter 4 ends with hope. Eve bears Seth, “another seed instead of Abel,” and when Enosh is born, “then began men to call upon the name of the Lord.” The Hebrew has God’s name, Yahweh, right there, which raises the question of how that name was lost by the time of Moses. From there it’s a side trip to Elijah on Mount Carmel, “the God that answereth by fire,” and what God did for an exhausted Elijah afterward: rest and food. Where Cain’s line went out to build and make things, Seth appears to teach his son to call on God. It started at home, with the head of the household doing the right thing.

Next episode: Genesis 5:1, including what the names in the genealogy mean and the name God gave Adam and Eve together.

Back from a short break and picking up in Genesis 3:20 through 4:8. God makes coats of skin for Adam and Eve, the first sacrifice for sin and an early picture of the cross. Plus: the “us” of Genesis 3:22 and the Trinity, why God closed off the Tree of Life, and how He gives chance after chance. Then Cain and Abel’s offerings: giving God our best, why the heart matters more than the checkbook, and God’s warning that “sin is crouching at the door — you must master it.”

Briefly recapping the Fall and the curse in Genesis 3: even in judgment, God shows Himself as a good Father. He promises a Redeemer who will crush the serpent’s head, and the thorns from the curse show up again in the crown Jesus wore on the cross. Adam names his wife Eve, “the mother of all living,” which leads into the miracle of life from conception, along with some family news about new babies and grandbabies on the way.

In Genesis 3:21, God clothes Adam and Eve in garments of skin. An animal had to die to cover their sin. That “crimson thread” runs from Eden through the Old Testament sacrifices to the Lamb of God, and it’s a big part of why communion matters: it reminds us what that covering cost.

God’s words in Genesis 3:22, “the man has become as one of us,” open up the Trinity: one God in three Persons, seen clearly at Jesus’ baptism. That turns into a candid side conversation about ordination councils, the limits of explaining God, and why believers should spend less time arguing Calvinism and Arminianism on social media and more time loving people. God is sovereign, and we are responsible for our choices.

Cherubim and a flaming sword bar the way to the Tree of Life, and that was mercy. God would not leave humanity locked into a sinful, decaying existence forever, and sanctification and glorification are His plan to bring us out of it. A little speculation follows: did the Garden last until the Flood, does the Tree of Life explain the long lifespans before the Flood, and what about its return in Revelation 22? In the end, Jesus is our true Tree of Life. There’s also a fun side trip into ancient Hebrew, the names of God, and how complicated the English language is.

In Genesis 4, Abel brings the firstlings and the fat portions of his flock, and Cain brings an offering “of the fruit of the ground.” God accepts Abel’s offering and not Cain’s. That opens an honest talk about tithing and giving, including a personal story about giving a “Cain offering” early in marriage and how faithfully God has provided since. A word of caution, too: don’t feel pressured into giving. Pray about it, and remember that God wants obedience and a cheerful heart, not just money. That includes our time, which many of us guard more tightly than our wallets. And the tithe goes back before the Law, to Abraham and Melchizedek.

Cain gets angry because he “did his duty” and expected God to owe him for it. God lovingly confronts him: “If you do well, will you not be accepted? … sin is crouching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” Even before the Law, God was teaching His children and giving them a way to choose rightly. Cain ignores the warning and kills his brother. Closing with Psalm 145:8–9: the Lord is gracious, merciful, and slow to anger, and He calls us to show those same traits.

Next episode: Genesis 4:9, as God comes to Cain with a question He already knows the answer to.

We’re back in Genesis 3 for the Fall. The serpent opens with the same question the world still asks Christians: “Did God really say?” We go through Eve adding to God’s command, Satan’s lie that “you will be like God,” and Adam standing right there and saying nothing. Then come the hiding, the blame-shifting, and God’s curses on the serpent, the woman, Adam and the ground. Through all of it God gives the first promise of a Savior (Genesis 3:15), the Seed who will crush the serpent’s head. We also cover why every part of the Bible is God’s Word, not just the red letters, how to test what you read against Scripture, and why sin is a twisting of what God made good.

Genesis 1–2 describe creation. Genesis 2 zooms in on Adam and on Eve, who was made from Adam’s rib to be his helper and companion. Genesis 3 opens with the serpent, “more subtil than any beast of the field,” asking the woman, “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” (Genesis 3:1).

That question should sound familiar to Christians today. “Did God really say?” and “Is that really what it meant?” are still the openings used to raise doubt about Scripture, whether through “that was just the culture back then” or by twisting the Greek and Hebrew. Our answer is that God doesn’t change (Hebrews 13:8) and that not one jot or tittle of His Word will pass away (Matthew 5:18).

Eve leaves out the word freely and adds “neither shall ye touch it,” which God never said. We compare this to the Pharisees, who built layers of oral tradition around the Law of Moses. Jesus called those layers the “traditions of men” (Mark 7:8–13; Matthew 15:1–9), and they kept people out of the Kingdom (Matthew 23:13). Churches can do the same thing when they set up man-made “guardrails” and treat them as tests of salvation or of spiritual maturity. The gospel is Jesus plus nothing.

Some related points from the conversation:

We encourage young people to study Scripture for themselves and to “show thyself approved unto God… rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). The memorization programs many of us grew up with (AWANA, RAs and GAs) hid God’s Word in our hearts in a way that lasts (Psalm 119:11). Good teachers like Charles Stanley, Adrian Rogers and J. Vernon McGee can point you in the right direction. With any book about the Bible, check the passages it cites, read the surrounding context, and see whether they actually say what the author claims.

Satan contradicts God directly. We talk about how much Satan knew. He knew God does not lie, and he seems to have known a Redeemer would come, which is why he has been chasing the promised Seed through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David and Israel, and why he still hates the Jewish people today. We also suggest jealousy as a motive: God formed humans with His own hands and made them in His image.

Satan and his angels are not all-knowing. Their view of the future is limited. We use the slave girl with a spirit of divination in Acts 16:16–18 to show this. Her fortune-telling was a moneymaker with short-range predictions, and it ended when Paul cast the spirit out. Modern psychics are the same kind of thing, and missionaries still tell of people coming out of the occult and leaving those “abilities” behind.

The temptation itself is “ye shall be as gods,” with the hint that God is holding something back. We point out that the same lie, that a person can become a god, shows up in some modern religions. Satan is the father of lies (John 8:44). He comes to steal, kill and destroy (John 10:10), and he seeks whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:8).

Eve reasons her way into sin: the fruit is good for food, pleasant to the eyes, and able to make her wise. Each of those desires was given by God, and Satan twisted them. We connect this to a line the hosts attribute to C.S. Lewis: sin is not the opposite of holiness but a perversion of what is holy. Today the same thing happens with God’s design for intimacy within marriage.

Adam was “with her.” He heard the whole conversation, said nothing, and ate. He had dominion over every creature (Genesis 1:28) and the intelligence to name every animal (Genesis 2:19–20), yet he didn’t stop it. Men are called to step up and say “no” when their families are being tempted. Paul calls Jesus the “last Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:45). Jesus did only what the Father told Him (John 5:19; Luke 22:42) and showed what Adam should have done.

Next time we pick up at Genesis 3:20, where Adam names Eve. Then we move into Genesis 4 and the first fight in human history, Cain and Abel.

Genesis 1–2; Genesis 3:1–19; Genesis 1:28; Genesis 2:19–20; Genesis 4; Genesis 5:5 · Psalm 22:3; Psalm 119:11 · Matthew 5:18; Matthew 15:1–9; Matthew 23:13; Matthew 27:29 · Mark 7:8–13 · Luke 22:42 · John 5:19; John 8:44; John 10:10; John 14:26 · Acts 16:16–18 · Romans 8:22 · 1 Corinthians 6:19; 1 Corinthians 15:45, 51–52 · Ephesians 5 · 1 Thessalonians 4:13–17 · 2 Timothy 2:15; 2 Timothy 3:16 · Hebrews 13:8 · 1 Peter 5:8 · 2 Peter 1:20–21 · 1 John 4:18

Episode 93: Genesis 2–3, from the First Command to the Serpent

We start by looking back on two incredible Sundays in a row. Brother Jake did his first baptisms (five of them), the altar stayed full song after song, and our youth came down without hesitating to pray with visitors. We also talk about a youth solo that knocked it out of the park, a packed choir, and the joy of seeing our young people get up and join Greg for his favorite Bible school song.

Then we go back to Genesis 2:

We finish by starting Genesis 3:1–3. The serpent asks “Has God really said?”, which is a tactic Satan still uses today. Eve adds “neither shall you touch it” to God’s command, and we talk about how adding to God’s Word leads to legalism, like the Pharisees. The fruit was never the point. Obedience and love were. We close on pride as the sin that brought Satan down, and on the humility of Christ, who left His glory to die for us.

Next time: We pick back up in Genesis chapter 3, around verses 4 and 5, and get into the heart of the Fall.

On this episode we continue discussing the Book of Genesis chapter 2.

We continue our discussion of the book of Genesis Chapter 1 following the days of creation.

On this episode we begin our discussion of the Book of Genesis.

On this episode we wrap up our discussion of the Book of Revelation. Join us next week as we begin our discussion of the Book of Genesis.

Join us as we wrap up Revelation Chapter 21.

Join us as we continue the Book of Revelation with Chapter 21.