On the Meaning of Cain and Abel by Chris White

Cain had a brother as long as he was Abel

^“ By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks. ”      --Heb. 11:4

^“ Woe to them! For they walked in the way of Cain and abandoned themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam's error and perished in Korah's rebellion.”   --Jude 11

To think of the Cain and Abel story, one can hardly ignore how fast jealousy and anger turned to fratricide and then lying and cover-up in the earliest generation of the human family.  This tragedy continues to reverberate through human society with a worldwide homicide rate of 7 people out every 100,000 persons being intentionally murdered.  But tragic as all of that is, the story of Cain and Abel is not primarily about the origins murder in the human family but rather the emergence of two kinds of people within the human race that are truly separated by their religion.


The background of the story (found in Genesis 4) centers on the worship of God as manifested in making sacrifices to Him.  It was not a question of if Cain and Abel were going to do this but how they were going to do this.  And you must know that even if you consider yourself a skeptic or even an agnostic, this speaks of your situation as well.  Cain is the tiller of the soil and Abel is the keeper of sheep.  Both know, presumably from their parents (Adam and Eve), that offerings are to be made to God and that offering is to be.


Cain makes as his offering the fruit of his labors as a farmer.  A beautiful basket of his best produce, maybe even some choice flowers, is arranged in a basket and placed on the altar before God.  It is a large basket, the best of the best, and yet it is rejected by the Lord.  Meanwhile, his brother Abel presents the Lord with a jumbled assortment of raw meat from a lamb he has slaughtered for this sacrifice.  And the Lord has regard for Abel’s offering.


At first blush the choice of Abel’s offering over Cain’s looks a bit arbitrary and unfair (which when parents act this way with their children predictably does stir up strife and resentments).  After all, both men were offering the Lord the fruits of their respective occupations.  But the Lord called Cain out on his sacrifice and told him to do right like his brother had done.  What we can derive from this is God had already set a standard of blood sacrifice and Cain had determined he was going to do his own thing and thus be a law unto himself.  In the words of Frank Sinatra, “I did it my way!”
And so before us in this story is in microcosm the only two religions that exist among men.  To be sure men hold to all sorts of religious ideas or none at all, but they are merely differing manifestations of the ‘way of Cain’ which is to approach God on terms other than what He has prescribed.  The other religion, the way of Abel, is to approach God on his terms.  He accepted only blood sacrifices because they looked towards and pointed to His son Jesus who would become “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (Jn. 1:29).  As Peter preached to those who had rejected Jesus and had Him crucified  ^“And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12).” 

Christ a Savior of all nations

This brings me to a final question: to which of these religions do you belong?  The answer to that question makes all the difference in the world.

Influence: The Church or Hollywood?

This may come as a shock to you but Hollywood has far less influence on our culture than does religion. Yes they have prominence in what you see on TV, but then again Hollywood virtually controls the medium. But prominent visibility doesn’t necessarily equate influence. As a nation, 120 million of us attend Church on a regular basis which is far more than the number who attend movies in a given week. When you consider that less than 25% of Americans read one book a year, and only 1% of them are in college, it is a safe assumption that listening to the weekly sermon is still the most widely practiced form of intellectual activity in America. If one were to look just at expenditures, Americans give 25 times more money to their houses of worship than they do to their local movie houses. So if the Church is so influential in our culture, why is it so seemingly invisible? The late news anchor Peter Jennings, himself a Canadian, was baffled by this. He thought it was odd that America was so deeply religious and yet it was nearly invisible to the news media. I have a couple of theories as to why this is so. First of all, unless you do something exceptionally weird, good, or flashy at your church, it’s of no value to the media. Every Sunday the vast majority of us come together and pray, worship, hear God’s Word, and fellowship with one another. It’s a good thing, but doesn’t create the kind excitement that plays well on film or television. Secondly, Americans consider their freedom to worship almost as sacred as their actual religion. In the name of respecting the freedom of others that we enjoy ourselves, we don’t make this an overt part of our personal or national discourse. It doesn’t mean our faith has no influence on America, it simply comes in through the back door of personal relationships which once again is hardly a media event. Perhaps a better gauge of understanding the Church’s influence in America would be to imagine if it didn’t exist or were suddenly removed (which would be a dream-come-true for militant homosexuals and radical atheists). Not to be over celebratory here, but the Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches of this country were huge partners in the building of our civilization and to this day provide countless hours of community services and emergency food and relief without any government help or incentive. The only real motivation is Christ’s great law: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. If this great influence were removed from our society, America would be less like itself and more like the Hollywood Babylon that some think we should be.

Monk Habits for Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants by Dennis Okholm

One of the bright spots in present-day evangelicalism is that the long impoverishment of it’s tradition of spiritual formation seems to be coming to an end. Witness the proliferation of books in the last two decades on the spiritual disciplines. When Richard Foster came out with Celebration of Discipline in the early eighties it was a bit of a radical book. Today, it is a classic of discipleship quoted by everyone else. Dennis Okholm has made an excellent offering in this field with his book which successfully makes the broadest principles of Benedictine spirituality accessible to Protestant laypersons. He makes a good point that St. Benedict actually preceded the existence of the Roman Catholic Church as we know it today and thus the tradition is actually more universally Christian belonging to neither Catholics or Protestants alone. That aside, Okholm invites the reader to consider the practices of listening, poverty, obedience, humility, hospitality, stability, and balance which are practiced to this day by those with a religious vocation. As an example, Okholm points out that the vow of poverty does not mean a monk has no resources. He actually has all he needs to do live his life and do his work. He or she just owns it communally instead of individually. A protestant can practice the same by generously sharing his possessions with others and creatively networking to pool things that are only used occasionally. Hospitality for Benedictines meant taking in and ministering to the needs of a stranger as if he were Christ in disguise. Protestants may not have a retreat house like a monastery does, but they might have a spare bedroom. Just treating the many strangers that cross our path in a given day as if they were Jesus Himself would be a form practicing Benedictine hospitality. The book does a good job explaining how all of these practices are directly connected with scripture and how they enable us to be more available to Christ that we might become more fully transformed. I would recommend this book to be read first and then follow it up with Henri Nouwen’s The Way of the Heart and Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines.