In this episode, we venture past traditional views and critically analyze the Biblical accounts of Cain, the serpent’s son theories, and what truly lies behind the mark of Cain. Learn how God’s rebuke to Cain reflects deeper issues of the heart, and ponder the real biblical lessons that come from these ancient stories. This narrative unfolds not just to recount history, but to offer insights into human behavior that remain relevant today.
00:00:03 Introduction to Strange Biblical Interpretations
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
SPEAKER 02 :
People get some really strange ideas about the Bible. There are those who believe, for example, that the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was sex. Never mind that God told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply. Never mind that he made them perfect and naked and unashamed. Never mind all that. I have concluded that some people couldn’t care less what the Bible says. They have their story, and they’re sticking to it. They go find a verse somewhere in the Bible that says something that they can use, and they grab it and hang on to it and build a whole idea, doctrine, or belief system around it and never bother looking at the Bible again. There’s a lunatic fringe also that believes that Eve had sex with the serpent. And her first son, Cain, was the result of that union with the serpent. So Cain is the serpent’s seed. Never mind what the Bible says. Well, just for the record, what does the Bible say? In Genesis 4, verse 1, it says this, And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord. Well, I don’t know. That seems easy to me. Adam and Eve had sex. They had a baby. His name was Cain, and they said this baby was given to us by God. So Cain was the first child born into the world, he was born of a natural union between Adam and Eve, and he appears to have been conceived after Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden. Now I know that’s not as titillating as the other theory, but it has the advantage of having at least some evidence behind it. There’s a law called the Law of Parsimony which says roughly that of two arguments presented on some theory, the shorter and the simpler of the two is more likely to be right. Why make something complicated out of something that is essentially very simple? Adam and Eve slept together. She conceived, had a baby. They named him Cain. We can safely assume that Adam and Eve liked the process that led to Cain. So they did it again, and they had another son. And they called this one Abel. Abel, we’re told, was a keeper of the sheep, and Cain was a tiller of the ground. In the process of time it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of his ground an offering to the Lord. And Abel, well, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering, but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell. He had a big storm cloud on his forehead. Now, when we read the Bible and we hear about offerings and sacrifice, we really don’t think very much about it. It’s just somebody kills an animal and offers it to God. I didn’t think much about it until I saw the movie The Bible. And there’s a scene at the end of that movie where Abraham has just sacrificed a goat and is burning the body as the camera backs away into the sky. And I was revolted by the scene because I didn’t feel like I ought to feel that way. I mean, after all, God commanded animal sacrifice, didn’t he? I shouldn’t be revolted at something God said was the thing to do, should I? Well, there are a lot of different ways of looking at that, and time won’t permit me to develop all of them, but let’s think about this offering, this one right here, Cain and Abel, for a moment. There is nothing in the account to suggest that God required an animal sacrifice. Not a word. Nothing that says God says thou shalt do it this way. There’s nothing specified at all relative to offerings. He may have, but the book doesn’t say so. Now, there’s a theory to the effect that the reason God accepted Abel’s offering and rejected Cain’s offering is that there already existed a revealed law about offerings. Abel did it right, and Cain did it wrong. But that assumes a fact that is not in evidence. In other words, where are you going to go to prove that there was a revealed law about offerings? Well, there’s not a word in the account. Now, since there are no instructions given to Cain and Abel about offerings, and if there were instructions that were germane to the story, they really ought to be in the story, shouldn’t they? So I think it’s safe for you and I to assume that they weren’t there or that they’re not relevant. So it’s reasonable to assume that the decision to give these offerings was theirs. Cain and Abel decided to give something to God. And why not? I mean, they had been blessed by God. They had crops. They had animals. Things were going good by this time, and they were grateful. So why was one offering accepted and the other rejected? There’s a mistaken assumption, I think, regarding sacrifice and offerings. They are not the way you get right with God. A sacrifice, an offering, is an expression of worship, of celebration, of thanksgiving. One gets right with God before one makes the offering, not by the offering. In other words, if you’re not right with God, he won’t receive the offering at your hand. He doesn’t want to hear from you. You have to first get right with God, and only then can you make an offering, can you make a sacrifice, can you give something to God that will be acceptable to him. So, if your heart isn’t right, your offering will not be accepted. Most preachers will accept the offering, but God won’t. And that’s as far as you need to go with Cain and his offering, especially since God himself explains the problem in the very next verse. And the Lord God said to Cain, Why are you angry? Why is your countenance fallen? If you do well, won’t you be accepted? And if you do not well, sin lies at the door, desiring to be at you. Master it. Get on top of it, boy. Don’t let this thing get hold of you. It’s a rebuke from God. He says, your heart’s not right. If you weren’t sinning, if you weren’t doing wrong, if your heart wasn’t all distorted and twisted, your offering would be accepted. Sin lies at the door, and it’s after you, Cain. You had better get on top of it. Cain was not accepted by God because he hadn’t dealt with his sin. His heart was not right, as becomes immediately apparent. And Cain talked with Abel, his brother, and it came to pass, when they were out in the field alone and out of sight, that Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and killed him. And so Cain becomes the first murderer. What did Abel do to him? Nothing. What did Abel take away from him? Nothing. The problem was that Abel, though, was a symbol of Cain’s failure. He was not willing to master it. He was not willing to get on top of his life. He wasn’t willing to change his heart. So he tried to stamp out the living image of his failure in Abel. There may be a lesson here. When I fall into hatred of another human being, The problem is not with him. The problem is with me, and I had better deal with it. Jesus said, He who hates his brother without a cause is a murderer in his heart. Is there anyone who thinks that the relationship between Cain and Abel was okay until the day of that offering? No, no, not at all. You know the rivalry was there. You know the attitude was there. You know the competitiveness was there. And Cain couldn’t master it. Well, the Lord finally came along and said to Cain, Where’s Abel? And he said, I don’t know. Am I my brother’s keeper? And now that phrase has passed into our language. And God said, What have you done? Your brother’s blood cries to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the earth, the earth which has opened her mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it shall never again yield her strength to you. You’ll be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth. Cain, it seems, was not only a murderer but a liar, and he was stupid. He thought he could hide his crime from God by covering it up with dirt, by burying it in the ground where it couldn’t be seen. And because he opened up the ground and put his brother’s bloody body in the ground and covered it up, God said the ground was cursed for him. He would never again be able to open the ground and have the ground yield its fruit to him. Now, one caution here. If you haven’t already, you will eventually run into someone who insists on taking the Bible literally. And right here is a classic figure of speech. It’s called personification. It is as old as the Bible. The blood of Abel is spoken of as if it were a person crying from the ground, hence personification. The blood spoke of the murder of an innocent man, just as the blood of Nicole Simpson testified of her death. Blood doesn’t speak, literally. But figuratively, it has always had a voice. So Cain was cursed. But what was that curse? There are a lot of misconceptions about Cain.
SPEAKER 01 :
I’ll be right back after these words. The most dangerous kind of sin, whether it be your own or that of someone else, is the hidden sin. The sin you cannot see. For a free program titled The Hidden Sin, write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44. And tell us the call letters of this radio station.
SPEAKER 02 :
Cain was placed under a curse, but what was it? Well, he was to be an outcast from civilization. He was to be a roamer, a nomad, having no home for the rest of his miserable life. And he would be a failure at any form of agriculture. Couldn’t grow anything. And that’s all. And it’s really pretty important to make that distinction. Cain was cursed, but he was not cursed in the way a lot of people seem to think he was. Listen to the following verses. And Cain said to the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me out this day from the face of the earth, and from your face I’m going to be hidden, and I’ll be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth, and it shall come to pass that anyone who finds me will kill me. Now hold it. Wait. Who’s going to find him? All that’s alive at this time, he’s killed his brother already. His dad and mother are the only people left, and he’s being cast off and run away from them. Well, what is sometimes forgotten when you read the early books of the Bible is the passage of time. Adam and Eve and their descendants lived for hundreds of years, as you’re going to find out shortly. And, for example, Adam himself lived for over 900 years and begat sons and daughters for the whole period of time. You can sit down if you’d like and do the math and figure out by an exponential curve how many people there might have been from, say, 900 years after Adam’s death. It was a substantial population by that time. So there would have been, long before Cain’s death, an awful lot of people who, if they found him, might have killed him. But the Lord said to him, Therefore, whoever slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken upon him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest anyone who finds him should kill him. And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden. And so, the mark of Cain passes into our collective memories, and it’s a terrible thing. But the mark of Cain is not the curse of Cain. Cain’s curse was that he would be a vagabond, a wanderer, and he couldn’t grow anything, right? The mark was given to him and placed upon him to keep anyone from hurting him. It was a protective mark. It wasn’t some kind of a sign that said, okay, here’s Cain, go ahead and beat up on him. Here’s Cain, go ahead and kill him. Here he is, lynch him. Here he is, make a slave of him. One totally absurd theory claims that God turned Cain black, and all his descendants were black. And they look at the black people in the world today and say that they have the mark of Cain. It is probably one of the most stupid ideas ever to be derived, in part, from the Bible. It is a curse, they say, and they use this mark of Cain to justify unspeakable crimes against black people. Well, add this to their crimes. They have corrupted Scripture. The mark of Cain is not a curse. It’s to protect Cain from violence. And so if anyone really believed, and notice how I said that, if anyone really believed being black was the mark of Cain, they should know that he is forevermore protected by God Almighty. That you are prohibited, forbidden to lift up a finger against any man who would have the mark of Cain. But, you know, who’s reading the Bible? Who cares what the Bible says? We’ll just take some idea and fabricate our own ideas around it and use them to our own ends. I’m afraid an awful lot of this misinterpretation of the Bible, this incredible corruption of Scripture, took place back in the days of slavery when people were trying to justify slavery. the inhuman treatment of black men and women, trying to salve consciences from having crammed them in the holes of slave ships and taken them across the ocean and thrown their dead bodies over the side of the sea as they went and food for the sharks. Well, you have to find something, I guess, to salve your conscience. But those people are the ones who deserve a mark. So let’s get the record straight. Not only is there not a word in the Bible about turning Cain black, all of Cain’s descendants, whatever their skin color was, died in the great flood of Noah. Everyone alive can count their descent from that righteous man. So there is no primal curse, no mark of Cain upon any man or woman living. In fact, this may be one of the great theological lessons from Noah’s flood. The curse is over. We all get a fresh start. And have you ever noticed God is very big on giving people a fresh start? I’ll have more when I come back after these words.
SPEAKER 01 :
And please tell us the call letters of this radio station.
SPEAKER 02 :
Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bare Enoch. And he built a city, and he called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch. Hold it. Hold it. Where, pray tell, did Cain get a wife? Now, this is an old favor to people who like to challenge the Bible. Would you like to have an honest answer for a change? I’ll give you an honest answer. Nobody knows. Now, to whatever extent that poses a problem with your interpretation of Genesis, let me give you a fundamental principle that you can take with you in Bible study throughout the whole book. There is at least a 50-50 chance it is your interpretation that is wrong, not Genesis. Most of the questions people ask about the early chapters of Genesis should be answered with a big, I don’t know. Because when people start trying to explain them, great confusion reigns. Let me show you what I mean. After this in Genesis, we get into a lot of begetting. And my first time trying to read the Bible, that’s where I nearly gave up. But it got interesting again in chapter 6. It came to pass… When men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair, and they took them wives of all that they chose. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he is also flesh. His days shall be a hundred and twenty years. Now, this is really odd, the construction of this is, because the verse 3, which I just read to you, seems almost out of place. But first of all, let me tell you what it means. What God is saying is, I am fed up with man. He is flesh. He is corrupt. His days are going to be 120 more years, and that’s it. That’s what he means. He basically is saying, from right here, there’s going to be 120 years before the great flood, and I’m going to get rid of all of them. Sounds kind of scary, doesn’t it? To think that somebody as powerful as God, who could blink his eyes and create the universe, says, I’m fed up with them. I’m going to give them 120 more years, and then I’m going to kill them all. For the moment, let’s lay that aside and continue with the idea that was going on here, that the sons of God are marrying the daughters of men of all that they choose. And verse 4 says, there were giants in the earth in those days. And also after that, when the sons of God came into the daughters of men and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men that were old, men of renown. I guess they would be if they were giants in the earth in those days. Well, people want to know, well, did angels marry women? Some people believe they did. And this is what I mean. When you should say, I really don’t know, people say, well, angels married women, and they had these great big giants and so forth, etc., and confusion reigns. Nobody knows exactly what this means, but it seems unlikely that it was angels marrying women because angels are spirit beings. They’re a different kind of being. You know, we can’t mate with monkeys, and angels can’t mate with us. I think the difference between angels and us may be greater than the difference between us and monkeys, as a matter of fact. So what does it mean? Well, there are just too many things that we don’t know about that time. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. How would you go about proving from the Bible that when God created Adam and Eve, that he never created anyone else? How do you know that there weren’t people somewhere else, that this was only one branch of humankind that he started in this one place at this particular time? Do you know that? Oh, I know there’s a scripture that says that Eve is the mother of all living, but you’ve got to remember, all of them died in the flood, and the people that came out of the flood were all descendants of Eve. So, who knows? We have no way of saying that that could answer how Cain got his wife. It could answer a lot of strange questions if there were more people than Adam and Eve. But we don’t know that either, do we? The fact is, the only thing we know about this is the Bible tells us that sons of God, whatever that may mean, married the daughters of men, whatever that may mean. And we probably ought to leave it alone at that. Some people have said that it was a certain kind of miscegenation because of the inbreeding that was going on in those early years, and the result of it was giantism. And that may be right, and it may not be right. In verse 5, God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of his thoughts was only evil continually. Well, you know, that’s not a bad description for the way things are right now, is it? The wickedness of man is great in the earth, and there are times when it seems every imagination going on out here in the hearts of man is just continually evil. And look what it says. It says it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and he grieved him in his heart. Now, that’s a troubling one, isn’t it? But there it is, staring at you off the page of your Bible, if you have it open, if you’re looking at it. It repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth. Do you know what that says? It says, I’m sorry I even started this mess. Now, we can find a way of explaining it around and say, well, repent means to actually turn around and go the other way. And I think it’s probably simpler, though, just to look at it and say, God was sorry he did it. And he was grieved by what had happened with man. And he decided that he was just frankly going to destroy them. Just going to clean them out. He could start another world somewhere else if he decided to do it. He could try it again. For all we know, he’s done it before and is going to do it again anyway. And this one didn’t work very well. The Lord God said, I’m going to just destroy a man I’ve created from the face of the earth. Man, beast, creeping thing, fowls of the earth. For I’m sorry I even made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. And because Noah found grace, I’m talking and you’re sitting there listening. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a just man. He was perfect in his generations. And Noah walked with God. And he had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and behold, it was corrupt. For all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. It’s really not that hard to understand, is it? I don’t know, morally speaking, if we are quite as bad today as they were before the flood or not. the movies that show these things depict them as being pretty bad. And, of course, Sodom and Gomorrah came along much later, and they got wiped out for how bad they got. But there, God didn’t kill everybody. He just killed those people in those two cities. But you can understand that we can get down to a place of corruption in the world where God would just be ready to wash his hands of us. except for Noah, and in Sodom and Gomorrah, except for a man named Lot and his wife and his two daughters. You know, you would think, reading this, that one would learn that it’s just not smart to trifle with God. When he gets tired of you, he has ways of dealing with you. Well, God said to Noah, the end of all flesh has come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through them. And behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Now, if you really want to get right down to it, the thing which finally had just brought God to the place of feeling he had to put an end to it was the violence, the increasing, growing violence. And we’ve run a long way down the road toward corruption in our country and the world has in general. And, of course, the sexual licentiousness, the sexual sins, the drugs, the alcohol, and all the things that we have done in these other areas have so corrupted us that we have begun to lose the moral fiber to resist violence. We have begun to lose what it takes to deal with violence. And so as time passes, we are becoming a more and more violent people. And God said to Noah, it’s over. Make you an ark of gopher wood. Make rooms in the ark. Pitch it on the inside and the outside with pitch. Here are the dimensions. Make it this way. I’m going to save you and some animals alive. But I’m finished with the rest of this mess. So Noah did what God commanded him to do. He and his sons went to work. They gathered the wood. They put together their ark. They built it. They had a long time, nearly 120 years to do it. And when it was done, God shut the doors and it started to rain. And all the losers stopped laughing. Until next time, this is Ronald Dart.
