I Did It My Way
Genesis 4:1-16
Dr. Roger W. Thomas, Preaching Minister
First Christian Church, Vandalia, MO
Introduction: If our text were a movie, I have the perfect musical soundtrack for it. It is the song Frank Sinatra made famous. In fact, it became his theme song. Sinatra co-wrote and recorded “I Did It My Way” in 1968. Many who knew Sinatra suspected that the song was part music and part autobiography. The lyrics sound the determined voice of a man who had experienced a lot of ups and downs in life. But even when life didn’t turn out the way he wanted, he stood his ground. No one was going to tell him what to do. Listen to the opening verse. “And now, the end is here And so I face the final curtain/ My friend, I’ll say it clear I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain/ I’ve lived a life that’s full I traveled each and ev’ry highway / And more, much more than this, I did it my way.”
“I Did It My Way” is more than Sinatra’s theme. It is also the story of human nature. But not just human nature in general. Yours and mine included. Our insistence on our way rather than God’s way explains a lot of human experience. That song would make the perfect sound track for our text!
Genesis 4 is part of the preface to the Bible. The preface is that part of a book that explains what’s to come. To picture it another way, the first eleven chapters of Genesis are like the little legend in the corner of a map. The legend shows you to how to tell up from down, where to start, and how to understand the little details. That’s what the opening pages of the Bible do. If you skip that, you will have trouble understanding what follows.
Genesis 1 reveals the origin of the world we live in. Life is not an accident. Genesis 2 describes who we are and what sets humans apart from the rest of the universe. Genesis 3 explains what went wrong and why the world we live in is so different than our wishes and dreams. Genesis 3 analyzes the root of evil. Genesis 4 pictures its fruit. Disobeying God has consequences. Not all of it immediate. Sometimes children reap what their parents sow.
Our story begins with the birth of two brothers. Genesis 4 picks up where Genesis 3 ends. Sin had entered God’s perfect world. It came in through an open window near the dark corner where God’s rule and man’s freedom meet. Both sides of the equation are true. God is in control. Yet he loves us enough to allow us room to choose to love him back or not. The first parents chose poorly.
Adam and Eve no longer lived in the paradise God made for them. Their children were born and raised where all families live—outside of Eden. Adam and Eve left the garden but they didn’t lose hope. God had promised that someday a child would be born who would change the course of history. He would undo the evil that had been loosed (Gen 3:15). We don’t know all that was going through Eve’s mind. But when her first child was born, she seemed to think this was it. She named him Cain, a word which meant gotten or acquired. She saw her first born son as God’s gift and her solution. She hoped he was the promised deliverer.
By the time her second came along, Eve no longer voices that same hope. She names her next son Abel, a name related to the word for vanity or vapor. Eve previews Ecclesiastes assessment of life’s futility, “vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” Or James’ reminder that life is but a vapor or mist. Here for a little while and quickly gone. Eve began her family with such hope then reality set in.
It’s that way for lots of families. Remember all those pictures of baby number one. The baby book records every little detail. Number two comes along. The pictures are fewer and farther between. The scrapbook contains only the highlights. By number three, the new has worn off and mom and dad are worn out. Number three is lucky to have a couple of spare pages in the back of number two’s scrap book. Who has time to take pictures?
I wonder how Eve’s change of attitude affected her two boys. We will never know for sure. Perhaps Cain grew up pampered, proud, entitled and convinced he couldn’t do anything wrong. Maybe Abel couldn’t do anything right, the object of his parents’ frustrations. We do know that Cain works the family farm. His younger brother ends up on the back forty herding the sheep. Two brothers born of the same parents and raised in the same family yet so different! They were just as different on the inside. Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, the Prodigal Son and the Elder Brother—this is not the last time we hear this story.
Act II of our story jumps forward at least a couple decades. The two boys grew up. The day comes when the two sons “go to church.” Worship is hard wired into the human spirit. The need to meet God started in the garden. Sin twisted but didn’t eliminate it. Men and women are still driven to believe in something bigger than ourselves. We either worship the creator, the creation, or some pathetic substitute. We cannot believe in nothing. As the ancients wrote, “Our hearts are forever restless until they find their rest in God.”
Cain and Abel knew that worship is hollow and empty without giving. So they each brought offerings. Cain the farmer brought the fruit of his harvest. Abel the herdsman killed and slaughtered the first born of his flocks. He brought the best he had in worship. We are not told many details. We know this much. God was pleased with Abel, but not with Cain. And most importantly, Cain knew it!
Why the difference in God’s response? After all, isn’t all religion the same? Isn’t one expression of worship just as good as another? Apparently God doesn’t think so! A few possible explanations have been suggested for God’s displeasure.
First, the two offerings may have represented a difference in commitment. Cain offered the fruit of his labors. Abel sacrificed a life. There is a qualitative difference. It is sort of like that old joke about the pig and the chicken. They saw a sign requesting produce for a benefit ham and egg breakfast. The chicken suggested they help out. “That‘s easy for you to say,” replied the pig. “For you that’s a donation. For me it’s a sacrifice.”
Easy, cheap, or convenient worship seldom impresses God. Remember what King David said when Araunah the Jebusite offered him everything he needed to make an offering to God? “I will not sacrifice to the LORD my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing” (2 Sam 24:24). No wonder the Lord called him a man after his own heart! God delights in committed worship.
There’s another related factor. The Old Testament insists that “without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.” The entire Old Testament system of sacrifices (the Passover, the Day of Atonement, and the rest) was in anticipation of the true Lamb of God, Jesus Christ. Throughout history God was preparing a people who understood the seriousness of sin. Sin demands life—the sinners or a substitute. A bloodless sacrifice cheapens sin. Maybe Cain was the first to try that short cut.
But God’s response may have been prompted by something else. The New Testament explains the difference between Cain and Abel this way. Hebrews 11:4 says, “By faith Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did. By faith he was commended as a righteous man, when God spoke well of his offerings.” God rejected Cain’s character as well as his sacrifice. Abel’s offering was the overflow of a believing life. Cain went through the motions. His heart wasn’t in it. His life didn’t back up his actions. God knows the difference even when others don’t. 1 John 3:12 warns, “Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous.”
This brings us to the third act in our story. Cain knew that God wasn’t pleased. What’s a person do when that happens? He can own up to the problem. He can acknowledge the error, ask for forgiveness, and pledge to do better the next time. He could! Or he can get mad. He can blame God. He can feel sorry for himself. That’s the way of Cain.
The Lord offers Cain some advice. “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.” No one toys with sin and wins. Insisting on doing life our way doesn’t make us free. It simply produces a less merciful master.
Cain’s anger takes control. Anger always does. It’s his way or else. He invites his brother to a secluded field. Abel never sees it coming. Cain does the unthinkable. He kills his own flesh and blood. Does he think that solves his problem? Does it make his offering any more worthy or God’s opinion of him any better? It doesn’t make sense. Sin and anger never do.
God confronts him. “Where’s your brother?” As if God didn’t already know! “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Plead ignorance and maybe the problem will go away. That’s a common human strategy. It didn’t work then. It doesn’t work now. Cain eliminated his brother, but he couldn’t eliminate the judgment of God. He was defiant to the end. God sentenced him to wander. Cain tried to build a city. To the end of his days Cain could have sang with Sinatra, “For what is a man, what has he got? If not himself, then he has naught / To say the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels / The record shows I took the blows and did it my way! Yes, it was my way!” The rest of Genesis 4 tells how Cain’s children and his children’s children continued to walk the path that he had blazed. With every generation, Eden grew fainter.
Conclusion: Our text from Genesis 4 gave birth to another famous story. You have all heard of it. Many of you may have had to read it for a high school or college literature class. John Steinbeck who would later win the Nobel Prize for literature wrote such classics as The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men. But the novel Steinbeck considered his most important was East of Eden. The title comes from Genesis 4:16. “So Cain went out from the LORD’S presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.”
Steinbeck wrote the book for his two young sons. The boys lived with their mother whom Steinbeck had divorced. He seldom saw them. But he thought of them. He explained, “I am choosing to write this book to my sons. ... They have no background in the world of literature. They don’t know the great stories of the world as we do. And so I will tell them one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest story of all—the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness.”
The book traces the lives of two families from the Civil War to World War I. Behind their stories is our story of Cain and Abel. At one point Steinbeck has the narrator in East of Eden explain: "Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. …We have only one story.” He referred to the story of evil’s unavoidable consequences.
Steinbeck was right and wrong. We all do live in the shadow of Cain and Abel. But he was wrong when he says that this is the only story. There’s another one that Steinbeck missed. It would be a sad world if all we knew was the story of Cain’s jealousy, anger, and revenge.
But there’s another story. The story of Christ reverses the story of Cain. Thousands of years later, God kept the promise Eve expected in her first born. The deliverer did come. In another garden in another place, he would reverse the stain of that first garden. Instead of “I did it my way,” the savior prayed, “not my will but yours be done.” On one very dark Friday he offered his own life as a sacrifice of blood and redemption. Three days God later raised him from the dead. To all who follow him in faith, he offers something better than Eden.
Listen to how the Bible explains our future: “But you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Hebrews 12:22-24).
***Dr. Roger W. Thomas is the preaching minister at First Christian Church, 205 W. Park St., Vandalia, MO 63382 and an adjunct professor of Bible and Preaching at Central Christian College of the Bible, 911 E. Urbandale, Moberly, MO. He is a graduate of Lincoln Christian College (BA) and Lincoln Christian Seminary (MA, MDiv), and Northern Baptist Theological Seminary (DMin).
