Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 461
Genesis 4:10.
CAIN was of the Wicked One and slew his brother. “The way of Cain” is not hard to describe. He is too proud to offer atonement for his sin. He prefers his own way of sacrifice. He presents a bloodless oblation. He hates the obedience of faith. He smites the faithful Abel. Beware of the way of Cain, O proud self-righteous ones, lest you run therein, for the steps are few from self-righteous pride to hatred of true Believers and murder is not far thereafter. There is the seed of every infamy in the proud spirit of self-justification, and it is a great mercy that it does not more often show itself in all its terrific ripeness.
Look, bold boasters of your own merits, at the mangled body of the first martyr, for this is the full-blown development of your rebellious self-conceit. From all pride and vainglory, from all self-righteousness and hatred of the Cross of Christ, good Lord deliver us.
This is not, however, the drift of my discourse this morning. I have rather to indicate the method in which we also may be guilty of this sin of blood-guiltiness concerning our brother.
Dear Friends, I feel assured that the text of this morning, terrible as it must have been in the ears of Cain, ought to ring in your ears, and mine. And it may be that while that cry is heard again, though at the distance of many thousand years, it may awaken some here present to a sense of guilt, and to a desire for amendment. And thus the blood of Abel may speak good, though terrible things to them, and prepare their ears to listen to the voice of that other blood, “which speaks better things than that of Abel.”
First, we shall this morning enquire for the criminals whose brother’s blood cries from the ground. Next, we will endeavor to show the hateful character of the crime. Then, thirdly, we will select the judgment. And fourthly, we will exhort the guilty ones to turn from their ways and to hear the voice of mercy.
I. First, then, we are to MAKE A SEARCHING ENQUIRY FOR THE CRIMINALS.
I do not intend to say much, this morning, about the act of actually slaying one’s brother. The question of the right-ness of war is a moot point even among moral men. Among those who read their Bibles, the allowance of defensive war may, perhaps, still be a question. But any other sort of war must certainly be condemned by the man who is a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ. We shall say nothing, however, or but very little, concerning the criminality of those ambitious and unscrupulous persons who hurry nations into war without cause.
Lust of dominion and a false pride are setting the United States on a blaze. I know at this time a tragic incident connected with the present war in America. Four brothers left one of our villages in Oxfordshire, two of whom, if now alive, are in one army and two of them in the other. And, I doubt not, as desperately as any of their comrades, they are thirsting for each other’s blood. What horrors cluster around the iniquity of civil war. On yonder soil it is the blood of brothers that cries from the ground. Men are fighting, one against the other, in this lamentable conflict for no justifiable cause. The one cause which justified the war, as we thought—the snapping of the fetters of the slave—is gone. Emancipation is not proclaimed, the slave is forgotten.
What might have been a struggle for the rights of man is now a shameful and abominable slaughter of brothers by brothers. And a cry is going up to Heaven from those blood-red fields which God will hear, and will yet avenge on both sides. Oh that they would sheathe their swords and end it once and for all! What matters it if there are two nations or one? Better two in peace, than one divided with intestine strife! How much better to have even twenty nations of living men, than one nation of mangled corpses! What difference is it to the survivors if they have all the honor and dignity of conquerors, when they are stained up to their elbows in the blood of their fellow men?
Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, “Consider your ways.” Arise, you that draw your sword against your fellows and weep like the weeping of Ramah of old, and make your cities like Bochim, because of your iniquities! Go back to your homes in peace, beat your swords into plowshares, and your spears into pruning hooks, for Jehovah will have none of them. He casts out your armies like dung upon the field because every man of you smites his kinsman and his fellow!
That, however, is not my subject this morning. May God grant that whatever may come of this terrible struggle, His name may be glorified. At present I see nothing but a carnival of madmen—Hell let loose. And I fear that an evil demon has deceived both nations, and made them like ravening wolves and roaring lions.
I have to deal with you, however and not with those across the ocean. Let us come, therefore, to the point. There are many persons whose brother’s blood cries to God from the ground. There is the seducer. He spoke with honeyed words and talked of love, but the poison of asps was under his tongue, for lust was in his heart. He came to a fair temple as a worshipper, but he committed infamous sacrilege and left that to be the haunt of demons which once was the palace of purity. Such men are received into society. They are looked upon as gentlemen, while the fallen woman, the harlot sister—she has to hide herself beneath the shadow of night.