Pastor Mark Nieting
Genesis 4: 4-16
Ash Wednesday 2011
Dear Friends In Christ, Gathered together wearing the “mark of the ash.”
All things, except for God, have a beginning…..a ‘genesis.’ Only God is eternal. Only God has always existed. God’s WORD begins with some very majestic words, ”In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” He brought all things into existence, literally from nothing…..with a thought from His mind.
“Let there be light. Let there be heavens and the earth. Let there be the dry land and the seas. Let there be plants and swarms of living creatures.” God said it and it happened…..and, God looked at all of it and God saw that it was GOOD.
In this fantastic paradise God formed Adam and then Eve from the dust of the ground. He blew His breath into them and they became living souls; and it must have been incredible for them; walking with God in the Garden of Eden.
But there was also evil in the Garden, a fallen angel named Satan, intent on spoiling God’s creation and the lives of God’s created. He tempted them to doubt the authority of God and they “reached for the fruit” and fell into sin. God’s holiness and man’s sinfulness resulted in consequences: Satan was cursed, Adam and Eve were put out of the garden, and…..Good News…. God promised to right the wrong that had come into the world. In time, a Savior would be born.
A child WAS born, the first-born of Adam and Eve. They named him CAIN. Was he the One, the Savior? Adam and Eve wondered. Even Satan wondered; would this be his downfall? The one who would crush his head?
A second son was born…..and named ABEL. Cain tilled the soil. Abel tended the flocks. Can you imagine the boys listening to their parents’ stories of the Garden of Eden, of walking with God, of life in paradise? Cain and Abel must have LOVED those stories, but NOT the stories that led to their expulsion from the Garden. Those stories were not so easy to hear…..how would they play out? When would Satan meet his “head crusher?” Who would that be?
Abel grew up in the shadow of his older brother. He heard the same stories. He worked long hours taking care of the flocks, while Cain raised the crops. Both brothers worked hard and their labors produced wonderful results.
Whether God commanded them to bring thank-offerings or whether it was a spontaneous outpouring of their hearts we don’t know, but a day came when each brother brought some of the “fruit of their labor” to give thanks to God. It was the first act of worship in human history.
Cain gathered a basket of fruits from his trees and seeds from his fields.
Abel chose a lamb, the finest of his flock.
Both offerings were certainly fine. Both were likely equal in value. The difference wasn’t on the surface…..the difference was in the hearts of the givers.
Abel’s heart will filled with love for God. Abel was waiting and hoping for God’s promise to be fulfilled. Abel quietly laid his lamb on a simple altar, offered with prayers that the sins of his parents would be overcome by the love of their God in forgiveness. Prayers that God would fulfill His promise of redemption.
Cain brought his gifts with a different motivation, one that’s still common today: that God can be influenced by the gifts we bring to Him. Cain’s faith was surpassed by his pride and his self-importance. Cain’s faith was in himself.
God accepted Abel’s offerings……….but not Cain’s. It made Cain angry. His anger turned to hatred; his hatred hatched a plan; and the plan flowered into the killing of his brother. Cain became a metaphor for murder in the first degree; outcast and separated not only from his family but from his God.
The lamb in this story seems almost insignificant. After all, it wasn’t the content of the offerings that we remember, it was the content of the hearts. Abel holds the story for about 3 sentences; and then he’s gone. Cain’s story isn’t much longer. Neither of them will ever be mentioned again in the Old Testament; and only briefly in the New.
But the LAMB will play an ever-increasing role.
It was there, just outside the gate of the Garden of Eden, that the lamb was quietly placed on the first altar in the first recorded worship service. The LAMB will be in full focus when God brings his first prophecy into fulfillment. And the LAMB will be in full glory and splendor in the final pages of Scripture as St. John describes the climax of God’s creation.
That is the genesis of the lamb.
God uses “types” … another word for “symbols”…. In the Old Testament to foreshadow Christ, who would be the fulfillment of that Garden of Eden prophecy; the one to crush the head of Satan.
The brazen serpent of Moses, held high on the pole in the desert to save God’s people from the poison of the snakes, was a “Type” of Jesus.
So was Jonah, three days in the belly of the whale and then “rising again” to life.
It was the blood of thousands of lambs saved God’s people from the plague of death in Egypt. So the lamb was a “type” of Jesus, who was to come.
There came a day when John the Baptist DID come, telling people “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”
Then came that fateful night when the lamb of the Passover was placed on the table in the upper room, set before the Lamb of God Himself; the “type meeting the anti-type,” the shadow meeting the substance, the promise meeting the fulfillment.
And then, for Abel, for Cain, for Adam and Eve, Moses and Peter, for Caiphas and Pontius Pilate, for you and for me, came those hours on the cross when Christ, our Passover Lamb, offered HIMSELF up to God in sacrifice for our sins.
At the end of time we will be, if by grace we are still in the faith, a part of that great supper of “the Lamb and His Kingdom,” guests at His Feast of Victory!
Lent comes again this year, as quietly as that first lamb came to that first altar. And so Christ comes to us in this season as He came; quietly that first Christmas, in a stable outside Bethlehem. The Lamb came and continues to come, in His holy Word. The Lamb meets us in the waters of our Baptisms. And the Lamb feeds us in the Sacrament of the Altar.
We are “the people of the Lamb.” He created us…. ransomed us…. and will be OUR LAMB forever. Amen.
