“Why did God accept Abel’s Offering?”

February 2019 – Grace & Truth Magazine

QUESTION: Why did God accept Abel’s offering and reject Cain’s? How were they instructed in what to bring to God?

ANSWER: God is righteous. He is sovereign. He is always fair. Also, all Scripture is given for our instruction in righteousness according to 2 Timothy 3:16, so there is obviously something in this account about Cain and Abel that God wants us to learn.

Very early in the ways of God with man, our first parents, Adam and Eve, fell into sin. Eve was deceived by Satan, who was in the form of a serpent. In Romans 5 we read that Adam is held responsible for bringing sin into the world because he sinned deliberately, having listened to the voice of his wife rather than to the command of God.

Once Adam and Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit, they knew they were guilty. They hid from the presence of God when He came to them in the garden in the cool of the day. Realizing that they were naked, entirely exposed and unfit to be in God’s presence, they made aprons to cover themselves. This was in a sense man’s first attempt to make himself fit to reach the presence of God by his own works. The effort failed. After God had righteously dealt with the matter, He made coats of skin for the guilty pair. To make coats of skin, animals had to be killed – blood was shed. This lesson is repeated again and again in God’s Word. “Without shedding of blood there is no remission [of sins]” (Heb. 9:22 NKJV), is the invariable teaching of God’s Word.

Throughout Scripture, God indicates that parents are responsible to teach their children, especially when it comes to the things of God. Can we not assume that as their sons were growing up, Adam and Eve told them the story of their experience in the garden into which God had originally placed them? Would they not have told of how they had feared after gaining the knowledge of good and evil and knowing that they had sinned before God, of how they had tried by their own efforts to cover up their nakedness? Surely then Adam and Eve would have spoken about how God had killed sinless animals to make clothes to cover them. Should the boys as they grew up to be men not have learned from their parents that approach to God was not possible through their own works, but only through a sacrifice that had to die, having its blood shed?

I realize that I am making an assumption in the previous paragraph, but I feel this is in keeping with the whole tenor of Scripture. Christ is the center of God’s entire revelation to us. “For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Rev. 19:10). Whether the Bible tells of Him directly, through prophecies or the many types and shadows, God wants us to focus on Him, His beloved Son. Details we might like to know in a story are often not given, that we might focus more on what God wants to tell us through what He has revealed than on things to satisfy our curiosity.

God is absolutely right in all that He does. Why should He have to give Cain and Abel special revelations about worship when their parents could teach them the simplicity of how to approach Him from their own experience? Worship as such is really not even a subject of the book of Genesis. It appears beautifully before us in Exodus when God delivers a people from bondage and wants to bring them near to Himself. In John 4 the Lord Jesus makes clear to the woman at the well in Samaria that the Father seeks worshipers who worship Him in spirit and in truth. Worship is something we bring to God, not something we receive from Him. Much of what is called worship in Christendom, or professing Christianity, today hardly qualifies as such according to worship’s scriptural definition.

Another factor to be considered is the motivation in the hearts of the two brothers. God is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. He is addressed as the One who knows the hearts of all in Acts 1:24. In Hebrews 11:4 He tells us that by faith Abel offered a more excellent sacrifice than Cain. First John 3:12 goes on to say that Cain was of the wicked one and that his works were evil and his brother’s righteous. This is God’s assessment, which He has been pleased to share with us centuries after the events in Genesis 3 and 4 took place.

Answered by Eugene P. Vedder, Jr.