I’m starting a 90 day Bible study where you read through he Bible every 90 days. It seems like a good time to start an ongoing Bible study on here. We need to learn to see Jesus in the Bible and I want to point out ways that I see him from cover to cover.
There are plenty of ways that the beginning of Genesis points to Jesus but I want to look at Cain and Abel. We know that basic story so here’s a quick recap. Cain and Abel both made offerings to God. Abel offered a lamb and Cain offered garden produce or what you could call the fruits of his labor. God accepted the lamb and not the fruit then Cain got mad and killed Abel. So God punished Cain and gave the family a new son, the end.
Where exactly is Jesus in this story? Kind of everywhere but let’s look at this. The blood of a lamb was the offering that God accepted. Not just any lamb either, it says, “fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock.” Many people make this out to be a heart issue. But the fact is that the firstborn lambs of the flock were a prophetic picture of Jesus too. This was the pattern God had shown them when He killed animals to clothe Adam and Eve too. Cain worked hard to grow a garden and he offered what the Bible calls, “the fruits of the soil” so what is the prophetic picture of fruits of the soil? The hearts of men, like Tupac sang about.
How are the fruits of the soil a picture of the hears of men? Jesus gave a parable about sowing seed where he described different types of soil and which ones bear fruit. He interpreted the different types of soil as different types of people and what was in their heart made the difference in whether or not they produced a crop. the Bible interprets itself this way and Jesus said this parable was key to understanding all parables.
Cain didn’t understand that his fruits were unacceptable because they represented good works making us righteous. He just got jealous and angry and fleshly and decided to fight against what he thought was the reason his gift didn’t make him right with God. He thought it was because his brother did a better work, and it was all just to make him look bad. Cain didn’t see the spiritual nature of the exchange, he only saw the physical.
After God dragged the truth out of Cain and explained the nature of blood, which flew completely over Cain’s head because he was still thinking in physical terms; God pronounced the punishment. The crops aren’t going to grow for you and you will be forced to wander the earth. He was about to become the first hunter/gatherer, just the opposite of what most historians teach oddly enough. This led him to start the first city, also backwards of what history teaches. I’ve come to feel like academics is doing this on purpose, but it may just be that, like Cain, they are only able to see things in physical terms and are limited by their logical minds.
Anyway, Cain suddenly can’t handle life when all that he had is now gone and he finally decides this is bad. God does the strangest thing here, “Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him.” There’s a lot more in the Bible about marks on people and I want to remember to follow this through to the end. But here’s the thing for now, as a killer he knew he deserved to be killed. This mark made him fit in after he had just done the first murder. Not only was it the first murder but it also pointed to Jesus. the Bible says that Abel was the first prophet to be murdered for righteousness.
So what kind of mark makes the kind of people who would be killing people one day in the future, not kill someone? It clearly isn’t a mark that God puts on His own servants otherwise all of the prophets wouldn’t get murdered all through history. Was Cain marked for destruction at this point? Was this a mark of the beast prototype? Those who see the mark know that he fits in here in the world and should be left alone. This is as much a question as it is a statement. I don’t know this for certain but it feels like it almost has to be related. As marks come up in the Bible I’ll try and keep that conversation going.
I hope you guys enjoyed this little Bible study. Today in the 90 day reading plan was Genesis 1-16, jump in there and read along if you would like. Try to find Jesus on every page. God bless you guys.
Practice Outlaw 