We come now to a part of Genesis which is the most debated subject in the entire Book of Genesis. It is more debated that the creation story itself. I honestly did not want to cover this, and in the interest of keeping us moving at a good pace through Genesis, I thought I would have a good excuse to either pick another subject entirely or just skip it and move on. However, one of the things which happensas we go through the Bible in my particular preaching method, is I do not get to choose the topics. The topics come from the Bible itself as we go through it.

Did people really live over 800 years? Where did Cain get his wife? What's in a name? Can we really trust Genesis? Hasn't science already shown us that there's no possible way Genesis can be true? What's any of this got to do with the gospel of Jesus Christ?

RC states of our text for today, “The prophesied hostility between the offspring of the serpent and the offspring of the woman (cf. 3:15) takes shape immediately in the hostility of ungodly Cain against godly Abel (vv. 1–16), and in the contrast of Cain’sungodly offspring (which we will see later) versus the godly line of Seth (4:17–5:32). There is a horrendous escalation of sin from Cain to Lamech. 4:1–16 The focus is on Cain, the archetype of Satan’s followers. Cain displays his kinship with the devil by his hostility against God and his murder of a good man (v. 8; Matt. 23:35; Heb. 11:4), together with his lies (v. 9; John 8:44; 1 John 3:12).”[1]

[1] R. C. Sproul, ed., The Reformation Study Bible: English Standard Version (Orlando, FL;Lake Mary, FL: Ligonier Ministries, 2005), 15.