By Faith Abel
Monday, July 18, 2005 at 7:00PM This is the second post in a series on Hebrews 11. You can find the first post here.
After the preliminary remarks of verse 1-3, the writer of Hebrews begins to go through his list of the faithful “people of old” to show us the significance of faith in their lives. He starts way back at the beginning with Abel, one of the sons of Adam and Eve.
By faith Abel offered God a greater sacrifice than Cain, and through his faith he was commended as righteous, because God commended him for his offerings. And through his faith he still speaks, though he is dead. (Hebrews 11:4 NET)
You remember the story, right? Eve had two sons. Cain, the first son, grew up to be a “tiller of the ground”, and Abel, the second-born, kept sheep. Each of the two sons brought an offering to the Lord—Cain from the harvest of his crops and Abel from the firstborn of his flocks.
The Genesis account tells us that
….the Lord was pleased with Abel and his offering, but with Cain and his offering he was not pleased. (Genesis 4: 4,5 NET)
You’ve probably heard the same reasons given for God’s pleasure with Abel’s sacrifice but not with Cains that I have. I remember being taught in Sunday School as a child that Abel brought his best to God and Cain brought leftovers. Later on I was taught that the acceptability of Abel’s offering had to do with the nature of his sacrifice: It was a blood sacrifice, while Cain’s was not.
Neither of these explanations comes directly from scripture. In this passage, the writer of Hebrews points to something other than the substance of the sacrifice as the reason for God’s acceptance of the one sacrifice and rejection of the other. It was, he says, Abel’s attitude that made the difference. Abel offered his sacrifice “by faith,” and it was because of his faith that God spoke of him as righteous.
God spoke of the acceptability of Abel and his offering, and because of that, Abel speaks to us. Abel has been dead longer than anyone else on the face of the earth, yet his story is much more than a piece of historical trivia, for his example of faith continues to teach us. Long-dead Abel is one of the ancients who obtained a good testimony through faith, and he speaks to us as one of the “great cloud of witnesses” whose faithful examples cheer us on to “run with endurance the race set out for us.”
Reader Comments (2)
Being a young man of 64, I've heard the story that Cain slew Abel and as you said in your post Abel was favored by God. I'm not saying that what I'm about to say is correct but from my searching of The Gospel that I've heard so often in Catholic Churches, I figured that Abel was lucky enough to not having been taken by Evil and then again I keep thinking that one of them had to play the part of Good and The Other Evil. To simplify "IT", we might say that "IT" is kind of being balanced in Reality, You see when Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel's parent had cast themselves down because of Our original sin, they were not the only one down here, Do you agree so far? :)
Anyway, I always figured from serving high mass as a child that some angels had beat our original parents down here on earth to the punch kind of expression. So to sum "IT" all UP I'm just guessing mind you that someone had to keep those angels happy and as we know and could imagine, Satan's Angels were not that easy to get along with and there probably was a LOT of jealousy roaming God's Earth especially back then! Don't you think?
I hear ya! Victor why would you want to sympatize with Cain?
Go Figure! :)
Really enjoying reading this material but I'll leave my other comment until I hear from you first cause I'm not always every bodies cup of tea on occasions if you know what "I" mean
God Bless,
Peace
Hi,
i stumbled across your article here, nice work.
God Bless,
Emma