That Old Hermenutical Magic Got Me In Its Spell

So we're in Bible study tonight and we're looking intently at the text of Genesis 4 - Cain and Abel. I try to get the folks headed down the road of examinations - their lives and the lives of the people in the text.

What is worship? What makes it real? How do you know whether you are doing it right?

We look at the offerings of Cain and Abel and see that God accepted Abel's and rejected Cain's which started the "this is NOT going to turn out well" clock a ticking.

What made one offering better than the other? The word used for each person's was exactly the same in Hebrew. One of the people in the class was fixated on this:

3 When it was time for the harvest, Cain presented some of his crops as a gift to the Lord.4 Abel also brought a gift—the best of the firstborn lambs from his flock.
Gen 4:3-4 (NLT)

He looked at "some of" versus "the best of the firstborn" and decided based on what the Bible says later on about "first fruits" Abel's met God's requirements, putting the "cart" in this case the Law, before the "horse" or the text in Genesis 4.



Problem - the first fruits do not make an appearance until the book of Numbers.

So Cain would have had no way to break a law that didn't exist yet. In this case then, functionally the offerings were equal and it was the heart of Cain that God rejected.

You would not believe how hard that concept was to get across. I felt at one point like I was in an old Matlock rerun trying to explain why the evidence he was presenting was inadmissible. "Your honor he could not have possibly teleported in to commit the crime because teleportation has not been invented yet."

"But I know I saw it on TV."

And then that exasperated, "But your honor..." Andy Griffith used to do so well.

We finally got there, but I lost 5 minutes in the process.