Listen to the sermon with the player below, or, download the audio.
+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. (Amen.)
Especially in the Church’s seasons of Advent and Christmas, when we think of Divine “birth announcements”, we might think of the New Testament’s reporting the angel Gabriel’s telling the Virgin Mary that she would conceive the Son of God, Jesus the Savior (Luke 1:26-38), and we might think also of the New Testament’s reporting the angel Gabriel’s earlier telling Zechariah that his barren wife Elizabeth would conceive the forerunner of the Savior, John the Baptizer (Luke 1:5-25). But, we might not think of what can be said to be four Divine “birth announcements” reported by the Old Testament, all of which Divine “birth announcements”, in various ways, point forward to the birth of the Savior and help us focus on repenting of our sins and receiving God’s forgiveness by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Those four Old Testament Divine “birth announcements” are the focus of our Midweek Advent Evening Prayer Services this year, beginning with Cain, about whose birth we heard in tonight’s Reading.
Picking up the narrative of the Old Testament, as we did, with God’s pronouncements to the serpent, the woman, and the man, we did not hear what should be the familiar immediately preceding narrative of the man and woman’s fall into sin, which we will hear again on the First Sunday in Lent, when more of Genesis chapter three is read. For our purposes tonight, however, we heard God tell the serpent, the devil, among other things, of the enmity (or, “hatred”) between the serpent and the woman, between the devil’s offspring (or, “seed”) and the woman’s offspring (or, “seed”), and how the woman’s Offspring would bruise (or, “crush” [NIV]) the serpent’s head, but the serpent would bruise (or, “strike” [NIV]) the woman’s Offspring’s heel. And, we heard God tell the woman, among other things, that God would surely multiply her pain in child-bearing and that in pain she would bring forth children. After God sent and drove out the man from the garden of Eden, Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, as far as we know their first child, no doubt experiencing what is familiar to many—morning sickness, swollen ankles, a pained back, and agonizing labor (confer Futrell).
What Eve said after giving birth to Cain is to some extent debated by Bible translators and commentators, at least in part due to what is thought to be an unusual grammatical construction in the original Hebrew. Probably the most common translation is what you heard read from the English Standard Version, with Eve’s saying, “I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord”. However, other translations have Eve identifying the man whom she has delivered with the Lord. For example, the International Standard Version has Eve say, “I have given birth to a male child—the Lord”, and somewhat similar is the Names of God Bible, which has Eve say, “I have gotten the man that Yahweh promised” (Bible Gateway). For his part, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther, at least in his Genesis commentary, describes Eve as hoping that Cain is the One promised to defeat the devil, even though she turned out to be mistaken (AE 1:242; confer Keil‑Delitzsch, ad loc Genesis 4:1-8, p.108).
You may know all, or at least some, of “the rest of the story”, how Eve also bore Cain’s brother Abel, whom Cain later killed, when the Lord had regard for Abel’s offering but the Lord did not have regard for Cain’s offering (Genesis 4:2-8). You may know that Adam and Eve’s children in some sense had less the image of God in which God created the first man and woman (Genesis 1:26-27) and more the image of their sinful parents through whom God created them (Genesis 5:3). And, that “image” is not about whom Adam and Eve’s children “resembled” but about original righteousness, holiness, and truth (for example, Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration I:10) and therefore also a right relationship with God, knowing God as He wants to be known, doing God’s will, and being perfectly happy in God (confer the 1991 Explanation #106). As Adam and Eve’s children, you and I by nature also lack part if not all of that image of God. We fail to fear, love, and trust in God above all things, and so we fail to love God in other ways and fail to love our neighbors as ourselves. We deserve temporal death and eternal punishment, apart from God’s, in His love and mercy, calling and so enabling us to repent and be forgiven by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.
Unlike us sinful children of Adam and Eve, Jesus Christ is the woman’s Offspring, conceived when the Holy Spirit came upon the Virgin Mary and the power of the Most High overshadowed her, making her child also, not the son of her fiancé Joseph, but the holy Son of God (Luke 1:35). Jesus Christ is the woman’s Offspring, Who bearing the sins of the world to the cross both bruised the serpent’s head, defeating the serpent, but Who also in that defeat had His heel bruised by the serpent, resulting in the woman’s Offspring’s death, as if, one preacher put it, “bitten by a venomous viper” (Futrell). And, that woman’s Offspring rose from the dead, and, because He has died for us and is resurrected, we who repent and believe do not die eternally. Eve’s faith is not explicitly mentioned in Holy Scripture (confer Leupold, ad loc Genesis 4:1, p.190), although she apparently trusted in that promise of God, even if she was wrong about Cain’s fulfilling it, but Abel’s faith is mentioned in Holy Scripture, as the seeming distinction between the sacrifices of Cain and Abel (Hebrews 11:4). In fact, the Divinely‑inspired author of the book of Hebrews goes so far as to say that Abel’s faith still speaks (Hebrews 11:4), as Abel’s blood cried to the Lord from the ground where Cain had spilled it (Genesis 4:10), though, that author of the book of Hebrews says, Jesus’s blood speaks a better word than the blood of Abel (Hebrews 12:24).
With bodies washed in Baptismal water and consciences clean from receiving the Body and Blood of Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar, we hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He Who promised is faithful; and, we consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as we see the Last Day drawing near (Hebrews 10:22-25). Our Lord’s first coming in the flesh humbly and His comings to us now in Word and Sacrament assure us that He will come a final time in the flesh gloriously to judge the living and the dead. We who repent of our sins and trust God to forgive us our sinful nature and all our sins for Jesus’s sake are so forgiven. God puts us into Christ in Holy Baptism, gives birth to us from above by water and the Spirit (John 3:3, 5; confer John 1:13) and so we are new creations (2 Corinthians 5:17; confer Galatians 6:15), being renewed in knowledge after the image of our creator (Colossians 3:10).
The Old Testament Divine “birth announcement” in tonight’s Reading may have been misunderstood by Eve as primarily relating to Cain, though it does relate to Cain in general, at least in terms of the woman’s pain in childbearing and bringing-forth children. More importantly, the so-called “proto-Gospel” (or, “first-Gospel”) relates to Jesus and His birth for us and for our salvation. May God preserve us in repentance and faith in Him until the end.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +