Brief: We fight against our sinful natures by
giving ourselves to the Lord and letting Him transform us.
Needed: nothing
Scripture: Genesis
4:1-26; Psalm 51:5; Luke 1:26-35; Romans 12:1-2; Hebrews 4:14-15
Read Genesis
4:1-2
When
did Adam and Eve start having kids? Was it before they sinned or after? (After
they sinned.)
Read Genesis
4:3-5
Why
do you think that Cain and Abel brought offerings to God? What were these
offerings supposed to do? What is the purpose of making an offering elsewhere
in the Bible?
Offerings
are either given in order to give thanks to God or to ask God’s forgiveness for
some sin that a person has committed.
Why do you think that God did not accept Cain’s
offering?
It could be that Cain did not have the right
attitude in giving his offering. It could be that when Cain gave his offering,
he really didn’t mean it. The main issue, though, seems to be that Abel brought
his best, whereas Cain only brought some.
God wants our best too. How do you think we can
give God our best?
We can give God our best by setting aside time for
Him every day. God wants us to spend time with Him, and He doesn’t want our leftovers. He doesn’t want it to be a last minute or
maybe-I’ll-get-to-it-when-I-have-time kind of thing. He wants you to plan to
give Him some time out of your day.
Read Romans 12:1
When
God says, He wants our best, He means
that He wants us. He wants us to offer ourselves to Him. We are the offering.
We give ourselves to God, promising to live for Him. We die to ourselves. Just
like a sacrifice dies, we stop living for ourselves, and we start living for
God.
By not doing what was right, Cain was sinning.
But how did Cain come to have sin in his life? He
didn’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Remember we said
that he wasn’t even born until after God had banished Adam and Eve from the
Garden of Eden.
There are only two solutions to how Cain became
sinful. One is that God created him to be a sinful person. This means that God
created Cain’s soul to be a sinful soul and put it in Cain’s body. Does this
sound like something that God would do? (No.)
We know that God does not make anything bad. He
makes things good, and they become bad
through their own choices and actions. The second theory is that it was a
natural consequence of Adam and Eve’s sin. When Adam and Eve sinned, they
became sinful. When two humans have a child, that child is human. So if two
sinful humans have a child, that child is sinful. This means that not only our bodies but also our souls are passed down to us
through biological reproduction.
Read Psalm
51:5
This is how all of us inherit the sinful nature. We
receive it from our parents, just like we receive our DNA from them. Since
everyone is a physical descendant of Adam and Eve, all of us have inherited
their sin.
But Jesus was not sinful. He was not born with the sinful nature.
Read Hebrews
4:14-15
What made Jesus different? Why wasn’t He born with the sinful
nature?
Read Luke
1:26-35
So what was different
about Jesus? (He didn’t have a human father. God was Jesus’ father.)
Jesus was the only
person to have ever been born without having a human father. He is also the
only person to have never had a sinful nature.
So it seems that we
inherit our sinful nature from our fathers. And since Jesus did not have a
human father, He did not inherit the sinful nature.
Read Genesis
4:6-7
What is God doing for
Cain? (He’s warning him not to do what he is about to do.)
Do you think God ever
warns us when we’re thinking about doing something that we shouldn’t? How does
He do that? (He warns us through our conscience and through the Holy Spirit
speaking to us.)
Read Genesis
4:8-12
What did Cain do when
God asked him what happened? (He lied.)
Did God believe Cain’s
lie? (No. God knew what happened. God knows everything.)
Do you think Cain’s
punishment might have been less if he had not lied to God about it?
That’s a possibility.
It’s always better to confess and tell the truth than to lie about it and keep
on sinning.
Read Genesis
4:13-16
Even though God
punishes Cain, God still has mercy on him by making it so that no one will kill
him.
Read Genesis
4:17
Who was Cain’s wife?
Adam and Eve were the only people having children
at this point so where did Cain’s wife come from? It was his sister. It wasn’t
until the time of Moses that God forbade marrying your relatives. Up until
then, your relatives were the only people you could marry. Cain had to marry
someone.
Read Genesis
4:18-26
It’s interesting to see how Cain’s line
contributed to the development of human society with tools and music while
Seth’s line continued the faith of his parents with prayer. Lamech also
continued Cain’s propensity for anger and violence, while we don’t see anything
like that in the legacy of Seth.
But Seth still did have the sinful nature, as we all do. So, how do we fight against our
sinful nature?
Read Romans
12:1-2
When we give ourselves to God and let Him
transform us, we can overcome the sinful nature.
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