People these days have become obsessed with the environment. We are constantly hearing about deadly greenhouse gases and the effect they are having on the climate. We are also hearing about how our high level of consumption is leaving behind a residue of trash and harmful substances that need to be eliminated. To curb the problem people have begun to chant the mantra, reduce, reuse recycle. And so people are recycling. They are recycling their shampoo bottles and empty cereal boxes and soup cans. They are buying their clothes at consignment shops to reuse old clothes instead of buying new. They are driving low emission hybrid vehicles, or zero emission electric vehicles. All in the hope to reverse the trend and preserve the environment.
So how did this happen? What lead to this concern for the care of the environment? A fear that our planet has become polluted, that we have filled it with deadly substances. A fear that the natural pristine order of this good world has become corrupted and corroded with our various byproducts. This environmental craze is built off of a fear that irresponsible use of the planet has polluted and poisoned the world so that it wont be a suitable place for us to live.
And so people recycle. They take shorter showers, they buy organic, they pay a little extra for a hybrid, they car pool. They buy high efficiency light bulbs. They turn off the lights, the tv, the computer all in the hope that they can help save the planet. All in the hope that they can help to return our planet to its natural, pristine and optimally habitable state. It's hip to be an environmentalist.
But with all this concern for the planet and pollution and the land and the environment, with all the reducing, reusing and recycling that is going in cities and urban centers all over the place, there is a pollution that is continuing unchecked. There are industries that are turning out destructive and corrosive materials and substances that will kill the planet, that will create a living environment that is utterly uninhabitable, that will be the death of all of us. And it's not smoke, its not greenhouse gases or automobile emissions, it's not oil spills or chemical spills. Instead the pollution that is destroying our planet and making unfit for people to live is the pollution of sin.
And it is a pollution. Pollution occurs when an un-natural substance is introduced into the natural environment that mixes and mingles with the natural so that it becomes corrupted and unstable. Sin does just that. Sin adds a foreign substance into God's good created order. It introduces things that do not belong. We think of chemical sludge dumped into streams and rivers and are concerned for the danger to the environment and for the health and well being of our children, but sin and the world's sin factories introduce the foreign and corrupting substances into the human experience every single day.
In our Old Testament text, this morning we see an act of pollution. We see that the actions of men interrupt the natural order of God's good world so that the environment was desecrated. Cain had become jealous of his brother Abel because the Lord accepted his sacrifice while Cain's had been rejected. And so Cain murdered Abel.
Life and death is in God's hands. It is not given to men to decide when life begins or when it ends. This is God's work. It happens according to the natural unfolding of God's creation. But then Cain took life into his own hands. In a fit of jealous rage he introduced something foreign into God's pristine world. He corrupted God's world and cursed God's world when he murdered his brother. He introduced something in to God's creation that did not belong and the result was that the ground itself was tainted.
Notice what God says, “What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground which has opened its mouth to receive your brothers blood from your hand.”
Life is God's gift. It belong to God to give life it belongs to God to take it away. Cain interrupted the natural ecology of God's world so that the ground itself was polluted.
God says as much in Numbers 35:33-34, “You shall not pollute the land in which you live, for blood pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it. 34 You shall not defile the land in which you live, in the midst of which I dwell, for I the Lord dwell in the midst of the people of Israel.”
Or else, consider Psalm 106. 38 they poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan, and the land was polluted with blood.
So sin, and specifically murder, pollutes the land and affects not just the people, but it affects all of God's creation.
But that is not all, murder is not the only sin that pollutes. In Leviticus 18 God gives commands about all kinds of sexual sins, sins that his people are not to commit. They are sins that violate and defile the nation, the people, and even the land. God says, “Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, 25 and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. Murder and sexual sins are a pollution. These sins introduce a foreign substance into the natural order of God's world so that it becomes disordered and harmed.
Lets consider our own day and our own time. Think of the murders that continue on each and every day. There are murders that go on that are publicly sanctioned. Murders of the unborn that are legally protected and even funded. There is an increasing disdain for the life of the aged and infirm. Make no mistake, the sins of abortion and euthanasia are sins that have stained the land with the blood of our innocents.
But that is not all. The indecent and lewd acts that were condemned by the Lord in Leviticus are more and more becoming common place. These relationships, that are contrary to God's created order, and are violations of his creation are becoming also publicly sanctioned and even protected by legislative or judicial decree. Make no mistake, these acts pollute and defile the land.
In the Old Testament, this pollution of sin required that those living in the land be destroyed. God said that the land would vomit out the people who committed those acts. God judged them in their sin so that they were destroyed.
My Christian friends, we live in a land that is polluted. If God judged the Canaanites and Perizites and the Hittites and Jebusites so that they land spewed them out, than certainly our land is poised to do the same. This pollution needs to be cleaned up. The environment needs a good spring cleaning.
There's nothing you or I could do about it, to be sure. After all to say that I had to change or that you had to change and that together we could make a change would be ludicrous. It would be like trying to clean up the smog in LA with a glade plug in. We are just not up to the task. So we can't fix it. But God can. God can clean up the sin that has corrupted our world. And God can return the world to order and cleanliness.
There is kind of a weird little thing that occurs in our text this morning that you can't really see in the translation. Sometimes there are phrases or comments that are made that could be possibly understood more than one way, and we seem to have one of those instances here in our text. When Eve gave birth to Cain, our translation tells us that she said, “Behold I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord.” The Hebrew grammar leaves us guessing a little bit as to exactly what she intended to say; it allows us to wonder if Eve didn't think The Lord had just sent the Messiah. A few verses prior God gave the first Messianic promise, the first promise of a savior. God promised a son of hers would crush the head of the serpent. And then Eve God pregnant and had a boy and she said, “Behold I have gotten a man, the Lord.” Apparently, Eve thought that Cain was the Messiah. Eve thought that this boy would clean up the pollution and mess that she and her husband had made.
Eve was wrong. Cain was not the Messiah. In fact, he turned out to be a murderer. And a polluter of the world. A man, yes. But the man who first spilled a man's blood and thus polluted the earth with death at the hands of men. And so Abel's blood cried out from the recently polluted ground for God's vengeance.
But time went on. Adams son and Eve's daughters gave birth to generations of men. And to generations of sinners. And the pollution on God's planted continued. But the Lord kept his promise and sent that man that Eve was looking for from her womb. The Lord sent Jesus; a man and the Lord all at once. God sent Jesus, to be born of a woman, born under the law, the same law that condemns Cain and also condemns us.
What Cain was not, Jesus was. Cain coveted. Jesus loved. Cain took life from his brother. Jesus healed those who were injured and even raised the dead back to life. Cain polluted the earth with the blood of his brother, Jesus came to clean up that pollution.
The Old Testament tells us that anyone who murders another, who spills the blood of his brother on the ground, that murderer will be cursed. The Lord cursed Cain because of the blood of Abel. If Cain was cursed because of the blood of his brother, imagine the curse for murdering the very Son of God. Imagine the world wide pollution that would ensue from the death of God's own Son after his murder. Imagine the curse. Imagine the death that would swallow up those guilty of his murder.
You would think, wouldn't you?
But the blood of Jesus did not bring about a curse. It did not bring about death and destruction on the earth. It was, if you would, a counter pollution. The blood of Jesus was spilled out on the ground, but not for our curse, not for our judgment. Instead, it became our blessing. We were blessed by God because of this blood of Jesus.
The curse of the law was too great a judgment for Cain to endure so God gave him a mark, an identifier that he should not be touched. The Lord has given the same thing to us. He has marked us and identified us as His own through baptism. We have been marked and set aside and preserved from Judgment because of what God has done for us.
The world is certainly polluted, filled with sin and cursed because of it. Yet Jesus has the antidote for that pollution. He has cleaned and cleansed the world when his blood was spilled on the earth so that we could be forgiven.
Amen.
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