8. Genesis 4:17-26 Kingdom Roots: The Rise of Anti-Kingdom

 
In his commentary on Genesis 4 the late Dr. James Montgmoery Boice relates the story of the agnostic Thomas Huxley who, many years ago left a speaking engagement in Dublin in a hurry to catch his train. He jumped into one of the city’s famous horse drawn taxi’s thinking that the porter in his hotel had told the driver where to go. Huxley simply shouted to the driver to drive fast. The taxi plunged through the Dublin streets at breakneck speed but after a while Huxley realized that the taxi was moving away from the station and his waiting train. IN sudden alarm Huxley asked the driver, “ Do you know where you are going?”
 
“No your honour, “the driver replied, “ but I’m driving fast”
 
“ So”, remarks Boice, “is our civilization, with similar confusion. For many of our contemporaries the situation is as Franklin Delano Roosevelt described it in his first inaugural address, “We don’t know where we are going but we are on our way!” 
 
Ours is a civilization out of control. We live in midst of what Augustine called ‘the city of man’, all around us buzzes the frantic life of the anti-kingdom, speeding headlong into an oblivion of sin we like to call ‘progress’.
 
But the roots of the anti-kingdom, the beginnings of our chaotic flight towards destruction has a beginning, and that beginning is Genesis chapter 4.
 
Last Lord’s Day evening we resumed our study of the book of Genesis and tonight we are thinking about the second half of chapter four , from verses 17-16 and the record we have there of the first human city. 
 
And I want us to read this half of the chapter keeping all that has gone before firmly in our minds still. Mankind is fallen. Cain has killed Abel. He has fallen under God’s curse and made to wander in the land east of Eden in ‘the land of wandering’ (‘Nod’ means ‘wandering’). 
 
And what we have in this half of the chapter is the succeeding history of Cain and his descendants. This is the rise of the Cainite civilization, but for all the successes of that civilization it cannot escape the pollutions Adam’s first sin, nor the cursed beginnings Cain had given it. Cain casts his pitiful shadow over the whole story. 
 
What is remarkable about the record of Cain’s family we have here is that it is also the history of the first city. And I want us to spend some time thinking a bit about that primeval city. Notice first that this is a sinful city. 
 
It was built from the very beginnings on the sin of Cain. 
God had cursed Cain in verse 10-12 with being a wanderer in the land. Rootlessness was etched into his nature. And isn’t it fascinating to see how rootless people quest for belonging? As soon as Cain is sent east of Eden to the land of wandering, we immediately find him settling down, having a family, building a city even. 
 
And here I can’t help but hear an echo of our own contemporary culture. Don’t we hear in our postmodern age about an increasing culture of rootlessness and restlessness? Don’t we hear about a sense of having been cut off from the past and with it cut of from meaning and significance? Dislocation and alienation are deeply contemporary phenomena, but Genesis 4 reminds us they are not new. Rootlessness has ancient roots! Ours is a society of neo-Cainites. We build our mighty civilization. We expand our cities. Our economy is strong. Our industry is complex. Our pride unending. Yet somehow in amongst it all we remain utterly empty, unsatisfied, bankrupt. 
 
It’s a strange thing how even after you build your city walls high, and you make a name for yourself as an enlightened society you are still every bit as much the spiritual vagabond as you were before. That is the lesson Cain’s history teaches; rootlessness cannot be escaped even in the city. The city of man is a wasteland full of restless wandering sophisticates, seeking freedom from sin’s bondage and Cain’s curse. 
 
Now doubtless Cain’s city building was an attempt to avoid the fate God had condemned him to. Surely he would not be a wanderer if he were King of the city state he named Enoch after his firstborn son. Cain most likely wants to build more than a city here; he wants to build a dynasty, a royal line of rulers over the city his hands had built.  What is Cain doing?
 
In the face of the Divine curse on his sin, Cain tries to build his way out of the problem! With each brick laid on the other the possibility of being rendered a restless wanderer in the earth seems to be diminished until, at last, seated in royal splendor on a throne he has made himself  Cain can sit back and survey the city, a lasting monument to his own greatness. 
 
In other words Cain’s city is an exercise in self salvation. Whether it be a religion of merit and works righteousness, or whether it be a secularized salvation via personal achievement, success, promotion (city building!) whenever we labour, like Cain, in our own strength to undo the restlessness and rootlessness that are the curse of our sinful natures, we demonstrate our citizenship of Cain’s city, we show we belong in the city of man , that we are members of the anti-kingdom, that we are still under the curse, that we are guilty sins and daughters of Adam.
 
This was a sinful city. Its very construction was a monument to Cain’s pride. And so it comes as little surprise when we discover that it was a city full of vice, a vice that seems to reach an early high water mark in the time of Lamech. In fact we are told three things about this city’s characteristic sins from Lamech’s era.
 
1. There was an obsession with physical beauty in this city. Lamech’s wive’s names are probably indicative of their physical characteristics: Adah means ‘pleasure, ornament, beauty’, while Zillah means “ shade” referring most likely to her dark luxuriant hair.  And Lamech’s daughter, verse 22, is called Naamah which means “loveliness”.
 
This is a culture obsessed with external beauty and physical appearance. They knew nothing it seems of “the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.” (1 Peter 3:4) Grace works on a principle of transforming us from the inside out, but sin obsesses over externals.
 
2. Marital sin began in this city. Now perhaps this is related to the obsession with the external and the beautiful, but it’s clear that Lamech is not content with God’s prescription for marriage as for the first time in human history Lamech marries two women in verse 19. And thus the ages long erosion of the institution of marriage begins! Here, in Cain’s city, are the roots infidelity, adultery and sexual sin.
 
3. Cain’s is a bloodthirsty city. Look at verses 23-24. Lamech boasts to his two wives that he has killed a man because he wounded him. Now two things are striking about these verses. First they are composed as a song of jubilation and celebration. Lamech sings about his crime. And secondly Lamech thinks that Cain’s sin legitimates his own. He is saying in effect, since old grandfather Cain killed Abel and was given a mark of protection and a pledge of divine vengeance on any who took revenge, so Lamech, who is self evidently superior in every way to Cain, should be given proportionately greater benefits. This man merely wounded him, but death was his reward. Cain is avenged seven times, but Lamech seventy seven times.  
 
This is an arrogant culture. It was a culture obsessed with external beauty. It was a culture oriented towards the erosion of the institution of marriage, and it was a blood thirsty culture of violence.
 
Sound familiar? Welcome to the city of man. This is where sin leads. It brings us to the anti-Kingdom, where men rule in place of God, and where vice rules instead of grace. Welcome to our contemporary secular society.
 
But not everything in Cain’s city is utterly perverse and debased.
 
This is certainly a sinful city, but it is also a cultured city. Look at verses 20-22.
 
The sons of Lamech are remarkably gifted. Almost certainly, where the text says that Jabal and Jubal were the fathers of those who did certain things, what is being said is that they are the originators of these skills. Jabal was a Bedouin style farmer, and Jubal was skilled at music. Tubal Cain was a gifted metal worker and craftsman.
 
Even in the midst of the sin and violence and depravity of the city of man, God still gave gifts of common grace to fallen men and women. The creation mandate to fill the earth and subdue it given to Adam in chapter 1:28 had not lapsed with the fall. Along with music verse 21, came poetry and song, verse 23-24,  and Lamech’s song is by all accounts a superb piece of ancient Hebrew poetry, using in short compass many of the leading features of the Hebrew poetic tradition. But even the common grace of God is distorted by human sin., and as we saw earlier Lamech’s  high poetic gifts are used for base and evil ends.
 
Cain’s city is a dark place, but God has not simply deserted it. In his common grace he is at work granting gifts where none are deserved. And I think it is instructive for us to notice that it is after all in Cain’s city that these things are said to originate. These basic building blocks of social development, music, literature, farming, metalwork and industry, even city building itself, these basic essentials of human society are given to us for our good and for our enjoyment, and they are given in the context of our fallenness and sin, given despite our sin. They are given even to the wicked inhabitants of Cain’s city.
 
And while it is tempting for me to go off on a tangent to speak about the freedom of believers to enjoy the common grace benefits of God, even in the city of man, I think fundamentally what we are meant to see in the grant of these gifts to the civilization of Cain is an intimation of the forbearance and goodness of God towards even a fallen humanity. God does not obliterate us in our sin and guilt. He not only suffers our rebellion, he positively showers us with the benefits of common grace for our enjoyment. 
 
It is therefore to our profound shame and far greater condemnation if, having received from his hand goodness and grace every day, we do not bow down and acknowledge him our God and sovereign King, before whom we are guilty sinners in need of special grace to take our guilt and shame away. 
 
3. There is hope for this city. Look at verses 25-26… 
 Another son is born to Adam in verse 25. Eve names him Seth, which probably menas “granted”, saying, 2God has grnated me another child in the place of Abel, since Cain killed him”. 
 
Fundamental to the message of the book f Genesis, and indeed to the message of the whole Bible is that there are, as Francis Schaeffer has said, ‘two humanities’, to civilizations, or to return to Augustines metaphor, to cities.  The two citries, wrote Augustine are, “ formed by tow loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God; even to the contempt of self.” 
 
The Lord had spken about that simple antithesis in Genesis 3: 15..ther will be enmity between the seed f the serpent and the seed of the woman. Two lines, to peoples would emerge, one living for self the other living by faith in the promises of the covenant. 
 
And in Genesis 4 we see the development of that antithesis. Cain was busy building the anti-kingdom, the city of man. But even as he did so, the Lord in his grace was laying the foundations for the city of God, the roots of the Kingdom of heaven.
 
Seth was born to replace Abel whom Cain killed. A new opponent to the agenda of Cainite rebellion has come to maintain the atithesis.  
And notice that Cain is the civilized cultured and advanced one, Seth is born outside the city. And that is always the way it is. 
 
And isn’t that they way the Lord has chosen to build his true kingdom? “Think of what you were when you were called,” urges Paul. “Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth…..Not many would have found eminence in Cain’s city.
But God chose the foolish things of this world to shame the wise, God chose the weak things of this world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things- and the things that are not-to nullify the things that are so that no one may boast before him.”
 
All the gifts, all the sophistication, all the wisdom of the world were to found in Cain’s city, but God carry’s on his saving purposes through the line of Seth, in the tents of Adam back at the edge of Eden. Not wise not noble not strong….Seth the son of promise
 
And that pattern persists in scripture. The city of man goes on to be exemplified I the tower of Babel, and then the city of Babylon, and eventually the city of Rome. The city of God remains hidden away in the Bedouin tents of Abraham called to wander in Canaan far from his home in Ur of the Chaldeans. Looking for the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.  It is seen quietly growing even while Israel are slaves in Egypt. Eventually the great foreshadowing of the City of God is constructed under King David, the city of Jerusalem, only to be laid waste and reduced to little more than a backwater for the various conquering empires that swept across Israel’s borders.
 
  Until quietly one day in Bethlehem a son of Seth was born. No-one noticed, but that one was to be the real city builder. The one who would erect the only real refuge for alienated rootless wandering sinful sons of Cain came without fan fare and without trumpet blast without any of the trapping of earthly power, for that is the nature of the city of God. 
 
Jesus Christ came to build the city of God, to afford rebels a refuge, to undo the curse that expels sons of Adam from the ground. Christ is the seed of the woman who shall crush the serpents head.
 
How do you get into the city of God? How do you gain citizenship in the heavenly city of forgiveness and grace and new life? How do you escape Cain’s city?
 
Verse 26 tells us. “at that time men began to call on the name of the Lord”
 
Not that men did not call on God;s name before, otherwise what are we to make of the offerings of Cain and Abel in verse 3-5? Rather what this indicates is that in amongst the wickedness of Cain’s city the worship of God revived, and sinful dwellers in the city of Man found their way of escape to the city of grace. 
 
And I think the placement of this verse as deeply significant. It is during the time of Seth that men recover the worship of God. It is with the restoration of the line of covenant promise that sinners start to call on the God of covenant love.
 
What is the message? Isn’t it simply that we are being pointed to the Seed of covenant promise to come who would be both the seed of the woman, a son of Seth, a child of the covenant, and the Lord himself on whom men began to call? Isn’t the message here that, hope for the hopeless citizens of the city of Cain lies with Seth? Isn’t the message that, hope for sinners lies in the one who knew no sin but was made sin for us that in him we might become the righteousness of God?
 
How do we find rest in the postmodern city? Where do we go for deliverance from the roots of rootlessness, which the Bible calls sin? 
 
We do what the Cainites did in the days of Seth, we call on the name of the Lord. We look to Jesus Christ the seed of the woman. We repent and believe the gospel and step out of the city of man, her in the city of London, and take up residence in the city whose builder and maker is God. 
 
Amen.