Cain wasn't just an impulsive guy who lost his temper. He was rejected in a particular way by the Lord—and that rejection was the first of a number of significant sacrifices to be denied in the bible. Here's what it means.
God doesn’t automatically accept every sacrifice. He wants people’s hearts, and he refuses all heartless, faithless rituals. Unfortunately, this is the default mode of all human religion: going through the motions. So the theme of rejected sacrifice is a story that unfolds from the very beginning of scripture. God has rejected some very important sacrifices, with devastating results. He still does it today. Every time, it points to the need for a better sacrifice, a perfect and final offering that can never fail to find God’s pleasure and acceptance. The story of Cain and Abel is the original rejected sacrifice.
The first thing this story has to show us is that there is something we all need desperately. Whatever this thing is, it fulfilled Abel when he got it, and it enraged Cain when he didn’t get it: this is the regard of the Lord. Our deepest longing is to be accepted and approved by our Creator.
C.S. Lewis reminded us that we all long to hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” In his essay “The Weight of Glory,” he writes, “To please God … to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness … to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is. … The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.”
In the Garden, we were meant to perpetually enjoy God’s loving attention—and that’s what was lost when we fell. Sacrifice is the attempt to get it back.
Abel enjoyed God’s regard, but Cain did not. There was something in his heart that God judged unwell. In Heb. 11:4, we read, “By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain.” Cain was rejected because his outward gesture had no inward basis; it was nothing but self-serving religion. God has always condemned and rejected attempts to gain his favor by people who don’t love him or truly want him, who only want what he can do for them. This also yields the first lesson about sin in the bible: “If you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door.”
If you engage in faithless religious activity—that is, without trusting in the death and resurrection of Jesus—you’re walking straight into life-changing sin.
In Heb. 12:24, we learn that the “sprinkled blood” of Jesus “speaks a better word than the blood of Abel,” which means that Christ is a savior and Abel was merely a victim: One was killed against his will, and the other sacrifices himself gladly and willingly for his people.
Both of these brothers shed innocent blood: Abel offered the blood of an animal in faith and was accepted. Cain was rejected because he had no faith, and in the outrage of that rejection he spilled the blood of an innocent brother. Just here is where Abel becomes a testimony of something greater to come. Someday there would be a brother who would offer his own innocent life to the Lord and be personally rejected (like Cain) even as his sacrifice was accepted (like Abel). And the rest of us are saved by our faith in that sacrifice.
Jesus is the innocent brother who bled to save us and turn all of our faithless, self-serving religion into acceptable worship.
Because of the sacrifice of Jesus, we can be accepted all the time—we can live in the accepting, loving attention of the Father. He gave that up on the cross so that we would never be without it, and he has offered a sacrifice once and for all that will never fail to please our holy God.