Welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the Book of Genesis. This is study #13 of Genesis, chapter 4 and we are going to read Genesis 4:13-15:

And Cain said unto JEHOVAH, My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me. And JEHOVAH said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And JEHOVAH set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

I will stop reading there. In our last study we talked about verse 13, where Cain said, “My punishment is greater than I can bear.” We saw that the word translated as “punishment” should have been translated as “iniquity.” His iniquity was more than he could bear. This incident is taking place, spiritually, at the “end of days” and it was the time God was separating the wheat from the tares that were within the congregations.

The year 1988 was the 13,000th year of earth’s history and it brought an end to the church age and at the same time God opened His Word, the Bible, to reveal many things that had been previously hidden. One of the things that came to light as the Spirit of God led His people into truth was the doctrine of the end of the church age. God ended His relationship with the New Testament churches and congregations and He commanded His people to come out of the corporate church. That became a mechanism by which God separated the wheat and the tares (the saved and the unsaved). This whole historical incident of the offering of Cain and Abel and the one being accepted and the other being rejected relates to this time. God’s elect were part of the corporate church during the church age and there were also professed Christians that were never saved in their hearts and these two groups were together. They went to worship together on Sundays, but when the proper time came God opened the Scriptures to reveal these things and it finally became known that God required more from an individual than a profession or words, but He required a heartfelt confession – He required that the individual have a new heart and a new spirit. Words are of no value because God looks upon the heart. As all this information from the Bible came to light, the unsaved in the churches began to feel rejected. In a sense, they began to feel like Cain when he and his offering were not acceptable to God. They became angry at their brothers, the true believers, and they spiritually “killed” them and this happened all over the world.

So, God is recording this incident and God cursed Cain from the face of the earth, due to the fact that Abel’s blood was crying unto the Lord from the ground. Since the blood was crying out to God, God responded by cursing Cain from the face of the earth and the curse was related in Genesis 4:12: “When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.” He would be a wanderer. We looked at the word “fugitive” in the Bible and we saw how it directed us to Amos to a time of spiritual famine when people would wander from sea to sea to seek the Word of the Lord, but they cannot find it. That is the penalty God pronounced upon the corporate church and its inhabitants that were like Cain. They went the “way of Cain” and they suffered the same punishment. They are cursed and they will no longer be fruitful; there will be no more salvation within the congregations. They will “wander about,” spiritually.

Some true believers were involved in this for a time until we learned about the end of the church age. We were wandering from church to church, according to reports. We would hear someone say, “I visited this Reformed Orthodox Presbyterian Church over in New Jersey (and we were in Pennsylvania) and it seemed very faithful to the Bible." Then the next thing you know, a couple of other families would go to that church for a few weeks, but after a little while when they found out more about them and asked some questions, they would see another “high place” and error. Then someone else would say, “There is a faithful church up in New York.” And people were willing to travel because they could not find a faithful church where they were, so they wandered. They went from congregation to congregation but, inevitably, the next church was not faithful either. That is “wandering” from sea to sea in a land that is experiencing famine, spiritually, and we did not know at that time that the famine in the corporate church applied to all churches – 100% of them were impacted because God’s Holy Spirit had departed out of the midst of the congregations. Since God was no longer in any congregation, it did not matter what corporate church you went to because God must bless His Word: “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” It requires the Spirit to bless His Word to the heart so there can be the necessary spiritual hearing of the Word. Without it, there is spiritual famine. There is dearth in the land.

And that was Cain’s punishment to be a wanderer and a vagabond in the earth. That was the iniquity that was greater than he could bear. It was his sin that he must bear. We discussed this in regard to the scapegoat that was released into the wilderness bearing the sins of the people of Israel to bear the wrath of God. Judgment began at the house of God and God began to pour out the cup of His wrath. It was a wrath that would transition at the end of the Great Tribulation on May 21, 2011 to encompass the entire earth, but it is the same cup of wrath. The people within the churches were experiencing the wrath of God as a corporate entity and they were bearing their iniquities.

Then it goes on to say in Genesis 4:14:

Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth;

The last part is identical to what God had pronounced in verse 12: “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.” But, here, Cain is responding to the judgment God had pronounced upon him saying, “Behold, thou has driven me out this day,” and this relates to Cain being driven out of the kingdom of God because the earthly church that Cain pictures was the outward representation of the kingdom of God to the world. Now God has broken that tie and cut off that relationship and driven them out, as it were, from the kingdom of heaven.

The Hebrew word translated as “driven” is Strong’s #1644 and it is found in Exodus 34:11:

Observe thou that which I command thee this day: behold, I drive out before thee the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite.

These were nations that had inhabited the land of Canaan. By driving them out, it was God’s judgment upon them. It was a display of God’s wrath in punishing them for their iniquity and then God gave the land to His people Israel.

Also, it says in Jonah 2-4:

And said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto JEHOVAH, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice. For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me. Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple.

The phrase “cast out” is the same word translated as “driven out” in our verse. We know that Jonah is a picture of Christ when He was suffering the wrath of God. Jesus said, “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” He was suffering the wrath of God.

To be driven out of God’s sight certainly means that you are under the wrath of God, so Cain was accurate in his appraisal of what God did: “Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth.” When we read this it does not seem to make sense that he is driven out from the face of the earth because he is still on the earth. It even says this in the second part of the verse: “and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth.” It is not like he was somehow leaving the earth, but he does say that he was driven out from the face of the earth.

This is where it is important to look to the original language and to our interlinear because in the English translation we cannot tell the difference between the first usage of the word “earth” and the second usage of the word “earth” in the same verse. They are identical English words, but they are different Hebrew words. The first time God used the word “earth,” it is a translation of the word that is Strong’s #127 that is translated as “ground” or “land.” For instance, it is the same word found in Genesis 4:10:

And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.

It is also used in Genesis 4:12:

When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength…

Abel was killed and his blood went into the “ground.” Cain tilled the “ground” and brought forth fruit previously. So, it should say, “Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the ground; and from thy face shall I be hid.”

However, in the second part of the verse the word translated as “earth” is a different Hebrew word. It is Strong’s 776. In the first four chapters of Genesis the word “earth” in English will appear 31 times and 28 of those times it is Strong’s #776. In Genesis, chapter 1 when God created the earth, it is Strong’s #776 in 27 of 28 times. This word means the “earth” or the “world” and the other word would have been better translated as “ground” or “land.” It would mean that he is driven out from the land of the kingdom of heaven or the corporate church. The corporate church is located in the world. It is not the world itself, but it is the “land” of the churches that are found in the world, so even though Cain was driven out from the kingdom of heaven, he is still in the world. And the churches today have been driven out of the kingdom of heaven. The churches and the congregations all over the world will say, “We are the church of God. We are the church of Christ. We are the Christian church.” They make these claims everywhere in the world and, yet, from the perspective of God and the perspective of the truth of God’s Word, they have no association with God, Christ or the kingdom of heaven. They have been driven out from the kingdom of heaven and, yet, they are still in the world and that is why we can still see the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, the Lutherans, the Baptists and the Catholics. We still see all these churches on the street corners of the world, but they have been made fugitives and vagabonds. They are wanderers, spiritually, and they have been removed away from God. They are not part of the kingdom of heaven and they no longer represent the kingdom of God as His ambassadors, even though they desperately want to cling to the name of God. Remember that God made this point in the Book of Isaiah. Speaking of “seven women” that spiritually represent the seven churches of Revelation that, in turn, represent all the corporate churches, it says in Isaiah 4:1:

And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach.

They try to cling to Christ (one man), but they want to eat their own bread and wear their own apparel; in other words, they want their own gospel, their own doctrines and their own righteousness. They want their doctrines of tongues and falling over backwards and “holy laughter.” They want their doctrines of “easy believe-ism” and whatever doctrines please them under the sun. They want to have doctrines wherein they can obtain their own righteousness or their own covering for sin (apparel). And, yet, they say, “Only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach.” In other words, they are saying, “We can act like heathens. We can believe like heathens and, yet, we desire one thing from you, God, and that is to wear the name of Christ. We desire to be called ‘Christian’ to take away our reproach.” And that is exactly how the world views the churches. They do know what God has done because they do not know the Bible. They do not know the abuse and disregard that the various churches of the world have for the Bible, so the world gives recognition as “churches of Christ” to the Catholic Church or they give recognition to the Free Will Baptist Church or they give recognition to the Pentecostal Church. The people of the world recognize them as churches of Christ and they are not concerned that God no longer recognizes them as churches of Christ. After all, God is invisible. He is a Spirit being and God is removed from them because they have no spiritual life within them and their concern and regard is not with God, but it is the “appearance of things.” If the world esteems them and the world gives them recognition as Christians that is their main concern. You can be sure that if the majority of the people of the world would begin to say to the churches, “We no longer recognize you as representatives of God because you teach falsely,” then the various denominations would be quick to call their meetings to correct the situation: “We have to take a look at our doctrines and get ourselves straightened out and become faithful.” Their concern is how they are viewed by the peoples of the world. Their concern is not God or the Spirit of God. They are not asking, “How does God view us?” If they were concerned, they would be shocked to learn that God views them as fugitives and vagabonds. He views them like Cain, as spiritual murderers and like those that have shed much innocent blood. God has driven them out from His sight and He has driven them out from His face. That is a terrible and awful judgment of God. It is a grievous thing for God to hide His face from them and, yet, that is what has happened to the churches and congregations.