A More Excellent Sacrifice

"By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead yet speaketh." (Hebrews 11:4). When God rejected Cain's sacrifice, Cain got angry. He got even angrier when he learned that after his sacrifice was rejected, God turned around and accepted Abel's, and even honored him for it. Cain's solution was to kill his brother, so that at least he didn't have a constant, living reminder of his rejection. Cain probably thought, as we sometimes do, that someone like Abel was just effortlessly righteous, that he never faced the same kind of struggles that Cain had to deal with, that he had never known what it was like to experience rejection. We aren't told the whole story, and perhaps Cain himself didn't know it. But I imagine that the sacrifice from Abel that God accepted was not his very first try. I'm sure that Abel, just like us, tried and failed and tried again and got things wrong and did things half-heartedly and went through the motions and phoned it in and experienced all of those little day to day interferences that prevent us from being as perfect as we could hope. But unlike Cain, and perhaps unlike some of us some of the time, Abel did not curse his fate the first time he experienced rejection. In his faith-filled efforts to overcome his weaknesses and humble himself before God and become as a little child, willing to accept the harsh truth that sometimes his best was not good enough, Abel went from one bad sacrifice to a more excellent sacrifice - not perfect, but nevertheless accepted by the Lord. When we fall short, when we slip up or relapse or snap or fib or cheat or swear, or in any other way fail to offer up an acceptable sacrifice to the Lord, we can follow the example of Cain and curse God for making us too weak and wicked and willful and descend in a murderous rage to the depths of Hell from which we will not allow ourselves to escape because we have divested ourselves of any sense of agency or accountability or responsibility or power. Or we can follow the example of Abel and acknowledge our shortcomings and yet still count ourselves able to offer up a more excellent sacrifice through our faith and through the grace of God.