Abel started in life, we may say, not according to the rule and direction given to Adam, “to till the ground from whence he was taken.” Abel, on the contrary, was a keeper of the sheep. This discloses at the outset that Abel had no intention of improving the scene around him, or of deriving by his own efforts anything from earth which would mediate between him and God. The sense of death was before his soul, and to be delivered from this could alone satisfy him. He was a keeper of sheep. Not listless and unoccupied, he tended his flock, passing from pasture to pasture as their need required. As he expected nothing to spring from the earth to relieve him, so no one place on it was his permanent abode. He was a laborer, a wanderer, and, suffering from the curse, he felt there was one on everything around him, and himself under the penalty of death in such a scene. Tending a living flock brought him into association with life— the very thing his own spirit needed.
He therefore (by faith) took of the firstling of his flock, what was the “beginning” and the “strength,” and he offered it to God. It was God’s own, typifying the life of Christ. This he presented to God, and it met his own sense of death; but he still had more to meet before he could encounter the presence of God. There was the need of acceptance also. This was met and answered by presenting the “fat,” which is the excellency of the animal, only obtainable through death―the result in resurrection of the death of Christ, which now satisfies the conscience as to its full acceptance with God. Thus Abel entered into the mind of God as to his own state before Him, and thus he obtained witness that he was righteous, not merely as to what he did, but how he stood. Happy as accepted of God, he has to learn the place and suffering of one so blessed down here. If he were accepted of God, he must be dissociated from a scene which was under God’s curse. If he were delivered from the sentence of death, death could be no penalty to him; but he must expect it where everything is contrary to the life in which he was accepted; consequently he is called to give unequivocal proof that acceptance with God and deliverance from judgment are such real blessings that actual death cannot deprive him of them. This is his testimony and this is his discipline.
Stephen, the first martyr of resurrection, gave better evidence in his death than in his life of the virtue of Christ’s resurrection, and his own soul advanced more into its realities in the moment of his death than it could during his lifetime. His last testimony was the brightest. While they, the agents of the world’s evil, were stoning Stephen, he was only responding to their fatal blows by consigning his spirit to the One they denied and disowned, and to prove how perfect and assured he was in Christ’s care and charge of him, he knelt down to expend all the strength their malignity still spared him in their behalf!