What is the oldest religion?
Ask which religion is oldest and most answers reach for Hinduism, or for some ritual dug out of the ground. Scripture traces the question further back still — to the moment sin entered the world and a man first had to ask how he could come near God — and it says there have only ever been two answers.
Two religions, one garden
One writer counts the world's religions and gets a total of two, both starting in the same chapter of Genesis, and both marked by a single word.
W. W. FeredayThere are only two religions in the world, and both are found in Genesis 3, because both started in the Garden of Eden. Man's religion is described in Genesis 3:7; God's in Genesis 3:21. Man's religion can take many forms — Brahmanism in India, Buddhism in China, and others — but one principle runs through them all, and it is expressed in the little word "Do." Man is thrown back on his own resources, to work out his own salvation as best he can. God's religion, in contrast, is happily summed up in the word "Done."
Man's religion is the fig leaves — the covering he sews himself. God's religion is the covering He supplies.
The oldest thing God ever did about sin
The first act of religion in the Bible is not something a man performs. It is something God does for two guilty people who had already tried and failed to cover themselves.
F. B. HoleAs soon as Adam fell and sin came into the world, it became clear that a guilty sinner needs covering. The sewing of the fig-leaf aprons and the hiding among the trees of the garden announced it as the instinctive feeling of the guilty pair. God's own action announced it even more loudly when He made "garments of skins and clothed them" (Gen. 3:21) — skins, notice, which meant that death fell on some animals so that the sinful pair might be covered. Abel's faith seized this first revelation of God's way of covering a sinner, and so in chapter 4 we read of his offering a firstling of his flock when he drew near to God.
(Older translations read "coats of skins"; the sense is the same.)
The first worshipper
Adam's two sons give us the earliest recorded act of worship, and the two men take opposite roads. The question behind their offerings is the oldest religious question there is.
William KellyHaving laid this down as the first application of faith, the next question is this: when man fell, how was he to approach God? The answer is, by sacrifice.
Cain was not irreligious. He brought God the best produce of his own hard work — and that is exactly where he went wrong.
Leslie M. GrantNotice that this verse connects faith with worship, in relation to the great truth of redemption. Sin had spoiled what God had created without fault. So creation was no basis for worship at all. Cain ignored the fall, and dared to offer the fruits of a cursed creation. Abel offered a lamb by the shedding of its blood, a striking picture of the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, in which the just penalty of sin is faced and borne. Faith recognises that this is the only ground of approach to God.
Every other religion came afterwards
If the world's religions grew upward from crude beginnings, they would be older than the Bible's account. Commentators here argue the opposite: they are all downhill from a knowledge everyone once had.
A J PollockThe truth is just the other way round. The false religions are only perversions of the original knowledge of God, as shown to us in Romans 1. At the beginning all men had an equal knowledge of God. The thought of God's judgment on sin, and the knowledge that faith had in approaching God, were seen in Abel's offering.
Sacrifice itself is the fingerprint. It shows up everywhere, in every distorted shape, which is odd for a practice nobody would invent.
Frederick W GrantThe use of sacrifice therefore demands our attention. We do not have merely a few isolated examples of it in some early patriarchs; it is something we find, in whatever twisted forms, running through every religious creed from the beginning. That such a thing — unnatural as it is — could root itself so deeply in the minds of men shows that it was plainly instituted by God, and shows the depth and universality of the shared conviction it appealed to.
The old rivalry has not ended
Cain's religion did not die with him. One writer traces it straight into the present day.
Hamilton SmithCain was a religious man, but his religion followed the thoughts of fallen man rather than the revelation of God. His natural religion led him to make light of sin, to despise God's provision to meet sin, to try to draw near to God on the ground of his own works, and to persecute the true child of God… The popular religion of the day ignores the revelation of God, and takes no account of sin in the sight of God.
Summary
- Two, not many. The world's religions reduce to two, and both began in Eden: man's covering, and God's.
- God moved first. The oldest religious act on record is God clothing Adam and Eve at the cost of a life — the pattern Abel's faith later grasped.
- Faith, not produce. Cain worked hard and brought God the fruit of a cursed ground; Abel brought blood, and was commended as righteous.
- Downhill, not upward. Everyone once knew God; the other religions are later corruptions of that knowledge, and the sacrifice buried inside them all points back to a divine origin.
- Still choosing. Cain's way survives wherever sin is made light of and acceptance is sought through one's own works — the oldest religion is still the one on offer today.