Brother you bring a question to mind: "What do you think they were doing with the lambs Abel was raising?" I never considered this until now.
When we are truly submitting to Christ our Lamb, and we know in our conscience that we are truly submitting to him, this provides us a sense that our nakedness is being covered so that we may have be able to answer from a clean conscience before God.
The opposite of this is, Revelation 3:17 "Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.."
Now, we know this is only an imputed covering which secures us while we grow to fully and truly put back on the righteousness of God after the image of Christ, for, 2 Corinthians 5:2-2 "For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven: If so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked."
Now that we live in a world wherein sin has entered to strip us naked of God's righteousness, the sheep Abel raised were a symbol of God's love in Christ which as those sheep's wool, sheared and used to cloth us, provides a temporary covering covering for our nakedness in this time of need. Adam and Eve did not need such covering before sin was born into the world as they had God's righteousness clothing them.
It cannot be true that Abel's flock of sheep served as meat for them to eat, but only to provide them with temporary clothing.
For, there would be no point in God's telling Noah what he did at Genesis 9:2-4
2 And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea;
into your hand are [that "every beast", that "every fowl, and that "all that moveth upon the earth"] they delivered.
3
Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you;
even as the green herb have I given you all things.
4 But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.
And by God's saying, "even as the green herb have I given you all things", it is clear that they were not previously given to them for food, else God would have reissued permission for them to eat the green herb at the same time.
There was no need for God to reissue permission to them to eat of all the green herb as they already knew that was theirs to eat. Therefore, it is quite clear that Abel's flock of sheep were for their wool as a temporary covering for their new found nakedness and not for food.
It is also clear that the clean and unclean animals entering the Ark where described as clean or unclean based upon the degree of hardship in cleaning up after them in the ark, so that it would not be a fight to keep the Ark clean and habitable during the time they would depend on it as their temporary home.
can't stop laughn'
