This morning we will only be looking at one verse of Scripture, but to get us into the context of that verse I will read a number of verses. If you have your Bible, please turn to Genesis 3. You may follow along while I read Genesis 3:1-21. Please stand, if you are able, in honor of the reading of God’s Word.

Genesis 3:1-21,

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, ‘Indeed, has God said, “You shall not eat from any tree of the garden”?’ The woman said to the serpent, ‘From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, “You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.”’ The serpent said to the woman, ‘You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings. They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ He said, ‘I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself.’ And He said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?’ The man said, ‘The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate.’ Then the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this you have done?’ And the woman said, ‘The serpent deceived me, and I ate.’ The Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, Cursed are you more than all cattle, And more than every beast of the field; On your belly you will go, And dust you will eat All the days of your life; And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel.’ To the woman He said, ‘I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you.’ Then to Adam He said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, “You shall not eat from it”; Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field; By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.’ Now the man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all the living. The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them.” (Genesis 3:1–21, NASB95)[1]

THE CONTEXT (Genesis 3:1-21)

Before getting to the verse that we will be looking at this morning I want to make sure you understand the significance of predictive prophecy. Most of the prophecies in the Old Testament made concerning the coming Messiah or Deliverer were written down 500 or more years before they were fulfilled in Christ. This did not come about by accident and it is certainly not a coincident. Lee Strobel, the author of The Case for Christ, writes that the probability of fulfilling just eight of the 300 prophecies made about the coming Messiah is one chance in one hundred million billion. That number is millions of times greater than the total number of people who have ever walked on planet earth! Strobel in his book quotes from mathematician Peter W. Stoner who calculated that the probability of fulfilling 48 of the 300 prophecies concerning the Messiah was “one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion!”[2] With these kinds of staggering odds and the fact that they all were fulfilled in the incarnation of Jesus Christ gives us great confidence that:

1. The Bible is the inspired Word of God and it is completely trustworthy. No one could have made it up. The Old Testament points to the first Christmas. The New Testament fulfills what the Old Testament prophets had predicted and were longing for.

2. Jesus Christ is who He claimed to be. These fulfilled prophecies give solid confirmation of His credentials and show us that Jesus Christ is God’s Son, who gave His life for us so that we can be forgiven and know that we will spend eternity with Him.

The passage of Scripture that we read this morning is without a doubt one of the saddest passage of Scripture in the whole Bible. Adam and Eve had everything they needed for life and happiness. They had never experienced anything evil, they knew only good because everything that God gave them and provided for them was good. In return, all that God asked was that they love Him and obey Him, and they could do that by following one rule concerning one tree in the middle of the garden. He told them to not eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That was all, one tree out of all the fruit trees in the garden. God said that if they ate of it, they would surely die. We have read this morning what happened when they disobeyed God. The serpent indwelt by Satan deceived Eve and she chose to disobey God and took fruit from the tree and ate it and gave some to Adam and he chose to disobey God and ate the fruit and the world was plunged into sin. Suddenly, the innocence of Adam and Eve is gone and they immediately know that what they have done is wrong and for the first time since they were created they are ashamed of their nakedness and they sew fig leaves together to make coverings for themselves. The relationship they had with God, their Creator, is broken. When they hear Him in the garden, they hide themselves because they are afraid.

Even when God gave them the opportunity to confess instead of taking responsibility for their sin, they try to pass the blame. Adam blames the woman and in blaming her ultimately blames God saying that the woman God had given him was the one who gave him the fruit. The woman blames the serpent for deceiving her. Suddenly what was paradise is no longer. The entrance of sin into the world ruined Eden. The smell of death is in the air. The serpent is alone and quiet, he alone is happy at the outcome. His plan was working out just as he had planned it. His hate for God caused Him to hate God’s crowning creation and he showed the universe that no race of beings could ever be trusted to freely obey God.

As God surveyed the wreckage caused by the disobedience of Adam and Eve, He immediately begins to deliver judgment and He starts with the serpent, the liar, the deceiver, the tempter. Then He will bring judgment on the woman and the man. But first He speaks to the serpent. In Genesis 3:14 God passes judgment on the serpent by placing upon him a two-fold curse in which he is first cursed more than any animal God had created. What the serpent looked like before the fall of mankind we do not know, but after the fall he was cursed to forever crawl on his belly with no legs or limbs of any kind. Second, because he would be forced to go on his belly, he would be an eater of dust. The bad news for the serpent is that there is no good news for him. God does not ask him what he did or why he allowed Satan to use him, God just judges him because Satan had already received his judgment when God had cast him out of heaven. In Ezekiel 28 we read of Satan’s pride and corruption and of his judgment. In verse 17 we read, “Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty; You corrupted your wisdom by reason of your splendor…” (Ezekiel 28:17, NASB95)[3]

Between the judgment of the serpent and the judgments of the woman and the man, God gives a promise and this is where we want to spend the rest of this morning, this is the first mention of Christmas that we find in the Old Testament. This verse is the first Gospel sermon ever preached on the face of the earth and it came from God Himself. Theologians call this verse the “protoevangelium” or the “first gospel.” These words spoken by God are the first mention of redemption. Everything else in Scripture flows from this one verse. Just like the small acorn contains a mighty oak tree, so this verse contains the entire plan of salvation. This verse has been called the sum and summary of the whole Bible. In this verse we are told that Jesus came to overturn the curse brought on by sin. If we are ever to understand the true meaning of Christmas, we cannot ignore the clear teaching in the opening chapters of the Bible. Let’s look at Genesis 3:15 phrase by phrase.

ENMITY BETWEEN SATAN AND THE WOMAN (Genesis 3:15a)

This promise of redemption begins with a prophecy that there will be enmity between the serpent and the woman. Here God is not speaking of the animal whom He cursed to crawl on his belly and eat dust, but now He is referring to the one who indwelt the serpent to deceive Eve. The serpent will be forever be linked to Satan, the serpent will forever be the personification of Satan. The apostle John in the final book of the Bible, in Revelation 20:2 looks back on this passage of Scripture and refers to Satan as “… the dragon, the serpent of old, who is the devil and Satan…” (Revelation 20:2b, NASB95)[4] Here God says that there will be hostility or enmity between Satan and mankind.

Eve understood that she had made a huge mistake when she listened to Satan through the serpent and because of that she would never be a fan of the serpent. Steven Ger writes in The Popular Bible Prophecy Commentary, “This passage contains far more than the mere origin of the antagonistic relationship between mankind and snakes. It is the theological explanation for conflict between good and evil.”[5] This conflict became clear to me when I lived in Haiti. The Haitians are deathly afraid of snakes, even though there are no poisonous snakes in Haiti. They do have boa constrictors, and one time while I was serving as the maintenance director of our mission’s hospital, I received a request for the wood of a dead tree on our property to be used to make charcoal, the main cooking fuel in Haiti. I gave the go ahead to cut down the tree and for the wood to be given to the men who cut it down. When they cut the tree down, they found it was hollow and when they split it open, they found a boa constrictor curled up inside the hollow tree sleeping. This sent the man splitting the wood and my Haitian employees that were with him into a panic and they came rushing to me. I went with them to see what all the commotion and panic was about. When I arrived, I found this six-foot-long snake just waking up and beginning to stretch out in the sun. None of the Haitians would go near it, but they informed me that it was probably eating chickens and young goats that were owned by our neighbors. I grabbed one of the machetes that they had been using to split up the tree and I chopped the head of the snake off and suddenly I became the hero of the day. Why are Haitians so deadly afraid of snakes? Because of what God said in Genesis 3:15? Yes, in a sense, because the main god of the Haitian pagan religion is Damballa and he is a huge snake that they summon up out of the ground at their pagan ceremonies. Damballa is none other than the serpent of old, Satan. The enmity, the hostility that God said would exist, still exists today.

ENMITY BETWEEN SATAN’S SEED AND THE WOMAN’S SEED (Genesis 3:15b)

God goes on in Genesis 3:15 to say that this enmity will not just be between that woman and the serpent, but that it would continue throughout history between the seed or offspring of Satan and the seed or offspring of the woman. Collectively this refers to the men and women of faith in every generation who have by faith believed in God and in His promises. Throughout the Bible we see this struggle between the offspring of the woman and the offspring of Satan, who are those who have chosen to reject God and His salvation and promises and instead be followers of Satan. Each and every one of us is born an offspring of Satan because we are born with the sin nature which we inherited from Adam. That is what Paul said in the first three verses of Ephesians 2, “And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.” (Ephesians 2:1–3, NASB95)[6] It is only when we put our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and believe that His death paid the penalty required for our sin and that God raised Him from the dead on the third day that we are transferred from Satan’s family and adopted into God’s family and become sons and daughters of God. The Apostle John explained it this way in John 1:12, “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name,” (John 1:12, NASB95)[7]

THE WOMAN’S SEED WILL CRUSH SATAN’S HEAD (Genesis 3:15c)

The next phrase of this verse is where we begin to really see Christmas, because suddenly the seed of the woman has become a specific person. The next phrase of Genesis 3:15 says, “He shall bruise you on the head…” (Genesis 3:15c, NASB95)[8] The use of the phrase “seed of the woman” or “her seed” now becomes very significant because this is not the normal phrase. The seed for conception comes from the man, this is what comes from the male to fertilize the egg. This is clearly seen in Galatians 3 where Paul speaks of Abraham and his seed, referring to his offspring. This is shown in the lists of genealogies in the Old Testament and in the New Testament where it is listed that it is the father who begets children. So why through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit does Moses, the author of Genesis, use this phrase abnormally? Because the seed of the woman spoken of here does not have a human father, all the way back to the opening chapters of Genesis God predicts that this child that would come, who would crush the head of Satan, would be virgin born, the seed of the woman. Here we clearly have reference to the first Christmas when the God-Man, Jesus Christ was born of a virgin in Bethlehem. The angel Gabriel’s response to Mary when she asked how she could have a child since she was a virgin was, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and for that reason the holy Child shall be called the Son of God.” (Luke 1:35, NASB95)[9]

SATAN WILL BRUISE THE HEEL OF THE WOMAN’S SEED (Genesis 3:15d)

The final two phrases of this verse speak of the greatest battle for the souls of men ever waged on earth. We have described for us not only the first Christmas, but we also have described the horror of Good Friday and the glory of Easter morning. We are told that Satan will bruise the heel of this One who is born of a virgin. God’s Son, Jesus Christ, will receive a wound from Satan that at that time will cause the world to believe that Satan has won. The wounding of the Messiah’s heel here is a description of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Satan believed that when his offspring put Jesus Christ on the cross that he had experienced a great victory, mankind was his. Satan believed he had defeated God by putting to death the Messiah. Satan failed to realize that the death of Jesus Christ was his undoing, because the death of a perfect, sinless person was a substitute for all the sin ever committed in the world by mankind. Satan’s judgment came at the cross. The Seed of the woman, Jesus Christ, applied the crushing blow to Satan’s head when on the third day after His death He rose from the dead bringing salvation and eternal life to all who would believe in Him. So why is Satan still around and exercising so much power if he has been crushed by the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ? At the cross Satan was judged and his sentence pronounced, eternity in the lake of fire prepared for him and the angels who rebelled with him, but he is allowed to roam the earth awaiting his final execution. You and I, however, do not have to be bound by his power because our freedom from Satan’s family has been purchased through the Lord Jesus Christ.

CONCLUSION:

The consequence for eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was death. The moment that Adam and Eve ate the fruit they died spiritually. Their relationship with God was severed and they no longer enjoyed the communion, the fellowship, that they had with their Creator before their sin. They also began to physically age and physical death became the plague of the human race. There is also a third aspect of death and that is eternal separation from God in the lake of fire. But the promise of the coming of the woman’s Seed and His death and resurrection makes it possible for man to become spiritually alive through faith in Christ, our physical death then becomes a doorway into the presence of God, and it also assures us that we will escape the judgment of God and the lake of fire. When we believe that Jesus Christ is who He claimed to be and believe that His death on the cross paid the penalty for sin and that He rose from the dead on the third day after His death, we are forgiven, we are justified, we are saved from future judgment. There is nothing that we can do on our own to make ourselves acceptable to God. This is also demonstrated for us in the 3rd chapter of Genesis. Adam and Eve made leaf coverings for themselves in hopes of making themselves acceptable to God. Verse 21 tells us that God made garments of skin and clothed Adam and Eve. This was to show Adam and Eve that death was required for sin. An animal had to die so that Adam and Eve could be clothed, and God provided the clothing and clothed them. A beautiful picture of God’s gift of eternal life and Christ clothing us in His perfect righteousness that we might be acceptable to God.

God has provided a way for you and me to be acceptable to Him, that way was through the incarnation of His Son that first Christmas. Jesus Christ was born into the world that He might pay the price for our sin. The gift if yours for the taking. We receive a lot of gifts at Christmas time, but of all the gifts you are offered this is the most important one to receive. Have you received this gift?

For those who have already received this gift, this is a wonderful time of the year to reflect and be thankful for what God has done for you through Christ. Come and worship at the manger, come and worship at the cross, come and worship at the empty tomb and anticipate worshipping at the throne.

[1]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.

[2]Strobel, Lee, The Case For Christ. Grand Rapids, MI : Zondervan, 1998. Pg. 247

[3]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.

[4]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.

[5]LaHaye, Tim and Hinson, Ed, editors, The Popular Bible Prophecy Commentary. Eugene, OR : Harvest House Publishers, 2006.

[6]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.

[7]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.

[8]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.

[9]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.

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The Seed of the Woman (Genesis 3:15)