God’s Great Salvation Announced (Gen. 3:15)

We focused in our previous study on the beginning of God’s great salvation, which we saw took place in eternity, before the world was created, when God determined beforehand to save sinners. We now move on to the beginning of time and if we know the Bible’s contents we will be aware that it begins with an account of how God created a perfect world in which humans were to live aware of his goodness and discovering his benefits. Yet that wonderful situation did not last, and we are told what went wrong about it in Genesis 3.

Many people read this passage and conclude that it is a myth, primarily because they say it gives the impression that a snake could talk to humans about God. But does the passage indicate that the creature here called ‘the serpent’ was a snake? Here are some indications that point to this creature not being a snake.

• To begin with, snakes were made on Day 6 of creation and were described by God as very good. Yet the creature that is described in 3:1 as very subtle is not depicted as being good.

• Also, with regard to its curse, it is said that it will eat dust. Yet snakes don’t eat dust for food; instead they eat all kinds of small animals and birds. They do eat dust as they crawl along the ground, although that is not likely to be the point of what God said.

• What about the contents of the curse pronounced by God? ‘On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life’ can be seen as a reference to the judgement that was meted out on a defeated ruler; such were often made to abase themselves before their conquerors. 

• It is evident that God is not speaking about a literal snake because he says in verse 15 that its head will be crushed by the Deliverer when he came, which could hardly be said of a snake in the Garden of Eden. 

• Elsewhere in the Bible, the devil is said to be the serpent (Rev. 12:9; 20:2).

• The creature in Eden called the serpent was made by God but had become marked by subtlety and craftiness. This fits in with what the Bible says about the origins of the devil.

The battlefield in Eden

The account in Genesis 3 makes it clear that the devil was attacking Adam and Eve. Therefore he was engaged in a battle, even although they did not realise it. What were the weapons that he used?  Paul gives us the answer when he writes in 2 Corinthians 11:3: ‘But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.’ The weapon that Satan used was deception.

Why was he engaged in a battle against Adam and Eve? In order to answer this question we have to turn elsewhere in the Bible. There are passages that indicate the devil once was a special angel who lived in God’s presence. But he chose to rebel and in doing so became the enemy of God. When he rebelled, and he was not alone because other angels joined him, sin entered into the universe. Since then, his aim has been to promote sin. And when Adam and Eve were created, the devil saw them as potential victims.

His deception involved two strands. First, he tempted them to doubt God’s warning about judgement and second he tempted them to think that God was depriving them of benefits. In a sense, the devil was saying that God was not serious with regard to his warnings and that he was selfish with regard to his possessions. We can say in passing that the devil has not moved far from those suggestions. Many sinful actions performed by humans, because they succumb to the devil’s temptations, indicate that those who do them don’t believe God will judge them and they also indicate that somehow what he forbids will be for their benefit.

Satan’s tactics were successful and he managed to defeat Adam and Eve. Maybe he imagined that he had overturned God’s purpose of having a race of human beings who would serve him forever. Since God had judged him by casting him out of heaven, he would have assumed that something similar must happen to Adam and Eve. If that was what the devil thought, he received a big surprise. Instead of pronouncing eternal judgement on Adam and Eve, he heard God say to him that a Deliverer would come who would be the Champion of the human race and who would defeat the devil.

This Champion is given an unusual title, the Seed of the Woman. He will also obtain a great victory over the devil, illustrated by the prediction that the Champion would crush the head of the serpent. In the process, the Champion would himself be hurt, indicated by the predicted wound on his heel. The devil discovered that Eden was not his battlefield of triumph; instead it was the commencement of a warfare that would result in his defeat.

The sin of Adam and Eve

Why is the sin of Adam and Eve so serious? One answer to this question is that their sin affected every part of their being and also affected all of their offspring and descendants. Because of their failure to obey God’s revealed will, which was that they should not eat the forbidden fruit, they and all their descendants became sinners.

Yet we have to probe a bit more into their sin in order to see why it was so serious. When we look back to Genesis 2 and the agreement that God made with Adam regarding the forbidden fruit, we discover that what had been made between them was a covenant. The covenant was connected to a time of probation in which Adam would be tested for a little while and if he fulfilled the requirements then he and his descendants would be safe forever.

So we can say that the requirement on Adam was sovereign, simple and strategic. It was sovereign in the sense that God had the authority to state the terms; it was simple in the sense that God did not require something difficult from Adam; and it was strategic because the entire future of the entire human race depended on him remaining true to what was allowed and what was forbidden. 

Would we have trusted Adam? Imagine taking a trip back to Eden and observing him after God made him. We would note that he was made in the image of God, which at least indicates he was like God in his desires. We would also see that he was capable of assessing all other creatures, as when he named the animals, so we would deduce that he would be able to assess accurately any other creature that he encountered and would know what to do with it. If we had been asked then whom we would like as our representative, we would have unanimously chosen Adam. Sadly, he would be unable to fulfill his role.

So Adam sinned and the threats of the covenant were implemented. Death came into the world, as Paul reminds us in Romans. We inherit it from Adam but we also deserve it ourselves because he was our representative. Imagine again Adam and Eve, standing beside the serpent, waiting to hear what God has to say.

The seed of the woman 

What is meant by ‘offspring’ or ‘seed in Genesis 3:15’? Initially, we might conclude that the verse is describing a permanent conflict between humans (the descendants of Eve) and the serpent’s seed (the devil and his followers). But the second half of the verse narrows it down to a conflict between two individuals because it uses singular pronouns to describe the participants. What God is announcing is that a descendant of the woman will crush the devil. 

This is the first indication given to fallen humans that, although they had sinned, it was not the end of the story. In this announcement to the serpent the guilty pair heard the promise of deliverance. The glad tidings of the gospel were preached in Eden before the sinful humans were evicted. Before the judgement fell, the Lord wanted them to hear the gospel offer. 

The campaign against the seed of the woman

It is hard to imagine a campaign beginning before one of those involved was born. Yet this was the case regarding the promised Champion. His enemy tried his best to destroy the line through which the Deliverer would come. This is a big subject and we can only scan some of the details.

We see aspects of it in the attempts to destroy the nation of Israel, first by Pharaoh attempting to eliminate the male babies, and second by the Assyrians and the Babylonians attempting to merge the people of Israel into other nations. Both Pharaoh and the later empires had their own agendas, but behind the scenes was the serpent trying to prevent the coming of the Messiah. He failed on both occasions, because in this conflict he does not even win a battle.

The conflict became more intense when the Saviour is born. Almost immediately, we have the incident of Herod killing all the babies of Bethlehem. Like the others before him, he had his own agenda, but like them he was fulfilling the wishes of his controller behind the scenes, the devil. Again, the campaign against Jesus failed.

The past campaign of the seed of the woman

One day, when he was thirty, Jesus appeared at the River Jordan and revealed his calling as the Messiah by being baptized by John. Straightaway, the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to confront the devil. It is important to note who is taking the initiative here – it is Jesus. This is the first skirmish, we might say, in the personal, one-to-one fight between Jesus and Satan. In the desert Jesus resisted the temptations that overcame Adam and emerged victorious in his campaign to return the wilderness to the state of Paradise. 

This was the beginning of three years of conflict between Jesus and the powers of darkness, displayed in the Saviour’s deliverance of many individuals from demon possession. It seems that the powers of darkness had amassed their forces in a special way at that time, but they discovered that Jesus would defeat them again and again. This was the Seed of the woman destroying the power of the devil. 

The battlefield of the cross

The climax of the battle took place at Calvary. We see its build-up in the Upper Room as Judas goes and betrays Jesus. Jesus realised that this was the hour of the power of darkness. Satan’s fury was to be unleashed against him. The devil’s infernal wisdom was seen in his ability to get Pilate and Herod to agree about unjustly condemning Jesus, to get Jewish leaders and Gentile rulers to combine in attempting to destroy the Messiah. On the cross, the powers of darkness attempted to destroy Christ by bringing his existence to an end. There he bruised his heel of Jesus, but discovered that the bruised Heel was about to crush his head. 

God ‘disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him’ (Col. 2:15). Their weapon against sinners was the punishment that they were due for their sins. But Jesus, having paid that penalty, removed from the evil powers their strongest weapon. In the process he also removed from them the demand that they could make concerning the death of sinners. By paying this penalty, Jesus destroyed ‘the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and delivered all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery’ (Heb. 2:14-15). The risen Christ rose in triumph and ascended as man to the throne of God, ‘with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him’ (1 Pet. 3:22). 

The present campaign of the seed of the woman

But the Seed of the woman is engaged in other activities in order to crush the head of Satan. These are connected to the preaching of the gospel as he delivers sinners from the spiritual blindness imposed upon them by the devil. A conflict takes place because the devil tries to destroy the church by persecution and other means. But believers are promised that the ‘God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet’ (Rom. 16:20). This will take place when Jesus returns and the devil and his followers are banished to the lake of fire. 

Some applications of this announcement

First, did Adam and Eve pay attention to this announcement about the coming Champion? We don’t know what response they made because the Bible does not tell us. John Bunyan, in a chart he has of the book of life, has his character read it and say that the first clear name in the list is Abel, but there was a space above it but he could not see if there were names in the space or not. This was Bunyan illustrating, in a very graphic manner, the uncertainty there is over the eternal destiny of Adam and Eve. It was sad for them personally that they brought humans into the state of sin, but it is even sadder if they refused the divinely provided remedy.

Second, how many promises do we need from God in order to experience his salvation? The answer is one, and this announcement is sufficient to bring any one to trust in Jesus. After all, this promise is one of two divine announcements made before the flood. The other was the prophecy of Enoch, the seventh from Adam, who said that ‘the Lord would come with thousands of his holy ones [angels], to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him’ (Jude 14-15). By Enoch’s time, there were many sinners on the earth and the Lord gave to them a warning of future judgement. But his first revelation was about mercy. 

Third, there is a hint here about the unusual way in which Jesus was conceived. He is called ‘the seed of the woman’ and we see in this ancient prediction at least an allusion to the virgin birth, of God bypassing the contribution of the male and miraculously conceiving the human nature of his Son in the womb of the virgin Mary. 

The apostle John tells us concerning this conflict: ‘Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil’ (1 John 3:8). This was what was announced in Eden and we can look back and see that God kept his word regarding his great salvation.