He Shall Crush Your Head Series

Good morning! This past week we entered into a traditional holiday period known in the church as Lent. Lent isn’t really something we are overly familiar with in the church of christ and christian churches, other than perhaps having pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. Essentially Lent is the period of 40 days leading up to Easter. Many denominations will use the 40 day period to give up something for God, in emulation of Jesus when he was in the wilderness fasting for 40 days. The idea is to help bring you closer to God, and to help you to begin focussing on the life and death of Jesus in the weeks before Easter. So what I would like to do as we come closer to the Easter season, is to begin to focus ourselves directly on Jesus, in a unique way. I would like to spend the next 6 weeks looking at prophecies throughout the Old Testament that looked forward to the coming of a messiah. I would like to try and put ourselves in the shoes of the people who first heard these prophecies, so that we can feel the excitement and longing that they would have felt for a Saviour to come. I think that it is easy to sometimes take Jesus for granted. For our entire lives, we have had the option of choosing Jesus. But we have never experienced a world in which a messiah was promised, but not yet here. A world in which your hope was put in sacrifices and keeping the law. So I hope that looking at these prophecies will help us to feel that deep sense of longing, and the excitement, of a messiah long awaited and finally come to save us all. And as we move closer to the arrival of Jesus through these prophecies, it will also be encouraging to watch the season slowly change outside the window as well, bringing the hope and promise of spring.

We are going to start this series with the very first prophecy of Jesus in scripture, which believe it or not, is in the third chapter of Genesis. From the very beginning we will see that God has had a plan to restore all creation to himself. From the moment that creation was cursed and broken, there was a Saviour destined to come and save mankind. But to understand why we need a Saviour, we begin by looking back at the moment that the human race first fell to sin. Adam and Eve were living in paradise in the Garden of Eden. Satan came in the form of a snake and deceived Eve into believing that if they ate fruit from the forbidden tree, that they could be like God and know the difference between good and evil, but that they would not die as a result. So she ate it, and took the fruit to Adam, and he ate it. Because of this, they DID know the difference between good and evil. But it became their downfall. That brings us to this section of Scripture, the curses section. This is when God issued curses as punishment for their sin, this is the moment that Creation is bent and broken. So let's read this passage

Genesis 3:9-19: 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 crush your head, And you shall strike 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 itAll 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.”