The Divine Advent(ure)
First Light
Genesis 3:14—4:1
This morning, we kick off for the Christmas season, believe it or not, a Christmas series, since Jesus Christ is what the Christmas season is all about. I’m calling it The Divine Advent(ure). We’ll have six messages to consider the Greatest Story Ever Told, the fact that God became a man and revealed Himself beginning with His virgin birth in Bethlehem now a couple thousand years ago.
Now I’m calling this first message “First Light.” We are literally going to look at the very first light with regard to the Incarnation—the first clue found anywhere in the Bible about this incredible event, the coming of God as a Man. And believe it or not, it’s found in the very first book of the Bible, the book of beginnings the Book of Genesis.
Now it has always struck me as interesting that this time of great light, or great revelation comes at what, at least in the Northern Hemisphere is the darkest time of the year. As I was working on my message last night, the last vestiges of the daytime, the last rays of light were descending beyond the western Sierras at about 5 p.m. Daylight is in awfully short supply at this time of year, and so it’s a dark time when we begin to talk about the great light that has ever dawned upon mankind in the person of the Messiah, Jesus Christ.
It also so happens that this is an illustration of the actual spiritual condition of our world. As we begin to celebrate the Christmas season, we find our world immersed in spiritual darkness. As we consider what brings great joy and hope to this time of year, we are often confused and overwhelmed by the fact that there is so much spiritual darkness, so much that does not make spiritual or moral sense going on in the world. Yesterday I read of the literal slaughter of Christians still going on in Iraq and Syria as ISIS militants behead and burn Christians, children and adults by the thousands, a genocide that continues to go on largely unnoticed. Last week we again heard of yet another mass shooting, this time in a Chicago hospital. In such innocent places, like the very schools which educate our most precious possessions, is where most of these mass shootings have taken place recently in the U.S. I had a brush just this past Tuesday with the great anxiety that now exists in our society as a result of these nearly weekly events now—I came over to this school, Sepulveda Elementary School on Tuesday afternoon to attempt to discuss the last of heat we experience on Sunday mornings so often about this time of year here only to find I could not get into the school—at the main entrance, the two side entrances, anywhere whatsoever, even though classes were obviously in session and cars were parked all around. After trying the main entrance for the second time a couple police cars rolled up with lights flashing and told the school was on lockdown and they officer suggested we get into cars. It was only a couple hours later before I discovered that one of the patients at the urgent care center across the street had been making threats, so police were called, and the school was completely locked down due to the threat of any kind of violence whatsoever.
And it is because of this sort of thing, repeatedly, in our time that one my many doctors, a young female doctor, confessed she was trying to figure out what was going on in the world—what prompts such moral and spiritual insanity. And this morning, we found out in the course of one cryptic but incredibly prophetic verse in the Book of Genesis which forecasts the great moral and spiritual battle which would characterize human history, which also in its few lines, also, amazingly also predicts the coming of the Savior, the Messiah, Jesus Christ, 1500 years before he showed up, and more than that tells us who wins in this great spiritual battle.
It’s all found in Genesis 3:15, the precursor to John 3:16 when it comes to our salvation and the hope of eternity. It reads like this: “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; 15 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.”
What we learn from this is this: God gives hope even as the darkness descends on the human race—we need to take that hope & live.
Now for just a second I need to pause & make note of a phenomenon of the darkness—and that is great deception. And one of the great deceptions that has come upon our planet is a supposed scientific theory of origins—the theory of evolution, and in most people’s minds in the U.S. it has discredited the Book of Genesis as a genuine historical account of what happened at the point of our Creation. And so I want to make a couple statements to make those of you who have been so deceived aware of what’s happened in the event that you doubt the truth of the Book of Genesis. First, the theory of evolution has been disproven by the scientific method. Louis Pasteur has shown that life never arises from non-living in 1864, and this has never been observed in human history. It has also been disproven by the fact that it is actually mathematically impossible for such complex organisms to come about as a result of chance. And more than that, Jesus repeatedly demonstrated his belief in the book of Genesis and the Creation account by references to Adam and Eve as real history.
And so in chapter 33 we come to the account of the Fall of Man—Adam’s partaking of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, thus plunging mankind into the darkness of sin and its consequence, physical and spiritual death. God has confronted Adam and Eve about their sin; they have both demonstrated a change in their nature by blame-shifting—accusing someone else of being responsible for their sin. Ultimately, Even brings the serpent, representing Satan, into the picture, and so God begins to pronounce his curses upon each of the participants. And it’s has he begins the pronunciation of his curse upon the serpent, that God reveals the course of human history from this point forward—the conflict between the darkness and the light that would characterize human experience from that point. First, he curses the serpent, the creature who had apparently allowed itself to be the vehicle of Satan’s possession and deception. “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 your will eat, all the days of your life.” Now my understanding is that the word for serpent indicates it was a dragon—a used often used of dinosaurs before the word dinosaur was invented. I don’t know exactly what form serpents took before the fall, but we do know what form serpents have taken since—they’re obviously without legs, they crawl on their bellies by virtue of being more cursed than any other beast of the field. But then comes the prediction behind the greater reality behind the serpent, clearly the great fallen Angel, Lucifer, or Satan, the Adversary. And the serpent is told “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.”
Now humankind, and especially women, have never exactly had a love affair with snakes. However, what we’ve got to know here is that this enmity, this hatred goes beyond the natural antipathy between women and snakes. The visible antipathy is simply an illustration of a greater spiritual enmity that has only now been engaged, almost as a matter of talionic justice for the fact that Eve and the Serpent had initially joined together to create this horrific set of circumstances in the first place. Adam’s sin was now going to result in there being an on-going hatred, warfare, battle between humankind and Satan for the rest of history until the New Heavens and the New Earth. Man comes into the relationship naively, even as Eve did, but not so with the great Serpent. Jesus tells us what he was all about when he addresses the scribes and the Pharisees in their opposition to Him thousands of years later. He says to them that they are much like the serpent in that they have rendered themselves servants of Satan: He says to them: “You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. 45 But because I speak the truth, you do not believe Me.”
And so what God predicts here is the spiritual war that to this day goes on in this world. It is the answer to the question so many people have in the great mass murders and evils of our day: What in the world is going on. Satan was a murderer from the beginning. His goal is to destroy mankind. He speaks lies and is the Father of lies. So is it any surprise that for instant, the Parkland, Florida shooter confesses later that they heard voices in their minds telling them to guy buy the gun they used and to go shoot the people they shot.
And this is our first point this morning. Don’t be naïve! Recognize we are and have nearly always been in a spiritual war—Satan vs. mankind—that is a matter of physical and spiritual life and death.
Maybe you thought this life was all about having a good time, making the most of it while you can. But don’t be naïve any longer. What’s going on is serious stuff. Your life, your eternal and spiritual life is on the line, the lives of all you love are on the line, because the devil plays for blood—that’s all he’s interested in. The reality is that we face a monstrous, depraved, cruel and merciless foe, horrific beyond our imagination, who is bloodthirsty and who will stop at nothing to steal, kill and destroy everything that is dear to us.
Now, do I have your attention?
The battle lines now having been drawn. The question is how do we survive, how do win in such desperate circumstances.
And the answer is in the next phrase: “Take the side of the Women’s Seed—the Christ, who wins the war. Take the side of the Women’s Seed—the Christ, who wins the war.
Now the prophecy takes on a longer view—a view to future generations. There’s not only going to be enmity between the Woman and the serpent but between the serpent’s seed and the woman’s seed. Verse 15 again, “and I will put enmity between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel. Now a major question we might want to ask is this whether “seed” is plural or singular here. I think it can be taken as both. The very fact that Jesus can speak of his enemies as being of their father the devil agrees with the view that seed refers to all the serpent’s seed. I John 3:8 would as well as it tells us this: “the one who practices sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil.”
On the other hand, as the verse develops it becomes clear that a specific seed is in view—one seed ultimately when it comes to the Woman’s seed. And here we have first light, the first light of the Day, the Dawn of our Redemption. Verse 15: “He (singular) shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel.”
Who is the “He” here? A man born of woman, ultimately a man born of a virgin, the Christ of God, Jesus the Messiah. A man born of the woman, generations later, would ultimately win the spiritual war. He would bruise the serpent, or Satan, on the head, evidence of a fatal blow. But not before there’s quite a skirmish. “And you shall bruise him on the heel.”
The picture seems quite fitting to describe what might happen between a man and snake. The man, by virtue of his stature, could step on, even crush the head of a snake, a fatal blow. A snake, by virtue of being underfoot, could bite the man’s heel. This is likely a reference to Christ’s crucifixion. We know from John 13, that Satan entered Judas Iscariot so that he went and betrayed Jesus to the Jewish authorities. That certainly Satan intended to destroy Jesus in his effort to destroy the author and finisher of our faith and salvation. But as we now know, in the very process of being crucified, Jesus took the wrath of God upon Himself for our sins so that we wouldn’t have to. The result was that our sins were paid for, and in a sense Satan was outsmarted at his own game—in the very course of murdering the Son of God, the Son of God paid for our salvation and our freedom from the works of the devil, if only we will believe and repent.
Colossians 2:13-15 beautifully conveys this truth to us in this way: “When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, 14 having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. 15 When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him.”
And the ultimate proof of Christ’s victory and our freedom from sin, death and Satan was Jesus’ resurrection from the dead—He had overcome our three chief enemies all in one weekend, our enemies sin, Satan and death, through His death as payment for our sins, and His resurrection.
And of course we know it’s through repentant faith in the gift of God that we have freedom from the penalty of sin and the promise of eternal life. John 3:16: For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.
So, Take the side of the Woman’s Seed-the Christ—who wins the war—and live.
Now an interesting side note as we consider this first light of the Incarnation of the God-man comes in Chapter 4:1. We’ve got to remember it was a very small world back then. A city limits sign might have read: "Earth. Population: 2." And one of those was, of course, Eve—Eve who had had a personal relationship with the two ultimate sides in this great spiritual war—God, her Creator and Satan her deceiver. And as earth’s population jumped by 50% in Genesis 4:1, Eve made a more than interesting declaration. Genesis 4:1: Now the man had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain, and she said, “I have gotten a man child with the help of the Lord.”
Now that’s the way the English reads in most of our modern translations. But that’s not the way the Hebrew reads. The way the Hebrew reads is this: “I have gotten a man child—the Lord!”
As you’ll see in the New American Standard Bible “with the help of” is in italics. That means there is no underlying Hebrew to support such a translation. It means the English translators have tried to smooth out the translation so it makes sense. But the Hebrew construction here decidedly points to the Lord, Yahweh, Jehovah, the most holy name of God, as being the direct object of the verb to beget. In other words, what I believe, and what no-less-an authority than Arnold Fruchtenbaum believes, is that Eve literally declared when she had given birth to the first man, that she had given birth to the God-man herself, in keeping with the prophecy of 3:15.
In other words, what she believed when she gave birth to Cain is that God’s prophecy of a deliverer from the curse had been literally fulfilled in that she, the woman had given birth, to Yahweh, the God-man. Alas, she was wrong, and she was very wrong—it was only Cain, who proved himself to be of the evil one’s seed. But her exclamation, in my view, indicates that she understood, in a very small world, that the prophecy spoke of a coming Messiah who would be God, born of a woman who would be win the spiritual war by defeating the serpent.
How incredible. God has never left man without hope. Even before He delivered the curse upon Adam that to dust he would return, that death would reign from Adam forward because of His sin, God gave the first rays of light with regard to our salvation and redemption. That unto us a Child would be born, and indeed his name would be Immanuel, God with us. And if he would give Himself as a guilt offering, He would see His offspring, He would prolong His days, and the good pleasure of the Lord would prosper in His hand.
And we are his offspring, if only we believe, and turn from our sins, the devil’s way, to His ways, unto eternal life.
For by grace you have been saved, through faith, and that not of yourselves it is the gift of God, not as a result of works, that no one should boast.
Hallelujah. Amen!
