And 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 shall you go, And dust shall you 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” (Genesis 3:14-15).
As we enter into Advent we are reminded that the essence of Advent is the idea of waiting, and anticipating, and hope for a coming deliverer… A coming Messiah. In Advent, we try to put ourselves in the place of the faithful waiting Hebrew looking for the coming of the Messiah to heal the world’s sin, to crush the protagonist, and to provide salvation and we do this in hopes of understanding the role and purpose of the Messiah better.
We remember that all this waiting and anticipating is because of the reality of Sin. Here in the Genesis passage God’s perfect world has been despoiled and defaced by sin. God pronounces judgment but in that judgment, God promises a coming deliverer and the wait for the deliverer begins. The look for the first coming… the first Advent begins.
That first Advent, we know, was about the coming of the King to pay the penalty of sin and in so doing crushing the head of the Serpent. In the first Advent, the inauguration of the King and Kingdom occurs but now we live in the season where we wait for the consummation of the present Kingdom when what we have in bloom will be to us the full flower.
Now we are in the period of waiting for the Return of the King.
Waiting and anticipating did not diminish Israel as it waited for the Coming of the King and it does not diminish us. Waiting and anticipating does not diminish us any more than waiting and anticipating diminishes a woman with child looking forward to the arrival of her child. In point of fact, the waiting and anticipating make the final day all the sweeter. So, there is the bittersweet in the Advent season. We are reminded of the wait but we are also reminded of the glory of that day when the wait is completed.
During this Advent season … this season of our own waiting and anticipating, I thought we would spend a little time looking at Israel’s waiting and anticipating for the first Advent of the promised deliverer.
That sense of waiting and anticipation begins in this passage. As we said sin has entered into God’s creation and His image-bearers have been defaced. Man has fallen but if man is to be restored it is must be God who performs the restoration. The door that will end the waiting must be opened from God from the outside via His timing and His sending of a deliverer.
This has been promised in the text.
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring[a] and hers;
he will crush[b] your head,
and you will strike his heel.”
This is the kicking off of the first Advent. God has promised a deliverer and now fallen but redeemed man must wait for this offspring who will crush the head of the serpent. As we know living on the other side of the first Advent we yet remain in the waiting and anticipating mode as we await the Second Advent of our Lord Christ.
We get hints that Eve was convinced that the first Advent was at hand when she brings forth her son Cain. Listen to her language.
Gen. 4:4 Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, and said, “I have acquired a man from the Lord.”
Several commentators have offered here that Eve here is acknowledging God’s hand in the birth of the child and she sees Cain’s birth as the fulfillment of the promise of God that her seed would crush the serpent’s head. Thus, Eve may have thought her first son would be the promised Messiah and put her hope in him.
If this is correct Eve thinks that God has fulfilled His promise already but as we all know Cain is anything but a Deliverer but instead accentuates the tragedy of the fall and so the wait continues.
This wait continues on throughout the rest of the Old Testament. And that wait is what we are going to trace out the rest of this Advent season. As the Scripture unfolds we get a fuller and fuller idea of what and who Israel is waiting for. Who is this Deliverer? How will we know He had come? The Old Covenant answers that question and as it answers that question we get a fuller and fuller idea of who it is we now worship as at the right hand of the Father. So in this series of Advent sermons, we come to know Jesus the Christ… the Deliverer better.
Along the way, we will see that there was an ebb and flow … a waxing and waning to Israel’s expectation of the first Advent. We will see times where Israel’s hope seems to be almost snuffed out and yet by God’s grace continues to flicker. By seeing this my hope is that we will adore even more the greatness of the first coming of the King.
Indeed, much of the New Testament – especially the Gospels – is a declaration of how the Old Testament anticipated future realities that were found in Christ. The Gospel resound with the declaration that the King has come and the Advent has arrived.
This morning we are going to look at the Pentateuch … the first five books of the Bible to see some of how God limns out what is to be expected of this Deliverer when He arrives on the scene. We hope to hit the high points because to be exhaustive would find us here for quite some time. In doing this we hope that we can see some of the major themes of the Old Testament. In short, we will be looking at the forest for the next few weeks and not the trees. We do so in order to see what Israel looked for in the promised one who would crush the Serpents head. In doing so it is hoped we will understand who we worship as very God of very God even better. In so doing we hope to understand Christmas even better.
As we have seen from this morning’s text God’s pronouncement of the curse upon the Serpent begins to give us explanation of who it is Israel is waiting for.
And the first thing we know about this coming seed is that He is a destroyer of the entity of who would destroy God’s creation. This tells us that Israel is waiting for a Warrior King. This coming Deliverer will not fit on a sentimental Hallmark greeting card. He is more Conan the Barbarian than he is a Lennox Figurine. He comes as a destroyer of the destroyer and the destruction will be bloody. Who could have guessed from this first prophecy that it is the Deliverer who will be spilling His blood to crush the head of the Serpent?
In this promise that the coming Deliverer will be a head crusher, there is the promise that in the crushing of the head of the enemy will be the salvation of God’s people. Only as the Serpent is destroyed will salvation be found. This theme continues throughout Scripture. For example in Romans 16;
20 The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.
As a brief aside we should note that it is likely the case that not a little of our mythology of slaying Dragons and so saving the fair maiden comes from this idea. The English Mythology of St. George slaying the Dragon. The whole idea of Beowulf and the destruction of Grendel. Much of our ancient mythology of a noble Knight slaying a beast Dragon bent on destroying mankind likely comes from the idea that the Messiah- Deliverer will crush the head of the Serpent. This is one reason why Christianity is a man’s religion. Christ is the Alpha Male who comes to rescue the Church (the fair maiden) and so sets all things aright. A pity then that Christ has been turned into a pajama boy inter-sexual hermaphrodite by the modern Church.
It is this promise of a Deliverer that makes bearable the judgment passed on Adam and Eve. Yes, there will be pain in childbirth but it will be through the bearing of children that the Warrior King will arrive. Yes, Adam will till the earth by the sweat of His brow but in the tilling of the earth, He will be constantly be reminded of the coming Deliverer who will deliver Him from His labors.
As the Advent story continues to unfold it is quickly seen that neither Cain nor Abel will be the promised Deliverer. Already Adam and Eve are learning that the destruction that they wrought will not be so easily fixed. Another man child arrives… Seth.
Seth may have offered hope again that He was the Deliverer but when we get to Genesis 6 we see that Seth and his line is not the answer as they dilute their seed by having carnal relations with women who were opposed to God and His people. Indeed in Chapters 6-9 wee see that the whole human race has been so corrupted that God resolves to start over again with a second Adam … Noah. Perhaps Noah is the promised Messiah? Noah is the head of the Human Race…. He is put into a new garden as it were but we quickly learn that just as Adam fell by the fruit of the tree so Noah shows himself no Messiah by his partaking of the fruit of the vine which in turn leads to an unseemly event by Ham (Gen. 9:20-27).
In Gen. 11, which we’ve considered the last couple of weeks mankind is once again at a flood point already. But instead of being visited with a flood God visits mankind and in blessing and judgment confuses their language. But we note that in the context of all this the seed promise first mentioned in Genesis 3… the promised serpent crushing seed… is now re-articulated to another Man … Abraham.
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go forth from your country, And from your relatives And from your father’s house. To the land which I will show you; And I will make you a great nation, And I will bless you, And make your name great; And so you shall be a blessing; And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:1-3).
We now learn that this Messiah who is being waited for is not only going to crush the Serpent’s head but he is going to a Messiah who has global implications. This Messiah who is being waited for is going to be a blessing to all the Nations. Here we find the beginning of the post millennial hope. The Messiah …the Warrior King who will crush the serpent’s head will be a blessing for all the Nations.
This Global champion who crushes the head of the Serpent will be the seed of Abraham (Gen. 13:15, 22:18) refers to Christ as we are taught in Galatians 3:16.
16 Now to Abraham and his Seed were the promises made. He does not say, “And to seeds,” as of many, but as of one, “And to your Seed,” who is Christ.
Abraham knows that the promised head crusher will come through his line and yet as I said at the outset hope waxes and wanes. Abraham is an old man with an old wife and yet despite God’s promise is without issue. He decides that He will help God along in God’s Messiah promise business and at his wife’s insistence take the wife’s maid to have this promised male issue. Abraham threatens the line by pawning Sarah off as a sister but God protects His promise.
Then the promised son finally arrives and God tells Abraham to sacrifice the seed (Gen. 22). From that incident, God’s people looking back realize more about the story of the Deliverer. We see through this type that like Isaac the coming Deliverer upon whom the hopes of the nations is placed will Himself become a sacrifice. God Himself will put forth His only Son who is obedient to the Father to the point of death in order to heal the wound inflicted in the Garden. The later suffering servant passages in the prophets underscores this aspect of the Messiah. So, divine irony is introduced as to who the Deliverer will be. Yes, he will be a head crusher but not without suffering in the battle. However, this is consistent with the promise in Genesis 3. His own heel will be struck by the servant.
If we next consider Jacob we see that he is in the line of the Messiah. Jacob has his name changed and we see that if the seed is going to come from this line it is going to because of God’s great grace to make it so. Jacob’s name means “deceiver,” and he is hardly the kind of man you’d expect the promised line to come through. Yet, God’s promises come clearly to Jacob and we learn about the Messiah to come in an incident where Jacob sleeps and dreams. Jacob has a dream of a ladder ascending to heaven which we will later learn points forward to Christ, as our Lord’s words in John 1:51 will later indicate.
51 And He said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to you, hereafter[a] you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”
This teaches us that if one is to deal with Heaven one must do so as through the son of man. There is no other name by which men must be saved. This teaches us that Jesus is the one upon whom heaven.
We learn through the promised line of Jacob and His sons that if a rescue of mankind is going to be accomplished it will have to be accomplished by God because the seed of the woman never looks very good. Humanly speaking, Jacob’s sons were even more of a wreck than Jacob so far as their ability to fulfill God’s purposes and promises to Abraham.
Reuben lay with Jacob’s concubine (Genesis 35:22). Joseph’s brothers were violent men. They dealt severely with the men of Shechem, action which caused Jacob to fear for the safety of his family (Genesis 34). These same men nearly killed Joseph and did sell him into slavery, with no compassion on either their own brother or father (Genesis 37). And Judah was willing to have inter into a sexual union with a woman he thought to be a cult prostitute (Genesis 38). These are not the kind of men which inspire confidence, especially in regard to the fulfillment of God’s gracious promises. Nevertheless, it was of Judah that Jacob prophesied:
“Judah, your brothers shall praise you; Your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies; Your father’s sons shall bow down to you. Judah is a lion’s whelp; From the prey, my son, you have gone up. He couches, he lies down as a lion, As a lion, who dares rouse him up? The scepter shall not depart from Judah, Nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, Until Shiloh comes, And to him shall be the obedience of the peoples” (Genesis 49:10-12).
Here we learn that the specific line that the Messiah will come through is the line of Judah and later Revelation in the NT tells us that Jesus was from Judah through both Mary and Joseph’s lineage.
This promised line from whom the Messiah-Deliverer will come goes down into Egypt to escape hardship and famine but while in Egypt the line is attacked by a Pharaoh knew not Joseph so that once again the promise of the deliverer begins to wane. There is genocide in the offering as Pharaoh seeks to snuff out the seed (Ex. 1:15-16, 22). And yet in another divine Irony God plays a trick on Pharaoh and has the one who will deliver Israel raised in Pharaoh’s own courts by his own daughter.
Moses Himself becomes a picture of the future deliverer as God uses him to first reign blow after blow upon the Pharaoh Serpent and then to finally crush the Serpent Pharaoh’s head at the Red Sea. Through Moses Israel is delivered from this bondage and to the careful reader, it is learned that Christ will deliver his people from the bondage of sin and will set them free.
We will pick up the narrative next week.
