Seed of the Woman

Introduction

Lets back up for a second and ask ourselves the question: Why is it that we place so much of our hope and confidence in the man Jesus from Nazareth that lived 2,000 years ago? I think this is a fair question to ask, because we really do place all of our eggs into this one basket. If we are going to place this much importance on someone, certainly there ought to be some grounds for doing so?

Now of course the biggest reason that we are so convinced is that we have faith, and faith is by nature something that cannot be 100% proved with hard evidence. We believe God has gifted us faith and if you do not have this faith then you will not understand it. However, it is also true that we have a faith that can be reasoned out as well. God has not given us a blind faith that is without reason, but he has also given us a lot of evidence to strengthen our faith in Him.

Much of what we believe is built around prophecies being fulfilled. One of the main ways God has decided to reveal his plan to us is through prophecies that have been given for thousands of years, many of which pointed us to a person who was going to come and save us. When Jesus was born, and throughout the 30 some years of his life, he fulfilled every single messianic prophecy. This gives us confidence that the man named Jesus who lived 2,000 years ago is not any ordinary man, but is in fact the Messiah that God has promised to his people ever since they fell into sin.

You Will Bruise His Heel

The very first prophecy about the coming Messiah was given to Adam and Eve by God Himself right after they were discovered to have sinned in the Garden. Many people refer to this event as the Protoevangelion, which means “First Gospel.” God just got done creating the world and everything in it. God made everything good, and in the middle of it he placed a paradise garden that had everything you could ever want. God created this paradise specifically for the first humans so that they would have a place to live and to enjoy. Even the work of creation is an act of love in which God created an entire paradise for the enjoyment of his people.

Now God placed his beloved people, his children in the garden to work and to eat of anything they would like except for one specific tree that would have given them knowledge of good and evil. It was at this time that Satan, disguised as a serpent, decided to start his rebellion against God. It was at this time that Satan decided he wanted to dethrone God, and his task was to recruit Adam and Eve to help his cause against the Lord. Of course we know that Satan did convince Adam and Eve to join him in his rebellion against God. So what we see is the people that God loved so deeply, the people that God had created with his own hands, the people who had God’s breath inside of their lungs incited by this fallen angel to dethrone their Father and Creator. This grieved God deeply, and it caused God to say this to the once-angel Satan:

Genesis 3:15 ESV

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

Genesis 3:1–15 ESV

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So 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 to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And 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. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of 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 fruit of the tree, and I ate.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” 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 above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

Genesis 3:14–15 ESV

The Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

Now at first glance it may seem like this section is purely just curses that God is giving to Adam, Eve and Satan. But let’s look a little close at what God says at the very end there, because he does not leave his creation without hope. God references a seed that would eventually come from the woman, a person who would crush the head of this evil snake that deceived Eve. It was in this moment that we had made an age-old enemy in Satan. Just as Satan desired to destroy Eve, so he also desires to destroy all of her children and even us to this day.

We also know that Satan is a powerful enemy to us. He is craftier than we are, and we find that we are much like Adam and Eve in our inability to defend against his temptations.

What is interesting about this prophecy that God gives is that whoever this seed is, he is going to be injured by Satan. God does not simply say that Satan will be obliterated with no casualties. From the very beginning, God shows that he had the plan to take some losses so that our enemy could be crushed.

He will Crush Your Head

What else is interesting about his prophecy is the way that these injuries happen. We notice that the seed of the woman will have a bruised heel and that the enemy is going to have a crushed head. God is claiming that the injuries are going to happen at the same time, because it will be the stomping on the head of the enemy that Jesus will be harmed. However we know that a bruised heel, while still an injury, is absolutely nothing compared to the death blow that Satan will receive.

Genesis 3:15 ESV

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

Of course we see this prophecy fulfilled at the end of Jesus’s life here on Earth. When Jesus dies on the cross, we see him stomp the life out of our enemy once and for all. As the anils are driven into his hands and feet, his heel is being bruised while he is crushing the head of death itself.

In this series we will be looking at just a few of the prophecies that Jesus fulfills to prove that he is the Messiah, and this one is one of the most important for us to understand. Jesus proves himself to be the seed of the woman, come in human flesh and resembling human form to win the victory that humans could not win by themselves.

Christ Shares His Victory With Us

And in fact Jesus didn’t just go die on the cross for no reason, and it wasn’t just so that he could establish his dominance over Satan. The very reason that Jesus crushed the head of our enemy was so that we would be freed from his grip. It was so that the chains that he had placed on his would be broken, and we would no longer be slaves to a cruel master but sons of our Father in heaven. Jesus dies so that we would no longer be helpless against our enemy, but that we would now have power to resist him and his minions. In , Jesus sends out 72 disciples to preach the gospel and he gives them power to proclaim the truth. When the 72 return in verse 17, they say

Luke 10:19 ESV

Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you.

Luke 10:17–19 ESV

The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” And he said to them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you.

The 72 got to experience the same thing we get to experience as followers of Jesus, which is true victory over our sin and our enemy! We get to experience the lightness of having our heavy chains broken after a lifetime of hard labor under the thumb of a cruel slavemaster. We get to experience authority and life because of Jesus. You can hear the excitement in their voices as they come to the realization that Jesus really is who he says he is, and that he is more powerful even than our enemy.

Jesus tells them about that fateful day in the garden when God had given Satan his death sentence, when Jesus was there and saw God cast Satan down from heaven like a bolt of lightning. Jesus is reminding these people that our enemy, though he is strong, is absolutely nothing compared to the power of the God who loves us. And not only is our enemy nothing compared to the God we serve, but because of what Jesus has done for us we find that our enemy has no power over us either. Jesus’s strength becomes our strength, and his victory our victory.

Romans 16:20 ESV

The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

Romans

Do you see what happens in this passage? Do you see how Paul uses the same language here to connect our victory to Jesus’s victory? Paul encourages these Christians that Satan will be crushed under THEIR feet. This shows that what Jesus did is extended to us, that we are victors through his work. Notice that it is still God doing the crushing, but he now uses us and allows us to experience this victory because of our relationship with Jesus.

So then what do we do about this? How do we respond to it? If our victory and our life is found in Jesus, should we not draw so much nearer to Him? Should we not long to be with him and to live our lives with him? Should we not long to have him enter every aspect of our lives? Should he not be at the very center of everything?

I believe we ought to mimic Paul’s response to all of this when he says

Romans 8:37–39 ESV

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:37

Allow nothing in this world to separate you from the love of Christ. Draw near to him in all things, for it is only in him that we will ever see victory over our enemy.