Sermon Tone Analysis

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:

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.

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

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

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

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.