The Undeserved Gift of the Gospel: Christmas According to Genesis 3

Intro

A debate that constantly rages every Christmas is what truly constitutes a “Christmas” movie

Some qualifiers: Christmas is a primary theme of the plot’s progression, Christmas serves as a watershed moment for a character’s arc, or Christmas serves as the prevailing background for the film’s setting

The most contentious question of them all: is Die Hard a Christmas movie?

I want to propose one movie that is noticeably overlooked in the great Christmas movie canonization controversy: Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

Dinner room scene: “Dear Lord Baby Jesus...”

Carley: “Hey, you know sweetie, Jesus did grow up. You don’t always have to call him ‘baby.’ It’s a bit odd and off-putting to pray to a baby.”

Ricky: “Well, I like the Christmas Jesus best, and I’m saying grace. When you say grace, you can say it to grownup Jesus, or teenage Jesus, or bearded Jesus or whoever you want.”

Lack of orthodoxy aside…he has a point.

Most of the world likes “Christmas Jesus” the best, too.

Rather than seeing him how he truly is, we as human beings always try to domesticate God in any way we can, and one of the chief ways in which we do so is rendering Christ, the cosmic king of creation sent into the world to redeem it as the incarnate Son of God, as a swaddled ball of cuteness that fits ever so nicely into our nativity sets.

In the spirit of the season, we’ve taken Christmas out of the context of very folds of the Scriptures which speak of it and turned it into hollowed husk of pure sentimentality.

The advent of Christ wasn’t an accidental or coincidental point in the course of human history; it was the very hinge of history itself. When he was born, all that the prophets had longed for was realized, and in his very first cries, the crying out of the people of God for salvation found its fulfillment. Yet to understand all that the hope of Christmas has in store for us, we can’t start with wise men, shepherds, and Roman emperors: we have to go back to the beginning of the story of us all, and it starts in a garden.

Paradise Lost (vv. 1-13)

God situated mankind as the crown jewel of creation. He intended for them to serve as stewards over all that he made in his place (Gen 1:26-30). Yet to do this righteously, they had to remain faithful to his commandments, and there was one in particular that perplexed them: staying away from just one peculiar tree.

It’s not about the what; it’s about the why that should concern us.

God is sovereign over creation. He sets the rules; we don’t.

All is well until a deceiver arrives who sows seeds of doubt in the minds of the first couple to be (vv. 1-5)

The serpent is not trying to disclose new tidbits of knowledge that God intentionally left out to Adam and Eve. His goal is to twist the goodness of God’s words to them so as to get them to question his lordship

Ed Welch: the satanic anthropological reversal

Instead of us lording over creation, creation lords over us.

There is one thing that we were never, ever meant to have in this life: the right to declare our own moral reality apart from God’s authority.

The temptation of the tree has nothing to do with how delicious its fruit is; it has everything to do with its forbidden status.

When Adam and Eve succumb to the serpent’s crooked counsel, they no longer see themselves as God does; rather, they see themselves as those who exist apart from perfect fellowship with him (vv. 6-7)

Shame is always felt when we actually are aware of the consequences of our actions, and nothing done in the sight of God gets rights to privacy.

God immediately knows that things are no longer as they were (vv. 8-9)

It’s not as if God was bad at hide and seek; his call to Adam was meant to signify that he was no longer by God’s side as he once had been in light of now being afraid of God’s holiness.

The disruption of the Edenic status quo immediately brought decay into the two most integral relationships human beings can have: with God and with each other (vv. 10-13)

The evil of Columbine begins in Eden.

Columbine by Dave Cullen

A Peculiar Promise (vv. 14-15)

As God begins to confront the destruction of the harmony within creation he has established by Adam and Eve, he begins at the source by addressing the slithering insurrectionist himself.

In the ancient mindset of the near east, serpents represented monsters who brought chaos, so for Satan to assume this form meant he schemed to send creation into disarray with his presence.

God doesn’t say that Satan is responsible for Adam and Eve’s sin, but he makes it clear that he had his hand in bringing it about.

In verse 15, we get the shortest summary of the whole storyline of the Bible to ever be written.

The protoeuangelion: the “proto-gospel”

God knows that unless humanity is able to be freed of the fallen flesh that now clings to it because of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, men and women will be left in abject slavery to the serpentine sinfulness now brought into the world.

The triumph of the seed of the woman is the first sign we have of eschatological prophecy in all of Scripture, since it looks to a day when the forces of Satan in the world will finally and lastingly be defeated.

John Calvin: the promise is the “medicine which could recover the lost, and restore life to the dead.”

The British soldiers surrounded by Nazi forces at Dunkirk were sustained by the constant declarations of Winston Churchill that they would prevail, the speeches he gave during that trying time being some of the greatest in history.

There’s a bit of a problem though with the promise: a woman doesn’t have offspring by herself.

The word used for offspring here means “seed” as well, meaning that the point of origination is direct to the woman herself.

Not children; only one child is in mind here.

For God to promise that the singular “seed” of the woman would prevail over the serpent meant that he himself would sovereignly make it happen apart from humanity’s own understanding.

Only someone somehow born of a virgin could fulfill this prophecy. In order to liberate humanity from sin, this promised redeemer would have to be sinless himself, something only possible if he came into the world apart from mankind’s own ability. He would be of them in likeness and the substance of his being, but he could not come from within them as an inheritor of their fallen flesh.

The conflict between these forces will last until the seed of the woman would have final victory.

It won’t be solved by Eve’s children; in fact, it’ll be worsened by them (Gen. 4)

Augustine: the line of Cain is what forms the city of man, given over to the love of self against the city of God

The promised redeemer will experience true pain in the flesh, but it will be inconsequential in comparison to his climactic defeat of sin and death

John Bunyan: “Yet I am God, and thy sins have been against me. Now because I have grace and mercy, I will therefore design thy recovery. But how shall I bring it to pass? Why I will give my Son out of my bosom, who shall in your room, and in your nature encounter this adversary, and overcome him.”

Fully human but not only human

God frames the whole story of humanity according to this promise; its fulfillment is the grounds for everything else that will take place.

Because Adam’s covenant with God was broken, a new one for humanity had to be provided through a truly righteous one worthy of upholding it.

Going East (vv. 16-24)

The complementarity between men and women that God intended has been left mangled by the fall (vv. 16-19)

The dance has become a duel (v. 16)

Without the promise of life, we are only of the earth (v. 19)

Creation has become our enemy rather than our ally, reversing the vision God gave at its completion.

Instead of letting Adam and Eve live a tormented life of sinfulness, God exiles them from the garden so that the promise might be fulfilled (vv. 22-24)

The loss of blessedness in man’s original sinlessness called for the sinlessness of another to bring humanity back to the source of eternal life, being in relationship with God alone.

Conclusion

This Advent, perhaps more than most before now, we need to get our priorities straight.

2020 has taught us that our hopes and dreams have more to do with passing presidential administrations than the promises of God fulfilled in Christ.

The realization of the kingdom of God, not the fleeting influence we might have in the kingdoms of men, is all that matters.

Our constant slandering and infighting merely over who will be in the White House brings shame upon our calling to be faithful servants of the gospel above all else.

Christmas means nothing if we do not see it as pointing toward the long-awaited salvation that thousands of years of strife and striving hoped for.

When Simeon says of Christ that “my eyes have seen your salvation” (Lk. 2:30), it’s because he knew exactly what he was looking for.

Bring up the picture of Eve and Mary drawn by Sister Grace Remington of the Sisters of the Mississippi Abbey

Eve only had a promise; Mary had a son. In him, we too have rest.