Life as a screw up…

The last two weeks we’ve been looking at the picture of how God intended life to be. As he created it and declared it to be very good (Genesis 1:31). This week we are going to look at the result of mankind’s failure to adhere to God’s standard and God’s promise to defeat the Serpent through the seed of the woman… 

Adam and Eve were created with a purpose (Genesis 1:28) “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.”

This really should not have been at this point in time a difficult task as creation was remember “very good”.  In fact In Genesis 2:15-16 when God placed him in the garden to care for it he was only given one warning, not to eat of one single tree… The rest of the creation was at his fingertips Genesis 1:29-30 says that every green plant was given for food…

But as we see in this week’s passage man wasn’t satisfied. We are good at screwing up a good thing aren’t we? Guess it comes natural… Adam and Eve rejected God’s perfect plan for themselves and brought pain and destruction down on the rest of mankind for what seemed like eternity. When they fell they hid… They ran from God because they were scared…

But God wasn’t going to leave them without hope… And in Genesis 3:15 we have a blueprint for hope being introduced.

“I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed.
He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”

It the midst of what looks like a very dark providence, God’s smiling face shines through in the most amazing way. Humanity may be cursed as a result of sin but God doesn’t leave them without hope. It was as if God was commuting their sentence even while he pronounced it…

The consequences of sin were serious and still are some 6000 years later… Pain in childbirth, relational conflict, toil in work, expulsion from the garden, and the worst of it death and separation from God…

But what a great God not allowing sing to have the last word!

This hostility was not some simple rivalry that would fade away and be forgotten over time nor would it be resolved quickly. Rather it would continue for many generations to come until eventually in God’s perfect time the true Son would deliver the final crushing blow to the head of the Serpent when he was hung on the cross.

As the prophecy of Genesis 3:15 unfolds in the early chapters of the Bible, we can see the themes for the rest of the redemptive story in action.  We can see God’s sovereign hand in all of it. You see all of Genesis 4-11, and really the rest of Scripture, is an outworking of Genesis 3:15.

While the hostility between the seed of the woman and the seed of the Serpent was a real lasting battle, the promise found in this very first proclamation of the good news was never in doubt.

God created a kingdom, and he is the King, but he made man to represent him in that kingdom. Adam and Eve rejected that call, which led to sin and death. But God promised to defeat the Serpent through the seed of the woman.