Lighting Up the Plan to Save Us All

By Pastor Dan Hickling

READ

“I will make you and the woman enemies to each other. Your descendants and her descendants will be enemies. Her child will crush your head. And you will bite his heel.”—Genesis 3:15 (ICB)

Yesterday, we learned how sin came into the world, which caused us to be separated from God . . . but God had a plan to save us! And today, we’ll start to see His plan come together.

In Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve sinned, God gave them consequences for their disobedience. He also gave consequences to the serpent, who tempted them into sinning. And who is the serpent? It’s Satan—the devil, our enemy. 

So, God said to them, “I will make you and the woman enemies to each other. Your descendants and her descendants will be enemies. Her child will crush your head. And you will bite his heel” (Genesis 3:15 ICB). Now, on the surface, this verse can be a bit confusing. What’s happening here is that God is declaring judgment against Satan, who just tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden to eat the one fruit God had forbidden. She then gave it to her husband, Adam, who also ate the forbidden fruit. By disobeying God this way, sin entered into their lives. And because God is perfect and good, His goodness required Him to judge those He had created in love. Instead of living in perfection and peace with God, people would have to deal with a world full of darkness and sin. Satan planned to separate us from our loving Creator—and he succeeded!

So, this verse came at a time of disaster, and the whole story of God’s relationship with people could have ended right there! But it didn’t. This is awful! How can we fix being separated from God? Well, as we read in today’s verse, God’s judgment against Satan also contains a promise to save us and fix what had just been broken. 

How so? Well, God tells Satan He will make him and the woman enemies. In other words, there’s going to be an ongoing battle between Satan and people. This battle would eventually come to an end. At a certain point, a showdown would occur between the forces of darkness and one of Eve’s descendants, and He would crush the serpent’s head and put an end to his power in this world. In other words, God promised that even though there were hard consequences for mankind’s sin, God had a plan: a Savior would come to destroy what Satan had done to destroy our relationship with God.  

This is the first glimpse of the gospel—the good news of God’s plan to restore us and save us. Throughout the Bible, we discover the descendant’s identity. Just a little further on in Genesis, God references the descendent again in the following promise to Abraham, “In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 22:18 NKJV). God fulfilled His promise by sending Jesus through Abraham’s family tree to bless all people of the earth and save us from our sins. This is what Christmas is all about! Through His birth, life, death on the cross, and resurrection, Jesus Christ defeated Satan’s plan to keep us separated from the God who loves us. The punishment of sin was paid on the cross, making forgiveness and right relationship with our Creator now possible.

LET THE LIGHT IN

wə·zar· ‘ă·ḵā: Seed. Descendant. Offspring.

This word is used in the Bible to describe a descendant or child in someone’s family line, but it also represents seeds planted that produce fruit. And in God’s promise, both definitions work! In His earthly family tree, Jesus is a child/descendant of Abraham, but He’s also the amazing fruit this seed of God’s promise produced—a promise made to Abraham almost 2,100 years before Jesus’ birth! And we get to enjoy the fruit of this seed (Psalm 34:8) through a relationship with Him. How cool is that? 

Abraham 

“Through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed” (Genesis 22:18 NIV).

The Seed

“Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say, ‘And to seeds,’ as referring to many, but rather to one, ‘And to your seed,’ that is, CHRIST” (Galatians 3:16 NKJV).