6 Words That Will Change Your LifeSample

When I was 14 years old, I got my first job. I went with a group of my friends to buck hay in Texas for a summer.  

It was the hardest job I’ve ever had.  

We worked 12-hour days, 6 days a week in the blazing hot sun of the Texas panhandle.  

I’ll never forget one field that was infested with snakes…rattlesnakes. Some of them got bound up in the hay bales. Others were underneath the bales that were being scooped up.  

When my buddy, Duane and I were instructed by our boss to get off the truck and roll the bales by hand into one long line, I was nervous.  

Then it happened. A rattlesnake came winding out from underneath a bale of hay. My buddy hit it with a hay hook, and then crushed its head. While the hay hook had stunned the snake, it was Duane’s boot heel that actually killed the poisonous rattler. 

In Genesis 3, we see something far more poisonous than a rattler on the loose. We see a spiritual battle shaping up that will impact all of human history.  

When God told the Snake (Satan), that He would put enmity (hatred) between him and the woman (Eve). Between his seed and her seed , Jesus, He was making it clear that a cosmic battle was going to ensue. But God also provided a foreshadowing of the outcome. 

When Jesus was crucified, it sounded the death knell for Satan. Although he can still wreak havoc on this earth, the guarantee of his ultimate destruction was secured at the cross.  

That’s why Satan used Peter to try to talk Jesus out of dying on the cross in Matthew 16, and why Jesus responded with such a harsh rebuke, saying “Get behind me, Satan!” 

This foreshadowing of the cross in Genesis 3:15 has been labeled “the protevangel” by theologians, which means “first gospel.” Isn’t it amazing that immediately after the fall of Adam and Eve, we can see God setting His redemptive plan in motion? 

And just six verses later we read, “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” If God clothed them in animal skins, that means that He sacrificed the lives of animals to cover their shame and nakedness. God removed Adam and Eve’s works-based, fig-leafed attempts to cover their guilt, and instead shed the blood of an innocent to cover their shame. 

God made the first sacrifice. And God—in Jesus Christ—was the last and lasting sacrifice. 

The world is full of people who are struggling with the pain and consequences of life in our broken world. Ask God to give you a heart that increasingly burns and breaks for the lost and hurting.