This subject of the Seed Promise is what I have wanted to blog about all along.  Yet I can’t describe to you what Genesis 3:15 meant to Adam and Eve without blogging about the entire story.  For those of you who have read my explanations on the different aspects of creation, I will now be summing them up in short sentences.  If my conclusions don’t seem correct, go back and read the article that I previously posted explaining how I reach my conclusions.

God has created the entire earth and everything in it in just six days.  He has ordained Adam and Eve as the highest beings in the scheme of creation, even above angels.  One angel comes down to earth and begins walking through the garden of Eden.  This angel is one of the highest, most powerful, and most beautiful within the hierarchy of the angelic order.  He sees Adam with his position as king over this world.  He begins to ponder why, with all of his own beauty and glory that he could not be given an amount of authority to rule over as Adam has been given.  He determines in his heart that he will have what Adam has, yet in heaven on a throne beside God being over all angels.

As this angel ascends into heaven with his sinful intentions, God issues his judgement upon His formerly spotless creation.  Many other angels have been caught up in the leadership of this now sinful angel.  They decide they will follow him instead of obeying their Creator.  All of these angels who commit rebellion are banished from the innermost courts of the heavenly realms.  They are also informed by God in a cryptic way that their final destruction awaits them in a place called the lake of fire.  They are all cast to the earth having had their holiness destroyed in such a way as to render them incapable of doing anything for the glory of God.  All they can do now, under the leadership of the Adversary, is oppose God and God’s intentions.

Adam has been walking with his wife in the garden.  His wife is tempted by the Adversary who uses his spiritual power to possess a creature for the purpose of trying to cause Adam to sin.  If Adam sins, then he will be like the Adversary, standing under the judgement of God as well.  Since the Adversary understands the nature of the marriage relationship, having known the mind of God before he fell from grace, he knows to tempt the woman in order to surreptitiously but subversively provoke Adam to sin.  He also knows how to twist the truth concerning the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

The woman is deceived since Adam did nothing to prevent that deception.  Adam willingly sins against His Creator.  The caretaker of creation has fallen from grace.  The head of the human race is now dead.  The Adversary has achieved victory.  Human eyes have been opened so that they know good from evil, but it is as spiritually dead creatures who know that they themselves are now evil and therefore stand ashamed in the presence of Holy God.

Instead of proclaiming judgement upon the entire human race as He pronounced upon the Adversary, God proclaims hope to the human race by covenanting with them through the Seed Promise.  Adam and Eve were already suffering the consequences of sin.  All that remained was for a final judgement stating that they too would one day be cast into the lake of fire which had been prepared for the Adversary and his followers.  But God did not do this.  Seemingly against His character of fairness, God extended grace to the human race by promising future deliverance.  Let’s look at the language that God used.

14 So the Lord God said to the serpent: "Because you have done this, You are cursed more than all cattle, And more than every beast of the field; On your belly you shall go, And you shall eat dust All the days of your life. 15 And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, And you shall bruise His heel."

Adam and Eve are listening to God speaking to the serpent which is possessed by the Adversary.  They have just been goaded by the serpent into sinning.  They hear God pronounce a curse upon this strange talking animal.  The animal’s body is now to take on a different form than it once had.  Every time Adam and Eve (or any other human) would see a serpent, they would remember the story of how Eve was deceived because of the way it crawled on its belly.

Still speaking to the serpent possessed by the Adversary, the LORD turns the attention in His language to the Adversary Himself.  Instead of the Adversary achieving an instant victory, God proclaims that this is only the beginning of an ongoing war between two opposing types of offspring yet to be born.  The seed is spoken of as both plural and singular at the same time.  There is the concept of warfare between the two sides showing the plurality of the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent.  But in the culmination of the fulfillment of the promise (the seed promise), it is reduced to singular language.  “He” will bruise the head of the serpent while the serpent will bruise “his” heel.  So the Seed of the seed promise is both a people to come and a person to save those people by defeating the Adversary.

Adam and Eve would have understood the bruising of the head of the Adversary to mean victory over the one they had just forfeited their authority over the earth to.  The Adversary had just been promoted to the chief spirit over this world since Adam and Eve were now in subordinate positions to him due to their sinfulness.  Yet here is God proclaiming the Adversary’s sure destruction through One to be born of Eve.  Note here that Adam and Eve must go back to the creation mandate to be fruitful and multiply if they want to have victory over the Adversary.  Hope for the human race now rests in Adam and Eve continuing as caretakers over the planet in order to redeem a future for planet earth.

Victory over the Adversary would mean several things to Adam and Eve.  It would mean restoration of everything that was just lost.  They lost their innocence.  They lost access to the tree of life, or a way to eternal life.  They lost their purity.  They lost fellowship with God.  They lost paradise on earth.  They lost their lives.  God’s declaration in the Seed Promise is that the head of the Adversary will be crushed.  His head, his authority, his power, all will be crushed by the seed of the woman.  So mankind will gain it all back.  If Genesis 3 contains what is termed “the fall of mankind”, the Seed Promise encapsulated “the restoration of mankind”.

The Adversary thought he could subvert God’s plan for the future by causing man to sin.  Instead of escaping his damnation by causing the human race to fall from grace, God proclaims that the Adversary’s doom is even more certain.  In addition to being cast into the lake of fire, God foretells that the Adversary will be defeated by these humans that he just tempted to sin.  Victory over the Adversary will be through the human race, and one Savior in particular, which was just sold into slavery to sin.

Who can comprehend the mind of God?

Have fun and stay busy – Luke 19:13

-The Orange Mailman