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INJ
Genesis 3:1-15
'The First Gospel'
Matins
Invocavit, the 1st Sunday in Lent | 25 February 2007
Dear Saints,
The last verse of our First Lesson, Genesis 3:15: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall crush your head as you shall crush His heal.” Before this sermon is finished we want to know what this verse means, and we want to find in it the comfort of the forgiveness of all of our sins.
My Bible has a subtitle over the Old Testament lesson from Genesis 3: “The Temptation and Fall of Man.” It's true that we heard of the devil tempting Adam and Eve in the beautiful garden, we heard how Adam and Eve listened to the Devil and took the fruit and disobeyed God and brought into God's good and perfect creation sin and corruption and death. We heard how Adam's and Eve's eyes are opened to wickedness, how they are ashamed of their nakedness and sew together fig leaves to cover their shame.
And then the worst part of the text, God comes walking in the Garden to meet with Adam and Eve, and they hide. They are afraid. They run from the presence of God. They hear God and jump for the bushes. This is the horror of sin, the horror of your sin, that you inherited from your Father Adam: it puts enmity between God and man, between God and you.
And so this is how it is with sinners, we set about the business of sewing together fig leaves to cover our shame and our sin, trying to atone for our wickedness, trying to make ourselves okay. Every false religion in every corner of the world can be found here in Adam and Eve's fig leaves. Every false religion in every corner of our own hearts can be found here in Adam and Eve's fig leaves, in their works and efforts to cover their sin. But this doesn't work, it can't work, it's not enough. They fall to far, there's no getting out, not on their own, not on our own.
So there they are, wrapped in fig leaves, trembling in the trees, the juice of the forbidden fruit still smeared on their face. Sinners are a pitiful sight. And God finds them. And they know it; here it comes. You remember how it was when you were a child, when you broke a window or a glass, and you knew that mom heard the crash. You hear the footsteps and, uh oh, here it comes: mother's wrath. Well look, Adam and Eve didn't just break a coffee mug, they broke creation, the creation, by the way, which God loves. They broke everything. They hear the footstep and, uh oh, here it comes: God's wrath.
That's what their sin deserved. And as the Lord stands up Adam and Eve and speaks with them there are curses. But there is more to the Lord's words than curses, for you and I and all sinners, there is more than curses, there is good news here. In fact, the last verse of our First Lesson, Genesis 3:15 is given a name, the Protoevangelion, the “first Gospel.”
Listen again to this text, the Lord says, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall crush your head as you shall crush His heal.” Now what does this mean? This is a very detailed text, and we will look at its details.
First we notice who the Lord is speaking to: the serpent, the devil. The Lord is promising to put enmity between the woman, Eve, and the devil, and more, it's not just between these two. The Lord puts enmity between “your seed and her Seed.”
What is the seed of a person? The seed is the child, the offspring of a man. The devil's seed is sin and death. But what about Eve? What is her Seed? The seed is normally the offspring of the man; the Scriptures speak of Abraham's seed, and Isaac's seed, and David's seed. Never, except here, is the seed of the woman mentioned. So something stunning is happening in this verse, God is promising that there would be born a man from a woman, a woman only. This should begin to sound familiar, like we confess in the creed, “[I believe] in Jesus Christ our Lord, who was born of the Virgin Mary...”
And what about this Seed? There will enmity between Him and the devil and his children, death and the devil. This Seed will fight the devil.
And how does this fight go? “He shall crush your head as you shall crush His heel.” When the Seed and the devil are fighting there is some crushing going on, some mortal blows. Jesus gets it on the heal while the devil gets it on the head. This means (and I hope the contours of this text are beginning to be clear) that the devil will kill the Messiah, but only for a little while, it's only His heal that is crushed, but that in destroying the Messiah the devil himself will be given a mortal blow, a crushing of the head.
So this Seed of the woman is able to do what Adam and Eve, in their perfection, were not: resist the devil, and more, destroy the devil. Something, by the way, that no human being could do. This is the work of God alone.
So here we have the text: God promises that their would be a Man who would be born of a woman without the aid of a man, who would also be God, and in His death that does not last He would destroy the devil and sin and death. Now that's a fantastic promise, and remember where it's given: in the Garden of Eden, right after Adam and Eve's fall into sin. They were expecting the full brunt of God's wrath, but instead they get comfort and the promise of Jesus that He would rescue and redeem and deliver them. And just about everything is included; after hearing this promise from God Adam and Eve could just about say the second article of the Apostle's Creed.
Through the history of the Scriptures we see this promise unfolding. How the fathers are promised that their Seed would be the Messiah, Abraham, Issac, Jacob, Judah and then King David. And then the birth of Jesus, His baptism, and then (the Gospel for today, the first Sunday in Lent) His temptation in the wilderness, the first contest in this head-crushing battle between Jesus and the devil. Finally His death and His resurrection, and the destruction of death and the devil. And all of this for us, to set us free, free from the fear of death, free from sin and hell. Jesus takes the blow of the devil, the death that is ours; He wins the victory that we had lost, and He wins it for us and for our benefit.
Our Father in heaven never wants us to be without the Gospel. Minutes after their sin He sends His Son walking in the cool of the day to find sinner Adam and Eve, and to comfort them with this great promise, and He does the same for us. The promise of God's love for us is never far away; it is never slow to come. There is forgiveness with Him, that He may be feared, and loved, and trusted. That first Gospel that brought comfort to Adam and Eve is also meant to bring comfort to you.
Do you remember how this text was titled in my Bible, “The Temptation and Fall of Man”? It doesn't seem good enough now, does it? Perhaps we can extend it a bit: “The Temptation and Fall of Man, and the Promise of God's Death for Their Salvation.”
Dear saints, may this first Gospel grant us faith to endure to the end. Amen.
And the peace of God which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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Pastor Bryan Wolfmueller
Hope Lutheran Church | Aurora, CO
