TEXT: Genesis 3:15
I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He will crush your head, and you will crush his heel.
Sermon
Vispera and Adan were two young kids playing together in the park. It was a beautiful park with trails, lush grass, verdant trees, and plenty of wildlife. Vispera and Adan’s father let them wander off on their own to explore.
While they were by themselves, a stranger approached Vispera and Adan. He was very sharp looking and spoke eloquently, except for a slight lisp. He was very pleasant. He introduced himself as Mr. Vibora. He told the kids he worked for a candy company. He was going through the park giving free samples of chocolate covered fruit candies to all the kids. They were the first ones he had seen in the park.
Vispera and Adan whispered together. They knew they shouldn’t be talking to a stranger. And they especially shouldn’t be accepting candy from him. But it was too enticing. They accepted the chocolate candy and quickly shoved it into their mouths.
They were still chewing when their father called out to them, trying to find them in the park. But they hid from him. The candy was delicious. But their guilt was devastating.
When their father found them he could see the guilt written on their faces. Having chocolate lips made it easy, too. He could see they were uncomfortable. They were holding their bellies. They began complaining about stomach cramps. He felt their foreheads. They each had a fever. He felt their hands. They were clammy.
He calmly asked them, “What did you do?” But he was a parent. He knew what they had done. They told him everything about Mr. Vibora and the chocolate candies. The dad figured out that the stranger had laced the candies with some kind of poison.
The father quickly hunted down Mr. Vibora, and like a good, protective father, he grabbed him by his suitcoat, lifted him off the ground, and pinned him to a tree. You could see the fear flicker in Mr. Vibora’s eyes.
The father’s voice boomed with righteous anger, “I know what you did to my children. I’m a physician. I’ll save their lives. But your life is forfeit. I promise you that! I’m not going to do anything to you now. I’m going to take my children out of the park to counteract the poison you gave them.”
“But when my older son, their older brother gets home from his military service overseas, he’ll be coming for you. I guarantee that. When he gets home, he’ll find you. I have no qualms telling you confidently, he will crush your head.”
That’s my modern retelling of Adam, Eve, and Satan, or in Spanish, Adan, Vispera, and Vibora for viper.
The story began in a park, in a garden – the Garden of Eden. The Father of creation, God Almighty discovered what the serpent had done to his children. So he broke into the world and announced the very first gospel promise. Without this promise there would be no Lent and no Easter. There would only be death and damnation. But the seeds of our salvation were first planted in this Garden of Promise.
This promise completely reversed what had just taken place. Satan had planted the poison of unbelief by tempting Adam and Eve to sin. They no longer believed God’s words. They ate the forbidden fruit. The poison of the forbidden fruit didn’t just infect Adam and Eve. It affected their billions of children throughout the ages.
The poison was effective. “The day you eat of it, you will surely die” (Genesis 3:17). They didn’t turn to God for mercy. They didn’t look to him for a second chance. They ran for cover and tried to hide from God.
The devil’s food produced a foul fruit hostility. They felt nothing but hostility - in other words, the opposite of peace. They shook their fists at God. They shook their fists at each other. They shook their fists at Satan. They were quick to blame God for their circumstances. They were willing to throw each other under the bus if it would save their own skin. This ended up costing the skin of innocent animals to cover their nakedness.
What had seemed like such an inviting friendliness from Satan was now unmasked as a malicious trick to destroy them. In great irony they had become unwitting allies of this serpent who hated them and wanted them doomed like himself. Inside and out, they now felt the permeating, damning hatred that a holy God has for what they had become. It was sheer terror.
Can being enemies ever be a good thing? Normally my answer would be “No.” We teach our children it’s not good to not get along with other people. We tell our kids, “Say you’re sorry,” and, “Be nice and make up with each other.”
But in the case of humanity and the devil, being enemies isn’t a bad thing … it’s a good thing, a God thing, a gift.
God announced a reversal of who was whose enemies. Speaking to the devil, God said, “I will put hostility between you and the woman.” God would change things. The woman wouldn’t be an ally to the devil anymore. God would create hostility between her and the devil. God would put her at odds with Satan. Instead of being allies with the devil and being hostile toward God, the Father took action to claim Adam and Eve back as his children.
That means humanity and God would have to be reconciled and be at peace with each other and be friends again. Being an enemy of Satan is to be a friend of God. And this announcement of friendship was not offered to the woman only, but also to her husband and to all their descendants – that means you and me. God said to the snake, “I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed.”
Notice how wonder-inspiring our God is. He did not advise Eve to redirect her hatred upon the serpent. He did not command her to hate the evil one. Nor did God urge her to do anything to affect the change in relationships. God would do it. He said, “I will put hostility between you and the woman.” God administered the antidote of forgiveness to save the life of man and woman and the lives of every man and woman who followed them. The antidote God administered was forgiveness in the promised Savior.
But who would this promised Savior be? We know him as Jesus – whose very name means, “One who saves.” Jesus, the promised Savior, would be the offspring of Eve to overcome all the offspring of the Evil One and the evil powers he would spawn to harm humanity. Jesus, the elder Son of the Father and the older brother of Adam and Eve would take on human flesh in defense of humanity, the people he chose to save as his own.
God said to the serpent, “He will crush your head, and you will crush his heel.” Satan who appeared so lively upon the tree in the Garden of Eden would be crushed and almost lifeless under the heel of Christ on Calvary’s hill. The only one in the universe powerful enough to do that is God himself. So the promised Savior would also have to be God. But since God is spirit, he would need a human foot to be struck and also a foot for the striking and crushing. God needed feet so in his incarnation, the Son of God took on the flesh and bones, the hands, head, and feet of a Man. True man and true God. The promised Savior would be both.
There is no question that Jesus would be able to crush Satan. God’s Son is always more powerful than a created angel.
In the process of crushing the serpent and saving humanity, the promised Savior would have to suffer. The serpent would strike his heel. As true man, Jesus would step into our shoes. He would be our substitute. He would take on himself the blame for all sin from the very beginning in that first garden to this very day. He would let the poison of sin infect him from the serpent’s fangs sinking deep into his perfect heel. As true God, Jesus is too large and too powerfully innocent for death to keep its hold on him. Through the poison of sin, with the wrath of God the Father, and the willing obedience of the Son, Jesus breathed his last on the cross.
All seemed dark and hopeless. The Ancient Serpent had struck. It seemed as if all was lost.
Until the Son of God breathed again on Sunday morning. Three days of rest in the grave was all that was needed to defeat sin, death, and the devil – the unholy Trinity. Jesus had crushed the serpent’s head. He had defeated death. He had paid for sin. He had won.
Now his victory over death is our victory over death. Jesus broke death’s grip not just as God but also as a man. Now, since he is a man like us and on our team, he shares his victory from death –his success in coming back to life – with you and me and makes it our success. Jesus once said, “Because I live, you also will live” (John 14:19). Death has no more of a grip on people who trust in Jesus than it does on Jesus himself.
God said, “I will put hostility between you and the woman.” With this simple promise, the Spirit of God lifted these two fallen creatures, Adam and Eve, up from the dust, restored their love for him, consoled them, and rescued their lives. With these words, they were forgiven by God, reconciled to him, and made God’s eternal friends and Satan’s everlasting enemies. Note this well! God intervened and repaired what was broken. So great is his love for humanity. So great is his love for you. He refused to wait around up there in heaven for you to get up off your couch and do something about your own salvation.
A lot happened in the first garden. It was a garden of life that turned into a garden of death. It was a garden of innocence that became a garden of insurrection. It was a garden where allegiances shifted swiftly. It’s a garden where the Father’s children ran away from him and became unwilling allies of the devil. But it’s also a garden where the Father called back his children with the call forward of a promised Savior. A promise that turned the friends of Satan into enemies of the Evil One. Poison was countered with a promise and death was undone by the death of Eve’s offspring.
A lot happened in the Garden of Eden. All of it can be summarized by remembering it as the Garden of Promise. Amen.