We look around, and we see the world full of sin. We look within, and we find our hearts full of the same sad blight. It is a dreadful reality, and we ask, how did evil gain this kind of rule, and how can it be conquered? Without Genesis 1-3, we would not know the answer, and Christ’s coming would not make sense. We would have no hope.
Sometimes it is good to go back to the beginning to remind ourselves of our original state, our rebellious insurrection, our ultimate ruin, and God’s prophetic utterance of the coming of Christ to redeem us out of our doomed state, our only hope of salvation.
Genesis 1-3 heightens our awareness that Christ’s arrival was not so much about the manger as it was to do cosmic combat against all the forces of evil as well as to rescue His own from damnation. At the onset, this “enmity” and “crushing” was designed to reveal that the method of God’s grace would prove costly: the heel of the Savior will be bruised, but the enemy would be vanquished. This embryonic form of the gospel reveals that God will provide a way of reversing our condition and keeping His promise by humiliating and destroying our ultimate enemy.
The prophets wrote of this promise with confident hope. Their faith enabled them to treat the future as present and the unseen as visible (cf., Hebrews 11). Angels peered through the course of time, with anticipation, of the eventual invasion of the Son of God into His this fallen world. In this very context, God has spoken of a coming redeemer, the One we would call Jesus who would come and live among His created ones, suffer, and be glorified.
God is a storyteller, and so we begin at the very beginning with man in paradise who made a decision and lost it all. Now what? The audience waits with eager anticipation of what will happen, and the Creator makes an announcement, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” This becomes the hope of God’s own. This Woman’s Seed will slay all unbelief, enough to win and conquer every heart of the elect. This promise is one where heaven will come down to earth so that those He calls may be raised to heaven. Here we are being promised that the Son of God will become man so that His own may be called children of God. This is the hope that the Old Testament gave, the New Testament fulfilled, we now celebrate.