The Protoevangelium

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I want to invite you to take out your Bibles with me and turn to Genesis chapter 3.
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And we're going to be looking at a passage, just one single passage this morning.
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So we're going to focus on verse 15.
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One of the things that every Bible student realizes very early in their Christian walk and very early in their study of the Bible is that the Bible is filled with prophecies.
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Prophecies are throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament.
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We even have whole sections of the Bible that are called the prophetic books, the major and the minor prophets.
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And prophecy is one of the signs that God gives to authenticate that His men are carrying His message.
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They said things will happen and they did happen.
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In fact, that's how you can know that a person is a false prophet.
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If a person says something will happen and it doesn't happen, according to Deuteronomy 18, then that person is a false prophet.
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Prophecy requires a 100% success rate.
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There's no 95, 90, 80%.
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Nobody's 99% a prophet.
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You're either 100% or you're not.
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And prophecy is valuable because it reminds us of two important truths.
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One, it reminds us that God is in control.
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Why can God make prophecies about the future? Because He controls what happens and He has determined what will happen.
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But it also reminds us that God has a plan.
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God makes prophetic announcements so that we will know that everything is moving toward His ultimate purpose.
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And this leads us to our topic today.
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What was the first prophecy ever given in the Bible? Well in our study today, we're going to look at something called the Proto-Evangelium.
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Now that word is a big long Latin word, but I couldn't think of a better title to use for the sermon because that is actually the term that our forefathers of the faith, our Christian forefathers used of Genesis 3.15.
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They called it the Proto-Evangelium because that in Latin means the first gospel.
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The first proclamation of the gospel.
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So what we're going to look at today is what Christian theologians and Bible students have looked at over the years and seen as the first time the promise and prophecy of the coming of the Messiah was given.
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So let us stand and we're going to read Genesis chapter 3 and we're going to read verse 15.
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God is giving His judgment upon the serpent who we know as Satan.
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And He says this, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring.
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He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise His heel.
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Father in heaven as I preach your word I pray that you would keep me from error.
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I pray that you would also keep me from cowardice.
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That I might preach truth with boldness is my prayer oh God.
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That I would be filled with the spirit and that your people would hear the word not only with their ears but in their hearts.
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That you would speak to them today through your word in Jesus name, amen.
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You may be seated.
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Well if you're new to our church you wouldn't know this but for those of you who have been here we've been in a lengthy study of the book of Genesis now.
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We have come to the year mark.
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We've been studying for a year now.
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We did take some time off during COVID so we can't say it was a full year but we have been a year in the book of Genesis and we are now finding ourselves at chapter 3.
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So we are literally going at a snail's pace.
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But that's okay because as we are going through the book of Genesis we are stopping along the way and we are examining some very important truths as we go.
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We spent many months looking at the creation account.
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We spent many months looking at the account of Adam and Eve and the creation of the first married couple and their marriage and then we looked at for several weeks the account of the fall where Satan entered into the garden through the form of the serpent and he took this good world that God had created where man was happy and innocent and had been given free reign over the garden both to rule and to work the garden.
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With only one command, do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and Satan went in and Satan tempted man through the woman to do the one thing that God had commanded him not to do.
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And how did Satan tempt him? How did Satan tempt her? If you eat this you will be like God.
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The first temptation was not the temptation of hunger because they had all the trees in the garden from which to eat.
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It was the temptation of pride.
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It was the temptation of idolatry.
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I get to be like God.
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I get to be my own God.
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If I eat of this tree I will know what God knows and therefore I will be able to be my own God.
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One of the major participants in that as I've already mentioned, this act of cosmic treason and that's what it was, it was an act of treason against God, the God who created, the God who established, the God who set man in the garden, this act of treason, one of the major participants was the serpent.
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And it was the serpent who deceived Eve and as a result she partook of the fruit and gave it to her husband.
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So in chapter 3 beginning at verse 14 we see God's judgment upon the guilty trio.
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The first part of the judgment is on the serpent.
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The second part of the judgment is on the woman.
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The third part of the judgment is on the man and last week's sermon we went verse by verse through that judgment and I explained what I believe it means when it says those things about the serpent, about the woman and about the man.
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But in the midst of this word of judgment we have verse 15 which stands unique among the rest.
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And I believe it stands unique because it is not just a word of judgment but it's also a word of promise.
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And it's not just a word of promise, it is a word of prophecy.
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Now, not everyone who reads this text sees it as a word of prophecy.
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Some people read Genesis 3.15 and they see it simply as being a naturalistic understanding.
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They would say, well this is just saying that men hate snakes and they bite snakes, men bite snakes on the heel and men hate snakes so they step on their heads and so this is really just a very naturalistic understanding of the text.
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And that's actually very popular among what we would say higher critical scholars.
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People who come to the text with an anti-supernatural perspective and they look at it and they say there's no prophecy here, this is just talking about the fact of people who are snakophobes.
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And the vast majority of people are.
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There's a word for it like ornophobia or something, it's some weird name.
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But I know I is one, I'm a snakophobe, I hate them, I don't like snakes, I don't even like lizards because they're snakes with legs, I don't like any of it.
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So I understand somebody seeing this from a natural view and saying well it's just saying that there's going to be animosity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, the serpent babies are going to have a problem with human babies and there's going to be this sort of natural view.
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And some people take that very what I would say simplistic view and I would actually say that's the wrong view and I'll help you understand why in a moment.
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But there are some people who take that naturalistic view.
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I don't think it's correct.
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Others see it in more of a broad scope of the conflict between good and evil.
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The seed of the woman is all the good people and the seed of the serpent is all the bad people.
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And so it's not about any specific prophecy, it's just about the fact that there's going to be good people in the world, there's going to be bad people in the world, there's always going to be conflict and so they take it in a very general sense of the general conflict of good men and evil men.
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And I would say I understand how someone can get there, I just don't agree.
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I don't think that that lines up with the whole of the text.
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Because throughout church history, and when I say throughout church history, I'm not talking about the last 50 years.
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A lot of people don't know anything about church history more than 50 years ago.
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You say what? It was like the Charlie Brown cartoon where Charlie Brown and Lucy were together and Lucy was writing a paper and Charlie Brown says to Lucy, says, what you doing? She said, I'm writing a paper about church history.
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And she reaches down and she says, my pastor was born in 1935.
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That's church history.
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That's when church history started was when my pastor was born.
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That's not how it works.
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Church history is 2,000 years and we can go back 2,000 years and we can see that this passage has been understood throughout church history, not just about the fact that people hate snakes and not just about the general conflict of men and evil men and good men, but this particular passage has been understood throughout church history as being the first promise that God is going to reverse the curse through the seed of the woman.
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In fact, I want to read from Irenaeus.
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Now, if you don't know who Irenaeus was, Irenaeus is a second century church father.
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He was a student of a man named Polycarp.
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And if you don't know who Polycarp is, Polycarp was a disciple of a man named John.
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You know who John was? That'd be a disciple of Jesus.
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So Irenaeus really takes us back to a very early part of church history.
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And this is what Irenaeus says in his, let's see here.
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This is his quote.
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This is from his apologies, which means defenses.
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Apology doesn't mean I'm saying I'm sorry.
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This is his defenses.
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He says, Christ has therefore in his work of recapitulation summed up in all things both waging war against our enemy and crushing him who had at the beginning led us away captives in Adam and trampled upon his head as thou can perceive in Genesis that God said to the serpent.
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And then he quotes Genesis 3.15.
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So this is Irenaeus.
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He's saying this is what Christ did when he was on the cross.
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Christ came and he fulfilled what God had said to Adam in the garden.
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And then he quotes Genesis 3.15.
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Now earlier we did a baptism.
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Remember when we did that? And what did I read from during the baptism? I read from scripture but I also read from something else.
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What did I read from? I read from a confession.
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Now we as a church, we are a reformed church.
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Which means that we hold the confessions that came out of the reformation as being important teaching tools.
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They are not scripture.
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They do not sit on the same shelf as scripture in our minds or in our hearts.
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But they do act as teaching tools for the past.
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And they tell us what our reformed forefathers believed.
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Well the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith is one of the best professions of faith that was ever written in my opinion.
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And this is what it says about Genesis 3.15.
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This is in the 1689 Confession chapter 7 part 3 on the covenant of God.
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And it says this.
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It says this covenant, that being the covenant that God made, is revealed in the gospel first of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the seed of the woman.
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So even the writers of the 1689 Confession, and if you look down, they give scripture references to all of the statements they make.
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Guess what scripture reference sits right next to that statement? Genesis 3.15.
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Am I going too far in trying to prove my point? Because if you need more, here's Martin Luther.
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Martin Luther said this.
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He said Adam and Eve, their consolation against sin and despair was their hope for this crushing which was to be brought about in the future through Christ.
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Adam and Eve are both full of sin and death.
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And yet, because they hear the promise concerning the seed who will crush the serpent's head, they have the same hope that we have.
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Namely, that death will be taken away, that sin will be abolished, and that righteousness, life, and peace will be restored.
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In this hope, our first parents lived and died.
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And because of this hope, they are holy and righteous.
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You see, Luther said they believed the gospel.
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God is going to crush the head of the serpent through the seed of the woman.
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That is a way of thinking of it as one of our Reformed forefathers said.
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It's like the gospel in a seed.
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And kind of interesting because it says the seed of the woman.
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But it's like the gospel in a seed form.
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John Owen said this.
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He said if you do not understand Genesis 3.15 as a Messianic passage, then the rest of the Bible will make no sense.
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Because the first promise of what God is going to do is given in the garden.
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So while this passage may be debated by some, I believe that what I'm teaching this morning stands firmly in line with Christian history, with biblical orthodoxy, and with the Reformed confession.
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Now I can begin.
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All right.
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So let's look at the text.
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We're going to do three things today.
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We're going to examine the text.
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We are going to, after we've examined the text, we're going to explore the principle, and then finally we're going to engage the application.
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So let's look first at examining the text.
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Genesis 3.15 says, I will put enmity between you and the woman, between yours offspring and her offspring.
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He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.
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Who's involved? Who are the three? There are three main, actually four, if you include God because God is the first.
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He's the I.
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When he says, I will put enmity, that's God speaking.
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And he says, between you, and he's speaking to the serpent.
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So the serpent is the second party in this.
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And then of course, the woman is mentioned.
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I will put enmity, that means war or strife or hatred or hostility.
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I will put that between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring.
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So we have four major parts of this text.
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We have God who is speaking.
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We have the serpent who is getting this spoke to him.
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We have the woman mentioned, and we have the offspring mentioned.
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So now we're taking the text apart, and we're looking at it.
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And God says there's going to be hostility between the serpent and the woman, and between her seed and his seed.
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Right then we have to ask the question, who is the seed? Well, if we're looking at this from the perspective of the devil, not just the serpent, we have to make the first recognition that the devil doesn't have physical children.
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Angels don't procreate.
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By the way, that's going to come up again in Genesis 6, isn't it, Brother Mike? Yeah, because that's another issue entirely.
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But angels, we don't believe, have the ability to procreate.
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So when it talks about the seed of the devil, or the seed of the serpent, how are we to understand that? I think we have to understand that in the way that Jesus uses the language.
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If we go into the New Testament, when Jesus is speaking to the people who are coming against him, what does he say? You are of your father who? The devil.
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When he speaks to those people who are opposed to his message in John 8, 44, you are of your father the devil.
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So in that sense, we can see that the serpent in that way does have an offspring.
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But what about the offspring of the woman? Because when it says offspring here, we have to ask a question.
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Is the offspring here to be understood as singular, one offspring, or is it to be understood as the collective singular offspring in the plural sense? If I talk about my offspring, I can be talking about Hope, because she's one of my five children, right? I could say this is my offspring.
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Or if I talk about my offspring as Ashley, Cody, Hope, JJ, and Faith, I can still say offspring, and it would still be correct.
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I wouldn't have to pluralize it.
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I could still say these are my offspring, right? Because in that sense, we're using what's called the collective singular.
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The collective singular refers to all my offspring.
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So is this immediate singular, one offspring? Or is this collective singular, all the offspring? Well, I think the answer comes in the third clause.
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Look at the third clause.
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He shall bruise your head.
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What do we have there? Singular, personal pronoun.
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He shall bruise your head.
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And you shall bruise his heel.
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So we have twice.
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Now, I know this may feel like you're going back to sixth grade English, but I'm trying to help you understand that this is how we come to the conclusion of what this means.
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We're looking at it from the perspective of language, and the language is very clear that there is a singular personal pronoun here for the seed.
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It's he who will crush the head of the serpent, and the serpent will strike his heel.
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Now, if you have a King James Bible, you might notice that the King James Bible translates this slightly different.
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The King James Bible translates this, it will bruise your heel.
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And the reason why is because in the Hebrew here, we have an ambiguity between the first person singular and the first person masculine and the first person neuter.
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Now, you know how language works, right? Masculine, he.
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Feminine, she.
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Neuter, it, right? Because a microphone is neither he nor she, so if I don't say he, I say it, right? So he, she, it, right? And that's how we use language.
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That's how language works.
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So in the King James, it chooses to translate it in the neuter.
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It shall bruise your heel or head.
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It shall bruise your head.
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And you say, now, why does it do that? Because in the Hebrew, it is a little ambiguous.
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But notice this in the King James, it says, but you shall bruise his heel.
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So even the King James, on the second time of the pronoun, uses the individual, personal, masculine pronoun, his.
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Have I lost everybody? This is important to me.
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I hope it's important, it's the word of God, right? If there's anything in the world we should wanna do, it's understand the word of God.
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I mean, we could stop.
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I could give you five ways to have a better marriage.
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I could tell you which avenger is the most like Jesus, but none of that matters.
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What matters is the word of God.
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You can go anywhere and get movie theater Christianity.
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You come here, you're gonna learn the word of God.
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This is the word of God.
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This is the most important thing in the world.
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And you are all smart enough to understand everything I'm saying.
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So we should know these things.
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Now, because I wanna make another point.
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The Roman Catholics make a very obscure translation here.
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Have you ever heard of the Dewey Rhames translation? The Dewey Rhames translation is the Roman Catholic translation.
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And they have some very obscure passages.
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This translates it, she shall bruise his head.
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And the Roman Catholics say that's talking about Mary.
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Think about how Mary is seen in the Roman Catholic Church.
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She is seen as being a mediator between us and Jesus.
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Some people believe she's the co-redemptrix with Christ.
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And Marianism or Mariology has really grown in the last hundred years, especially under popes like John Paul II who believed that Mary was part and parcel of his salvation.
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And so when they see this passage, they don't see it as he will crush the head of the serpent.
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They don't see it as it will crush the head of the serpent.
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They see it as she will crush the head of the serpent.
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There's no reason to take it as she.
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There's nothing in the Hebrew that would indicate that.
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So why do they do that? Because in the fourth century, Jerome translated the Vulgate, which was the Latin translation of the Bible, and he translated it in the feminine.
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Having been influenced by what I believe is a false view of Mary's position.
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So there's a lot to know about history of this text and why people would hold to different positions.
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So my position is simple.
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I believe that when it says he will crush the head of the serpent, that that is specifically talking about one singular offspring of the woman.
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And by the way, if you have a New American Standard Bible, and if you do, praise God, that's a great Bible.
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It gives the most obvious translation because it capitalizes the H in he.
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He shall bruise the head.
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She, or you shall bruise his heel.
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Capitalizes the he.
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Why would we ever capitalize a pronoun if it wasn't the beginning of a sentence? It's called the divine capitalization, right? We're capitalizing the divine pronoun, right? So anytime you see God, and then it says he, in the New American Standard Bible, it uses the capital to point back to the he, to God.
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Well, the New American Standard doesn't want you to have any, it doesn't want you to have any doubt that this is talking about Jesus.
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So it says he will bruise the head of the serpent, and it refers to Jesus.
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So now that we understand at least the broad part of breaking this text down, now what I wanna do is I wanna move to the second part.
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I wanna explore the principle.
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The principle is the principle of the seed, or the principle of the offspring.
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Because throughout the Bible, the offspring is a concept that is used to point to Jesus.
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I'll give you an example.
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Everybody turn in your Bible with me to Galatians chapter three.
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In Galatians chapter three, the apostle Paul is seeking to prove that Jesus is the promise given to Abraham.
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And so in Genesis chapter, I'm sorry, Galatians chapter three, verse 16, he says this, now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring.
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It does not say and to offsprings, referring to many, but referring to one, and to your offspring, who is Christ.
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Notice that.
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Now I'm gonna tell you something.
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There are some Hebrew scholars who are not Christians who would take Paul to task here.
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They would say, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul.
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You just don't understand grammar.
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Because the word offspring is not singular.
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It's collective singular.
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So Paul, you just don't know what you're talking about.
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You're interpreting this incorrectly.
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And you know what Paul would say? He would say, I didn't interpret it.
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The spirit of God did.
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Paul is writing Galatians, but Galatians is being written under the inspiration of the spirit of God.
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So this is not Paul's interpretation of the word offspring.
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This is the Holy Spirit of God's interpretation of the word offspring.
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And therefore, if we have an issue with how the Holy Spirit understands Hebrew, I think we might wanna take a step back and say, wait a minute.
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Wait a minute.
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I think the Holy Spirit knows Hebrew better than I do.
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And the Holy Spirit, through the apostle Paul, is here speaking, and he says very clearly, when God promised Abraham that through his offspring, the world will be blessed, he was talking about one offspring, not many.
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He was talking about one offspring.
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And this passage is actually referring to Genesis 15.5.
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In Genesis 15.5, God tells Abraham, look toward heaven and number the stars.
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You'll be able to number them.
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And he says, so shall your offspring be.
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And you said, see, right there, Genesis 15 is about all of Abraham's offspring.
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It's about all of the many thousands of people.
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I mean, it's in the text.
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He said, look at the stars, there's many stars.
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And God said, so shall your offspring be.
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So the promise is for these many offspring, right? And Paul says, yes, yes, yes, that's all true.
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But all of those offspring are not the real fulfillment of the promise.
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All of those offspring culminate in one single offspring that really mattered.
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And it's Jesus Christ.
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I wanna read to you a quote from R.C.
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Sproul.
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This is from an article he wrote in Table Talk years ago.
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About Galatians 3.
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He says this.
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He says, that hope for a new Israel, a true Israel that would embody all that God called Israel to be, persisted across the centuries into the New Testament era.
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This hope was finally fulfilled in the incarnation of God's true son by nature, Jesus Christ.
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Matthew tells us that Jesus fulfills Hosea 11.
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He is the true Israel.
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The faithful Israel who succeeds where old covenant Israel failed.
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Like ancient Israel, he came up out of Egypt, passed through the waters, was tested in the wilderness.
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But unlike old covenant Israel, however, Jesus passed the test.
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He is therefore worthy to be called God's son because of who he is in his deity and because of what he accomplished in his humanity.
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Jesus is the true Israel.
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Now that may be hard, especially for folks who maybe have been reared in a dispensational theology, but Jesus is the fulfillment of the promises given to Abraham, not the nation of Israel.
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Ultimately, the promises given to Abraham were extensions of the promises given in this text.
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The seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent.
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And it all points to Jesus.
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Since you're in Galatians, turn to chapter four and just look at this.
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You all know this verse because we read it every Christmas.
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In Genesis chapter four, verse four.
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But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son born of woman, born under the law.
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Why does Paul stress that Jesus was born of a woman? Isn't everybody born of a woman? You ever met anybody who weren't? I mean, seriously, have you ever met somebody who wasn't born of a woman? So what makes the point that Jesus is born of a woman? Well, we could say that that's referring to the virgin birth, Jesus is born of woman only.
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And typically, that's why we read it around Christmas time.
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Because we focus on the fact that Jesus is born of woman only, not of the union of woman and man.
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But could it not also be pointing to the fact that the fact that he is the seed of the woman, not the woman Mary, but the woman Eve, the promise of the woman in Genesis three, that he is the seed of Eve.
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Here's the thing, I believe this.
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I believe that when Eve had Cain, I believe that Eve thought Cain was gonna be the serpent slayer.
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Because in Genesis chapter four, she says, I have been given a man by the Lord.
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Why does she say I've been given a man? Why is she so excited? We might say, well, she's excited because she had a baby.
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But could it also be that she was excited that here's the one who's gonna crush the head of the serpent? I was promised one to crush the head of the serpent.
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Here he is.
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And who is the first one that God led to murder and become a murderer? Or God, I didn't say God, I meant Satan.
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Who was the first one Satan led to become a murderer? It was Cain himself.
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So maybe Satan himself thought Cain was that seed.
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And maybe that's why the corruption was so intense for him.
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There's so much to consider from this passage.
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But the principle is throughout Scripture.
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God has a plan to save His people through a promised Redeemer.
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And that Redeemer would come through the seed of the woman and He would crush the head of the serpent.
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Now, let us move to the application of this.
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Because I know so far we've been a little bit with our head in the clouds.
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We've been dealing with language and we've been dealing with all of those things and we've been going to cross references.
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I wanna now move to the very practical aspect of how do we apply this? We didn't come here today just to get an English lesson or a Hebrew lesson.
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First of all, under the application, I think this passage, Genesis 3.15, answers the question that a lot of people ask.
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What did the Old Testament saints hope in? Because think about that.
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A lot of people say, as a New Testament believer, we hope in Jesus.
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But what did the Old Testament saints hope in? Can I tell you the Old Testament saints hoped in Jesus too? Can I tell you that everybody that's ever been saved hoped in Jesus? Even though they didn't know His name was gonna be Jesus, even though they didn't know maybe where He was gonna be born or what He was gonna be, they knew that a serpent slayer was coming and they trusted that God was going to make right what was made wrong in the garden.
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In fact, Richard Barcellos, in his teaching on this, I think makes a very interesting point.
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He said Noah was called a preacher of righteousness.
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That's in 2 Peter 2.5.
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It says Noah was a preacher of righteousness.
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But Noah was before the flood.
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Noah was before Abraham.
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Noah was before Moses.
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What did he preach? Could it be that he preached that a serpent slayer is coming? What did Enoch preach? Could he have preached that God is going to make right what has been made wrong? Maybe not the same language that we're using, but still a hope.
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You see, this passage provides hope from now on.
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From now on, we're going to see this promised hope be the heart of God's people.
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And this promised hope will go from Noah.
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It will go to Abraham.
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It will go to Isaac.
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It will go to Jacob.
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You remember this.
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Always remember this.
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Noah, Shem, Ham, Japheth, their children, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the 12 sons of Jacob never touched a Bible.
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Who was the first one to write scripture? Moses, 400 years after they were taken to Egypt.
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What did they trust in? They trusted in the promise.
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And I think that promise can be traced back to the garden.
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The second thing I think we can see as far as application is our participation in the crushing of the serpent.
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Remember we sang a song earlier? Romans 16, 19 says, be excellent at what is good, be innocent of evil, for the God of peace will soon crush Satan.
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He will crush Satan under our feet.
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You say, but wait a minute.
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God already crushed Satan under the head.
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Didn't God crush Satan at the cross? Yes, we can say that He did.
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But we can say that Satan still exists and he still prowls around as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.
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And so we get to participate.
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We get to participate as the body of Christ in the crushing of the head of the serpent.
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I think we saw a part of that this morning.
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When we see someone going from death to life.
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When we see someone going from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light.
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When we see someone saying, I want to serve Jesus with my whole life.
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That is a crushing blow to the head of the serpent.
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And one day there's going to be the final blow.
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One day the Bible says, God is going to take that old serpent and He is going to cast him into a lake of fire where he will be tormented day and night forever and ever.
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That's the final.
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There will be no Satan to worry about in heaven.
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You won't be walking around in heaven and be worried that there's a serpent that's going to sneak up and try to talk you into turning against God.
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And that leads me to my third and last point of application.
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I think this text reminds us that the cross was not a secondary plan.
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But that the cross of Jesus Christ was decreed by God from the beginning.
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Jesus is the lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
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Genesis chapter 13 verse eight.
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I'm sorry, Revelation 13 verse eight.
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And Jesus' work is not accidental.
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It is not an afterthought.
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And the entire world was created by Him and for Him.
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And our purpose today is to glorify Jesus because that was our purpose from the beginning.
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This world was created for one singular purpose, to glorify the Son.
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And the Son's glory has been shining since the dawn of creation.
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See, this is why I think I have a hard time with people who say, oh, I don't think this passage is about Jesus.
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The whole Bible is about Jesus.
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Anywhere you cut the word of God, it will bleed the blood of Christ.
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Not specifically always in the most exact language, but it's all pointing towards one purpose.
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And if I believe the purpose of all of the Bible is to point me to Jesus, how can I not see Jesus in Genesis 3.15? One of the greatest commentators in Bible history, and many of you have read his comments on scripture, was a man by the name of Matthew Henry.
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And this is what he says about Genesis 3.15, and I'm gonna use this to draw to a close.
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A gracious promise is here made of Christ.
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As the deliverer of fallen man from the power of Satan.
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Here was the dawn of the gospel day.
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No sooner was the wound given than the remedy was provided and revealed.
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This gracious revelation of a Savior came unasked and unlooked for.
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Without a revelation of mercy, giving some hope of forgiveness, the convinced sinner would sink into despair and be hardened but by faith in this promise, our first parents and the patriarchs before the flood were justified and saved.
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By his death, he gave a fatal blow to the devil's kingdom, a wound to the head of the serpent that cannot be healed.
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And as the gospel gains ground, Satan falls.
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The mortal wound was given at the cross.
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And now he awaits the day that his final judgment will come.
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And in the meantime, we get to enjoy the blessing of stepping on his head every time the gospel is proclaimed.
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Praise the Lord.
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Let us pray.
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Father, I thank you for the opportunity to preach your word.
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I thank you for the opportunity to be reminded today that this hope of salvation came not just in Bethlehem, but in Eden.
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And Lord, we can look back now and say, of what were all of those who came before us saved? And they were all saved of Jesus Christ.
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Lord, I am reminded of the Victorian homily, which says, it was on Golgotha that the old serpent gave the Savior the deadly bite in his heel, which went right through his foot, fastening him to the cross with its nails.
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And Lord, we know that was the moment that the serpent struck at the heel of the Savior.
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But Father, in his work of propitiation, when he yelled, it is finished, Father, he dealt a death blow to the serpent and his work.
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And Lord, how grateful are we? How thankful are we to share in that work? Father, I pray this morning for any person in this room who doesn't right now share in the work of Jesus Christ by faith.
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I pray, Lord, that you would, by your mercy, draw them to yourself, give them the gift of life and repentance and faith, Lord, which only comes from you.
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And I pray this in Jesus' name and for his sake.
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Amen.