Bible Passage: Genesis 3:14,15
Pastor: Michael Willitz
Sermon Date: June 13, 2021

Bulletin June 13, 2021

Genesis 3:14,15

¹⁴The Lord God said to the serpent:

Because you have done this,

you are cursed more than all the livestock,

and more than every wild animal.

You shall crawl on your belly,

and you shall eat dust all the days of your life.

¹⁵I 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.

The Curse that Saves

1. Satan’s plot will be defeated.
2. Mankind will be redeemed.

Dear fellow redeemed in Jesus Christ, the almighty and the everlasting God,

Imagine that you have in front of you a standard sheet of paper, and a line runs straight down the middle of the page. One column is marked “Good”, and the other column is marked “Bad”. So you’ve got a chart in front of you with one column for good things and one column for bad things. Now, under which column are you going to place the following words: Hostility? Crush? Cursed? I think we would tend to put words like these under the “Bad” column, wouldn’t we? Words like these do not sound like very good words. Yet when we come to today’s text, these words are very good words. They are very good words for us at least. In fact, this text, with these words, has been given a good name. It is called the Protoevangelium, which is Latin for the “first gospel” or the “first good news”.

To understand how words like these could possibly be a message of good news, we need to know who is speaking these words, and we need to know to whom he is speaking them. The LORD speaks these words, but he is not addressing us. These words are not addressed to Adam or to Eve or to any other man, woman, or child. And yet, even though these words are not spoken to us, we are not eavesdropping when we give these words our attention. The LORD wants us to hear them. In fact, he speaks them for our benefit. In these verses the LORD issues a curse, but the curse which he speaks is The Curse that Saves.

So, then, whom is the LORD cursing when he speaks these words? He is cursing none other than our enemy, Satan. Our text merely calls him “the serpent”, but later on in the Scriptures, the Apostle John identifies him. In Revelation chapter 12, John calls this lying tempter “the great dragon . . . the ancient serpent, the one called the Devil and Satan, the one who leads the whole inhabited earth astray,” [9].

Satan was there in the Garden of Eden. He came in the form of a serpent, and he led Adam and Eve into unbelief and sin. The LORD had clearly said of the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, “On the day that you eat from it, you will certainly die,” [2:17]. But Satan led Eve to eat that fruit, and Eve gave some to her husband and he ate the fruit.

Now everything was changed: the man and the woman died spiritually when they doubted God’s Word, and with their fall into sin, all creation fell into ruin. Satan must have thought that his work had been a grand success. As he remained in the Garden after fulfilling his sinister plot, he must have been watched and relished the terrible results. Do you think Satan watched with scornful disdain, as the man and the woman clothed their bodies with fig leaves, as if that would keep God from knowing what they had done? Do you think Satan patted himself on the back, as the man and his wife ran and hid from the LORD, as if they could keep God from finding where they were? Do you think Satan had his opening argument prepared, to tell the LORD what he ought to do to the fallen crown of his creation?

But his terrible work would come back around on his own terrible head. His great pride was leading him up to a great fall. Do you think Satan realized just how deep the LORD’s love for mankind goes? Do you think he grasped what lengths the LORD would go to for our rescue? Do you think proud Satan was ready to receive the insult of all insults? Having led astray these humans whom he hates and despises, Satan now must hear God’s decree that by a human he will be destroyed. It would have to be like telling a terrible lion, “You are going to be hunted and eaten by a mouse.”

In our text, we hear the decree of the LORD: “The LORD God said to the serpent: Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all the livestock, and more than every wild animal. You shall crawl on your belly, and you shall eat dust all the days of your life,” [14]. So God gave to serpents the lowliest position of all the animals. Whether snakes had legs or even wings before this, I don’t know. Whether they had forked tongues that flitted in and out of their mouths, I don’t know. But since this Word was spoken, snakes have crawled on their bellies and have licked up the dust, as a continuing reminder of the LORD’s judgment on the devil.

The LORD goes on in the next verse to tell just what will happen to Satan. And now, for the first time, Satan and all creation hear God’s plan from all eternity. The LORD says, “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,” [15]. Hostility. The LORD will establish hostility between the woman and the serpent. Now on the surface that might not sound all that profound. Many women do not especially care for snakes, and most snakes are going to turn tail and slither away at the first sound of a woman walking down the trail. But there’s something much more significant that the LORD is saying here. Eve listened to the Devil, and in this way she became his student. In the course of his instruction, she chose his words over God’s Words. So Eve became a rebel and an ally of the devil in his rebellion. Not only that, Adam enrolled himself in this instruction as well. Now all of us are brought into this world as children of the devil, pupils of Satan, trained by him in the arts of pride and deceit.

But this partnership is not to last. Instead, God declares hostility. God will sever this alliance between Eve and the serpent. She and all others who are born again unto faith in God’s promise, are enemies of Satan. They are once more friends and children of God, because of the work of one specific Seed of the woman. This title, “Seed of the woman,” is a very unusual title. Much more commonly, the Scriptures speak of the seed of Abraham, or David, or some other man. But the LORD promises One who is coming who will be the Seed of the woman. He will be true man, born of a woman, but he will not have an earthly father. Instead, as the LORD will later say through his holy prophet Isaiah, “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and name him Immanuel,” [7:14], a name which means, “God with us.” The eternal Son of God would be this Seed born of the woman. He who walks in the Garden in the cool of the day will be conceived by the Spirit and born of the virgin, and will walk with human feet here in the midst of mankind. He who seeks the lost man and woman in the Garden that he might save them will come in human flesh to seek and to save the lost. He who promises to put hostility between the serpent and the woman, will come and will bring not peace, but a sword. As Jesus said in our Gospel text today, he came to tie up that strong man, the devil, and to plunder us out of the devil’s dread possession. He came with human feet that he might crush the devil’s head and that he might offer his human heel as the price of our redemption.

When the LORD says in Eden, “He will crush your head, and you will crush his heal,” [15], the image is visceral, it is gruesome, though we cannot and dare not turn away from it. The image is one of a man who stomps on the head of a venomous snake. The crushing force of his foot kills the snake and renders him powerless. And yet, even as the man drives that deathblow to his enemy, the snake achieves one last terrible strike, sinking his fangs into the man’s foot. Both are struck, and both die, but the LORD is talking about more than mere men and mere snakes. He is talking about our redemption in his war with Satan.

In the person of Jesus, our God had a true human body to live a righteous life as a substitute for each one of us. And he offered this body to be injected with all the venom of our sin on the cross. Jesus took from us our pride, our lying, and all the corruption that infected us from the time we were conceived, and he put this sinful venom to death in his body when he gave up his life on the cross. Jesus suffered all the damage that was done by Satan, but in taking this on himself, he crushed that ancient serpent’s head. As true God, death could not hold Jesus, and it will not hold us. He has died in our place and has risen. We will rise too. Nor will hell swallow us, since Jesus has already endured our punishment. The crafty serpent has been robbed of his prize. He has no claim on us. Christ has bound him, and plundered his house. Now he awaits his final doom when he will be thrown into the lake of fire and of sulfur.

When the LORD curses Satan, his Words mean salvation to us. It is also true that when the LORD speaks salvation to us, his Words spell out the ruin of our old, evil foe. In your Baptism God said to the serpent, “Depart, unclean spirit, and make room in this temple for the Holy Spirit.” When you hear the absolution, and God declares you forgiven, his message to Satan, your accuser, is this, “Your accusations do not stick. Your case is overthrown. I see nothing on this child except the righteousness of Jesus.” And finally, when the last day comes, and the Holy Christian Church is separated from the serpent and his seed, the Lord will say to you, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father.” And the serpent will see that he has lost you forever, and that the almighty, eternal God has loved you with an everlasting love and would not be parted from you at any expense. The defeat of the devil is unto our eternal gain. Thanks be to God, His Son has done it, and the Kingdom’s ours forever.

Amen.

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