Sermon Tone Analysis

*Seeds of Hope: The First Gospel (Genesis 3:14-15)*

/Preached by Pastor Phil Layton at Gold Country Baptist Church on November 18, 2007/

www.goldcountrybaptist.org

It was a day that affected the entire universe and course of history for the worse.

Every day we feel the effects of Genesis 3 and sin and the Fall.

The fact that we are all dying, and have diseases and difficulties is all because of what happened in this chapter.

Few places in the Bible have a more pervasive and profound impact on everything you do, think, and say.

Every time you turn on the news, you see the effects of Genesis 3. Every time you open the newspaper, you read of things that are only explained adequately by Genesis 3. The reason our nation will have an election next year and the reason we have government at all and policemen is because of this chapter.

The source of suffering and struggles and in your life, in your marriage, in your children, in your job, is all in these few verses.

The rest of the Bible would not make sense without Genesis 3.  The world would not make sense without this chapter.

In some ways, it is one of the saddest chapters in scripture – how mankind has fallen from the original perfect and good state God created us in and is now in a hopeless state.

But it is precisely at this point that God in His marvelous grace planted seeds of hope.

These seeds would grow and blossom through progressive revelation revealing the main character in the drama of redemption, the seed of the woman, Jesus Christ who would defeat the devil and his seed.

Christ is pictured in this chapter, He is promised in this chapter, and He is present in this chapter as we saw last week.

The day that would live in infamy for Adam and Eve was also the day God allowed them to live in infinitely great promises of grace.

God is by nature a Savior, and right in the midst of curses, we will see the eye of the storm; God’s sovereign saving mercy toward those who were yet sinners.

The darkest day in human history would be used by a merciful and Mighty God to make the glory of the light of the gospel shine brightly on its backdrop.

There is bad news, but there is also good news here.

It is right in the midst of the first judgment, that we see THE FIRST GOSPEL.

Genesis 3:14-15 (NASB95) ‘*The Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, Cursed are you more than all cattle, And more than every beast of the field; On your belly you will go, And dust you will eat All the days of your life; And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel.”’*

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The gospel is in Genesis – not in the full N.T. understanding, but clearly the seeds are planted here that grow throughout the O.T.

 

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*The Immediate Consequences – v. 14*

 

*14 **The Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, Cursed are you more than all cattle, And more than every beast of the field; *

 

There are always consequences for sin, and this is where the gospel starts.

Not only are there immediate consequences, but ultimately there is eternal consequences for our rebellion against God, which we will see prophesied to Satan a little later.

This is where the gospel starts – our personal sin brings personal judgment.

The serpent is cursed “more than” other animals – this implies that the curse and the fall effected all creatures, and we will see later in this chapter that animal death takes place.

“Curse” has the idea of banishment of blessing.

Cursed was a word for judgment of God because of sin.

*On your belly you will go, And dust you will eat All the days of your life;* \\ \\

Notice in v. 14 after giving Adam and Eve a chance to explain what happened, that God doesn’t give the serpent a chance to confess or repent, He immediately begins to speak curses and judgment to the serpent in verses 14-15 that he would have to crawl on his belly from now on.

As one old preacher has said, “Adam blamed the woman, the woman blamed the snake, but the snake didn’t have a leg to stand on”

 

The text doesn’t actually explicitly say snakes used to have legs, and I don’t think it’s teaching snakes literally eat dust.

The Hebrew phrase refers to defeat and humiliation.

Satan who spoke through the serpent tempted Eve with his own desire to be like the Most High, but now he will now be the most low.

The one who tempted her to eat is now going to have the dust to eat, i.e., agony of defeat.

Psalm 72:9 “let their enemies lick the dust” (in our vernacular “another one bites the dust”)

 

This curse is “for all the days” and will never be undone:

Isaiah 65:25 (NASB95) 25 /“The wolf and the lamb will graze together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox; and dust *will be the serpent’s food*.

They will do no evil or harm in all My holy mountain,” says the Lord./

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Sometimes people will refer to this whole section in Genesis 3 as the “curse” but it’s worth noting that Adam and Eve are not cursed, it is the serpent here in v. 14 that God uses the word “curse” for.

God /does/ curse some humans later in Genesis (Cain, Noah’s son Canaan through Ham, God curses any who curse Abraham, etc.) but I want to show you next week that to Adam and Eve, God actually /extends grace/ rather than cursing them personally as He does with the serpent and as He could have done with them here.

Moses not only wrote Genesis, he wrote the whole Torah or Pentateuch, where there is a familiar story of the serpent and how it epitomized death and curses.

The original readers of Genesis may not have missed the connection here with the cursedness of the serpents in a vivid experience in their lifetimes in Numbers 21.

Because of sin God had sent venomous serpents into their midst who were biting the people and causing widespread death as part of God’s judgment and curse on sin.

Numbers 21:8-9 (NASB95) 8 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a standard; and it shall come about, that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, he will live.”

9 And Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on the standard; and it came about, that if a serpent bit any man, when he looked to the bronze serpent, he lived.

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Kent Hughes points out:

‘The snakes were the result of sin – in fact, the perfect expression of sin because it was the serpent who tempted Adam and Eve in the garden, thereby bringing sin into the world.

Our very natures have been polluted by the serpent’s venom … (Rom.

3:10).

Above the dying people we see the likeness of a serpent lifted up on a pole, foreshadowing Christ who was “made … to be sin for us” (2 Corinthians 5:21) … Our Lord became sin (or [like what was deserved by the] serpent) for us.

Romans 8:3 says, “… his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin.

Second Corinthians 5:21 adds, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

‘And Galatians 3:13 states, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.”

With all the animal realm from which to choose, God chose the perfect representation – the serpent.

On the cross our Lord took the sins of the world upon himself as symbolized by the writhing serpent.

… The command to look to that uplifted serpent was a gracious foreshadowing of looking to the crucified Christ for our salvation.

No wonder our Lord said, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (John 3:14)’

15 so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life.

\\ 16 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

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He continues: ‘… Moses raised that serpent up high in the camp, and all the dying Israelites had to do was look to that pole and be saved.

No matter how horribly they were bitten, no matter how many times they had been bitten or how sick they were, the opportunity for salvation was there.

Even the most degraded and miserable sinner who looks to Christ alone for salvation will be saved.

This great grace had its origins and image in the “first gospel” in the garden.

There was hope in paradise lost!’[1]

 

Moses wrote a lot about curses for sin and sinners.

For example, he wrote in the law “cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree” which N.T. applies to Christ who was nailed to a tree for us and bore the curse and judgment deserving of all humanity, but in a particular and special way He was an actual substitute for all He would save, taking their guilt upon him.

It was an atonement that satisfied the demands of God’s wrath, a definite atonement that actually averts God’s judgment for His elect and allows Him to be Just and to justify those who are of themselves ungodly.

God imputed their sins to Christ’s account, and for all who are redeemed and regenerated and who repent and receive Christ alone by saving faith, God justifies them at a point in time, a judicial and forensic declaring them righteous by imputing a real and perfect righteousness to their account.

The judge of the universe not only acquits them of their curse and crimes, He counts them righteous in Christ and views them not merely “just as if I’d never sinned” but He views them just as if they’d lived the perfect life of Christ.

/Because the sinless Savior died, my sinful soul is counted free/

/For God the Just is satisfied to look on Him and pardon me/

 

This is the abounding astounding grace of God toward depraved  sinners who not only don’t deserve it, but who deserve the exact opposite!

Marvelous, infinite, matchless grace freely bestowed on all who believe!

 

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*The Incessant Conflict – v. 15a*

 

*v.

15 I will put enmity between you and the woman*

 

When God addresses the serpent in this passage, conservative scholars generally agree that God is addressing more than the reptile, he addressing what’s behind this temptation, the satanic forces as well (as N.T. calls the devil “the serpent of old”)

 

The emphatic position[2] of /enmity/ highlights the struggle that will ensue, which has more in mind than simply explaining “why women don’t like snakes.”

It’s certainly true that snakes repulse /most /humans.

Most people fear snakes and have an enmity against these slithering sinister creatures (even Indiana Jones feared snakes when he feared little else!)

 

When I was growing up in the Philippines we had a couple occasions where we had Cobras in our house (Cebu, Davao) and on our property, which was greatly alarming to us.

While certainly the passage involves a real animal and real antipathy between it and physical humanity, the language suggests more is going on in this verse and more than a mere reptile is spoken to here.

There is debate as to whether only a physical snake is being addressed in verse 14 (or both), but clearly the shift in 3:15a moves beyond the animal kingdom:

 

-         /Enmity/ is a term limited to persons and moral agents rather than mere beasts.[3]

-         The phrase “days of your life” in v. 14 is similarly never used of animals.

-         When God says to the serpent “your seed” – that Hebrew word for “seed” is almost never used of animals (only twice out of 200+ uses in O.T.).

-         The 2nd person pronoun (“you”), in moral issues, indicates a being with moral sense and responsibility.[4]

-         The early part of Genesis 3 certainly portrays a being with supernatural intelligence and access, and the future offspring of the woman (however interpreted) would certainly live longer than the individual snake in Eden, yet God says to the snake “/You /[masculine singular] will bruise the heel” of the future offspring of humanity.

So it seems evident that God’s discourse is directed beyond this temporal reptile.

*And [enmity] between your seed and her seed*

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This enmity will continue beyond the garden to the children and children’s children of the original two characters.

There will from now on be a deep-seated enmity and hostility that will continually take place throughout history for two classes of people.

There’s a lot of discussion about what “her seed” refers to, but a question that doesn’t get as much attention in commentaries is who the seed of the serpent is.

If God is addressing Satan here, how can Satan reproduce himself?

Angels do not marry and are not corporeal beings, only God can create new beings.

This question is not directly or explicitly answered in Genesis 3, it’s only raised, but we have more in our Bible than this chapter.

Matthew 23:33 (NASB95) \\ 33 “*You serpents, you brood of vipers*, how will you escape the sentence of hell?

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Even in the O.T., the word can be used of spiritual children:

Isaiah 57:3-4 (NASB95) \\ 3 “But come here, you sons of a sorceress, *Offspring* of an adulterer and a prostitute.