Advent Day 9 - The Curse and the Promise

When I was a child, every year part of our pre-Christmas tradition included the reading of Our Christmas Story by Ruth Bell Graham (wife of Billy Graham). Every night in December, we would snuggle up and hear my mom read the next portion of the exciting story. It's been years since I read it now, but  one of the parts that I remember most is the way she relates the Nativity tale everyone knows (Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus) back to the very beginning of Genesis --  where it all began.

I credit this book with beginning my understanding of how God's plan fits all together all throughout time. And how fitting, to go back to the beginning when celebrating Advent.

The story of Genesis starts out with hope as God creates humans as the pinnacle of his breathtaking creation. It is elysium indeed - environs of such beauty, companionship, meaning and love. And most of all, the personal relationship with God the Father and Creator. But all that is destroyed when humans decided to go their own way. And when God finds out, he pronounces the doom laid on man and woman because of what they have done, and the punishment which will befall their tempter, the serpent. Part of the punishment of the serpent, God's enemy, reads:

¹⁵ 

And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
    and you will strike his heel.

Genesis 3:15, NIV

The curse came with a redemptive promise. It is foretold that the offspring of woman will crush the head of serpent, that is, Satan.

Note some interesting things:

1) The enmity is between the serpent and the woman and her offspring. This reference says nothing of the offspring of the man. And that came to pass: Christ was indeed born of a virgin woman -- not of the joint union between a man and a woman. 

2) The serpent would bite, or strike the heel of the offspring, but ultimately, would be crushed/trampled upon. Satan worked a deadly blow to Jesus at Calvary, but was defeated when Jesus rose from the dead. Ultimately, he will be crushed entirely and thrown into the fiery lake. 

In the midst of all the pain of the curse, these few words of Genesis 3:15 don't seem like a very great or significant promise, or even very positive. Yet, as the rest of the Bible shows, God doesn't lay all his cards on the table at once. Bit by bit, He reveals himself to humans through the patriarchs and the prophets. He slowly unwinds his master plan, trying to prepare his followers, and even then, it is too advanced for humans to grasp. Even when Christ directly claims his divinity and impending death, he is not believed by those around him. Yet in hindsight, we can see that God had everything under control all along.

The full "head-crushing" of Satan is yet to come, in an epic battle described between Revelation 19:19 and 20:10. Yet it is reassuring that God's plan of salvation started right from the beginning and that He knows what the end will be.

Have a happy cold and wintry evening!