Genesis 3_14-19 - The Gospel Before the Gospel： God's Curse on the Serpent
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Summary
In this sermon, we continue our study of Genesis chapter 3, "The Curse of the Serpent" and discuss the implications of the curse on the serpent, the women, and all creation as a result of the fall.
Transcript
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Well, it is wonderful to continue the study of this weighty chapter of chapter 3 in Genesis.
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This chapter is so weighty, I believe that the rest of Scripture turns upon this chapter.
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All of redemptive history revolves around what has occurred in this particular chapter
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And the first was titled The Serpent, The Woman, and the Collapse of Order
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And it traced about how the fall of mankind came and reversed God's order
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Now, what I mean by that, if you look back in that text, if you want to understand some of the context there,
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that though God created man first, woman second, and then placed the animals under his dominion,
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we saw that the serpent reverses that order in that, you know, the serpent comes up to the woman,
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and the woman comes up to the man, and it's this reversal and this collapse of order which causes the fall.
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You even heard in that text a second, because you listened to the words of your wife, right?
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And we know that humanity's fall resulted in the separation of God and eventually death.
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Not just a physical death, but spiritual death, the separation of the soul from the presence of God.
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Now, last week, we saw how Adam and Eve's sin produced guilt, fear, and eventually caused them to hide.
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Now, we also saw that how, in our own way, we still do this.
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We still try to run from the eyes of the Lord in a variety of ways.
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We hide behind our excuses by our justifications for why we did it, for our rationalizations to make sense of why it is okay that we transgressed against God's will.
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Now, today we turn to part one of what is going to become a three-part series on the curse on the serpent and the sexes.
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And today, this sermon will be titled The Gospel Before the Gospel.
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And it's going to deal with the curse of the serpent.
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So we're only going to get through verses 14 and 15 today.
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Now, the term curse, it's nearly synonymous with the term judgment.
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It pronounces upon this guilty party the certainty of a coming judgment or coming consequences as a result of their actions.
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It's really a divine declaration of tragedy that will come.
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Tragedy and suffering is coming after the words of the Lord.
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I want you to notice that not only the serpent is cursed, but all of the animals are cursed at this point.
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Why are the animals included in all of the serpent's doing here?
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Well, man had dominion over the animal kingdom.
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We know that God had given dominion over all of creation.
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And so when Adam fell, all creation fell with him.
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of it, it's not just of humanity, but all of creation. As we learned before, Adam was made
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from the Adama. Adam was made from the Adama. He is dust made from dust. And so you can't curse one
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without cursing the other. You curse the Adam, you curse the Adama. And so essentially, when the
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ruler falls, all creation falls with him. Now, we don't know exactly what the serpent looked like
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before the fall, but apparently he had, well, potentially he had legs. The text suggests that
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and that God's curse stripped them away and the serpent becomes the lowest of all of the creatures.
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Now, it was said here in the text that it was condemned to essentially slither
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and eat dust all the days of his life. Now, this is what I would call a memorial of humiliation.
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My children will come in, they'll bring snakes and wang them in the window.
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We know lots of rattlesnakes have been found in our area.
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We found two or three of them on our own property.
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Well, I think it really is kind of a testimony to the integrity of God's justice.
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These things are still here and they're still on the ground.
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It also stands kind of as a quiet rebuttal against the theory of evolution.
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The serpent, you know, at least one creature, has remained completely unchanged for 7,000 to 10,000 years.
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It's just there, doing what it was supposed to do because of God's curse,
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Now, throughout Scripture, we see this image of eating dust.
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It's really a curse of humiliation, of condemnation.
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Micah 7.17 says of Israel's enemy, it says,
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May the desert tribes bow down before him, and his enemies lick the dust.
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Isaiah 49, 23, it's prophesying of a future Christianized world.
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Kings shall be your nursing fathers, and queens your nursing mothers.
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With their faces to the ground, they shall bow down to you and lick the dust off of your feet.
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Matthew 10, 14, Jesus is talking to the disciples.
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If anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that town.
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There's actually more scriptures that I didn't include in here.
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And so the serpent licks the dust in humiliation
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You see this little glimmer of hope in the gospel.
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Evangelium, you're going to have different scholars say it different ways.
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Proto meaning first, evangelism is really the rooted Greek word for good news.
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In fact, it's the first messianic promise in all of Scripture.
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And we see it right here in the midst of the curse to the devil.
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I will put enmity between you and the woman
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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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While the curse is spoken to the serpent, the curse is spoken to the serpent.
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It's most directly aimed at the spirit that has possessed the serpent, which is the devil.
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So you've got to have some distinctions here because this is a little bit poetic,
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a little bit of a riddle going on here that you'll see.
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So if the first part of the curse applies to the animal itself,
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The second part of the curse really targets the devil, the demonic power working within this animal.
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And so you have some distinctions here as we're going to make a didactic reality of this.
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It says, I will put enmity between you and the woman.
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Now, at this point, there's enmity between God and man, between Eve and Adam.
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between Eve and God, but there's not enmity between Adam and Eve and the serpent.
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There's enmity between the serpent and God. There's enmity everywhere except between man
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and the serpent. It's interesting, just think about this for a second. There's enmity everywhere
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except enmity between man and the serpent. And what does God do? He relocates the
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enmity. While the enmity is actually between God and man, and the serpent and man, God relocates
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the enmity to place it between man and the devil, and God and the devil. It's really an amazing
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shift, and a little bit of the start, where we start to see that God is coming in for redemption
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here. There is some justice that is about to occur.
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a holy war. There is a holy war that is about to be
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it's not only a judgment, it's an announcement of divine conflict
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that will happen throughout the rest of history.
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There will be a divine conflict happening not just between Eve and the serpent, but throughout the rest of history.
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Now, because the woman was the vessel attacked by Satan.
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This is really cool, guys. Pay attention to this.
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Because the woman was attacked by Satan, God makes the woman the vessel of his vengeance.
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Satan used the woman to bring death into the world.
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So God will use the woman to bring redemption and life into the world.
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Through Eve will come the one who destroys Satan.
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Now this is a form of what we would call divine irony.
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You need to learn it because the church is forgotten.
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Pharaoh used water to drown the Hebrew children.
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Haman was hung there by the gallows he wanted to have built for them, for his enemies.
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and over again you see this kind of poetic justice
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he says you meant evil against me but God meant it for good
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God takes these tragedies and turns them into triumphs.
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Hebrews 2.14, through death, he destroyed the one who has the power of death.
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Now, poetic justice, why does the church need to learn this?
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The Muslims, it's why the Muslims turn churches into mosques.
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it's why they rename america's streets with names of islamic leaders they understand poetic justice
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they understand that what we've just this principle we've forgotten victory is not merely about
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winning victory is not merely about winning it's about reversal it's about reversal
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It's about using what was once against you to now serve as your cause.
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It's about taking over and putting everything under the submission of Christ that was once against Christ.
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Over and over and over, God flips it on its head.
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God expands the curse beyond the individual serpent and the woman.
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It's really talking about two lines, two spiritual families.
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The thing that's interesting here is that Satan doesn't bear children in the sense of there's no baby demons being born.
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And we're going to see here in a minute that women don't have seed technically in the way that men do.
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Eve is called the mother of all the living.
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Now, does this mean that every human being that comes from Eve is a child of light?
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Scripture testifies against that because Scripture shows us in the very next chapter,
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Genesis chapter 4, Eve's son Cain murders her other son Abel.
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In 1 John 3.12, in the New Testament, says of Cain,
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It says of Cain, if I can not lose my space here, like I just did.
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It says of Cain, it says, Cain was of the evil one.
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Some of her offspring are going to be good and some of them are going to be evil.
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but specifically this is speaking to those whom God has chosen to be his this is the intersection
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of the doctrine of election there are some that are elect there are some that will be redeemed
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and there are some who will not there is no injustice here there is just justice and there
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So her offspring has this two-fold meaning, right?
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First, collectively, it's talking to the elect,
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the people of the light, the people of the Lord.
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You shall name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sin.
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There are his people and there are people who are not his people.
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My sheep hear my voice and they know me and they follow me.
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Meaning that there are those who are not his sheep.
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In fact, Jesus says in John 10, he says, you are not my sheep.
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now secondly this is ultimately talking to the promised seed Jesus Christ
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and he kind of is this representative of the serpentine lineage.
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who is, if you look to the genealogy in Matthew chapter 1,
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And so you have this kind of tracing that happens through the Old Testament.
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And so the elect is not Cain, it was Abel, and then Seth.
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It's not the false prophets, it's the true prophets.
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Twelve regular men are going to go and overturn the Roman Empire?
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Again, you can see this lineage, Matthew chapter 1, verses 1 through 16.
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But through this promised seed comes the Christ, the new Adam, the second Adam, the better Adam.
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And what also comes from that Adam, the first Adam, what came from the first Adam?
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And in the same way that the first Adam and Eve produced a fallen humanity,
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you know what Adam and Eve were really good at?
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You know what the second Adam and the second Eve are good at?
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The dominion mandate that was intended for Adam and Eve to be fulfilled.
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And he multiplies and he's filling the earth with people filled with life.
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You have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable.
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And though Christ has already conquered the serpent, there is at some degree a war still going against the offspring of Satan.
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We know that there's this battle, and this battle is this.
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The war is over in the sense that the battle's done.
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I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth.
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It's not to say that he's going to win in the future.
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You walk into the world and you go, your king has been conquered.
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now again i want to touch on this phrase the seed of the woman it's very important you guys are
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going to be theologians we want to understand this we want to understand the scriptures
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this is difficult because especially for the old testament jews they're trying to figure out what
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is what is being meant here there are over a hundred passages of scripture that mention seed
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and every single one of them speaks to the seed of man the seed of man what is the seed of woman
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Now, because Jesus, the Son of God, is the true seed of the woman,
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what this is really saying is that he's not going to be conceived by a man.
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This is a bit of a prophecy to that miraculous birth that's coming.
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And no one could have expected it, even though it talks about it a bit in the Psalms.
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Which is so important to the gospel, by the way.
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Because if Jesus had an earthly father, that means that he would have inherited the original sin that came from man.
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Because that man, that father of his, would have been a descendant of Adam.
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And because Adam is corrupted, everything that comes from Adam is also corrupted.
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And therefore, Jesus would have been born with sin.
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And if Jesus is born with sin, then we know Jesus could not have died for your sin.
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And he would not be able to operate as a sinless substitute on your behalf.
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But now, because Jesus is a new Adam, born of the seed of the Holy Spirit, he's born without sin.
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And he can die on the cross, not for his sin, but for your sin.
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It's an amazing, amazing reality to understand these truths of the gospel.
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Because Roman Catholic art, you may have seen it.
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It has Mary often depicted with her foot on the head of a snake while she's pregnant with Jesus.
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The scripture does not say that Mary will crush the serpent.
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The scripture says that her seed, Jesus, will crush the serpent.
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Now, Adrian Rogers said of this verse, he says,
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Not only a battle, not only a birth, but a bruising is prophesied.
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Not only a battle, not only a birth, but a bruising.
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Now, the bruising of the serpent's head happens through a divine paradox.
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As I mentioned earlier, what looks like Satan's greatest victory
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at the crucifixion of Jesus was, in fact, his greatest defeat.
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Now, at Golgotha, Golgotha, the place of the skull, that is where Jesus was crucified.
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There's a great book, a great Puritan book called The Death of Death and the Death of Christ.
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Some early Jewish and Christian traditions even suggest that Golgotha got its name
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because Goliath's head was buried there at Golgotha.
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And tradition says that the foot, the foot of the cross was actually there
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and it went down and crushed the skull of Goliath.
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That essentially the true David, the new and better David, Jesus Christ,
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crushes the head of the ultimate enemy of God's people.
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I don't know if it's true, but it's cool, right?
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While Christ has kind of delivered this fatal blow
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We know Romans 16, 20 says, the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.
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Now Eve is sitting here hearing this curse to Satan.
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And she certainly does not understand all that we understand.
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okay i'm gonna have a baby coming here i'm gonna have some offspring
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uh when she gives birth to cain we know her hope was high she says genesis 4 1 she says
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i have i have gotten a man with the help of the lord uh your scripture might say i have
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i have gotten a man from the lord in hebrew actually that word from isn't there
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It can actually be translated, I have gotten the man, the Lord.
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And so there is, some scholars believe that Eve actually believed, I have begotten the Lord.
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it was after this kind of devastating realization that Cain is not the Messiah
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that's going to bring them back to Eden, back to peace with the Lord.
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At the very time that this happens, Genesis 4.26, you can turn one page over,
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it says, people began to call upon the name of the Lord.
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It's the very first prayer recorded in Scripture.
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They're saying, oh Lord, I'm calling on you to fulfill that promise that you gave to Eve.
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every faithful person began crying out to God to fulfill his promise of redemption.
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Just this long-lasting echoes throughout time until the coming of Christ.
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It's a really great message to understand as we anticipate Christmas.
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Just this beautiful groaning and waiting for the Messiah.
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Now, as I get ready to close here, we often forget this last half of verse 14.
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he was without sin, but it was imputed to Christ.
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It's an amazing thing when you start to connect your systematics.
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We know, again, 1 Peter 2, 24, He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.
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Father, we thank You, Lord, for this incredible redemption.
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Lord, we ask that you would help us to understand it more,
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that we have become children of light by your will