The Enemy of the Woman and Her Seed

When I was a boy there was a TV show called The Rifleman starring Chuck Connors.  In one episode, Lucas McCain (Connors) is sacked out in his bedroll and when the other cowboys wake up they are surprised to find that Lucas is late getting up, since he is usually the first up, and they begin cajoling him about being a sleepy head.  He is laying there flat on his back under the blanket with his cowboy hat covering his face.  When even their boisterous teasing fails to wake him up, someone finally pulls away the hat and Lucas’ face is beaded up with sweat and his eyes are wide with terror.  It seems that in the middle of the night, a rattlesnake got under his blanket and liked the warmth so much that it refused to leave. 

Ever since the Garden of Eden, it has not gone well between humans and snakes.  Let’s go back to Gen. 3:14-15.  God has learned of the serpent’s attempt to lure the most prized creatures that God had created away from God in a rebellion led by Satan.  And the devil had succeeded; both the man and the woman were tempted to eat the forbidden fruit and in that act rebelled against the Creator who had given them not only life in paradise, but even gave them the privilege of wearing God’s image.  That privilege belonged only to mankind, and not to any other creature under heaven.

When God came to investigate, he started with Adam, who pointed the finger of blame at Eve, and she pointed the blame at the serpent.  God takes it all in and responds in reverse order:  first, He addresses the serpent.  The gist of it is that instead of achieving status and exaltation and raising himself above God by leading a rebellion, the serpent’s place will fall to the dust, in humiliation and defeat.  God is making absolutely clear is that He is by far the superior power in this fight.  We may be tempted to think that God and Satan--both superhuman in power--are equal but opposite powers (dualism).  They are not; God is vastly superior.  The devil set himself in opposition to almighty God, and God casts the serpent down to the dust.  

But it is what comes next that is especially interesting.  God determines that there shall be perpetual warfare between the woman and the serpent, and between the “seed of the serpent” and the “seed of the woman.”  Henceforth, as far as the eye can see, there will be two species that are enemies with each other.  And although the story picks up on the natural fact that we human beings do not like snakes, and the plain fact is that they do not much care for us either, aside from that this incident in the Garden of Eden marks the beginning of spiritual warfare.

The “seed of the serpent”, as this develops in the Bible, is:

• Satan and all of the spiritual forces aligned with him in rebellion against God:  demons, fallen angels, and wicked spirits of every sort.
• It would also include human beings who have lined up with the devil against God (John 8:30-47).  Here Jesus offers freedom or liberation because He understands that people who are caught up in sin are being held in slavery.  Ironically, those same people think that they are finding freedom for themselves by going where sin leads them.  And so, the people to whom Jesus speaks want nothing of the liberation He offers.  So Jesus drives the issue back and declares that freedom or slavery is determined by who your father is.  Jesus is the divine Son of God; His Father is God.  But since they are slaves, rather than children, that means they do not have a lasting place in God’s house.  And Jesus admits the truth of their claim that they are “children of Abraham.”

Let me tell you about Abraham.  As you follow the story of Genesis, wickedness among human beings spreads and multiplies until the flood of Noah.  Under those terrifying waters on which floats the ark, God puts all of humanity to death and scours His creation of sin, and wickedness, and evil.  The creation has been refreshed and cleansed.  But sin erupts again, and God calls a man named Abram, and the plot of the story demands that Abram (or Abraham, as he comes to be known), will be part of God’s solution to this epidemic problem.  From Abraham come the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and only they of all the nations of the earth can claim Abraham as their spiritual ancestor.  They are the children of God’s problem-solver.

But then Jesus comes and declares that it is not enough to merely be the physical descendants of Abraham.  The problem of sin won't be fixed by them.  What really counts is to be the children of Abraham in a spiritual sense.  Abraham was a believer; a man of faith.  And only those who shared his faith could properly be called his children.  And Jesus draws attention to the fact that the people to whom He speaks, although they are physically Abraham’s children, at the same time they are of a mind to kill Jesus.  That is something that Abraham, as a spiritual person, would never do.  And that shows that these people have a different father, a different spiritual father (read).  You see, these people are obviously part of the Satanic rebellion against God.  They are really part of the “seed of the Serpent” of which God prophesied in Gen. 3:15.

• Finally, the seed of the serpent includes the false religions of the world.  Paul declared in 1 Cor. 10:20 (Rev. 9:20) that when the Gentiles offer their sacrifices to idols, they are really sacrificing to demons!

And so the seed of the serpent will be the enemies of the seed of the woman.  And who are her seed?  Well, on the one hand, these are the entire human race.  Eve becomes the mother of all living beings; every single human being can trace ancestry back to Mother Eve.  And so, Satan really is the enemy of every person who has lived and who ever will live.  But people will finally win the fight.  Even though Adam and Eve fell, and even though every human being to follow took part in the rebellion against God, they would be victorious over the serpent.

And at the end of v. 15, God declares in advance a winner and a loser in this enduring battle.  And suddenly there is a startling shift from the plural to the singular.  Suddenly God is not talking "they and them", about them plural in warfare against them plural.  Suddenly, this conflict boils down to "him vs. him"—one particular “seed of the serpent” against one particular “seed of the woman.”  And notice that God declares that there will be injury suffered on both sides, but the injuries will not be equal.  The woman’s child will strike injury to the head of the devil, but the devil-seed will merely strike the woman’s child on the heel.  One injury will be serious; but the other injury will be fatal.

What is this all about?  Well, the description of the seed of the woman is a peculiar way to refer to children, because in the Hebrew Scriptures, children are usually identified in relation to their father.  In part, this was because the ancient cultures sometimes were polygamous; in a given family there might be several mothers, but just one father (Jacob had 13 children to four mothers).  So why do we have reference to the "seed of woman"?  The day would come after many centuries that God sent His own Son from heaven to earth.  He was born of a woman and her name was Mary.  This birth began with a conception in which no human father had a part.  The virgin mother was impregnated directly from God as she was overshadowed by the Spirit, and they named Him Jesus.  Although it was cultural convention to identify a child with his father, this child was truly “the seed of the woman.”

The most famous and magisterial work of Paul was his letter to the Romans.  In chapter five, Paul set forth Jesus as the New Adam.  Where Adam had been a failure who was won over by Satan against God, this New Adam kept unbroken faith with God.  He stood against the Devil and never rebelled against God.  Each Adam performed a noteworthy act that brought a result for all people.  The first man, Adam, famously committed an act of trespass against God, and that act brought death--death to everyone.  But the second man, Jesus Christ, performed an act of justification, and that act brought life--to all of us.  What he means is that while Adam ate of the forbidden fruit, Jesus (the seed of the woman), even though He never joined rebellion, Jesus went to the Cross to suffer death.  And that death was the punishment that God set on the rebellion of Adam and Eve, when He declared that whoever would eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would die.  Jesus ate no fruit, but he took the penalty for those to whom the penalty for sin applied.  And in that moment, Satan had done his worst to injure the holy offspring of the woman--us and Him.  That injury was so serious that Jesus died.  But by the power of a gracious God, Jesus was resurrected to life.  He recovered from Satan’s injury and won a victory that takes in all of the other descendants of Eve who end their rebellion against God and give their faith to Jesus.  But more than that, when Jesus was crucified, that was a death-blow against Satan.  The death of Jesus defeated the devil and brought his rebellion against God to an end.

Paul has much more to say about Jesus and His victory, but I want us to turn to Romans to focus on just one verse (16:19-20).  The idea is that while Jesus dealt the death-blow to Satan, he though wounded will remain active for a while.  Until his demise,  you and I have been empowered to contribute to the downfall of Satan.  You know, there was an occasion when Jesus sent out 70 of His disciples on a mission and as they represented Jesus in their ministry to people, demons were cast out of people.  And when they returned to Jesus they related to Him with great excitement that even the demons submitted to them!  I mean, usually the demons had power over people.  But Jesus simply said, “Listen—you don’t know the half of it; I watched Satan fall from heaven like a lightning flash.”  While they were casting out demons, Jesus was able to see into the invisible heavenly realms that that ancient serpent was cast down from lofty spiritual heights down to the dust, just as God had prophesied.  That downfall was the result of the work in ministry of Christians like us.  And just as in Romans 16, that great fall taken by Satan took place when the people of God became enemies of the devil.  It is not just the Cross-work of Jesus that slays the serpent; it is our working as the body of Christ that crushes his head.

Back in the Garden, after Adam and Eve tried to cover their shame with fig leaves, God did something unusual, something gracious.  He gave the man and the woman the skins of animals to cover themselves with—fur and leather.  And that means there had to be a death.  The animals had to die as a sacrifice as a consequence to human sin.  Follow this in the Bible, and it leads to centuries of sacrifices and the shedding of rivers of the sacrificial blood of animals until, on the Cross, Jesus became the sacrifice that made all other sacrifices obsolete.  The serpent struck His heel, but by pouring out His own blood, Jesus had crushed the serpent’s head and covered our shame.