The Serpent-Crusher and the War Over All

Hamilton makes a good observation in his commentary on Genesis 3:14-15: “The order of the narration of the sin and the sinner is the reverse of the order in which each comes under God’s judgment.”1 Take a look at verses 9 to 14 and see the order of the divine confrontation to man, then to woman, then to serpent, now back through the divine sentence to the serpent, then to the woman, then to the man. So the serpent is at the center of a chiastic structure. But we must not make the common mistake of reducing this to the trivial curiosity. What does it really mean?

First of all, God skips the questions altogether with the serpent. There is no restoration possible, so there is no repentance possible. That is another clue as to the gracious element in God’s confronting us. Second, it puts the serpent at the center of the curse and God curses him directly—‘cursed are you’ (v. 14)—whereas the curse language to the man and woman did indeed place them under the curse, but made their labor the direct object. We will note three pairs in these two very significant verses.

• Two Princes

• Two Offspring

• Two Bruisings

Doctrine. God declared all-encompassing war at the curse; and Christ defeated the serpent at the cross.

Two Princes

Note that while God begins to pursue with the man, and has no grace for the serpent; yet when it comes to the curse, God begins with the serpent.

“Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life” (v. 14).

Kidner heads our speculation off at the pass: “These words do not imply that hitherto serpents had not been reptiles … [the story of] how the serpent lost its legs … but that the crawling is henceforth symbolic.”2

This is an expression of the lowest debasement, used of mere mortals: “For our soul is bowed down to the dust; our belly clings to the ground” (Ps. 44:25). So even in the future state, it says that, “the dust shall be the serpent’s food” (Isa. 65:25). It may be that the signs relating to the church taking up (Mk. 16:18) or trampling upon serpents (Ps. 91:13) all aim, on the basis of Christ having already decisively conquered, are signs of the final subjugation promised in the words: “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Rom. 16:20).

This is called by theologians the protoevangelium, meaning “first gospel” in Greek. On its surface, it speaks of two immediate audiences, but then emerges two main characters: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring” (v. 15a-b).

The two main characters are undisputed: the serpent and then some promised offspring to come. To those first parents, the most obvious thought would have been “someone like Adam.” Why? Because the human couple would have had human offspring. Moreover, the first man failed; a second man would be the most obvious idea for a “do-over.”

Right in the middle of this first gospel is a first strike at war: ‘I will put enmity’ (v. 15a). This word, êḇāh (אֵיבָה), means “hostility, warfare, hatred.” Now, who is the speaker of Genesis 3:15? It is God. Who, then, declares this war? God. It is not Satan who does so. Neither is it mankind. It is not human sin nor depravity, much less some divisive person, or inconvenient sphere of life. God started this conversation that explodes all of our so-called polite company.

This is the truth that is so antithetical to our culture that expects peace at all costs. God divides between sheep and goat. God says I WILL PUT ENMITY. And so Paul says even to the divided church, “there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized” (1 Cor. 11:19).

If God is like this, Christ is also like this. The reason for that is very simple. Since Christ is God, it follows that, by virtue of His divine nature, it is God Himself (that implies also the Son of God Himself) who affects this hostility. He says, “For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise” (Jn. 5:19). This is a matter of essence, but it is also a matter of mission:

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household” (Mat. 10:34-36).

Jesus carries on in the breaking forth of the new age that same division that the triune God first initiates in the world at the beginning of its fall. Christianity does not bring peace by an immediate ceasefire, but rather an intensification of division between light and darkness. 

Two Offspring

First, to the word that is used for both the serpent and the woman—SEED (זֶרַע)—which has already been used on other parts of the created order: cf. twice in 1:11, twice in 1:12, twice in 1:29, and now twice again. To use it about human beings is not strange, as it is used to Noah and to Abraham about both covenants to them and their “seed” (9:9; 12:7). What might be difficult here is that this “seed” passes on not merely biologically, but also spiritually. About the serpent’s seed, although some have tried to suggest that this means the demons, we should note that the same people do not say that the seed of the woman is the angels. So this is asymmetrical. But perhaps more importantly, as Boice wrote,

“Satan does not really have offspring. He is not engendering little devils. The demons were created once by God, before their fall, and they are not now increasing in number.”3

The words ‘her offspring’ (v. 15b) have a double meaning, if not also a triple. Waltke speaks of the scriptural pattern of “an immediate descendant … a distant offspring, or a large group of descendants. Here and throughout Scripture, all three senses are developed and merged.”4 This we derive from an application of logic, but the logic is simple. Just look at the two sides of the same coin together—‘your offspring and her offspring’ (v. 15b). If we grant that Satan cannot be his own offspring, then it stands to reason that the ‘and’ (v. 15b) after the opposition of Satan to Eve—‘between you and the woman’ (v. 15a)—introduces the offspring of Satan’s kingdom in the plural and the offspring of Christ’s kingdom in the plural. The reason that this plurality is depicted by a woman at the head is also not difficult to discern. The Bible is constantly comparing the church to the bride of Christ, and its miraculous origin to be like the promise of new life out of a barren womb.

Thus when Isaiah prophesied,

“Sing, O barren one, who did not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, you who have not been in labor! For the children of ithe desolate one will be more than the children of her who is married,” says the LORD” (Isa. 54:1).

The Old Testament figures of Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah, had already served as types of the church carrying forth both offspring—both the singular promised Christ, and the plural promised children of Abraham. So Paul speaks of both in the same breath to the Galatians,

“Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, ‘And to offsprings,’ referring to many, but referring to one, ‘And to your offspring,’ who is Christ” (3:16).

“And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” (3:29).

To speaking of ENMITY here now is corporate. Not only do Christ and Satan war against each other and hate each other, but the people of the kingdom of the one are engaged in a cosmic war against the people of the other.

“And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth. And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it. She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne, and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which she is to be nourished for 1,260 days” (Rev. 12:1-6).

Now if you want even more help on that Revelation passage, please see my eschatology class, and the session on Approaching Revelation—and you will see even more clearly why we are not forced to choose about this “seed of the woman” between Mary and the church.5 It is both. Eve is the prototype. Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah were successive types. But Mary is the individual fulfillment, and the church the collective fulfillment.

Two Bruisings

How does this prophecy end? Christ will act and Satan will act. The action of Christ is the decisive one. Is says, ‘he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel’ (v. 15c). We should know that the two verbs are the same word in Hebrew—shuph (שׁוּף)6—which raises the question of why some translations have made these two different words. Deeper reflection demands that we understand these on two different levels, but better to explain that than to translate them differently.

So that twelfth chapter of Revelation continues, to speak of the dragon being thrown down to the earth; and even though he pursues the church to the ends of the world, yet “they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death” (Rev. 12:11).

These two bruisings were two dimensions of one act—one event. The devil was lured in by an apparent victory.

“by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him” (Col. 2:14-15).

So the momentary violent death of Jesus became the decisive, ultimate crushing of the serpent.

It may be asked why the good news first appears in terms of God’s triumph without any clear indication of man’s restoration. Kinder comments that it is because “redemption is about God’s rule as much as about man’s need.”7

“It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name” (Ezk. 36:22).

So even the death of Christ had as its highest end “the glory of God the Father” (Phi. 2:11), even while its subordinate end is that which is our immediate good news, that He “lay down his life for his friends” (Jn. 15:13). The end of Christ’s love for His own people is secondary too, but, we might say, “wrapped up in,” the greater end of the glory of God. This only strengthens the confidence that the believer must have that God is committed to our salvation. His own glory is at stake in the defeat over this serpent. 

PRACTICAL

Use 1. Correction. The story of the fall of man begins with a divinely initiated warfare between two human races and nothing sticking out from that story. Most modern Evangelical religion does not start with this assumption. Genesis 3:15 is not a whisper about a secret war in the spiritual realm between angels and demons that does not touch down on earth. It is about the two seeds precisely on earth, in history, and in every nook and cranny of your life.

We are willing to concede that there is a “spiritual war” in the Christian life. However, this is reduced to one’s private struggles. Others are willing to recognize a vast spiritual war among angelic beings, and there it remains—among the mysteries, and thus among the mere curiosities. Still others are willing to insist that Christianity demands our own conflict with the culture around us, yet this is divorced from the spiritual dimension and free from spiritual “rules” of any kind. 

Francis Schaeffer offered a correction to this a generation ago. He said,

“The primary battle is a spiritual battle in the heavenlies. But this does not mean, therefore, that the battle we are in is otherworldly or outside of human history. It is a real spiritual battle, but it is equally a battle here on earth in our own country, our own communities, our places of work and our schools, and even our own homes. The spiritual battle has its counterpart in the visible world, in the minds of men and women, and in every area of human culture. In the realm of space and time the heavenly battle is fought on the stage of human history.”8

The idea that physical wars, political campaigns, institutional sieges, conflict among the elders of a church, or even the arguments on the pages of a book of philosophy, might dangle on the dimension of secondary causes, traceable to thrusting of angelic swords all about us—this can only be a foreign notion to our modernized minds. 

There are great words of Isaac Watts, in his hymn, “Am I a Solider of the Cross?”

Are there no foes for me to face?

Must I not stem the flood?

Is this vile world a friend of grace?

To help me on to God?

These lines are rhetorical questions with answers increasingly clear to the maturing Christian.

Use 2. Consolation. Apart from Christ, you and I would indeed be of the seed of the serpent. Paul says that we, “were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Eph. 2:3), so that we needed not just a heart transplant (as in the Ezekiel 36 prophecy), but also a “seed transplant,” so that Peter says,

“since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Pet. 2:23).

There is a terrible doctrine regarding the seed of the serpent that whose adherents would congratulate themselves in believing. It reduces the story to this or that race, and has lost the wonder—or perhaps never wondered at all—at the miraculous transformation that has taken place by the Holy Spirit. This same rebirth of each Christian was also a plundering of the strongman. When Christ paid for your sins, He performed the ultimate rescue operation from an enemy’s clutches: “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Col. 1:13-14).

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1. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1-17, 196.

2. Kidner, Genesis, 75.

3. Boice, Genesis, I:201.

4. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary, 93.

5. Yet Calvin makes this very choice, and chooses the latter: “Wherefore, the sense will be (in my judgment) that the human race, which Satan was endeavoring to oppress, would at length be victorious” (Commentaries, I:171).

6. “bruise, crush” — the first use being in the qal imperfect masculine third-person singular, יְשׁוּפְךָ֣; the second use being in the qal imperfect masculine second-person singular, תְּשׁוּפֶ֥נּוּ.

7. Kidner, Genesis, 75.

8. Francis Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1984), 25.