It is a joy to welcome so many
of you to our evening worship this evening.
May I assure visiting believers among us that
when we draw near to the table of
our Lord at the close of the service,
we welcome all who acknowledge Jesus Christ as
personal Saviour and Lord.
If therefore you would like to join those
who will be partaking of the sacrament, you
are invited, during the singing of the hymn
following the sermon, to move into the centre
of the sanctuary, and that will make it
more convenient for those who serve.
We return once again this evening to the
book of Genesis and to chapter three.
In these Sunday evening services we have been
attempting to let Genesis speak for itself.
For the time being we have been evading,
really, most of the criticisms levelled at it
from various quarters, and we have been, as
it were, inviting the book to tell us
its own message, to declare its own theme.
And we want to pursue that thread again
this evening.
Now, I think you will agree with me,
particularly those of you who were with us
last Sunday evening, that Genesis chapter three must
surely be one of the darkest chapters in
the whole of the Bible.
Last Sunday evening we were hearing the echo
of God's curse upon Satan and upon the
soil.
And then we were hearing the echo of
God's sentence, first of all upon Eve, and
then upon Adam.
So that, all in all, this is a
very sombre setting.
This is a very dark, dark background.
But the light of God never shines brighter
than in a dark place.
We were not able to point very much
to it last Sunday evening, but we want
to do so tonight.
Right here, in the thickest gloom of dismal
Eden, where sin and condemnation and death have
entered, there is the light of the promise
of the good news of Jesus Christ, our
Saviour and our Lord.
And I want to turn to that this
evening, and briefly to notice two main things.
I would like to read verse fifteen in
the first place, and then verses twenty and
twenty-one.
And they bring before us two pictures of
the grace of God.
First of all, the grace of God in
promise, or the grace and its promise, and
then the grace of God and its produce,
or its prefigurements, if you prefer.
First of all, verse fifteen.
I will put enmity between thee and the
woman, and between thy seed and her seed.
It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt
bruise his heel.
And then verses twenty and twenty-one.
And Adam called his wife's name Eve, because
she was the mother of all living.
Unto Adam also and to his wife did
the Lord God make coats of skins, and
he clothed them.
First of all, then, I want us to
look at the grace of God and its
promise.
We have to take serious note of the
promise that we have here in verse fifteen.
And I want to read it again.
It says God, addressing himself, will you notice,
not to Adam nor to Eve, but addressing
himself rather to the serpent, to Satan, in
the guise of a serpent.
I will put enmity between you and the
woman, and between you and the seed, and
your seed, I'm sorry, and between your seed
and her seed.
He shall bruise your head, and you shall
bruise his heel.
Now let me summarize that before we come
to analyze it.
This is a context of judgment.
God is passing judgment upon the serpent.
And what he's telling the serpent and Satan
behind the serpent is this.
You think you've got a victory that can
never be retrieved.
God says, I want to assure you that
however great your victory in this hour has
been, I'm going to retrieve the situation.
And what I'm going to do is this.
I'm going to put enmity between you and
the woman that you seduced, and between your
seed and the seed of the woman.
And by thus placing enmity between you, I'm
going to tear you asunder.
And I'm going to break the unholy alliance
between you.
And I'm going to pursue the building of
my own kingdom of righteousness and of holiness,
despite your attempt to intervene.
And what is most significant, since I shall
not be able to refer to it at
any length later on, let me just do
so now.
God tells Satan that he's going to use
the very woman, or the seed of the
woman that he seduced, in order to turn
things upside down.
I'm going to use, he says, the very
seed of the woman to crush your head.
God in sovereign grace and sufficiency addresses himself
to the enemy of mankind and assures him
that the ultimate victory is not with darkness,
but with light.
Now let's look at this.
Let's examine it just a little.
First of all, let's look at this divinely
placed enmity.
I will put enmity between you and the
woman and between your seed and her seed.
You will remember that right at the beginning
of chapter 3, Satan secured his greatest victory
by the propagation of a lie.
He always does.
The lie that secured the great victory here
was this, that God is not trustworthy.
How often he's played that card.
God doesn't have your real interest at heart.
He wants to keep you there, under his
thumb.
And it is because of that that God
has said to you, don't you eat of
the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil.
If you did, of course, you'd have something
exceedingly wonderful.
And God doesn't want you to have that.
Now that is the basic lie with which
Satan won over first even then Adam.
And thereby he brought them into an unholy
alliance with himself.
As we have been at pains to indicate,
what happened here is this.
There is a new division of man and
Satan against God.
There is a division of kingdoms here in
embryo.
Whereas at the very beginning of Genesis, God
and man were together in unison and in
fellowship, no longer so.
Now man and his wife have moved over
and have taken sides with Satan in this
unholy alliance against God, and God is alone.
Now that's the picture.
Into that picture of desolation and of death,
God says, look, I still hold the keys
of victory in my hand, and I'm going
to do something.
I'll put enmity between the woman and you
and between the woman's seed and your seed,
and this is the beginnings of salvation.
Now this word enmity is a term not
applied to dumb beasts.
I quote from one of our contemporary scholars,
its scriptural use limits it like the verb
which is at its root to enmity between
persons or morally responsible agents.
That means this.
God is not speaking to the serpent or
of the serpent, purely as a serpent, and
saying that there's going to be enmity between
the serpent family and the human family.
That's not what he's saying.
He's addressing a responsible agent behind the guise
of the serpent, namely Satan.
And what he's saying is that he is
going to introduce an enmity between the two,
the seed of the woman particularly and the
seed of Satan.
Now this is what salvation is all about.
How do you distinguish a man who is
a Christian?
What is salvation?
Viewed from one aspect, this is precisely what
it is.
A Christian man, a man who has partaken
of the divine salvation, is a person who
knows what it is to have enmity placed
in his heart towards evil and the source
of evil.
And this is nothing other than a miracle
of divine grace.
You see, by nature, we love evil.
As we come into this world as children
of Adam and Eve, as members of the
Adamic stock, we have a predisposition towards certain
things that are evil.
Not that we all like everything in exactly
the same way, but nevertheless we have this
predisposition, this bias towards evil.
But what God says is this, I'll put
enmity between you, woman, and the serpent on
the one hand, and especially between the seed
of the serpent and the seed of the
woman.
And when that enmity comes in, what will
eventuate is this, the alliance will be broken,
the kingdom will be torn to pieces, the
foundation of it will be severed into shreds.
God promises to put enmity that will separate
Satan and the members of his kingdom.
Now notice, we turn from the person in
whom victory will be gained to the pain
by which victory will be secured.
God says, he, the seed of the woman,
she will bruise your head, and you shall
bruise his heel.
I'm going to put this enmity, says God,
that will separate the two of you.
This hatred of one another.
But this is going to be procured at
a price.
This is not something that is easy to
bring into existence.
And he who is the seed of the
woman, he will bruise your heel.
I'm sorry, I'm getting it all mixed up.
He will bruise your head, and you shall
bruise his heel.
In other words, the emergence of salvation, as
it is promised here, is going to cost.
There's going to be a bruising on both
sides, between the seed of the woman and
the serpent, or his seed.
Now, what is God referring to here?
Who is the person involved?
Well, I think that is fairly clear from
the rest of Having read through the Old
Testament and the New, it becomes reasonably evident
that the seed of the woman is essentially
our Lord Jesus Christ.
You remember how God refers to the Lord
Jesus through the Apostle Paul when he writes
to the Galatians?
He says, in the fullness of the time,
God sent forth his Son, made of a
woman.
Have you wondered why that statement is found
there, that he was made of a woman
rather than just born into the world, or
a human being, or something of that kind?
Why did God refer to his Son, the
Saviour, that was coming, already come, when Paul
wrote?
Why did he refer to him as the
seed of the woman?
Well, of course, if you are familiar with
the New Testament and with the facts, the
answer is clear.
Jesus Christ was not the seed of a
man and a woman.
Jesus Christ was not the seed of Joseph
and of Mary.
He was the seed of Mary.
He was the seed of the woman.
As in the morning hour we had occasion
to refer to this, so let us refer
to it again because it is so important.
Jesus Christ was conceived of the Holy Spirit,
but he was born of the Virgin Mary.
He was the child of the woman, but
he was not the child of the man.
We can see how this fits in exactly
with what God said way back here in
Genesis.
Now, let me say something on the base
of that.
I am not suggesting for one single moment
that Adam and Eve recognized all this, or
realized all this.
I don't suppose they did.
But in the mind of God, who knows
the end from the beginning, who already had
chosen to send forth his Son in the
fullness of the times, in the mind of
God, the reference must surely be to his
Son.
God's promises are invariably fuller than we realize,
so then the person in whom the victory
is to be gained is his Son.
And then we notice the pain by which
that victory is to be secured.
He will bruise your head, you shall bruise
his heel.
Contrary to popular opinion, it is amazing where
one meets this, but you know the same
word is used to describe both actions.
The action of Satan in bruising the heel
of the Saviour, and the action of the
Saviour in bruising the head of the serpent,
the same word is used exactly in the
Hebrew.
The distinguishing thing is not in the word
for bruising.
The distinguishing thing is this.
Satan will be able to bruise the heel
of the Saviour, but the Saviour will bruise
the head of the serpent.
To quote E.
J.
Young, what is meant is that the seed
of the woman will deliver a capital blow,
whereas the serpent for his part will deliver
a lesser blow.
In other words, when our Lord Jesus Christ
puts his foot upon the head of Satan,
it is veritably a crushing blow.
It is on his head.
If the bruising of the heel of our
Lord Jesus Christ by Satan involved the sorrows
and the anguish of Calvary, then what devastation
must be involved in the bruising of the
serpent's head?
We can understand what Paul meant when in
writing to the Romans he said this, the
God of peace will soon crush, that's the
word he uses, crush Satan under your feet
in a very short time.
The Gospels record some of the things that
Jesus did with Satan, how he spoiled him,
baffled him in his temptations, rescued souls out
of his hands, cast him out of people
when they were demon-possessed, dispossessed the strong
man armed and divided the spoil.
By his death he gave a fatal and
incurable blow to the devil's kingdom and wounded
the head of the beast so that he
can never be healed again.
So when his gospel gains ground, Satan falls
and his kingdom receives a blow.
He is bound by the prayers of his
people, but by the grace of God the
day is coming when he will be cast
into the lake of fire.
That's the message of the gospel.
God says then, I will put enmity between
your two seeds so that from now on,
as I choose, I will sever the link
and the alliance will be broken and I
will build my kingdom of righteousness and this
I will do through the seed of the
woman who has become your ally for a
moment.
Though it cost him, he will be victor.
Grace and its promise.
Isn't it wonderful to have a promise such
as this in a dark setting, such as
this terrible third chapter in the book of
Genesis, where all is dismal until God speaks.
The other thing I want you to notice
tonight is this, grace and its produce, or
as I indicated earlier, I think we ought
to say grace and its prefigurements, and you
will see why in a moment.
The grace which promises victory in the unspecified
future is not impotent to do something now.
You always have that charge from unbelieving men.
When we refer to the promises of God
as they relate to the future, unbelieving men
always tell us, oh yes, but it's all
pie in the sky when you die.
What about the here and now?
Has not God something that he can do
here and now, right now?
Well, he can.
And I want to tell you that before
Adam and Eve went out of that ancient,
edemic garden, they had seen some miracles of
grace.
And we shall see them in just a
moment.
Two things only can take our attention tonight.
First of all, God in his sovereign grace
produced faith in himself, faith in himself,
confidence in his promises.
Now, I think you will agree with me,
if you are familiar with what we have
here in Genesis chapter 3, that this surely
must be one of the greatest miracles of
all.
It was a most unpromising spiritual climate in
which to have faith, in which to generate
faith.
If God can evoke faith in himself by
Adam and Eve, after all that has taken
place in this garden and in this setting,
then there is hope that the tide shall
be turned and Satan may yet be overcome.
But can he?
Can he break the alliance?
He's talked about putting enmity between them, hatred
between them, but can he generate faith?
This is necessary to salvation.
The paradise of man's innocence has long been
destroyed by Satanic influence, so that man has
believed the lie that God was not well
disposed toward him, and therefore God could not
be trusted.
Well, that lie has bred doubt unquestionably in
God's goodness.
Adam and Eve are both doubters now.
And when they hear the curse and the
condemnation upon Satan, upon the soil and upon
themselves, probably there is further reason here for
doubt, for doubting God, because they are doubters
already.
And when once the seed of doubt is
in your soul, doubts multiply.
I want you to notice the unexpected confessions
of faith that we have here.
Did you notice Adam's confession of faith?
I must say that this has been one
of the great thrills for me as I've
been brooding over these chapters again.
I don't think I'd ever seen this as
clearly before.
But it is something that brings a whole
new dimension into this very somber situation.
Look at verse 20.
The man called his wife's name Eve, because
she was the mother of all living.
You say, where's the confession of faith there?
You've surely made a blunder somewhere.
Well, now take a look at it.
We've already indicated tonight that the background is
a background of curse and of judgment.
God's already expressed that, and I refer to
it more than once.
Not only that, but we are to understand
that spiritually Adam and Eve have died already,
and something has withered within them.
Their relationship with God has become strained.
But now, despite the judgment, on the basis
of the promise of the fifteenth verse, Adam
gives a new name to his wife.
He'd only called her woman before, the feminine
of man.
But now he gives her a proper name,
a different name altogether, a proper name.
And what's he going to call her?
And what he calls her is this, the
living one, because she was the mother of
all living.
But there was no one else living.
Now, some of your commentators will say, well,
the only way to explain that is Adam
didn't really say that.
But it's the person who wrote Genesis later
on said she's the mother of all living.
Well, there's another way of understanding it, too,
that Adam believed the promises of God.
And he believed that God had promised a
seed who would turn the tables and who
would bruise Satan's head.
And because he saw his wife as the
mother of all who would live, and of
that seed he changes her name.
And I believe that it's something of that
order that we must see here.
Because even if we leave out those words,
because she was the mother of all living,
the very seed of that thought is in
the name that he gives her, the living
one.
In other words, the curse is upon them,
judgment is upon them.
But because of the promise of God, it's
not all judgment.
There's light, there's promise, there's hope, there's good
news.
And therefore, he calls her the living one.
Adam's confession of faith.
No, no, it's not the kind of confession
of faith that you have in the light
of all the truth that we have in
the New Testament.
It's not as full, it's not as vast,
it's not as meaningful.
But you come back into this context.
It is faith, all right.
He could not have spoken of his wife
in these terms if he still thought of
judgment and of death and of curse.
But he believes the promise.
And in principle, this is exactly what faith
is.
Faith is a response to the promises of
God in terms of acceptance, in terms of
confidence.
It's the same here in Knox tonight as
it was a way back here in the
book of Genesis whenever this took place.
Adam's confession of faith.
God then has evoked faith from the very
Adam who doubted him.
If you turn to chapter four and verse
one, I pose a question here rather than
make a statement.
And the question is this.
Is not this Eve's confession of faith?
And if you ask me, I believe it
is.
And let me read it.
Now Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she
conceived and there came, saying, I have gotten
a man with the help of the Lord.
Now I pose the question, what does Eve
want to say there?
Is not this also a confession of faith?
Following upon the sentence passed on her involving
pain in childbirth, Eve has passed through the
experience of pregnancy for the first time.
And she's come out of it and she's
got that little bundle of life in her
hands and she says wistfully and gratefully, I
have gotten a man, literally, with Jehovah.
What do you think was in her mind?
Was it simply a statement that she'd got
a child?
Now it could be that.
But I suggest to you that the very
wording here indicates that it's probably more than
that.
That is, that Eve also believed the promise
of chapter 3 and verse 15, that God
would send the seed of a woman to
do this remarkable work of salvation.
And she's asking the question, if not making
the statement, isn't this the man that God
had promised?
I've got the child.
Is this the seed who is to crush
the tempter's power, the tempter's head?
I hope that is not straining the text.
Some would say it does, others would say
it doesn't.
And there are some very renowned evangelical expositors
who insist that this is so.
Whether it is or not, we have Adam's
confession of faith which is clear and crystal.
And the point I want to make is
this.
Right there, in the darkness and the dismal
dreariness of Eden, God induces faith in the
hearts of those who are turned away from
Him.
Now you know there is hope for the
gospel in any circumstance.
There is hope for the gospel and for
the emergence of the church in any part
of the world if God can produce faith
like that in men that have so utterly
turned their backs upon Him.
And then I turn to the one other
thing that I want to mention tonight.
The grace of God which produced faith in
that dismal climate also provided a covering for
Adam and Eve in their need before each
other and before their Creator.
Look at verse twenty-one.
And the Lord God made for Adam and
for his wife garments of skins and clothed
them.
A very simple statement that, and yet I
suggest to you that there may be much
more to it than meets the eye.
Sin had made these two very self-conscious
and guilt-ridden.
They were as uncomfortable in the presence of
one another as they were in the presence
of God.
That's why they sewed fig leaves together to
hide themselves one from the other.
That's why they hid behind the tree of
the garden a little earlier on.
And that's why they hid behind words and
arguments when God spoke to them.
Some of us don't hide behind trees anymore
but we hide behind arguments.
They did that too.
But it was all because they had a
sense of guilt and a sense of shame
before God.
Now God provided them a covering at the
cost of sacrifice.
He provided for them garments of skins.
Whether Adam and Eve realized what was taking
place we cannot dogmatize.
But in the light of future developments, with
a sacrificial system that God introduced into the
history and into the religious life of Israel,
surely we must see something very special here.
You see, God knows the end from the
beginning.
Whether Adam and Eve realized it or not
is quite a different thing.
But God, in intention, in taking away from
them that apron of fig leaves, throwing it
on one side and providing for them a
garment that required a sacrifice, the slaying of
an animal and of blood, first of all,
is doing something which is most symbolic and
suggestive in the light of later events.
What is it doing?
Well, let's put it in the form of
the simplest principle.
What God is telling them is this.
Look, you cannot cover yourselves, you cannot hide
yourselves, you cannot dress yourselves properly in my
sight.
You, as sinners, cannot stand in my sight
in anything that you bring yourselves.
I must dress you.
I must provide something for you instead of
those fig leaves.
I must provide something and I can only
do it by sacrificing by the death of
something.
Now, let me repeat.
I am not suggesting for one moment that
Adam and Eve could see and understand all
this, but in the mind of God, that's
what he did.
He's giving them a little prefiguring, a little
portrait of future things, a bird's-eye view
of something that is to come.
And in the light of Calvary and in
the light of the New Testament, we, reading
back into Genesis, can see how wonderful our
God is, that the God who sent his
Son to die, that his righteousness might be
imputed to sinners and become thus their salvation.
Right here, in the very dawn of human
history, gave to Adam and Eve a garment
that was to be symbolic of that great
event yet to be.
We've just sung, have we not?
Jesus, thy robe of righteousness, my beauty is
my glorious dress.
Misflaming worlds in these arrayed, with joy shall
I lift up my head.
This spotless robe the same appears when ruined
nature sinks in years.
No age can change its glorious hue, the
robe of Christ is ever new.
What are we talking about?
We're talking about the fulfillment of that blessed
foreglim that we have right there in Genesis.
When Jesus Christ tore away from men all
their unrighteousness and self-righteousness and said, none
of it avails.
You can't come to my presence in your
own righteousness.
All your righteousnesses are as filthy rags.
Take them away.
Well, how then can we approach God and
stand in his presence?
There's only one way.
By the imputed righteousness of his Son.
Being justified by faith, we have peace with
God.
And justification is the imputation of the righteousness
of Christ to the believing sinner.
God provided then a covering at the cost
of sacrifice, and that covering was a covering
that calmed the conscience.
Adam and Eve were not simply comfortable in
one another's presence, but they were at peace
in the presence of God.
You know, in Galatians chapter 3 and verse
27, Paul uses the little phrase about putting
on Christ.
Have you put him on?
It's a delightful picture.
Paul brings it out in many other parts
of the New Testament.
I won't go after them tonight.
But it's the picture of Jesus Christ as
a robe.
A robe of righteousness.
Now, I want to tell you that that's
what a church is meant to be.
A robing robe.
And I hope it doesn't upset you for
me to put it like this as we
conclude.
I invite you to make the very seat
on which you sit your robing robe.
By an act of will and by the
grace of God, renounce your self-righteousness and
cast away your sin.
And say to yourself, I'm not attempting to
come into the presence of God, nor to
the table of my Lord, in the righteousness
which I have spun myself.
Because God doesn't accept it.
Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ.
Put him on.
So that henceforth you look upon yourself, not
as a fellow or a girl, a man
or a woman that's done an awful lot
of good.
And the Almighty owes you such a lot.
But rather as a sinner that deserves nothing
but condemnation in yourself.
But Christ is your righteousness.
And I'll tell you one thing.
If Christ is your righteousness, your robe of
righteousness, that's not only providing for you access
to his table here upon earth, but to
the heavenly Jerusalem.
My good friend, have you put on Christ?
If you haven't, do so now.
Let us pray.
Our God and our Father, we turn to
thee in Jesus' name.
Realizing that in thy holy presence we can
put nothing else on that makes us acceptable.
Nothing but the righteousness that was procured at
the price of Calvary.
Tear from us, we pray thee, everything else.
Everything else that we might depend upon, whatever
the fig leaves of the twentieth century may
be.
We ask of thee to give to each
and to all of us now a sense
of the greatness of the grace that provides
positive righteousness to link us with thee as
well as an enmity that separates us from
Satan.
Work this twofold miracle in each of us
tonight that we may find that there is
a chasm that is opening up increasingly day
by day which separates us from the source
and author of sin and death and puts
us more and more on the side of
him who is our creator and our savior.
These things we ask in his holy name.
Amen.