In the garden, God promised that the offspring of Adam would crush the head of the serpent. Let’s think about all the ways this verse points to Christmas.
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Hey, this is Scripture for Students. I’m Steve Whitacre, president of Trinity College and a pastor at Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville. I want to help students build a daily habit for life-long Bible reading. Today is December 2, 2024 and this episode of Scripture for Students is called Cometh the Serpent Crusher. Grab your Bible and let’s get started.
Our family has a phrase that we pull out from time to time: “Cometh the hour, cometh the man.” We generally use it kind of ironically to mean that I’ve arrived on the scene for such a time as this. Suppose there was one piece of pie left in a dish and Mrs. Whitacre had just the right spot in the dishwasher for that dish, but… there’s that pesky piece of pie. But I happened to walk into the kitchen at just that moment. “Well, cometh the hour, cometh the man!”
You would think that the phrase would have arisen around some great hero on a battlefield, like General Eisenhower, or some great national leader, like Winston Churchill. Well, I did a little research and it the first recorded use of the term in print was in relation to the game of cricket:
This phrase was uttered by the English bowler, Cliff Gladwin on the 20th December 1948 in Durban, South Africa, when, with 2 wickets standing and 12 runs required off the last three remaining overs, he came into bat. He scored the winning run from a leg-bye with the last ball of the match after the ball had struck him on the thigh.
Afterwards, in the dressing room, he proudly showed all comers the bruise from which cricket’s most famous leg-bye was scored. “I told you, ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man.’”
I don’t know anything about the game of cricket so I don’t know what half of that means, but I at least get the gist that Cliff Gladwin became the hero when he got hit in the leg by the ball. There you have it: cometh the hour, cometh the man.
This season of Scripture for Students is about Advent, so if you know that the word Advent means “arrival” or “coming,” it’s probably not hard for you to see why this phrase came to mind as I was thinking about Christmas. Never before had an hour cometh that had been so looked for and longed for and prayed for as desperately as this one. And never before had a man cometh who was so perfect, so holy, so full of grace and truth.
But to understand what Jesus’ coming at such a time means, we have to go back to the beginning. If we want to understand all that makes up and surrounds his coming we have to understand how it all started. Why the virgin birth and the manger and the angels and shepherds and the wise men and the star and Herod? How did we get here? Let’s go back to the very beginning.
Open your Bibles up to Genesis chapter 1. You know how this story begins: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And if we were to read chapter 1 straight through (which you should do as soon as this podcast is over), one thing we would notice is the phrase “and it was good” over and over. Every single day of creation ends with this pronouncement. And of course, 1:31 is the high point: God looks over all that he has made, “and it was very good!” In chapter 2, we take another lap through the sixth day of creation and we learn a lot more about the creation of Adam and Eve.
And I know that you know that chapter 3 is about how sin came into the world. We need to learn the skill of coming to a familiar passage and reading it again for the first time. Hebrews says that God’s Word is living and active so there is no reason why any Christian should ever be bored reading God’s Word.
Try to imagine that you’ve never read the Bible before. You’re never heard anything about any of it: Abraham, Moses, Psalms, Prophets, Jesus. And you read the first two chapters of Genesis and you’re thinking, what a world! This is a paradise. What happened? And then you come to chapter 3.
Let’s start reading in verse 1. I want you to follow along in your Bible. We need to absorb it with all our senses, so look at the words on the page, follow along with your finger, you could even read it out loud with me. Here we go:
Genesis 3:1–15
1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”
2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden,
3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ”
4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.
5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.
7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
8 And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
9 But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”
10 And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”
11 He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”
12 The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.”
13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
14 The LORD God said to 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.
15 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”
May the Lord bless the reading and the hearing and the keeping of God’s word.
There’s so much here and we could spend the whole month talking about what we learn just from this chapter. But for today, in order for us to think about the advent of Jesus—the coming of Jesus—we need to think about the curse that God lays on the serpent, especially the second half of it.
The first half is really intriguing: the serpent is cursed by being made to go about on his belly, in the dust. When I read that, I’ve got more questions than I do answers: what was the serpent doing before this? Did it have legs? Was it a dragon or a lizard of some kind, and so because of this curse, maybe it got downgraded! Or maybe before this, it could slither about half upright, like in the cartoons, and look Adam in the eye. I don’t know.
But more important for us is the second half the curse, in verse 15. Let’s read it again: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”
Two things here: first, there is enmity. Enmity makes enemies, but this is more serious than just that people naturally recoil from meeting a snake on the trail. This means that there will be war between Adam and his people and the serpent and his people for the rest of the days of the earth.
And God makes this prediction to the serpent about Adam: he shall bruise your head but you shall bruise his heel. Theologians today sometimes call this the protoevangelium. You can whip that out at dinner tonight and impress your family.
You might be able to guess what that word means: proto means first, like a prototype; evangelium sounds kind of like “evangelism” because it is from a Latin term for the “good news.” So this is the first announcement of the good news of the gospel. It’s the first hint of what this story will be about. It’s a whisper of the Christmas story yet to come.
My ESV translates this word “bruise,” but some translations put it “crush.” I like that word because it sets us up so that when we read our Bibles, on every page, we can ask, “where is the serpent crusher? When will he come?”
So, when we get to the New Testament, and the apostle Paul says in Gal 4:4 that Jesus was born, “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son…” Well, cometh the hour, cometh the serpent crusher. Let’s think about this passage in three ways:
- First, think about the whole story of the Bible and ask: are there other, lesser serpent crushers who showed up before the great serpent-crusher, Jesus?
- Second, in what ways does Jesus come as the serpent-crusher?
- And third, we know that there is still enmity between the serpent and the offspring of Adam (that’s us!). But how does the knowledge and belief that Jesus is the serpent-crusher give us hope today to continue to fight sin and grow in godliness?
That’s all for today. If you enjoyed this episode please share it with a friend and follow us on Apple Podcasts.
This content is sponsored by Trinity College of Louisville. We shape young men and young women for Christ and for the church. Learn more at TrinityCollegeLou.com. Until next time, keep growing!