Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everybody! I hope you enjoyed celebrating Jesus' birthday and the start of a new year!
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For my first two blog posts, I talked about some of the commands that Jesus gave us. Now I will be talking about some of God's promises, and I figured I'd start with the very first one.
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So the Lord God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this, Cursed are you above all livestock
and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust all the days of your life.
And I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
He will crush your head, and you will strike His heel.”
Genesis 3:14-15
Now, this might sound very familiar to you. It should! It's part of the story of creation. This is the part where God curses Satan after he told Eve to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He tells him that he will have to slither around on the ground forever (did snakes have legs when the earth was first created?) and that he'll have to eat dirt. Ew.
However, that's just the first part. Look back to the rest of this passage. It says that God will make Satan, Eve, and her offspring enemies. It says that one of Eve's descendants is going to crush the devil's head (so, defeat him) and that the devil will only harm said descendant.
Wait a minute – Eve is the first woman in the world! Every single person who is or has ever been (minus Adam) is her descendant! That's a lot of people who could be the one to crush Satan's head. How are we supposed to know who it is?
Well, here's the short answer to that question: the Bible tells us that it's Jesus. But if I stopped here this would a pretty boring blog post, so here's the long answer: is there any person in the Bible who defeated Satan? Is there anyone who was victorious over sin? Part of defeating something is not giving into it. Was there any one person who didn't ever sin?
King David was a good and godly man, but he still sinned. Remember Bathsheba?
Paul was and still is a great example to all believers. Could it be him? No. He gave into sin. Think back to before he was converted. He persecuted and killed many people just because of their religious practices. What about Peter? No. Isaiah? No. John the Baptist? Nope. Billy Graham? Nu-uh. Superman? Wait – what?
The only person in the history of, well, everything, who never sinned in their entire lifetime was Jesus. From the time He was born, to the day He died, to the day He rose again, Jesus never sinned. Even though He could have just given into temptation, He was never mean to His siblings; He was never rude to His mom; and He never took it out on His dad when He couldn't figure out how to fix that one math problem. Even when Jesus got mad, He didn't sin in His anger. He was the only person ever who did not give in to sin. Therefore, He was (and is) the only person able to defeat sin and death. And He did. By dying. On a cross. And rising again.
I wonder what Eve thought of all of this. Or Adam. When God told them that their descendant would defeat the very thing that first tempted them, what was their reaction? The Bible doesn't say. But we can always imagine. What would we have done if we were in that same situation?
We have just sinned and then found out that God's going to use one of our descendants to triumph over the thing that prompted us to sin. I, for one, would want that descendant to come very soon, so that I wouldn't have to suffer from God's punishment for very long (God's punishment for Adam and Eve can be found in Genesis 3:16-19; part of your homework is to read it!). I would hope that one of my children would be the one to defeat Satan.
It turns out that there were 76 generations from Adam and Eve to Jesus, according to Luke. The two would never be able to see the fulfillment of God's promise to them. That means that they had to trust the Lord to do what He said He would do. They had to trust that it would happen without seeing it happen.
We Christians trust the Lord like Adam and Eve did – except we trust that Jesus died for our sins, even though we weren't there when He did it. We trust in this because of the Bible and because of what God did in our lives when we became Christians: He gave us the Holy Spirit as proof of our salvation.
Trust is big part of the Christian life. We hear about it a lot in Sunday School, sermons, etc., except usually when we hear it it has a different name. That name is faith.
“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see,” says Hebrews 11:1. This means that faith is believing in what we hope for (like that Jesus is coming back) and being sure about what we do not see (like that God is there, even though we have never seen Him).
Now that you know what faith means, I ask you to pray that you would live out that meaning every day. Pray that God would help you to trust in Him just like Adam and Eve trusted. Pray that you would be able to have confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.