Gen 3:14–15 — The Promised Serpent Crusher

The title of today’s sermon is “The Promised Serpent Crusher.” Taken from that last part of verse 15: “He shall crush your head and you shall strike his heel.” As I mentioned, the ESV, which I just read from, translates that he shall “bruise” your head and you shall “bruise” his heel. And I am a little bit uncomfortable with that too mild of language. Bruising the head is not quite the point. That sounds like a mild injury from which one could easily recover. No, it is “crushing.” This word is used several times in the Old Testament where it clearly means to crush. He shall crush your head.

Now the reason why the ESV translates it bruise is because they want to point out that the same verb is used in the second part of that sentence. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel, showing the similarity between the two actions. It is the same Hebrew word and so they want to maintain that wordplay by using the same English word to translate it. That is why they say bruise both times. But I think it is more accurate to say, “He shall strike or crush your head, but you shall strike his heel.”

The First Promise of the Gospel

And so this is the first promise of the gospel in the entire scripture. This is the promise of the serpent crusher, the promise of one who will come to crush the serpent, to destroy the devil. There is an interesting verse later on in the New Testament, in 1 John, in 1 John chapter three, where it says this, 1 John 3 verse eight, whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil. And later on in verse 10, that is described as being the children of the devil. So back to 1 John 3, eight. It says, whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, is a child of the devil. For the devil has been sinning from the beginning. And the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. You can tell that this passage here in 1 John 3 is, it has Genesis 3:15 in view. The idea of the devil having offspring, the children of the devil. The idea that Christ is the Son of God who came and appeared in order to destroy the works of the devil.

And so we have clear New Testament commentary on this verse here in Genesis 3:15 that shows us that this is the first promise of the Messiah. This is the first promise of Christ to come, who is the Son of God, who became man, who will be the one who destroys the work of the devil.

Now part of the reason why we are a little bit uncomfortable with that language of speaking of this as the devil being crushed, the devil being defeated, is because in the immediate context, it seems like we are talking about a literal creature that looks like some kind of snake or lizard, who is a literal creature in the context. It goes back to chapter 3 verse 1. The serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. And then in verse 14, when God pronounces His curse upon the serpent, He says, 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.

And so at first we may think, where do we get this idea that it is talking about the devil? It seems like it is talking about a real creature who is among the other beasts of the field. And even his judgment is that he is going to go on his belly like a snake. Well, the answer is that there is an amazing intermeshing of this physical earthly creature and the demonic realm that is using this creature. The serpent is a real creature. This is a real being that God made, who is one of the beasts of the field, but he is being used and indwelt by Satan. And we can see this. We can see this even in the text. We do not have to go to the New Testament. We can see it even in the text. The fact that there is something more here than meets the eye. This is not just a creature. This is a creature, but there is an evil power behind it and empowering it. We can see that in the text itself.

It says the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field. There is something that sets this one apart from the ordinary beasts of the field and the other creatures that are out there. This snake, or lizard, or whatever it is, is intelligent, arguing, speaking of divine things. He knows about God’s word to Adam and Eve that they must not eat of the tree. There is a demonic power indwelling and making use of a literal creature. Just as in the Gospels, where demons dwell inside of human beings and make use of the human beings to speak through them. So also here we see this being who is intelligent, who is subtle, who engages in deception, who speaks against God in rebellion against God, and who tries to bring Adam and Eve onto his side in joining his rebellion against God. He has knowledge. It is distorted knowledge, but he has knowledge of divine things. He has knowledge of God’s purpose for mankind and for creation. Again, it is distorted and full of his deception and lies, but he does have some insight into God’s purpose, and he is seeking to thwart God’s purpose for creation.

The Humiliation of the Serpent

Our text begins in verse 14 with this amazing statement that comes completely out of the blue. If we just read the previous context in verses 8 through 13, it seems like the whole focus of this moment of divine judgment when God confronts Adam and Eve, it seems as if the whole focus is going to be upon them, upon Adam and Eve. God does indeed interrogate them. He does ask them, what is going on? Why are you hiding from me? Why are you trying to flee from me? Who told you that you were naked? And he even allows Adam and Eve to make excuses for their sin and to blame someone else. Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the serpent. And we would expect at this point that God would simply confront their excuses and judge them. That is what we would expect.

But then suddenly things take a turn. And in verse 14, the Lord confronts the serpent. The Lord said to the serpent, because you have done this, because you instigated this event of causing Adam and Eve through your deceptions to sin against me and to break the covenant, because you have done this, cursed are you. Above all livestock. Cursed are you. God pronounces his curse of judgment upon the serpent. He does not pronounce it upon Adam and Eve. He pronounces it upon the serpent. That is an astonishing revelation of grace right in the midst of judgment.

You would expect God to judge Adam and Eve, to cast them out of the garden, maybe even to cast them directly into hell itself. But instead, God pronounces judgment upon the serpent. And in the very process of pronouncing judgment upon the serpent, he also promises to send the offspring of the woman who will undo Adam and Eve’s sin, and he will crush the head of the serpent. This is an incredible revelation of God’s grace right in the midst of wrath and judgment.

It reminds us, does it not, of Israel. Remember how Israel, the long story of Israel, after they received the law at Mount Sinai, and they were told that they must keep the law in order to obtain life, and if they disobey, they will receive death. In Deuteronomy 30, Moses says, today I present before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, choose the blessing by obeying me. And if you do not, you will be under the curse. And of course, the whole story of Israel is that they fail, that they sin, they break the commandments, they worship other gods, they listen to the lies of the serpent. And the culmination of that is as you get closer to the end of the Old Testament, you read about how God is going to confront Israel, his unfaithful people, and he is about to send them into exile. He is about to expel them from the garden, that is from the land in which God had placed them.

And if you read the prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and many of the prophets, you hear over and over again this word of judgment that God is going to punish his people. He says, you were my people, but now you are not my people. You were my bride, but now you are an adulterous and unfaithful bride. And so I am going to divorce you and send you away. But what is amazing is that even in the midst of judgment, as God is pronouncing His curse and wrath upon His unfaithful people, side by side with the wrath, you find these wonderful oracles of hope and comfort and promise. And God says, But even though you have sinned against me and you are not my people, yet I will take you to be with myself again and I will restore you. I will make a new covenant. I will send the Messiah who will come and he will redeem you and save you and restore you back to the land and restore you back to that previous covenant relationship that I had with you. In the very moment of wrath, hope and joy and promise shines forth. And so also it is here. In the first moment, the first moment of the revelation of God’s promise, God reveals his grace and he reveals the promise of the coming Redeemer who will undo Adam’s sin and who will restore us to paradise.

It is an amazing thing. It is an amazing how God’s grace shines out in our moments of greatest darkness. Perhaps you have experienced that yourself in your own life. Those places, those times when things have been so dark and so bad and you have felt so far from the Lord, the Lord brings his light of the gospel into your heart and shows you his grace.

And the focus, the spotlight is not upon you. The spotlight is not upon Adam and Eve and how they will be forgiven and restored. The focus is upon the Redeemer. The focus is upon this one who will crush the serpent’s head, who will defeat evil, and who will bring us back to the Lord.

Obviously this demonstrates something, does it not? It demonstrates for us that although God is presented in the text as if he is a finite creature like Adam and Eve and who is trying to investigate and find out what is going on, he even asks Adam, where are you? As if he does not know. And although God is presented as if He is trying to figure out what happened, whether or not Adam and Eve sinned, who told you that you were naked, did you eat of the tree? Although God is presented that way, we know that is not The truth is that God is the divine creator who is omniscient and absolutely sovereign over all things.

Yes, he does accommodate himself to our creaturely experience of time and of growing in knowledge. He accommodates himself. But all along, he had already determined before the foundation of the world, even before Adam and Eve were created, He had already ordained that he would send his son. And so here in this moment of judgment, when God reveals his judgment upon the serpent, and then he reveals the promise of the coming Messiah, he is showing that he is not taken by surprise. He is not learning what happened. He is now revealing the truth of the gospel that was hidden within the divine counsels before eternity.

This is what we call in theology the Covenant of Redemption. The Covenant of Redemption is a covenant within the Triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, already even before creation, planning that Christ would come as the mediator and the Savior. Christ was ordained, the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Son of God, was ordained to be the Redeemer, who would become man, who would go to the cross, who would defeat the devil, who would rise again from the dead and save his people from their sins.

God is saying he is going to do what he had already planned to do, and he reveals it here in this wonderful, unexpected outpouring of grace and glory and joy upon the people of God. Adam and Eve will need to learn more about this and need to know how to respond to this word of promise. There is also going to be, as we will see in the subsequent paragraphs here, some difficulty that they are going to have in their lives. The woman will continue to engage in the process of bearing children, but it is going to be hard. It is going to be characterized by pain. Man is going to continue to do his work of subduing the earth, but he is not going to be able to completely subdue it because the ground is going to be cursed. And so there is going to be a long life that they are going to have to live, learning how to live as servants of the Lord in response to His grace, waiting for that day when Christ comes and fulfills the promise of his salvation. They are going to have to learn to walk by faith. They are going to have to learn how to respond to God’s grace and live as the Lord’s redeemed servants.

So this initial promise of God’s grace and glory and joy here is something that is going to take time for them to learn more about. We will even see as the rest of Genesis unfolds that the people of God are going to learn more about this. God’s going to come to them again and again. He is going to come to Enoch and to Noah and to Abraham and the patriarchs and unfold to them more and more about what this promise means. Here it is just a seed. And it is going to take time for that seed to grow and to expand and for all of it to be fleshed out. And it is going to take a history. It is going to be a whole history of God’s dealings with His people in the Old Covenant until Christ comes in the fullness of time.

But God is patient. He will take his time. He will patiently lead his people into all truth. But at this moment here, he begins to reveal the first promise of his grace. Theologians refer to Genesis 3:15 as the protevangelium, proto meaning first, and evangelium means promise of the gospel. It is the first promise of the gospel. And all of the other promises those oracles that we are talking about in the prophets, about behold a virgin shall conceive, all those promises in the time of the patriarchs that God made to Abraham, all the subsequent promises in the Bible about the coming Redeemer are simply the unpacking and unfolding of this foundational seed promise.

Here it is at the beginning point. Here is the fountain of all of redemptive revelation from this point on. The rest of the Bible from Genesis 3:15 on is simply unpacking and unfolding the significance of this key foundational promise. God says, I will put enmity between you and the woman. He is speaking to the serpent. I will put enmity between you, the serpent, and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. Clearly, already in the text, we are seeing that it is not just talking about that physical creature. There is something deeper going on here. There is a power at work. This creature that literally came into the garden and that Adam and Eve spoke with was only an instrument of a more sinister force. And God is now addressing that sinister force. God is now addressing that demonic realm, which is Satan himself.

I Will Put Enmity

What does God say there in verse 15? I will put enmity. I will put enmity. Now the word enmity is not a common word in our ordinary English conversation, but it is related to the word enemy. So if we think of enemies, then we understand what enmity is. Enmity is the state of being enemies, of being hostile to one another. Why does God say, I will put enmity? Well, because until this point, until the first promise of the gospel and Adam and Eve responding in faith to that promise of the gospel, which we know that they did. We know that they did respond in faith because of verse 20. In verse 20, it says, the man called his wife’s name Eve. What does Eve mean? It means life. And so by calling her Eve, Adam is saying, I believe God in your promise that she will be the mother of life. She will be the mother of this serpent crusher who will come and give us life and undo the effects of the fall and of death.

So Adam and his wife believed in this promise, but before that moment, before they received the promise and believe it, They are not yet in a proper relationship with God. They have sinned against the Lord. God had made them, back in Genesis 2, God had made them to be in covenant fellowship with God, but God had placed before them a test. The test was, you shall not eat of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.

Adam and Eve broke that test by listening to the serpent, by listening to the voice of the devil speaking through the serpent who was saying to them, God did not really say that and God is not telling you the truth. Listen to me, join me in rejecting God’s authority. And so at this point, prior to their faith, they are now no longer in fellowship with God, they have been, through the temptation of Satan, they have become friends with Satan. They have allied themselves with Satan. They have betrayed God. They were in covenant relationship with him, but they betrayed God. They have rejected his word, and they have now decided to throw in their lot with Satan and his plot to thwart God’s purposes for creation. They are at enmity with God. And they are friends with the devil.

The Two Offsprings

And now God is saying here in verse 15, God’s going to change that. He is going to break this new covenant bond. It is a false covenant. It is a covenant of death. He is going to break this false covenant that has been established between Adam and Eve and the serpent. And he is going to create enmity between the serpent and the woman, and between your offspring, the offspring of the serpent, and her offspring, the offspring of the woman. He is going to put enmity. He is going to change this alliance that has been created between mankind and Satan. He is going to change it into a warfare. He is going to change their affections from being affections that are in line with the devil to being affections that are opposed to the devil and now back in line with God. I will put enmity in their hearts so that they now love me and not you. And they have now taken up their sword that they had originally put down.

Remember Adam was supposed to confront the serpent. He was the priestly guardian of the sanctuary. He was not supposed to sit there and let the serpent have a theological discussion with his wife. He was supposed to step forward and have this confronting moment where he was to defeat the serpent and expel him from the holy sanctuary of God. But he failed. He put down his sword and he let the serpent come in. And he let his own affections be distorted so that now he is agreeing with the devil and rebelling against God. But now God is saying, I am going to cause you to pick up your sword that you had put down. I am going to put enmity between you and the woman. I am going to cause mankind to now rise up where before they had bowed down before the devil. And agreed with him and become his servants, they are now going to rise up by my power, putting strength in them, giving them new hearts that love me and hate you. And I am going to cause you to take up that sword again to engage in holy war against the devil. Is this not referring to the wonderful truth that we believe as Christians, which is that God, the Holy Spirit, is the author of faith? We do not become Christians based on our own free will. It is that not we decide to believe in the Lord, that we decide to take up sides against the devil based upon our own free will and our own decision to believe.

No, the Bible says from the very beginning, the very first promise of the gospel is a Calvinistic promise. It says God is going to do it. God is going to create this enmity. God is going to change their hearts so that they no longer love the devil, but now they love God. And part of loving God means hating the devil. God is going to create this new attitude in their hearts, this new love for God that is so in line with God and so devoted to God’s glory and so seeking His purposes that now man is filled with holy hatred of sin and evil. That is what God is promising to do here.

God is promising to create an elect people called from the fallen mass of humanity that is in league with the devil. He is creating the offspring of the woman. That is simply the biblical theological way of speaking of the elect. All of those who are the offspring of the woman are those who were formerly part of the offspring of the devil, children of the devil. But God is going to put faith in their hearts, change their hearts, put enmity against the devil in their hearts where before there was friendship, and he is going to call them to himself and to make them his own people.

Again, I think it is very helpful to always think about the fact, and I have mentioned this before in all of the sermons on Genesis so far, that the original audience of this story, this narrative of creation and fall, the original audience is Israel. Whether it was given to Israel at Mount Sinai or whether it was later teaching that Moses gave in the wilderness. We know that Moses is the author of the book of Genesis. And so he is communicating these truths of events that happened long before Israel came on the scene in order to help them to understand their identity and their calling.

And what is one of the main things that Israel needs to do? Israel is called to be a holy nation that is engaged in holy war against the enemies of God. We see this from the very beginning when they are in Egypt. And they are in bondage to Egypt and to the Egyptians and to Pharaoh. And what does God do? God judges the Egyptians. God judges Pharaoh and all of the gods of the Egyptians. And Pharaoh and his army is pictured as if they are like the devil and his army that are seeking to oppress God’s people. And God delivers the people out of bondage in Egypt delivering them from their slavery and tyranny to under the devil, and he makes them his own people. He says, now you belong to me. You are now a holy nation who belong to me.

And therefore, because I have put enmity in your hearts against evil, and I have called you to be my people, you must now engage in holy war against that which is evil. And so they are immediately called to engage in holy war. Now, we are not to think of this like in modern ethnic terms like genocide. That is what secular people think about when they look at the Bible’s depiction of the way in which the Israelites go into the land of Canaan and destroy all of the Canaanite cities. And they put to death all of the Canaanites who live there. Modern secular people look at that as being, oh, this is genocide, and that the Israelites are being called to kill and to genocide all of the original inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites.

That is not what is going on. What God is doing is He is using His people who have now been called into His covenant with Him. He is using them as His holy instrument to engage in spiritual warfare against Satan and his followers.

The Canaanites were not just simply ethnically Canaanites. They were not just simply non-Jews. The Canaanites were particularly evil because they were in league with the devil. They were engaging in idolatry of the worst possible kind. Even offering their own children as sacrifices to their gods. Engaging in all kinds of evil pagan practices with sexual immorality that is the most heinous that you could imagine.

And God is using the people of God, his now redeemed people, the offspring of the woman, to be his instrument of holy war against the devil and his followers. So when Israel heard Genesis 3:15, I will put enmity, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring, Israel is now being reminded, oh yeah, we need to pick up that sword. We cannot just simply go into the land and intermarry with the Canaanites and pretend that everything is fine and just focus on having a good economy and living and trading and trying to have a good life.

No, we are a holy nation called to be God’s special people, called to live for Him. We are called to engage in that holy war against the evil one. And of course, the whole story of the Old Testament is that Israel failed again and again. Remember how in the book of Judges, they go through this cycle. In the book of Judges. They are in the land, but the Canaanites are still there. Whether it is the Amorites or the Midianites or the Philistines, they are all still there. They are all the same people. They are all the same offspring of the serpent.

And over and over again, what do they do? They start to let down their guard. They start to get comfortable. They start to intermarry. They start to even worship the gods of the Canaanites. And then what does God do? He sends the enemies of God’s people to wake them up and to say, God is now going to judge you because of your failure. And then the people cry out in their bondage. Now they are enslaved to the Midianites again, or they are enslaved under the thumb of the Philistines. And they cry out to God for deliverance.

And then God sends a deliverer. Those are the judges. Later on, it will be David and the kings. God sends a deliverer who delivers them from their oppression. And they have to repent of their compromise. They have to repent of worshipping the false gods, of intermarrying with the Canaanites. And they have to recommit themselves to be that holy nation that God created them to be. And they continually go through that cycle again and again and again, until the very end of the story is, it gets so bad that God says, I am done. And he sends them into exile.

And so already we are seeing in this text here, this first promise of the gospel, that Israel is called to be the offspring of the woman in that collective sense, this holy nation that is engaging in holy war against the enemies of God. But that they will fail and that they will not succeed in doing that. And that is why this promise not only looks ahead to the history of Israel, but beyond that, to the history beyond Israel, to the coming of the ultimate offspring of the woman, the individual offspring of the woman who will finally crush the head of the serpent. It is very emphatic in Hebrew. It says, he shall bruise your head. And the Greek translation of this, called the Septuagint, makes it even more emphatic by using this masculine and singular pronoun. He shall bruise your head.

You might think that it is just saying that they, the offspring, will bruise. No, it specifically says he. This is a messianic oracle. There is looking beyond the history of Israel and the collective offspring of the woman in the nation of Israel. Looking beyond that, beyond their failure to the ultimate individual who will bruise the serpent’s head. He will do it. He will do it. Israel failed. We fail. If it is up to us, we always fail. We always let down our guard. We always compromise. But it is Christ, Christ is the one who will do what we could not do.

This is why, as it says in 1 John 3:8, this is the reason the Son of God appeared, is to destroy the works of the devil. How wonderful that we have this promise of the gospel, this wonderful promise that God will do what we could not do. Because of sin, however, because sin has entered into this world, This individual who is spoken of here is not simply viewed as being another Adam. He is viewed as being more than Adam. He is the second Adam, but he is going to do something more.

Because of the introduction of sin and death into this world, the only way in which that work of confronting the serpent that was originally assigned to Adam, the only way that work can be fulfilled is through redemptive suffering. And so our text says, he shall crush your head and you, the serpent, shall strike his heel. Because of the introduction of sin into this world, now the work of the second Adam does not only involve confronting the serpent. It involves confronting the serpent by means of his own suffering and death. And this points us, of course, to the mystery of the cross.

It points us to the wonderful paradoxical reality that the way in which Christ defeats the serpent is not merely by an exercise of divine power, just like coming down from heaven and just casting the serpent into hell, but it is through his own suffering. Through his own cross, he must undergo the wrath of God for us. He must deliver us from hell. And he can only do so by undergoing hell itself in our place. This very reality of the suffering of the coming offspring is also hinted at in verse 21, when the Lord God made for Adam and Eve garments of skins, garments of the skins of an animal. In order to do that, you have to slay an animal. There has to be a sacrificial animal in order to produce these skins of covering.

Christ the Serpent Crusher

So already we see this idea that Christ is going to suffer on the cross. He is going to be the final sacrifice to take away our sin. He is going to redeem us from this fallen world. What an amazing promise of the gospel we have here in this passage. Christ is the serpent crusher, not you. Christ is the serpent crusher, but you can stand in his victory by faith. By faith, you can share in his triumph. By faith, you are united to Him. And that is why the Apostle Paul will say something amazing in Romans 16 verse 20, alluding to this very passage, but applied to us. He says that the God of peace will crush Satan under your feet. The God of peace will crush Satan under your feet. Why? Because of what Christ has done for us. Union with Christ, that is the only solution. Union with Christ in his death and resurrection. What a wonderful assurance we have in the Lord to know. That He is the one that is doing all this work. He is the one that is putting the enmity that is making our hearts new again, and to be in league with God and not with the devil. He is the one that is going to send the coming serpent crusher. He is the one that is doing it all by His grace.

Our job is to believe it, just like Adam and Eve believed it. And Adam named his wife Eve in faith in that promise of the gospel. Our job is to believe it, to rest in it, and to live in that confident assurance that whatever struggles you are going through in this life, whatever spiritual warfare you are encountering in your personal life, you know that the outcome does not depend on you. Thank God it does not depend on you, because if it did, you would fail. It depends on Christ and what Christ has done for you.

Believe in it, rest in it, and live in the strength of it.