Genesis 3

This is perhaps the saddest chapter in the Bible—the fall of man from perfect fellowship with God. If there is going to be good, if man is going to have a choice, then there obviously must also be evil. Eve, then Adam, chose to disobey God. Men and women have been doing it ever since.

Satan appears here in the form of a “serpent,” though the exact nature of that critter is unknown. Apparently, he walked on two legs, because part of his punishment for inducing Eve to sin was that he would slither around on his belly (v. 14). It’s a little difficult to understand exactly what is going on here—talking snakes just don’t quite fit with our conception of reality—but the world was obviously much different back then, so allowances must be made for that. Remember God walked around the garden as well.

Satan did not make Eve eat of the fruit, of course. The devil doesn’t force us to do anything. All he did was the same thing God does—he presented his arguments and let Eve choose. Satan “converts” by his word the same way God does. Every time we are tempted to sin, there is, consciously or subconsciously, a reasoning process we must go through. Reasoning can be put into words, and that is how Satan seduces us. God puts forth His arguments for us to do good; Satan puts forth his for us to do evil. Too often we are persuaded by the evil line of reasoning.

When confronted by God, Eve blamed the devil, and Adam blamed Eve, and then ultimately God: “Then the man said, ‘The woman whom YOU gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate,’" (v. 12). So humans have been trying to justify and rationalize their iniquities since the very first sin. And, like Adam, many people down through history have blamed God.

But, there is also very good news in the chapter, verse 15. God, speaking to Satan, said, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, And you shall bruise His heel.” It’s an obscure verse until we look at it through the light of the rest of the Bible. The battle will be between man and devil, but more importantly, Satan’s seed and woman’s seed, who shall bruise (crush) the head of Satan. To my knowledge, this is the only time in the Bible that the offspring of man is referred to as “woman’s seed;” usually, it is the “seed of man.” This is thus ultimately a prediction of the virgin birth of Christ, since no human male was involved in it. What God is promising here is a Savior. Man has sinned, broken his perfect bond with God. Sin now comes between us and Deity (Isaiah 59:1-2; Romans 3:23). God wants us back, so the scheme of redemption is inaugurated in Genesis 3:15. A Savior will come, and He will come as a human, born of a woman without the help of a man. The rest of the Old Testament flows from this verse. As we shall see—and I will follow it very closely for you—the lineage of this Messiah is unfolded throughout the remainder of the Old Testament.

Now, you aren’t going to get all that from reading just Genesis 3:15. As I said, we must look at the rest of the Bible to understand what God is saying here. But how many “murder mystery novels” give all the evidence in the first two or three chapters? God’s plan unfolds in history, and the Bible traces that history for us.

Genesis 3 ends with Adam and Eve being evicted from the Garden of Eden and losing access to the tree of life, of which, if they ate, they apparently could have lived eternally. It isn’t surprising, in the least, that the tree of life shows up again in Revelation 22:14. What was lost in Genesis 3 is regained in Revelation 22. The Bible presents a beautiful, unified, perfect whole.