In 1988, Anissa Ayala was 16 years old and diagnosed with a
rare form of leukemia. The doctor said that if she did
not receive a bone marrow transplant after chemotherapy
and radiation treatment, she would die.
Neither her parents nor her brother was a match and they
could not find a donor elsewhere.
Her parents, both in their 40s, conceived another child and
hoped that it's bone marrow would be compatible with
Anissa's. To their great delight, it was
determined that this new baby was a compatible donor, and when
Marissa Aiella was 14 months old, they took some of her
marrow and gave it to Anissa. Anissa made a full recovery from
the leukemia and both sisters lead healthy lives today.
In a very real sense, Marissa saved her sister's life.
She says without me being a perfect match for my sister, she
would not be here now. In comparison, Jesus was born
into this world for the express purpose of saving us, and He is
the one and only savor Savior. That is the perfect match.
In a sense, He's the perfect match for the sins of the world
because he's God in the flesh, and only a perfect God who came
down to be a man could die. But this man who was God also
lived a perfect life and never failed in sin, and he comes to
take away our curse. And that's what Christmas is.
It marks the day that we celebrate when this whole thing
began. And and so we're in this series
called Anticipating Advent. And over the last two weeks, we
looked at his second Advent. That means the coming of Christ.
He came the first time and he's going to come again.
We believe as Christians. And we looked at his, his second
coming the first two weeks. And now as we draw closer to
Christmas, we're going to look at the first Advent or the first
coming of Christ. And today specifically, I want
to talk about how Christmas reverses the curse.
You see in in the book of Genesis.
The theme of the book of Genesis, if you didn't know, is
blessing. But there's also kind of a anti
motif or theme, which is curse. It's do this and be blessed or
don't do this and be cursed. And that was kind of the
covenant that God had had made with his creation.
And we're going to look at that in in Genesis chapter 3, we see
that shortly after his creation, mankind cannot obey God and
eventually falls into a not just themselves, but the entire
creation falls under a curse. So we're going to look at
Genesis 315, which was the, the verse that I read earlier today.
But before we do that, I want to set up the context to where we
are at. And so I've got three points
today. And the first is the context of
the, the choice that was made. You see, when God created the
world, he said it was actually blessed in days 5-6 and seven in
chapter 1 of Genesis. Day 5 is when he created the
first set of animals, the ones that that were were in the
water, the water animals. And at the end of it he says,
and he blessed them. And then on day 6 if you go to
day 6IN chapter 21 he makes the land animals and the humans.
And after that in verse 28 it says, and God bless them and
said to them, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, subdue
it and have dominion. And then you get into chapter 2.
Everything is still perfect and very good.
God has pronounced blessing on his creation.
And then on the day seven he rests, and it says he blessed
the 7th day as well. And you see this motif of
blessing starting out and what it what does that word mean
Blessed? It means to be filled with
strength or to be adored. To be blessed or to bless is to
invoke divine favor, often implying a positive disposition
of a kind actions toward the recipient.
And it also means that there was prosperity with respect to the
fertility of the land and the health and fertility of the
beings or the creatures, including human beings.
And so there's this blessing in all creation.
And, and, and God says, OK, I've blessed you now I've given you
some things to do. And theologians would call this
the covenant of works. It's a an agreement between God
and his people that they will follow him and do what he says
obey him. And in Genesis 215, God in the
midst of the garden and after Adam had named all the animals
and was enjoying God's creation before woman was born or brought
from his side. God says this, he makes some
rules. He says the Lord God took the
man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it.
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, you may surely eat
of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat
of it, you shall surely die. That was God's rules.
He said, I've made this creation and you can enjoy everything
except for this, this one tree. If you do that, you're going to
be cursed. You're going to, it's going to
bring consequences to you and to all of the creation.
And, and just so you know, Adam and Eve had perfect free will.
They had a choice. They had a choice to make
whether they would follow God's commands or not.
Now as it moves forward, something else is added to the
mix and it's an enemy, it's an it's evil, it's Satan.
Up into this point, the Bible tells us that everything was
good in God's creation. But then this evil being comes
into play in chapter 3. In verse 1 of chapter 3, it
calls him the serpent. It says now the serpent was more
crafty than any other beast in the field that the Lord God had
made. Now in one sense this is talking
about a snake, but the word in in the original language can
also mean dragon. And if you know anything about
who Satan is, Revelation 12/9 says this.
This is the last book of the Bible that recounts the story of
the Bible and tells what's going to happen in the end.
And it says, and the great dragon was thrown down, the
ancient serpent who is called the devil, and Satan, the
deceiver of the whole world, he was thrown down to the earth,
and his angels were thrown down with him.
So in this setting, in this perfect creation, at some point
in time, we don't exactly know, but sometime before this garden
narrative, a war happened in heaven where Satan, who was an
Angel, had some pride. He wanted to take God's
position. He wanted to elevate himself
above God, no longer wanted to worship God, but wanted people
to worship him or angels or wanted to be something big, make
a name for himself basically. And he was cast out of heaven.
And the Bible says he took of the third of the angels with him
and who are now fallen angels and demons.
And so that's a little bit of, you know, kind of demonology and
where evil comes from in all this.
You know, we have to understand that God created it.
He's all knowing and he knew that this was going to happen.
And so God still allowed it to happen anyway.
And we have to, to some degree not be like Satan and say, OK, I
don't need to know it all. And if God made it, then it must
be good. Even though the fall came to be.
So for whatever reason, this serpent Satan is allowed to come
into the picture in God's perfect world because he's cast
down. And here we start this
narrative, the context of the choice that ruins everything
basically. And 1st we see the lie of Satan
in verses 4:00 and 5:00. If you have your Bibles turn to
Genesis chapter 3, you can follow along with me.
I don't have these verses up on the screen, but in verses four
and five, it says the serpent said to the woman, you will not
surely die for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes
will be open and you will be like God knowing good and evil.
What is what's going on here is although man and woman are given
this ability to make a choice to follow God, we have this being
that's actually very powerful that is influencing and trying
to deceive the first human beings, in this case, the second
human being who was Eve. Now in this we see that Adam
isn't anywhere around in this first part and Adam was the
first one to be created. But that is what happens.
Satan in in the midst of choices, Satan comes into our
world and even still exists today and he lies to us.
He lies to us about what God has to say in his word.
You see, Satan is twisting God's word here and he's saying you
don't have to believe God, but he just wants you to basically
be miserable. Now you don't have to raise your
hands, but how many of you have thought about this when it comes
to the idea of religion and believing in God?
I've heard many people say religion is just this man made
program that was made to control people right?
To make them fall in line to be more obedient to governments.
I've heard that before. I've also heard that, you know,
religion is all about taking fun out of the world or faith in God
takes takes the fun away and and so this is kind of the lie of
Satan that whether that you can't trust God's word.
It still happens today, but then we look at Eve's response when
Satan asked her this question in verses 2 and three.
We first we see the lie of Satan, then we come to legalism
and lack of leadership from Adam.
Let's look at verses 2 and two and three.
It says he said to the woman or and the woman said to the
serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but
God said you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in
the midst of the garden need neither shall you touch it lest
you die. Now I don't know if you've
caught that there, but her second part of the sentence was
not in God's word. And that's what we would call
legalism. When you add things to God's
word that aren't there in order to mostly in order to be made
right with God or to find your favor from God.
When you add things in the word that are not there, that is
called legalism because we believe that it faith through
grace alone and Christ alone is how we're made right with God,
not through acts of obedience, although they're still in the
covenant of works. This is a narrative that has to
play out so that we can get to the grace in a moment.
So just bear with me, but what we see here is legalism.
What we also see here is, as I said, Adam is not in the
picture, but Adam was the one who was told this verse here.
So it was after these verses in Genesis chapter 2/15/17 that God
took the rib out of Adam and made woman.
And so some theologians believe that she didn't hear directly
from God the command. It was supposed to have been
Adam's role and job to teach his wife the word of God and he he
either failed, which he gets a lot of blame in the New
Testament for failing in that he either failed or she
misunderstood or a mixture of both.
But what ends up happening is in verse 6 it says so when the
woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was a delight
to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one
wise, she took its fruit and ate and she also gave some to her
husband who was with her and he ate.
So there was the lack of leadership because Adam knows
the command of God. But here we have Eve, who not
not only misunderstood God's Word, maybe because of the lack
of understanding or a lack of being taught, but also a love of
pleasure. You see that there?
You saw that there in the Scriptures, It says it was a
delight to the eyes. It was a desire to make one
wise. And so she took the fruit and
ate it. There was a a love of pleasure
that somehow surpassed her desire to follow God's law, to
listen to the lie, the temptation, the deception of
Satan. Again, this is all something we
can look at chapter 3 and we can say this is basically how
humanity still is today. We believe the lies of Satan,
that you can't trust God's word. Then we add things to it, like
man made religion making it harder to come to the Lord.
And then we're tempted by the pleasure out there instead of
rather following God. We want to please ourselves and
even we want to think that we could become as wise as God.
And so we've got the lie of Satan, the legalism, the lack of
leadership, the love of pleasure.
Now we come to the consequences. It says verse 7 the eyes of both
were opened, and they knew that they were naked.
And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves
loincloths. 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.
But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, Where are
you? And he said, I heard the sound
of you in the garden. And I was afraid because I was
naked and I hid myself. What do we see there?
We see immediate shame and cover up.
And I know you know this because we all do this when we do
something wrong, whether you're a child or whether you're an
adult, when you do something morally wrong, you know that it
was wrong or you go against your, your children's commands
or your, your, your parents commands.
Sorry, maybe that was a, you know, a slip there because it
seems like our children lead us, especially the toddlers rule our
lives. But that's just a that's a proof
that sin exists. By the way, you know, you don't
have to teach a child to disobey, right?
You have to teach them to obey. But immediate shame and cover
up. They sow fig leaves to cover
themselves. All of a sudden they eat this
from this fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Now they know evil. Now they have this knowledge of
evil that they didn't have before and they knew it must
have flashed before the eyes. All the things that humans can
contrive and dream, dream up about human bodies and the, the
disgusting things, the, the, the things that they think about
when it comes to nudity and nakedness outside of the
marriage relationship between a man and a woman.
They felt shame from the choice that they made.
They knew the evil that exists. Now they want to cover it up and
now they want to hide from God. Isn't that what we do as well?
We cover up our shame, our guilt, our sins with lies.
And then we also run from God. That's when we quit praying,
right? I'll come back to you, God, when
I'm living a little bit better of a life.
Have you ever felt that way before?
Like I don't want to come to you now.
And we're kind of in denial that he's actually omniscient.
He knows everything. He sees everything.
He sees exactly what you're doing.
But instead we still think we can hide see, because in the
next part, God calls them to confession.
When God said, where are you? It's not as if God didn't know
where they were. He was calling them to be
honest. OK, Are you going to do the
right thing? He even gives them a chance.
This is mercy, by the way. He gives them a chance to
confess. Did you?
You know? You know you'll have mercy on
your child when they do something wrong, if they'll come
and say, yes, it was me, I own it.
And he gives them a chance. He says, where are you?
Where were you? And then he says, who told you
that you were naked? Have you eaten?
Of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat.
And he already knows. And here's what happens.
Instead of confession, we get the blame game.
It says the man said the woman whom you gave to be with me, she
ate. She gave me fruit of the tree
and I ate. So what does he do?
He blames the woman, but God, he says you made her and you're the
sovereign Lord. You brought us together.
This must have some be your fault.
Don't we do that? We blame another person.
That's the first thing we want to do, defend ourselves, blame
another person. Again, this is a biography of
all of us here, but don't we blame God for our problems in
life, decisions we made long ago that have reverberating
consequences, and somehow we blame God?
You allowed this. Why did you allow this?
Why did you make this happen instead of just owning our part?
You see, God has his part, and the things that He decides to do
are a mystery to us. But what we don't have to be
unclear on is our part, the things that that we do and our
choices. That we make and it goes on with
the blame game. 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.
She too does not own it, but she blames it on the serpent.
Which then finally leads us to the curse of all creation.
The curse that needs to be reversed.
Now we got to look at this again to get to the context of why the
good news of Christmas is such good news.
But first we see the consequences now of these
actions that were made. It's to animals, it's to the
woman, it's to the man, and then we see it to all creation.
So I'll start with animals in in Genesis 314, 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. Now this is an interesting verse
because if you think about this, don't snakes already live on
their belly right and slither throughout the the Bible says
that God created creepy crawling things.
And in one of those days you can go back and find that.
So the question is, what's going on here?
Well, there's a couple of different ways that this could
be taken. One, it could be that Satan
appeared in such a way that was some kind of a a serpent who was
eventually cursed and some things changed in his body
specifically. But the other thing which is
probably more the the better, the better description or the
better interpretation of this is that Satan had the power and
does have the power to possess animals and living creatures.
OK. And so he's talking to Eve
through this serpent, but he as this spirit is, is, is speaking
through this serpent to deceive her.
Now, the other part is weird is why doesn't she think it's weird
that a snake is talking to her? Which brings in all kinds of
funny things that I was studying this week.
By the way, some people believe that that maybe animals before
the fall were more intelligent. Maybe they could communicate.
Like God opened Balaam's Balaam's donkey's mouth to talk
and so maybe animals could communicate.
So I looked at my dog and I was like, I know that you are
smarter than what you look. I mean, don't you think that
sometimes about your animal, you're like, you know, I maybe
they understand me. Sometimes there's just a little
something in there. And then I thought, you know,
Nope, you're the dumbest animal that I've ever had.
And so evolutionists actually claim that snakes, and this is,
you know, scientific thing that there are some snakes out there
that have vestigial limbs, which are like useless remnants of
possible limbs that snakes may use, some snakes may have had
and that might prove now they, they think that proves
evolution. But what I would think is that
might prove devolution. See the, the, the kind of the
use of the word there. That's actually a real word.
But devolution caused by Satan, not only not animals and humans
aren't getting better and healthier.
You know, only the strong survive.
What's actually happening is things are getting worse.
There's a curse. We're dying.
And so with the snake. Maybe this snake did have limbs,
though, like a lizard. Maybe snakes had limbs, but God
curses this animal. So now that all snakes are a
representation, as we can have visual representation of God's
creation, we look out there just as we look at God's creation and
we say the glory of God, right? The sun, the moon, and the stars
all proclaim the glory of God. Now we can look at certain
animals like the snake and we can say God really humbled you
because the idea of a snake, Slytherin on the ground, on his
belly, that's the lowest of low. You could be Slytherin and now
you have to eat all of your food out of the dirt.
A snake is a representation of sin and lowliness.
And in fact, beautiful gospel and later in the book of
Numbers, there are these snakes that God allows to come in and
start biting the people. They're venomous snakes and and
God says in order to be healed, what you need to do is grab a
snake, lift it up on a pole, and when people look to this snake,
they will be healed. That was a representation of
snakes being evil in sin, but Christ taking our place. 2nd
Corinthians 521 says He became sin.
Who knew no sin, so that we might become the righteousness
of God. Jesus Christ becomes our sin,
hangs on the cross, and anyone who looks to Him now is saved.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. There's the serpent, but it says
cursed above all livestock. So now we know that there's,
there's especially cursed, humbled Slytherin along the
ground, but then all livestock now dumb.
They can't talk to us anymore. Possibly.
I don't know. I, I don't necessarily really
believe that, but they're not, they don't live the way they're
supposed to. They get sick and die just like
humans do. So moving on then to the woman,
I'm going to skip 3:15 for a second and get to the woman.
It says to the woman, he said I will surely multiply your pain
and childbearing. In pain you shall bring forth
children. Your desire shall be for your
husband or contrary to your husband, and he shall rule over
you. Now first Eve gets her
consequences laid out by the Heavenly Father.
She made a choice and there are consequences to that choice.
And so now, although humans were created to procreate and
reproduce, now there's much pain.
And I don't have to tell all the women in the room how much pain
is involved in childbearing. If if you know what that's like,
you can say Amen or you can say Ouch, either one.
But I, I saw this meme earlier that says now women can
understand what it's like when men get a cold.
I am just kidding, all right? Sometimes we are babies.
I know that it's weird, right? Like it is weird that when men
get a cold day, maybe women have a higher threshold for physical
pain sometimes I don't. Maybe that's how this works.
But but the pains of childbearing, and it's not just
in the birth part. Now it happens all the way from
conception to the end of life, you see, because you have
pregnancy problems with pregnancy problems leading up to
that. And then when you finally have
these children, that's called childbearing as well.
And they grew up, they start making their own choices.
And those choices, the Bible says that a foolish son is a
sorrow to his mother that can be included in this, this pain.
It could also be talking about emotional pain.
Now, ladies, I don't want you to think that this is all your
fault. All right?
Like this was Eve, OK? Eve made this choice and her
consequences passed down on to all human beings and specific
ones to women. Yes.
But we're not looking and saying because Eve did this, now all
women are guilty. No, as I said, Adam gets a
brunt, if not more of the blame in the New Testament.
He was supposed to be leading, as I said, he was supposed to be
the protector, provider, priest. He was supposed to be clinging
to his wife. It says in in Genesis 224 that
man would leave his father and mother and hold fast to his
wife, cling to his wife, be there for her at all times.
He failed in that. And she takes the food and she
provides it to him and she teaches him, oh, this is OK.
The serpent told me. Now she's the priest.
So Adam fails in this. Yes.
But we what we also see in this is now marriage has issues.
And you can think Adam and Eve just say it.
Next time you guys get in a fight, say thank you.
Adam and Eve. Can we just forget this?
Honey? It was their fault.
There's a an order of things in which God created and human
beings fell out of order. In fact, sin means to miss the
mark. It is a it's it's like archery
and hitting a target. To sin is to literally mean miss
the mark. You've missed what the target
was. They missed the target.
The first human beings. When God reverses the curse, we
don't have to miss the target anymore.
But this is what has happened. And so moving on then one thing
I would say is that Eve, not only is she, you know, take a
lot of the blame, but she does get some honor in that she's
called the mother of all living. Adam named her Eve, which means
the mother of life or the mother of all living.
And so certainly the the consequence of pain and
childbearing is shown in this verse as well, because now she
sees every generation of child that has come after her sinning
going against God. But it's interesting, I'll get
to it later, how God uses the woman to change things as well.
But then we get to the man. And here we find that it said
and Adam said because or he said to Adam, because you've listened
to the voice of your wife and had of eaten of the tree of
which I commanded you shall not eat of it.
Cursed is the ground because of you.
Now we've got the earth. Everything is cursed because of
you in pain. You shall eat of it all the days
of your life, thorns and thistles that shall bring forth
for you, and you shall eat the plants of the field by the sweat
of your face. You shall eat bread till return
to the ground, for out of it you were taken, for you are dust,
and to the dust you shall return.
Some say Adam's sin was passivity.
As I've said many times, that Hebrew word listen to your wife
is also you obeyed her. You obeyed her into sin rather
than obeying God. So now, because he has sinned
and he failed to be the protector, provider priest, not
only is he at fault, but now the ground is cursed.
And now he's, as he's trying to be the provider, there's toil
and pain in trying to get food. That's what work is.
I mean, basically, that's why we work, right?
We work to eat, right? We work to get food and survival
for our family. And yeah, you can enjoy your job
too. You should.
The Bible says you should try to, you know, do everything to
the glory of God and and love what you do because that's your
lot in life. So find one, find a good job.
But this explains why things are still broken and they don't
work, right, Right. Your boss is unorganized, right?
Or your body doesn't work, so you can't get up to make it on
time to work. Then you get in trouble.
Then you get fired. Your car breaks down because
moth and rust destroys. Ways of providing for our family
are now difficult. The economy is up and down.
There are global catastrophes and death now comes to all
mankind. That's what it says in those
last verses. He had it all but allowed a
lapse in judgement and a moment of pleasure to take the place of
reigning with God his Father here on earth.
And and here we are. That's the human race.
That's where we're at today. Except for God does something so
merciful and so gracious even in the midst of the consequences of
all this sin right in the middle.
That's why I passed over that verse because you can overlook
it sometimes like you think a lot of people look back at the
Old Testament like God is God, the Old Testament God.
He's a wrathful God. He's a mean God.
He's a judging God. And I've heard people say I like
the God of the New Testament. Well, they're the same God and
God hasn't changed. And in fact, he's a triune God
and the Son of God is about to come and reverse the curse or be
promised to reverse the curse. That's the mercy.
That's the the covenant of Christmas, I'd like to call it
because I'm trying to keep all these things alliterated with
two CS in the points. If you didn't notice that the
context of the choice, the curse of all creation in the covenant
of Christmas, what is a covenant?
A covenant is a promise, a promise.
It's a promise that I'm going to keep up my end of the bargain.
And it's embedded right here in the middle of all this
consequences of our own sin. He says.
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. As soon as sin enters the world,
God does not delay. Here on display is the grace and
mercy of God, but He starts to reveal His plan for redemption.
As I said, he already knew all this was going to happen in the
1st place. And that's the biggest struggle
for a lot of people is why would God, again, that's questioning
God. Why would God do it this way?
Why would he allow all this brokenness and sin in the world?
Why? The best answer I can give you
from Scripture is that this way glorifies God the most.
Why? Because not only does God
deserve our worship and all the glory for being Creator and for
all of His perfect attributes, being other than us, holier than
us, mightier than us, that alone deserves the the glory and the
worship not. But we also come on the Lord's
Day. We call it the Lord's Day
because Jesus Christ rose again on a Sunday.
And so we worship God because not only of his power and his
wisdom and His might, but His love and His grace that was
displayed that Christmas morning when He sent His Son to come to
this earth. It said God is not only a just
God, He is a loving God enough to assume humanity to come and
put himself in the mess that we created so that he could war
with the serpent. He could war with the enemy.
He could war with Satan on our behalf and be bruised in his
heel on the cross to be broken and beaten and bloodied and
pierced so that we could be victors and our our right
relationship with God could be restored.
That is what Christmas is about. That was that's what this this
verse is about here Herman Batink says the promise that
this covenant of grace, we were in the covenant of works.
And now he reveals, OK, we had this.
We had this agreement that you were going to obey me and I
would bless you, but you failed to do that.
So I'm doing it all. I'm going to take this into my
own hands and I'm going to show favor to you.
Blessing. That's what grace, the word
grace means. It means a gift.
You don't earn it. You don't deserve it.
It's just the love of God and and here.
And so we would call this not just not the covenant of
Christmas, really, we would call it the covenant of grace that we
see all through the the Scriptures.
The Westminster Shorter Catholic Catechism, which is an older
confession in the 1500s that came out of the Protestant
Reformation where they were were looking through Scripture and,
and nailing down the the theology that needs to be
understood for right relationship and faith.
They ask a question and a catechism is just a question and
answer type of a thing that they did for learning.
Did God leave all mankind to perish in the estate of sin and
misery? And then answers God, having out
of his mere good pleasure from all eternity elected some to
everlasting life, did not did enter into a covenant of grace
to deliver them out of the estate of sin and misery, to
bring them into an estate of salvation by a Redeemer.
All right, now we look at this verse and you're thinking, how
do you get all that from this verse?
Well, when he says between you and the woman, he's talking to
Satan directly and he says you and the woman and her offspring
and yours. Well, that offspring that is
talked about isn't just an it, but then it gives it a pronoun.
He gives it a pronoun. He and his.
This now becomes a person, a promised person.
And by the way, this is a curse. And so you say, how can a a
promise? We call this a promise.
Well, for God to curse the enemy, to curse the evil 1 is a
blessing and a promise to you and me.
In a war, if someone comes in and takes out the other side,
who gets blessed, right Who when they take away the power of the
evil side of a war? We become the victors, and
that's what ends up happening here.
Because when Jesus dies on that cross, he takes away all of the
power of Satan. You see, Satan came to bring sin
into the world to thwart God's plan of creation.
But God says I've already got a plan for that too, and it's
actually going to glorify me even more.
I'm going to come down and show my people how much I love them
by living amongst them and dying for them first.
John, 38 says the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy
the works of the devil. So this bruising of the head,
that word bruise means to batter, to crush.
And so often times we talk about this as crushing the serpent's
head. Christ, when he died on the
cross, crushes. It's a fatal blow.
You see, bruise to the heel is bloody and violent, but it is
not fatal. And although Jesus died on the
cross, he rose from the dead, but the crushing of the
serpent's head takes away his power.
Have you ever heard of that saying before we got to cut the
snake off at the head, got to cut it off at the head, right?
Because you cut it off at the tail, it, you know, it continues
to live and survive. And the powers in the head of
the snake, Jesus takes away the power of Satan now, because we
can have forgiveness of all the sins, the sins we inherited from
our our our forefathers, from our earthly parents, Adam and
Eve, which by the way, you can follow genealogies in Scripture
that trace us all the way back to them.
This is literal history, by the way.
This is real truth. We believe that the Bible best
explains creation and the human condition better than any other
explanation in the world. And we can back it up.
We can and we can look at all the human being, not every human
beings ever listed in the Bible, but the ones that traced from
Adam to Jesus. And that's where this comes in,
her offspring, her offspring is preserved.
And you see it through the the Old Testament.
It's such a beautiful thing where God is working and moving
and Satan is warring and trying. And Martin Luther once said that
that after this promise, he believes that he was afraid of
all women up to Jesus. And he should be because there
was now he was living in anxiety like who's going to be the who's
going to be the seed, the offspring out of out of which
family, out of which woman? And God, You see through this
whole story of the Old Testament, it's such a beautiful
thing. Time would fail me to share with
you all the different different people that God used like
Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Judah who leads to David and
even Isaiah says she was going to a a virgin was going to
conceive and bear a son and they shall call his name Emmanuel,
which means God with us. And you can find a, a genealogy
in Matthew chapter 1 of of all those names if you want to go
through all of that. But the Son, this offspring, the
he is preserved throughout all Scripture.
In fact, John Calvin says it like this.
At the beginning, when the first promise of salvation was given
to Adam, this promise we're talking about here, it glowed
like a feeble spark. Then as it was added to, the
light grew in fullness, breaking forth increasingly and shedding
its radiance more widely. At last, when all the clouds
were dispersed, Christ, the Sun of Righteousness, fully
illumined the whole earth. And that was Christmas.
That's the beauty of Christmas. And not just a baby boy to be
born, but a baby boy to be born, grow up, live a sinless life,
die on the cross, and you can even see.
And this is the last thing I want to look at as we think
about the grace of God in the midst of all of our sin.
Now, every one of us here is a Sinner, and we've failed.
This is our biography, but in the midst of all of our
failings, we see the this is called the first gospel.
The first message of hope is Genesis 315.
But shortly after that we even see a picture of the cross and
the atonement here. And it said, after all of this,
and they were naked, the Lord God made for Adam and his wife
garments of skins and clothed them.
What is that? What do you see in there?
God literally had to kill one of his creatures, sacrifice a
creature that he created in order to cover His beloved
creation, the human beings in which He loved.
The grace there is so beautiful. Man tries to cover his guilt and
shame with elements that cannot bring satisfaction.
And one pastor told me one time that if you've ever touched fig
leaves, there's some that are really itchy.
So that would have been a very terrible thing to put on
sensitive areas like Adam and Eve did.
But isn't that what we do? Again, we we make things when we
take matters into our own hands. We make it worse when we cover
up our shame. Even more pain, just like Adam
and Eve did in the blame game. But God sacrifices the life of
the creature to cover the nakedness and the shame.
We cannot atone for our own sins.
Only God can do the work for us to be redeemed and forgiven.
And what a gracious God He is. And so don't cover up your sin,
poor Sinner. God will do that.
Sin now has no power. If you're stuck in your sin
right now, just know Jesus defeated that.
You don't have to live in shame and guilt any longer.
You can walk in victory even though you yourself have still
sinned and struggled with sin daily and it but what you need
and what I need is to continue to go back to this promise and
realize the power and the grace of God that it really did take
away sin. Quit believing the lies of Satan
and the twistings of the words of God and the false teachers
and the false religions out there that will tell you that
no, you must become worthy. You must add your works to this.
This is pure grace. And families, let's start
leading our kids into the truth of who Jesus is then, not just
celebrating A tradition. Yes, gifts are fine and trees
are fine. We love Christmas.
Put lights on your house. But please, for the love of God,
teach them the real reason why Jesus came and why we celebrate
this and we make bad choices and sometimes they are really bad
and it does need to be confessed and recognized, but then it can
be forgiven and that's why Jesus came.
Christmas is this reminder that God loves us and He keeps His
promises, His greatest promise, in the person of Jesus Christ.
We are saved by faith alone and one day we will be fully saved
out of this world and all the problems that come with it.
Would you pray with me, dear Lord?
Father, we come to you with brokenness and pain of our own
consequence. And yes Lord, there are things
that have happened to us in this world as well, but that's a
result of sin. We do not blame you.
Forgive us for shifting the blame and believing lies and all
of our sin where we've missed the target of obeying you.
And thank you God that you're such a gracious God that you
took care of our sin problem and now you bring us close to you.
And you have this. We have this holiday to just
continue to renew our our covenant with you, although it's
1 sided and you keep it all and we constantly fail.
That's why we worship you and you deserve all the glory and
the praise. And I pray, Father, you'd help
us to know this more deeply and love you more dearly.
And I pray that you draw unbelievers to yourself today in
Jesus name, Amen. Amen.
Would you stand and sing a response with us?