beginning

Once Thanksgiving is past, we move to Advent. We start looking toward Christmas, and that often involves looking back into the Old Testament. I was reminded this morning that the entire Bible is the story of Jesus, so in a way it’s all about Christmas.

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

This is where it  really starts. The moment God realized Adam and Eve had made that original bad choice, he started to make it right. They chose evil and corruption; they listened to that first lie from the Father of Lies, and as a result their relationship with God was fractured and their souls were in jeopardy. And all descendants of Adam and Eve, including me, from that moment were born with a bent toward sin.

But God was determined from the very start to redeem his people. The first prophesy of the Messiah came from God himself, in the Garden of Eden, at that moment when original sin was revealed. Everything else in scripture was the detail of how God’s plan was worked out.

All of history from that moment was about the enmity between the offspring of Eve and of the serpent. All the wars, all the poems and paintings, all the yearning and searching and exploring, all of the scientific inquiry relates to this cataclysmic struggle, this realization that we’ve been banished, this longing to find our way home. And opposed to that is Satan and everyone he can pervert to his cause of destroying God’s goodness wherever they find it.

But the offspring of the woman would one day crush the serpent’s head. And that hero, our Messiah, would be born at Christmas. One day I’ll live eternally the glory of that historical fact; until then, I look forward longingly toward Jesus’ second coming just as the Jews did for the first.