The First Punishments

Genesis 3:15 “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.”

When God was disappointed at Man’s first disobedience, God give three kinds of punishments to the three transgressions. The first one was deception, the second was greed and the third one was disregard. These three sins deserve different treatments so that we could learn from them properly.

This characteristic of the serpent is already known as per verse 1. But God is still angry at the devil and sentenced it. God did not ask the serpent for any explanation because of his known cunningness. Also the serpent is cursed but neither man not woman. Leading others into sin is a very terrible thing God gets furious about in any stage of life. If our actions discourage others away from holiness, we are doomed. Mark 9:42, 43 is a perfect example of this. The reason why Jesus hated almost every Pharisee and scholar is that they had made tradition so bad that no action of the poor, ignorant people were useful in God’s sight. God curses the animal more than all other domestic and wild beasts which clearly show that being a hindrance to anybody puts us lower than all believers and non-believers. These people lose their dignity, freedom and also their basic necessities.  

When God says that the enmity between us and the devil starts with Eve, the enmity should be understood as repentance which is the basic necessity of salvation. This enmity causes this controversy between the serpent and the woman’s Seed. The importance of women in salvation is that God brings repentance in them first. We see that the whole genealogy of David and Jesus starts with Ruth. This is very important for us to learn how this is done. She makes sure not to abandon her mother in law by keeping the LORD in her commitment. (Ruth 1:17). We can see repentance here when we read Orpah’s departure to “her gods”. The woman does not necessarily point at Ruth alone, but many others primarily including Mary. God always seeks women to start working. There is no trouble between man and the serpent. The hardness of men never sees the need for salvation.

Jesus was the one who had crushed the serpent completely. God wants Satan to fail even further by calling Jesus as the woman’s seed. This is to make sure that God wants complete victory by using the same vessels that failed to succeed.

Woman in most instances point at a congregation or a group of people. Examples are Jerusalem, Babylon and the Church. This woman in Genesis 3:15 should be Israel who had received enmity with sin (repentance) through Moses. Israel was led through a lot of trouble, slavery, failures, captivity and silence for salvation. This is portrayed exactly as childbirth. Salvation becomes a very expensive prize for man. When there is greed, God sees to it that the gift is transferred but comes with a cost. The cost is given in two- fold (pregnancy and while labor) for us to understand the value of the outcome. Please note that this gift from God is not what we were greedy for (being like God). This gift is salvation which is the first step towards glory.

There are reasons why God had chosen woman for salvation. This is because of man’s tendency to ignore God and to listen to her. Many instances in the Bible point to the importance of women’s role. One important example is the birth of Samson where the angel of God appeared to Samson’s mother and asked her to refrain from eating and drinking unclean things (Judges 13:9). In the two appearances, the angel chooses to meet the woman first. This is God’s method of always choosing a weaker congregation who would depend on Him. However, the woman’s ambitions and desires are all now focused on man and the man should rule her. This submission helps us not to lose her and her family to the darts of Satan. It is interesting that the woman holds the enmity but is submissive to the husband to avoid pride.

The sin of disregard is also very expensive where our properties are cursed instead of us. Man has to spend all his lifetime toiling to survive. God starts the sentence with the phrase “because you have heeded the voice of your wife”. Since God wanted Man to have dominion, it was very disrespectful of man to be silent and let woman do the deciding. So, God pushes man to a status where all his concentration would be wasted for survival.

But Jesus comes with a new definition that man does not live by bread alone but by the word of God which is said during starvation. The original statement of this verse is in Deuteronomy 8:3 and speaks about manna. We can see the maturity here away from Sin. Adam had to toil only for bread. Israel had to toil to execute God’s plan and God provided bread. But Jesus starved proving that the salvation from God can deliver us from all the bindings of this world which is a much better situation than Eden.

Lastly, man is doomed to dust which is also victoriously won by Christ. We are not born of the dust but are called as a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). We do not return to dust because we are born of the Spirit and so, we return to the Lord Himself. This promise of eternal life gets executed only through Jesus Christ. John 3:6 says that we are not flesh. Flesh does not define us because if it does, we will be ending in dust. However we are destined to eternal life.

This is the value of salvation and how it has brought us away from Sin. Let us uphold this strongly.

Amen.