Word of Salvation – Vol. 29 No. 35 – September 1984

 

Man’s Problem And God’s Solution

 

Sermon by Rev. S. Voorwinde M.A., M.Th. on Genesis 3:15 & Gal.4:4-5

(Belgic Confession Art. 17)

Scripture Reading: Genesis 3:8-20; Galatians 4:1-11

Suggested Hymns: 317; 94; 428; 388; BoW 804

 

Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

A hundred years ago things were obviously very different to what they are today.  The greatest difference was perhaps this, that people were genuinely optimistic about mankind.  It was commonly believed that man was basically good and getting better all the time.  The future looked rosy; a golden age was just around the corner.  There would be progress, prosperity and happiness for all.

Today we are no longer as optimistic.  We would all freely admit that man has a problem; in fact he has many problems.  All you have to do is read the paper or watch television, and it’s all spelled out for you in bold print and in living colour: inflation, unemployment, crime, war, world hunger, political oppression.  There’s not much to be optimistic about and there’s every reason to be afraid of the future.  Man has developed horror weapons that were undreamed of 100 years ago.  Yes, man is in trouble and everyone knows it all too well.  How could people have ever been so naive as to be optimistic about the future of mankind?

So we are all agreed that mankind has problems.  But what is THE problem, the basic problem confronting humanity today?  This is where you will get a whole host of differing and conflicting answers.  Many will say that man’s problem is political and economic.  It’s the class struggle, the conflict between the rich and the poor, that is our greatest curse.  What we need to do is to redistribute the wealth, let all have an equal share and create a classless society.  Others will tell you that the problem is lack of education.  Educate people and they will be enlightened.  It will free them from ignorance, superstition and prejudice.  Still others will tell you that the problem lies not in man, but in his environment, his sub-standard living conditions; his lack of opportunities.  If you raise his living standard, if you give him a better environment you will make him a better man.

Or maybe the problem does lie in man himself, but it’s a psychological problem and not his fault.  His neurotic behaviour, his maladjustments, his inner conflicts, they’re all due to his upbringing, the hang-ups of his parents and grandparents; but it’s nothing that the right kind of therapy won’t solve.

And yet, as people try to diagnose the basic problem there is one word they won’t use.  Our contemporary prophets don’t use it and today’s philosophers don’t use it.  A renowned psychiatrist in America, Dr. Karl Menninger, back in 1972 wrote a powerful book entitled, “Whatever became of Sin?”  In his book he notes: “In all of the laments and reproaches made by our contemporary seers and prophets one misses any mention of sin, a word which used to be a veritable watch-word of the prophets.  The disappearance of the word ‘sin’ involves a shift in the allocation of the responsibility for evil.”  And then he continues by giving his own standpoint: “I believe there is sin which is expressed in ways which cannot be subsumed under words such as ‘crime’, ‘disease’, ‘delinquency’, ‘deviancy’.  There is immorality; there is unethical behaviour; there is wrongdoing.  And there is usefulness in retaining the concept and indeed the word ‘sin’.”

It’s a very unpopular word today, this word “sin”.  You don’t come across it much in the newspapers and in magazines nowadays.  You don’t often hear it used on the radio and on television.  It’s as though the word has been quarantined in the church and in the language of religion.  Yet we cannot understand mankind and we cannot understand human behaviour if we get rid of this concept of sin.

God has diagnosed man’s basic problem and He has called it sin.  Yet we will wriggle and squirm, we will twist and turn to get away from the diagnosis of the great Physician.  If He is going to cure us then we must first accept His diagnosis of our condition; and that is that the root cause, the disease of which all other problems are mere symptoms, that disease is sin.  And we’re all affected with it, the most powerful millionaires and the humblest peasants, professors and dunces, old ladies and babies.  The Bible’s verdict is that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

The primeval sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden is repeated in the life of every human being in the world today.  That simple story about the forbidden fruit, a story so often scorned and ridiculed, still goes a long, long way in telling us what is basically wrong with mankind.  Man is in rebellion against his Creator.  He wants to go his own way and live without God.  He wants to live and yet at the same time be cut off from the source of life.

So, brothers and sisters, we need to take Genesis 3 very seriously.  It’s such a relevant passage for our time.  That’s where all our problems stem from.  That’ s what’s wrong with the human race.  It started with the sin of our first parents and it continues in the world today.  Whatever today’s prophets or philosophers or psychiatrists may say, it’s what God says that really counts and He says that our basic problem is sin.  But God not only says what our problem is, He also offers a solution.  He’s not like a doctor who makes a diagnosis but cannot offer a cure.  God first of all confronts the man with his responsibility: “Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”  Adam then shifts the responsibility onto Eve, and Eve in turn blames the serpent.

Then in reply God pronounces a curse on all three: first on the serpent, then on the woman and then on the man.  The serpent will slither along on its belly and eat dust all the days of its life.  The woman will be in pain as she gives birth to children; and the man will be engaged in painful toil and eat his food by the sweat of his brow.

Now you may ask: Where is the cure, where is the solution in all of this?  What hope is there in this threefold curse?  Well, on the surface there certainly doesn’t seem to be.  And if you just take it all literally you won’t see anything deeper or anything that could have brought real comfort to Adam and Eve.  Yet, in the curse on the serpent we have the hope of mankind.  Here we have the first example of what happens so often in Scripture.  You’re reading a passage about history and suddenly it takes off and flies into the future.  You’re reading about Solomon for instance, but then all of a sudden you realize it’s about the Messiah and His kingdom.  Or, you’re reading about Israel but a few moments later you find you’re reading about heaven and the New Jerusalem.  A text like this is like a bird hopping along slowly and then without warning it takes wings and disappears into the distance.  Or, like an aeroplane: first it just taxies around on the tarmac but once it’s on the runway it accelerates, takes off, flies higher and higher till it vanishes above the clouds.

That often happens in the Bible, when suddenly history becomes prophecy, a statement becomes a prediction, the literal becomes figurative.  You have all of that in the Lord’s curse on the serpent.  It begins with a simple statement about a snake: “Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals.  You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.”  This does not mean to imply that snakes used to have legs.  Rather the crawling snake is a sign of God’s curse, just as the rainbow is a sign of God’s promise.

So far the statement is completely literal.  It’s simply a curse on the animal.  But then it’s as though God’s words seem to rise beyond the immediate situation.  The aeroplane is taking off; the bird is beginning to fly: “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.”  You could say that in the first part of this verse there is still a reference to the snake.  There is indeed enmity between snakes and humans, and you don’t have to be a male chauvinist to say that women particularly are horrified of snakes.  So there is a sense in which you could still take these words literally.  As Calvin says: “I interpret this simply to mean that there should always be hostile strife between the human race and serpents, which is now apparent; for by a secret feeling of nature, man abhors them…!  As often as the sight of the serpent inspires us with horror, the memory of our fall is renewed.”

So if you’re afraid of snakes, it’s a reminder of God’s words in the Garden.  It’s also interesting to realize that humans have very few fears with which they are born; but experiments have shown that there are at least two things that terrify even very young babies.  One is the sudden loss of support and the other is the sight of a snake.  The fear of serpents seems to be very deeply engrained in our nature.

Anyway, that’s just an interesting digression; we must return to the main point, which is, that the curse on the serpent is a twofold curse.  We already know that it was Satan who used the serpent to tempt Adam and Eve.  And so, here in verse 15, the curse passes beyond the reptile to the devil himself: “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.”  In this verse we see a triple enmity:-

(1)  between the serpent and the woman;

(2)  between the serpent’s offspring and the woman’s offspring;

(3)  between the serpent and “him”.

There is going to be enmity, there is going to be a struggle between those who are for Satan and those who are for God, and this struggle will come to a head in the contest between Satan and “him”.  We are not told who it is who will crush Satan’s head, but in this curse on Satan we do have the first glimmer of the Gospel.  As one theologian has said: “The promise is given that somehow from the human race there will arise one who will deliver the blow that will destroy the serpent.  This is the first Messianic promise of the Old Testament.” (E.J.Young – “In the Beginning”, p.107).

Today we live in the age of fulfilment and we can look back.  No wonder that some people have called Genesis 3:15 “the first Gospel” and the “mother promise”.  History has indeed shown that there is enmity between the serpent and the woman, between the devil and the church, between the woman’s offspring and the serpent’s offspring, that is, between the children of God and the children of the devil.  We see it already in the very next chapter of Genesis where Cain kills Abel.   Then we see it with Noah and the ungodly world.  Next there’s Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Israel and the Gentiles.  One was the offspring of the woman and the other was the offspring of the serpent.  In the New Testament we see it with Jesus and the Pharisees whom He called “serpents” and “the sons of the devil”.

There has always been that deadly enmity, not so much between demons and mankind, but there’s that deadly conflict between two opposing humanities: the offspring of the serpent and the offspring of the woman.  It’s not until Revelation 12 that we are told exactly who these offspring are.  In this chapter that our enemy is referred to as “the great dragon, the serpent of old who is called the Devil and Satan.”  And then at the end of that chapter we read these significant words: “Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to make war against the rest of her offspring, those who obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus” (verse 17).

The woman’s offspring are the true children of God.  Do you belong to them?  Are you one of them?  Do you obey God’s commandments and do you hold to the testimony of Jesus?  We shouldn’t be surprised that we’re involved in a spiritual conflict.  But we also know that the outcome is secure: Christ will crush Satan’s head, though Satan will strike his heel.”  For Adam and Eve those words were just a glimmer of light and a ray of hope.  It was on the cross of Calvary that the enmity between the serpent and the woman came to a climax.  It was there that the head of the one was crushed and the heel of the other was struck.  The comparison is between a major and a minor injury.  The crushed head is fatal; the bruised heel is not.

Therefore in God’s curse on the serpent we have the Bible’s first signpost to the cross.  Christ was bruised on the heel, He suffered pain.  But Satan’s head was crushed; he suffered a mortal blow because sin was paid for and death was overcome.

And this is where we come into the picture.  In Galatians 4: 4 & 5 Christ’s victory is applied to us: “But when the time had fully come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons.”  Jesus Christ was the seed of the woman, the woman’s offspring par excellence.  It’s only because of Him that we can be the true offspring of the woman, true sons and daughters of God.  It was on the cross that He redeemed us so that we might receive the full rights of sons.

This Paul wrote to the Galatians; and how well did he know it.  Once he belonged to the offspring of the serpent.  Now he belonged to the offspring of the woman.  Once he was a slave of Satan.  How he is a son of God.  And how did that happen?  How was he transferred from the old humanity to the new?  It was when he saw that the cross of Christ was God’s unlikely solution to man’s problem.  If sin is man’s problem then it was at the cross that God dealt with that sin in the most drastic and radical way you can imagine.

It is only because of the cross that sins can be forgiven.

It is only because of the cross that one day swords will be beaten into ploughshares and war will be no more; that one day all diseases will be healed, the hungry will be fed and death will be no more; and that there will be a new heaven and a new earth where justice reigns supreme.

So why is the world still in such a mess today?  Why is mankind bogged down with such vast problems?  It’s because of the ongoing enmity between the serpent and the woman, between his offspring and hers, between Christ and Satan.  The world is the battle ground’ and you and I are either on one side or the other.  Satan is down but not yet out, defeated but not destroyed.

Are you on the right side?  And if so, are you fighting?  If you are then you have the promise that “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Romans 16:20).  If you’re with Christ you will share in His victory and the serpent will be crushed under your feet too.

To God be the glory!

Amen.