As we mark the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ, we of course begin by celebrating the objective nature of His arrival. He was born in particular town, to a particular mother, in a particular year. He truly lived among us. When the time was fulfilled, He was born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem us all from the curse of the law.
That curse was extensive—wherever a weed might grow, wherever tears and sorrow might be found, wherever there was any kind of bondage to decay. But He came to make His blessings flow far as the curse was found. In the Incarnation we see the beginning of a glorious search and destroy mission—the curse of the serpent, and all of that vipers’ brood, were going to be hunted down and crushed. Rejoice—the dragon-slayer is born. The God of peace will soon crush Satan beneath your feet.
And so we celebrate what this has done to the principalities and powers, which have all been silenced by a conquering baby. We rejoice in the revolution this has brought in the relations between Heaven and earth, and that we now have been given the new heavens and the new earth, in which righteousness dwells.
But Jesus is Lord everywhere, and in everything. We do not want to celebrate His public authority while reserving to ourselves any private territory in our hearts where we may think and feel as we please. Neither do we want to cultivate an inner disposition of pious quietism at the expense of recognizing the Lord’s public and utterly political authority. As Chesterton noted, the Lord came into this world, not to bring us inner light, but to destroy the doctrine of inner light.
So we do not want to do anything that will contribute to the false alternative of personal piety over against a public recognition of the Lord Jesus. What we want to do is consider our individual hearts, not as private enclaves in which to hide Jesus, but rather as beachheads, from which, with His authority well-established there, we may bring Him—with an exuberant shepherd joy—to all the nations of men.
And so, in that spirit, every time I say “rise, the woman’s conquering seed,” I invite you to reply with the prayer “bruise in us the serpent’s head.”
Grace and peace to you, from God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit is not left out of this blessed greeting, for He is the grace and peace of God, and He proceeds from the Father and the Son. And in the true Spirit of the triune life, He does not give us gifts in lieu of Himself; He always gives us the gift of Himself. But we tend to waver in unbelief, and we fall into forgetfulness. We do not remember (as we ought to) that God Himself has taken up residence in us. Because He is holy and resides in us now, we are called to be holy. There is no room in us for a viper’s den anymore.
Rise, the woman’s conquering seed,
Bruise in us the serpent’s head.
To mark new beginnings is natural, and whether we are doing it with the church calendar, or with the civic calendar, we want all our strivings and resolvings to be gospel-driven, not guilt-driven. We need new life far more than a new leaf, and so we cry out to God. Let every transformation in our personal lives over this next year be the result of sheer grace, utter gift, inexorable life, and God’s overflowing kindness. Our prayer to God is that He would tell us to rise up and walk—and that we would throw away the crutches of duty, and run after Him on the legs of joy.
Rise, the woman’s conquering seed,
Bruise in us the serpent’s head.
The grace of mortification is true grace. In His kindness God slays all faults that would slay us if given the chance. With many of them, we know how deadly they are, but this doesn’t make them any less powerful and alluring to us. We therefore lift up to Him all rank hypocrisy, all hidden lusts, all undiscovered thefts, and we plead with Him to use the full weight of His heel on them.
Rise, the woman’s conquering seed,
Bruise in us the serpent’s head.
Not only does God deliver us from sins that we know to be sins, and which therefore humiliate us, He also delivers us from those bright and shining sins that tempt us with an appearance of virtue and concern for justice. And so we lament our tendency to complain that it is not fair when someone else is paid more than we have been, blessed more than we have been, or recognized more than we have been. If we want the serpent’s head of pride to be crushed in us, we want the same thing for the serpent’s neck, which is envy. Bruise the head, break the neck, and throw the carcass out.
Rise, the woman’s conquering seed,
Bruise in us the serpent’s head.
We have spent money, we have prepared food, we have moved furniture around to make room, we have gone shopping, we have wrapped presents, and we have done all this for the sake of others. May we have done this for others in truth, and not for the sake of garnering a reputation as a giving person. How much of a servant’s heart we actually have is on display in our reaction if someone actually treats us like a servant.
Rise, the woman’s conquering seed,
Bruise in us the serpent’s head.
We love the triad of truth, goodness, and beauty. We return thanks to God for all three, and yet we also confess the tendency we have to gravitate to externals. But God the Father speaks as the father in Proverbs does, when He says, “My son, give me your heart.” When we give the shell and not the kernel, when we give the wrapping paper and withhold the present, we are taking the first steps on the road that Cain took. The outside skin of truth is doctrinalism, the outside skin of goodness is moralism, and the outside skin of beauty is formalism. We turn away from all of that now, heartily sick of it.
Rise, the woman’s conquering seed,
Bruise in us the serpent’s head.
And as we began with grace and gospel, we return to grace and gospel. The just shall live by faith, not begin by faith and finish with human effort. If we do not want ramshackle Christian lives, then we must have the only perfect human life ever lived, and that life was first given to us in the womb of Mary. We do in fact have faith in Jesus Christ, but at the end of the day, we are saved by the faith of Jesus Christ. He is the perfect one, He is the righteous one, He is the holy one, and He is the faithful one—and He was all of that for our sake, for us men, and for our salvation, from the moment of His conception on. As the old gospel song puts it, “Mary was the first one to carry the gospel,” and the gospel she carried was a person—the person given just for us.
Rise, the woman’s conquering seed,
Bruise in us the serpent’s head.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.