Our Mother’s Great Revenge

After our first father was fashioned from the dust of the ground, and the breath of life was breathed into him, the Lord God saw that the situation was still not satisfactory. We had a world now, and a king to rule over it, but the king had not yet been crowned. He had been created in the image and glory of God, but the glory of the man was not yet there. And so the Lord God put Adam into a deep sleep, took a rib from his side, and fashioned from it the woman. She was the crown. She was the capstone of the creation week. She was the glory of the glory of God. The whole creation was good, very good, and now it wasn’t going to get any better.

But the serpent, full of subtlety and malice, hated what the Lord God was doing. He was filled with envy, and venomous lies were under his tongue. He resolved that he was going to knock the crown off Adam’s head, and in this great evil he succeeded. He persuaded our first mother to eat the forbidden fruit. That fruit was the fruit of dominion and godly rule, and she was enticed to reach for it prematurely. She then in turn became the serpent’s deputy, and persuaded her husband to disobey the Lord God’s command. She had been created to be a helper to the man, and so it was that she helped him into ruination.

When the Lord God came down to adjudicate the aftermath of this tragedy, to sort through the debris, He began by cursing the serpent, and in that curse we see the first great indication of God’s redemptive intent. He told the serpent that the woman would ultimately have her revenge upon him. Notice how the Lord God speaks of it. He says, “the woman” and “her Seed.” This is personal.

The Seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent’s seed, treading upon him. He would be bruised Himself, but He would overcome. Satan and all of his ways would be cast down. His stranglehold on our misbegotten world would be removed, taken away. The serpent would be undone, and he would be undone through the agency of a woman.

Just after this, Adam named his wife Eve, because she would be the mother of all the living (Gen. 3:20). She would give birth to children; she would become the ancestress of all the living, and on a physical level, this of course includes all human beings. But preeminently it refers to the promised Seed, the Lord Jesus Christ, and secondarily it refers to all who are alive in Him. He is the resurrection and the life; He is all the living. In Him, we walk in newness of life.

So clearly Christ is the Seed of the woman, but He is also the Seed of Abraham.

And so Mary, the mother of our Lord, was Eve’s proxy in this great battle. She was the point of this final fulfillment. She was the tip of the spear. But faithful women down throughout all history, daughters of Sarah, contributed to this victory, just as Sarah herself did. In the plan and purposes of God, individual and corporate realities are all woven together into a rich textured fabric. That fabric included Eve, Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Tamar, Hannah, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, the wife of Isaiah, Mary Magdalene, and Mary, the mother of our Lord. But also you. “You are her daughters,” Peter says.

The woman in Revelation is unnamed, but as a great image and symbol she contains within her all the faithful daughters of Eve.

The serpent is not hard to identify, as John makes very clear just a few verses later. He is the serpent of old, the great dragon. The serpent had not received the curse laid upon him humbly, not being repentant at all, and so throughout human history he had borne a particular malevolence toward women. It began with envy, which is why he tempted her in the first place, but it spiraled down into bitter envy and resentment. He knew that God had promised that he would be conquered, that his head would be crushed by the Seed of the woman. And so he fought against his pronounced doom, fighting over the centuries with a rancid malice.

The serpent, the dragon, the devil, Satan—all one. He deceives the whole world, vigilant, looking in every direction, guarding against the birth of the child who would be his undoing. Like Herod, he took the whole thing with the utmost seriousness.

Now I said earlier that the corporate and individual realities are intertwined. We read earlier in Galatians that the Lord Jesus was the promised Seed. He was the fulfillment of the promise implicit in the curse pronounced upon the serpent. It would be His heel that would bruised, and it would be Satan’s head that would be crushed. This is why the devil tempted the Lord Jesus in the wilderness. This is why Satan entered into Judas. This is why the devil, believing himself to be wiser than God, thought to unravel all the prophecies, thwarting them. And so when his machinations all succeeded, and Christ was nailed to the cross, and the cross was dropped into the hole in the ground, it turned out that the serpent was the one who was impaled there. Christ, who knew no sin, became sin on our behalf. And the sin that He became was prefigured in the bronze serpent that Moses had been commanded to make.

And so the crux of the fulfillment is there, in the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

But we are not yet done. This Savior, the Lord Jesus, is the second Adam, and an Adam is not an Adam without a bride. And Scripture teaches us that a bride is her husband’s body. The Christian church is the bride of Christ and is identified as the body of Christ in many different ways. This means that as the bride of Christ, we are the hands and feet of Christ. Did you hear what I said? We are the feet of Christ.

So all who have believed in Christ, the promised Seed, are themselves seed.

The promise implicit in the curse pronounced upon the serpent is a promise that includes us. We are not left standing on the sidelines, watching all of this. Not a bit of it. What does Paul say to the Christians at Rome?

As the kingdom of God grows, this is what is happening. As sin is mortified in your life, this is what is happening. “Bruise in us the serpent’s head.” As churches are planted, this is part of the glorious fulfillment. As the gospel is preached, the serpent’s skull is cracked. And this violent thing is done, remember, by the God of peace. This is what Christmas is all about. This is what it means.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.