The Fall of Man and Promise of a Messiah (Genesis 3)
God created a perfect world, put man in a perfect garden, and gave him the perfect helper for life (Genesis 1-2). It was...perfect. The only thing that could ruin it was man himself. Which he (and she) promptly proceeded to do.
The nature of humanity, from the creation, has never changed. It is exactly the same today as it was when God made Adam and Eve. Satan used arguments to persuade Eve to sin; he didn’t force her, he COULDN’T force her, God did not allow Satan the power or the right to force anyone to sin. When we sin, we do so deliberately, succumbing to Satan’s (false) reasoning that such actions will improve our condition. There might indeed even be a limited, temporal improvement, and Adam and Eve did not physically die upon their sin. But they believed Satan rather than God, they made excuses for their sins, they blamed somebody else—Eve blamed Satan, Adam blamed the woman and even faulted God (“the woman whom YOU gave me...”)—and humans do exactly the same thing today. The Bible perfectly explains the nature of man. Again, that nature, obviously, hasn’t changed from the beginning of man’s existence.
But then we get to one of the most important verses in the entire Bible. Man sinned, and God immediately set His scheme of redemption in motion. God is speaking to Satan:
“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” (Genesis 3:15).
Upon initial reading, that verse is obscure; if one simply picked up the Bible and started reading it from the beginning , he would almost surely not recognize it as the beginning of the Messianic promise. But the Bible, in a way, is like an Agatha Christie detective novel—clues are scattered all through the Old Testament and finally revealed in the end (the New Testament) what they all mean and how they fit together. We will see, as we proceed, how the rest of the Old Testament (“Christ is coming”) flows from this verse. But note the following:
--there is enmity between Satan and humanity;
--there is enmity between those who follow Satan (his “seed”) and the woman’s “seed”, in this case, Christ;
--Satan will bruise Christ’s heel (at the crucifixion), but the Messiah will “crush” Satan’s head—ultimate victory.
Again, no one would probably understand that upon their first reading of this verse. But this is what the ultimate revelation of the Bible tells us. Skeptics won’t believe it, of course, but they are in this verse, too—the seed of Satan.
One final point in this story. While we do see the perfect psychology of man here—Satan uses it to initiate the fall of man into sin—talking snakes are not exactly in harmony with our current view of the world. What we need to realize is that, before the completed, final revelation of God’s Word, miracles did happen. God—although actually very rarely when you compare all the events that have happened in history—did speak to man and intervened directly into man’s affairs, and He allowed Satan to do so as well. The devil directly talked with Jesus (Matthew 4). His emissaries were allowed to possess certain individuals in the first century (so that Christ and His apostles could demonstrate their power over the spiritual world as they also demonstrated their power over the physical world). These things were necessary before we had the final, complete Word that God has given us. Now such things do not happen, though the providence of God is still a real, viable matter. He doesn’t do the miracles today that He did in the Bible; the revelation and confirmation of the Word (the major purposes of the miracles) are complete. If you question this, just ask yourself how many formerly dead people (four days in the grave like Lazarus) do you know, and how many glass eyes have you seen on display from blind people who have been immediately, and miraculously, cured? God heals and works today; but through natural law, which might even be more astonishing than the miraculous.
Satan still influences people to sin—and he does it exactly the same way he did it to Eve: through the arguments he presented to her. The only difference is he cannot use a physical “serpent” to directly convey his message. That age has been terminated by God.