Jun P. Espina 14 min read
Updated on February 13th, 2020
The Seed of the Woman is Chapter 9 in My Book, Christian Teachings Revisited
9
THE SEED OF THE WOMAN
And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. — Genesis 3:15, KJV.
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BRIEF SUMMARY
All the books comprising the Holy Scriptures talk about Christ in many ways since our Lord’s Spirit lived in the prophets and writers of the Bible. Wrote the apostle Peter that “the prophets who prophesied . . . made careful searches . . . the Spirit of Christ within them.” (1 Pet. 1:10-11) In chapter one of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Bible said that “God . . . spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways.” (Heb. 1:1) Luke also wrote that “beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He [Christ] explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.” (Luke 24:27) Jesus Christ, our Lord God and Savior, is the Word of God (cf. John 1:1,14). Hence, our Lord said: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me; and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life.” In the Bible you meet Christ, and in Christ you have trust and confidence in the Scriptures as the very word of God. The above truths or principles define the primary subject in this chapter, which is the traceability of Jesus Christ, who is God Incarnate, in all portions of the Holy Scriptures.
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God is the message of true Christianity and how He loves us through the Seed of the woman. He has a Book which tells the big story about this Seed. It all begins with Him who is our Father. He created all things in heaven and on the earth out of nothing. Covered with darkness, the void, and formless earth then saw the sun shining and the clouds dressing the skies. God embellished the boundless expanse of the universe with stars and galaxies, while on the earth, there you see the flowers and the singing birds. Our Father created that one mystery called life on which He brought many things to the surface, such as the music of nature during the night, and the millions of colors which painted the breaking of each day. In nature, we see a divine beauty and design, for the finger of God created it all.
ADAM’S CREATION
But then God found no one to care for all the things He made, so He created the first man Adam according to His likeness, and then Eve, and then put them in Paradise. It is the account of our beginning: we came from God who is Spirit and Almighty and who existed before the world was. Omnipresent, He doesn’t have a beginning, and neither does He cease to exist.
We call His Book the Holy Bible and in it was our story; the story why are we here on this planet and where shall we go from here. When God the Father created heaven and earth and all things in them, He thought of creating man according to His image, for the former to take charge of all His creations. “You have dominion over all things,” He told Adam and Eve. Our first parents were perfect and immortal, created to rule the earth forever!
READ MORE: Earth Forever Peopled According to God
GOD’S ARCHENEMY
Soon after, the devil, God’s archenemy, desired to thwart God’s plan for man as he wanted us all to die. He hated the thought of our immortality and everlasting joy, for he was a murderer from the very beginning! The man, as God’s image, showed intelligence and gave names on everything. He called his wife Eve, which means the mother of the living, knowing her children would never taste death. Because of His love, God also equipped the man with free will and power to love Him or not. But the devil who is also Satan, the fallen Lucifer, who was once the chosen angel of God, tempted Eve to eat the forbidden tree—to disobey God. Adam also ate since he listened to his wife. Because of their sin, Adam and Eve lost Paradise and started a life away from the Garden of Eden, away from God, and under the rule of the devil. Adam then grew old and died after 930 years on earth—to dust he returned from which he came. It was not God’s plan, but the devil’s!
THE SEED
Was God defeated by the devil with Adam’s Fall? No. For He promised Eve that there would come out of her a Seed or a Descendant, who will crush Satan’s head. Eve was first tempted. Hence, Adam blamed her for their Fall. But God said, “women will be preserved through the bearing of children.” (1 Tim. 2:15) She has a role to play in man’s redemption, which is about the coming of her Seed—the Seed of the woman!
After Adam and Eve’s temptation by the Devil, who appeared as a serpent, God sentenced them. “And I will put enmity between you and the woman,” He said, “and between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel.” (Gen. 3:15)
Thousands of years went by after the Fall. But the war—the enmity—between God and Satan persisted like waiting for the Seed of the woman to come and finally defeat and “bruise the head” of the devil. From our first parents came multitudes of people upon the face of the earth. But God “saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” (Gen 6:5) The Devil triumphed in the heart of all humanity and found a civilization of very depraved people starting from Adam’s eldest son, Cain, who murdered his brother, Abel, without cause. The devil was indeed a murderer from the very beginning!
So, God said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.” He flooded the whole earth and saved only Noah and his family, for he “found favor in the eyes of the Lord.” (Gen. 6:6-8)
After the Flood, God chose Abraham and promised that: “In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice.” (Gen. 22:18) Here again, the Seed of the woman was promised: “Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say, ‘And to seeds,’ as referring to many, but rather to one.” (Gal. 3:16)
Sarah, Abraham’s wife, was barren. But God had a promised Seed to him and all human race, and so by divine intervention, allowed Isaac to be born when his mother was passed her age being already 90 years old. Mysterious, but then God wanted Abraham to offer Isaac to Him. Abraham, the man of faith, obeyed. But when he was about to knife his son, an angel of God intervened and ordered him to offer instead the ram that was “caught in the ticket by his horns.” God’s promised Seed reached a higher level of a concept, for then Abraham’s faith and the substitutionary death of the ram highlighted the doctrine. There was a partial fulfillment of the promise: “In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen. 22:18)
THE ISRAELITES
Over 400 years after that, Abraham’s descendants, also known as the Israelites (of which until now this nation continues to exist in the land called Palestine!), became slaves in Egypt. But God saved them through Moses, who brought them out of the land of bondage. He taught them salvation from sin against Him, their Creator, through the death of a substitute, through the shed blood of an animal sacrifice such as a goat, a sheep or a lamb.
As Pharaoh of Egypt resisted the exodus of the Israelites through Moses, so God “struck all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of cattle.” (Ex. 12:29) But before it happened God told Moses to call for the elders of Israel and command them:
Henceforth came the Passover Feast or celebration of the Israelites, where they slay a lamb, shed its blood, as a memorial of God’s salvation for them when He once smote the firstborn of Egypt.
THE CHOSEN PEOPLE DISOBEYED GOD
Then in the wilderness, as the Israelites left Egypt and journeyed toward Canaan, the Land of Promise, God gave Moses His laws, but the Israelites, His chosen people, disobeyed them all. So, God made a tabernacle through Moses, a place of worship to shed the lamb’s (and other animals’) blood as an offering for forgiveness. For “according to the Law, one may almost say, all things are cleansed with blood, and without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” (Heb. 9:22)
But the people of God, whom the devil ruled in their hearts, continued to sin against the Lord for which He sent fiery serpents that cause the death of thousands. And so Moses prayed and told those bitten (by the snakes) to look for healing at the brass serpent on a pole he made according to God’s instructions.
The Israelites didn’t know all that had happened to them were part of God’s love and salvation story for man. The Passover lamb and the brass snake on the pole in the wilderness were but copies representing the Seed of the woman. He was to crush the head of Satan, the enemy of God.
In the wilderness, God provided a remedy for people’s sin through His servant Moses. “The Lord your God,” He said, “will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him.” (Deut. 18:15) The people learned that the remedy was the Seed and that He would be an Israelite like them and would be forthcoming.
Through the loving guidance of God, the Israelites from Egypt finally reached the Promised Land. It was the place known in God’s Book as Canaan (or Palestine in today’s map) Their father, Abraham, received the place hundreds of years before as a gift to him from God.
DAVID BECAME KING
After running the new Israelite nation through Judges, God made David king. He told him through the Prophet Nathan that: “Your house and your kingdom shall endure before Me forever; your throne shall be established forever.” (2 Sam. 7:16) We all know King David died, and his kingdom, gone. Why did God say, “your kingdom shall endure before Me forever”? Since God knew the Seed of the woman would come through David’s royal lineage. Hence, the Book of God says: “For David himself says in the book of Psalms, ‘THE LORD SAID TO MY LORD, “SIT AT MY RIGHT HAND, UNTIL I MAKE YOUR ENEMIES A FOOTSTOOL FOR YOUR FEET.” Therefore David calls Him “Lord,” and how is He his son?’” (Luke 20:42-44)
We learned earlier that there was enmity or war between God and His archenemy, Satan the devil, and that the Seed of the woman would crush Satan’s head. This Psalm of David speaks of God’s enemies, the devil, and his demons: their defeat and pained future as God’s footstool. But the Seed of the woman could not have been the son of David! He was an Israelite, but not David’s son.
The “prophets who prophesied of the grace that would come . . . made careful searches and inquiries, seeking to know what person or time” the woman’s Seed would come. (1 Pet. 1:10-11) Then came Prophet Micah who said, “. . . yet out of thee [Israelites] shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.” (Mic. 5:2, KJV) The Seed of the woman was from long ago, from the days of eternity, and He was to be the Ruler of Israel.
THE COMING OF THE SEED OF THE WOMAN
The devil thought he won at the Garden of Eden when he tempted our first parents to disobey God and to choose death and hell, instead of immortality in Paradise. But not at all, for there was that Seed, who would soon come to bruise the serpent’s head.
For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us;
And the government will rest on His shoulders;
And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.
There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace,
On the throne of David and over his kingdom,
To establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness From then on and forevermore. (Isa.9:6-7)
THE BIRTH OF JESUS
Here is light on Nathan’s prophecy that the kingdom of David will last forever, but it will be the woman’s Seed who will be its King and of whose government upon earth will continue to increase.
God sent Angel Gabriel, according to His Book, to Nazareth, a city of Galilee in Israel. Gabriel was to inform a virgin there named Mary that she would conceive in her womb a son who should be named Jesus. It was the fulfillment of the prophecy of the Prophet Isaiah that he made around 700 years before.
“How can this be since I am a virgin?” asked Mary. “The Holy Spirit,” replied the Angel Gabriel, “will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and for that reason the holy Child shall be called the Son of God.” He added that “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David; and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and His kingdom will have no end.” (Luke 1:26-36)
➩ And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. — Genesis 3:15, KJV.
THE WITNESS OF JOHN THE BAPTIST
Around 30 years after the birth of Jesus, John the Baptist, a prophet of God, was at the river Jordan of Israel. He was baptizing and preaching that people should repent, for the kingdom of God was at hand. Then he saw Jesus coming to him and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is He on behalf of whom I said, ‘After me comes a Man who has a higher rank than I, for He existed before me.’” (Mark 1:9-11)
Herod the King sent John to prison and then executed him.
Jesus, after His baptism by John, went to the wilderness 40 days and nights without food. And the devil appeared to tempt Him, but Jesus told Satan what he was telling Him was not God’s Word. The devil used the same maneuver he used with Eve, which was all linked with the lust of the flesh and the eyes and the pride of life. For three times, the devil tempted Jesus, and for three times also the Latter quoted God’s Word in His defense.
Eve succumbed to the lies of Satan on the forbidden fruit, but Jesus, on the other hand, defied the devil in the power of the Holy Spirit and God’s Holy Word.
THE MIRACLES OF CHRIST
Then Jesus, in His around three-year ministry on earth, performed many miracles. He fed over 5,000 men with just five barley loaves and two fish; He also opened the eyes of the blind and caused the lame to walk and cleansed the leper. He even ordered dead Lazarus to come out of his grave and the young lad at Nain to get out of his coffin.
Jesus also taught His disciples about the reality of hell, its endless torments, its worms, and the gnashing of teeth. “Come to Me,” He said, for “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” He is the only way to heaven; He is the Door and the Bread of eternal life.
After believing and trusting Jesus as God’s only Son, a woman name Mary Magdalene—she had seven demons—got converted. Jesus forgave and saved her. He saved also the woman at Sychar and the thief on the cross. Jesus taught that heaven was His Father’s house, and we, His followers, will live there forever. He will return to earth again. And when that time comes, He would resurrect all His followers out of their graves. Those still alive at His coming will be changed. All of them He will snatch away to heaven in a wink of an eye.
CHRIST VERSUS THE RELIGIOUS LEADERS OF THE JEWS
➩ “[H]is appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man and his form marred beyond human likeness.” (Isa.52:14, NIV)
THE CRUCIFIXION AND ASCENSION OF CHRIST
What agony was it? The thief on the cross with Him didn’t go through it. Such distress was so barbed as to hire an angel from heaven; it even caused Jesus’ sweat to be like drops of blood. The only explanation is that during the crucifixion, the devil knew of his forthcoming defeat. His last option was to launch a full-scale attack by crushing the heel of the Son of God, the Seed of the woman. “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel.” (Gen. 3:15)
Years after Jesus’ ascension, the apostle Paul, His chosen vessel to plant churches in the known world during that time, wrote that “[now] the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say, ‘And to seeds,’ as referring to many, but rather to one, ‘And to your seed,’ that is, ‘Christ.’”
So Jesus, who is Christ the Lord, was the promised Seed of the woman, the only Hope of the entire human race against the rule of the devil in this world. Jesus was the Child seen by the Prophet Isaiah as quoted by Matthew:
JESUS, THE SEED OF THE WOMAN
He was the Seed of the woman because He was born of a virgin.
➩ “But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman.” (Gal. 3:16-17; 4:4)
The Passover Lamb was a copy of Christ, His blood being shed for the forgiveness of our sin. What about Moses’ brass serpent? Well, it was the stamp of Jesus on the cross. Those who trust in Him, those bitten by the serpent of sin (and experienced a guilty conscience), will get salvation and healing of their sin-sick and hell-marked souls. The tabernacle and the lamb’s shedding of blood also represent the work of Jesus.
➩ But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things to come, He entered through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation; and not through the blood of goats and calves, but through His own blood, He entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? (Heb. 9:11-14)
The story of the Seed of the woman did not end there because the devil is very much alive yet. Satan continues to rule upon the planet earth and the war between him and God goes on. Then Jesus Christ our Lord, who is the King of kings and Lord of lords, will overthrow him during our Lord’s Second Coming to the earth! And when that time comes, He will bind Satan and throw him into the abyss for a thousand years. Afterward, Christ will throw him “into the lake of fire and brimstone . . . and . . . be tormented day and night forever and ever.” (Rev. 20:2;10)
Christ once said to His disciples: “I was watching Satan fall from heaven like lightning. Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing will injure you . . . [for the] Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil.” (1 John 3:18; Luke 10:17-20)
FAITH IN THE SEED SAVES
The Seed of the woman, Jesus, won in this celestial drama. Satan ruined man’s immortality by tempting him to disobey and sin against God, but Christ our Lord saved man and restored his lost immortality. He ascended to heaven to prepare His followers mansions there. (cf. John 14:2) The cherubim and a flaming sword once guarded the tree of life (See: Gen. 3:24.) during Adam’s time. Now God offered it again to those who have Christ in their hearts. (Rev. 22:14)
Jesus said to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25-26)
I pray that this question of Christ, the Seed of the woman—the Son of God—won’t leave your heart unanswered! ∞
