Genesis 3:15 - From Worst to First

Every so often in the world of sports, something remarkable happens. A team goes from last place one year to first place the very next year. They go from worst to first in just one short season. In a sense that’s what Genesis 3:15 is all about. God took the world’s worst scenario and then immediately brought the world its first incredible promise of a Savior.

It was the worst possible scenario because God’s perfect creation was ruined. Adam and Eve, the original man and woman whom God had created in his own image, disobeyed God. When they did they brought sin into our world. Along with sin came the curse of sin—death, just as God had told them, “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Genesis 2:17).

It was Satan who tempted Adam and Eve to fall into sin. He took the form of a serpent, lied to them, and led them in their rebellion against God. The results of this fall were immediate: guilt, shame, denials and accusations. Adam and Eve would now one day die—as all human beings must one day die since every human being descended from Adam and Eve is conceived and born in sin (Psalm 51:5, Romans 5:12). The crown of God’s creation was now separated from their loving Creator. It was truly the worst possible scenario for all of humanity.

But on that very day when Satan led human beings into sin, God didn’t just scrap Project Humanity or hit some kind of reset button and start over. Instead God did something incredible to restore this situation from worst to first. He made a cosmic promise, the first promise of a Savior. It is this very promise that God unfolded over the centuries through his prophets as each new generation received more and more details about who this Savior would be.

God took the initiative. On the same day that Adam and Eve fell into sin, God said to Satan, “I will put enmity.” Enmity means hostility. “I will put enmity or hostility between you (Satan) and the woman (Eve).” Up until this point, when Eve listened to Satan’s lie she was in a sense Satan’s “friend.” And if God had not intervened, Eve and her descendants would have gone on to live forever with their “friend”—Satan. But God’s promise sparked a change in Eve’s heart. She turned back to God and trusted his promise. Satan would become no longer a friend of any sort, but the enemy.

“I will put enmity…between your (Satan’s) offspring and hers (Eve’s).” Admittedly this phrase seems hard to understand at first. But in the context of God’s further revelation in the Bible, it is clear that this phrase refers to the ongoing hostility between Satan’s “offspring,” that is, non-believers in God’s promise, and Eve’s “offspring,” that is, believers in the promise of a Savior.

The enmity or hostility that God predicts would reach its climax in just one of Eve’s descendants. This is the “He” of whom God speaks. A single male human being is referred to. “He will crush your (Satan’s) head, and you (Satan) will strike his heal.”

Who is this “He”? It is none other than the one about whom the New Testament Scriptures speak in Galatians 4:4,5. But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons.

God’s promise of Genesis 3:15 culminates in none other than God’s own Son, Jesus Christ! As a true human being he was descended from Eve. Born of a woman, the Virgin Mary, he came on a mission. The Apostle John says this about Jesus: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:8).

The hostility of which God speaks in Genesis 3:15 finds its ultimate fulfillment in the hostility between Satan and Jesus Christ. Throughout the life of Jesus we see how Satan worked to defeat Jesus. For example, just as Jesus began to preach and teach publicly, Satan tried to tempt him to forget about his Father’s plan (cf.

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