The First Gospel Promise

The First Sunday in Lent Sermon| Rev. Rolf Preus| February 22, 2026| Genesis 3:15

“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

The entire Bible can be divided into two teachings: the law and the gospel.  The law tells us what we must do.  It is summarized in the Ten Commandments.  God tells us to do this and not to do that.  If you do what the law demands, you are blessed.  If you don’t, you are cursed.  The law promises blessing only to those who obey it.  And a mere outward obedience is not enough.  Unless you obey the law – not only by your deeds, but also by your thoughts and your words – the law stands in judgment against you.

The gospel tells us what God has done and is now doing to rescue us from the judgment of the law.  The gospel does not tell us what to do.  It announces to us that Christ has already done everything required of us.  He has obeyed the law for us, and He has suffered the penalty for our disobedience to the law.  For Christ’s sake God forgives us all our sins and pronounces us to be righteous in his sight.  The law promises blessing to those who obey it.  The gospel promises blessing to those who believe it.  The law makes demands that we cannot meet.  The gospel makes no demands at all.  It gives us what it promises.

The world lives under the law.  It lives under God’s judgment.  Listen to God’s judgment against disobedience that God pronounced after the first sin:

To the woman He said: “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children; your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”  Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’: cursed is the ground for your sake; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.  Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field.  In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

The joy of childbirth is marred by pain.  The unity of marriage is torn apart by conflict.  Women want to rule over their husbands.  Men want to use their wives to please themselves.  The good earth, created by God for our benefit, conspires against all of humanity as thorns, thistles, floods, tornadoes and every other natural calamity ruin our hard work and render it fruitless.  Finally, we all return to the dust from which we were made.  God’s judgment is not just a theological concept.  It is the bitter reality of all human existence.

It all goes back to one single act of disobedience.  God told the man not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  The man told his wife.  Satan did not tempt the man.  He tempted the man’s wife.  The man stood there and listened.  He said nothing.  God gave him the duty to protect her.  There was only one person in the whole world from which she needed her husband’s protection.  He was Satan.  He took on the form of a snake.  The man did not intervene to protect his wife from his lies.  He stood there.  God made him to be the spiritual head.  He was to be her pastor.  He gave up that office by refusing to speak out against the devil’s lies.  Instead of exercising the duties of his office, Adam, by standing there silently, acquiesced to the ordination of his wife to be his pastor.  Adam had heard God’s voice.  Eve was not there when God gave Adam the command not to eat of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden.  Adam told Eve what God said.  Eve depended on Adam’s voice.  But he failed her.  That was the original sin.

The original sin was that Adam listened to the voice of his wife instead of to the voice of God. “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it, cursed is the ground for your sake.”  It is not surprising that churches that deny the historical accuracy of the first chapters of Genesis also ordain women as pastors in the church in defiance of God’s clear command that they do not do so.  The original sin of Adam and Eve was that they defied the word of God.  Every subsequent sin is nothing but a continuation of the original sin.  God says it.  That settles it.  But Satan asks, “Did God really say?”  Sin listens to Satan and then follows his voice instead of God’s voice.  St. Paul calls false teachings “the doctrines of demons.”  Jesus calls Satan a liar and the father of lies.  God speaks the truth and from that divine truth our life is given to us.  Satan speaks lies and from those lies flow sin and death.

God warned Adam that the day he ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was the day he would die.  He did and he did.  He did not die physically for several hundred years, but he died spiritually the moment he ate.  Adam and Eve saw that they were naked.  Before they sinned, their nakedness brought them no shame but now, they felt the need to cover themselves.  It was a futile effort.  They couldn’t hide themselves.  They were guilty.  They ran away from God and hid.  They could not hide from God.  He found them.  In the conversation that followed they tried to avoid accepting responsibility for their sin.  Adam blamed Eve.  Eve blamed the serpent.  And then God spoke.  He spoke judgment.  But pay close attention to what he said first.

God spoke to the serpent.  It quickly became apparent that He was not just talking to a snake.  He was talking to Satan.  He said, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed.”  Enmity is not something that a snake can have.  Snakes bite because their instinct is to bite.  But having enmity against another is possible only for intelligent beings.  God is talking to the evil spirit who used the body of a snake to seduce the woman into sin.  He’s talking to the devil and He’s waging war.

It is as if God is saying to Satan: “You deceived her.  You led them both into sin.  You infected them with the venomous poison of your lying doctrine.  Now they run away from Me and are afraid of Me.  You have corrupted their souls and My holy people whom I made in My own image have lost the innocence in which I created them.  But the Seed of the woman will destroy you.  You will hurt Him.  You will strike His heal.  But the pain you inflict upon Him will only be temporary.  He will take your venom into Himself, and it will not destroy Him.  Instead, He will destroy you.  The very heel you strike will come down on your head and crush it and silence your lying tongue.”

God declared war against Satan.  That was the first gospel promise.  Before he pronounced the curse of His law on the woman and on the man, He gave them the gospel.  They had sinned.  They were afraid of God.  They wanted to run away from God as if from an enemy.  Now, whenever they heard the voice of God it would instill fear in their hearts so that they would cower and cringe and try to escape.  So, God made sure that the first words He spoke to them in their sin were not words to condemn them, but words to condemn the one who led them into sin.

The Seed of the woman was, of course, Jesus.  The word “seed” is used in the Old Testament to refer to the descendents of men, not women.  Men have seed and women do not.  The Old Testament always traces the lineage through the man, never through the woman.  Only in this instance does the Bible mention the Seed of a woman because there would be no man.  She would be a virgin.  The Seed of the woman was to be the virgin-born Son of God.  Only God in the flesh could destroy the power of the devil.  A mere man would fall victim to the father of lies.  But the eternal Son of the Father could prevail against him.

And He did.  Today’s Gospel Lesson shows us how He did it.  Jesus opposed Satan with the word of God.  He responded to each of the devil’s temptations by saying, “It is written.”  All of Satan’s temptations were designed to turn Jesus away from his task of rescuing sinners from their sin.  His temptations failed.  Christ’s obedience replaced Adam’s disobedience and God’s condemnation of the world was replaced by his justification of the world.

The Bible teaches us both the law and the gospel.  Clearly, both divine teachings are needed.  During this Lenten season we take to heart the law of God and we confess our sins.  We have loved other things more than we have loved God.  We have misused God’s name.  We have neglected His Word.  We have disobeyed the human authority set over us by God.  We have failed to help our neighbor’s bodily needs.  We have lusted and spoken harshly and unkindly about our neighbor.  We have been dissatisfied with what was ours and have coveted what we had no right to have.  And for this God’s law condemns us all.

But the law is not the final word from God, though the devil would have us think so.  The gospel tells us that the virgin-born Son of God crushed the lying head of the devil by obeying the law as the substitute of all sinners and by dying the death of all sinners on the cross.  The devil tried to dissuade Jesus from going to the cross, but he could not.  His love for his Father and His love for us sinners compelled him to go all the way to the death of the damned and to go there to be condemned in the place of us all.  By taking into himself the noxious poison of the world’s sin and by bearing in his innocence all the guilt of humanity, he took away from the devil his most deadly weapon.

The most powerful weapon of the devil is the accusation.  He accuses you.  The name “devil” means slanderer and the name “Satan” means accuser.  The devil accuses us.  He wants to convince us that God is our enemy.  The devil tries to persuade us to run away from God and hide, as Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden after they sinned.  But the gospel wins our hearts back to God.  The gospel doesn’t tell us how to win God over to our side.  The gospel tells us that God is on our side.  It tells us that for the sake of the woman’s Seed all our sin is washed away forever.  And this truth, this gospel truth, is what silences Satan’s lies and binds him in chains.

Those who don’t believe the gospel live under the judgment of the law.  They can deny God, reject his law, or make up laws they can obey to win God over to their side.  It doesn’t work.  Everybody needs Christ.  Everybody needs the gospel.  St. Paul writes in Romans chapter three:

For there is no difference; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith. 

Watch Jesus as he drives the devil away.  His obedience belongs to us.  We heard God’s law condemn us.  It left us helpless and lost.  We heard God’s gospel forgive us.  It brought us to faith.  The gospel is God’s final word to us.  This is what drives the devil away from us and brings us peace.  Amen