This week’s “Wednesday Word” is a summary of Dr. Wellum’s sixth session in his series, The Bible’s Big Picture, given on Sunday, October 18, 2009.
As we discovered last week, Genesis 3 is one of the most important passages in the entire Bible. It describes what is wrong with us and thus the nature of the human problem. Unlike non-Christian views, it ties our problem to history, i.e. to the choice of our covenantal head, Adam, acting as our representative and disastrously choosing to set his will over against the God of the universe. In this one act, sadly, Adam has brought sin and death to the entire human race (see Rom 5:12-21) and it is only if God acts to save that there is hope for Adam’s race.
This week’s lesson continued to unpack the effects of sin upon the human race. In a four-fold way Adam’s choice has brought universal effects upon all of us. First, vertically speaking, Adam’s sin has brought alienation between God and the human race. As a result we stand under the wrath of God and in his presence we stand guilty and condemned. Second, horizontally speaking, sin has brought disharmony and alienation within the human race so that human beings are cruel to each other in a whole host of ways—in marriages, families, society at large, and so on. Third, internally speaking, sin has brought an internal disruption within each one of us so that all of us, in Adam, are schizophrenic at heart. We do not understand ourselves and we often do not and cannot grasp why we do the things we do. Fourth, cosmically speaking, due to the curse of God as a result of sin, we now live in an abnormal universe so that the entire creation groans under the travail of sin and death. All of this is spoken of at the end of Genesis 3 where God not only announces that we shall return to the dust in death, but he also casts Adam and Eve out of his presence, graphically pictured by their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and thus speaking of all of these realities. The only way back to the Garden is by going forward in redemptive-history and hoping that God himself will remedy the situation. To depend upon ourselves for the solution to the problem will be foolhardy and useless at best. We are completely dependent upon the God of grace to act on our behalf.
Thankfully, even within Genesis 3, there are glimmers of hope. Probably the greatest glimmer is found in v 15 where it is announced that the future seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. Here we have an initial, enigmatic promise, but it is a promise nonetheless that God will not leave us to ourselves and that in this future seed, the reversal of what has happened in Genesis 3 will take place. We are not given a lot of details, but we must assume that in this promise, God is saying that the human race will continue, that the seed of the woman will be in a battle with Satan and his offspring, and that final victory will be achieved. In light of all that has occurred in the “Fall” (literally the reversal of the created order) we must see this promise of “Redemption” as that which will achieve a “new creation” in the sense that the creation order will be restored. It seems that Adam lays hold of this promise when he names his wife, Eve, “mother of all living.” At least Adam thinks that God is not finished with the human race and that there will be one who comes who will reverse all the disastrous effects of sin—vertically, horizontally, internally, and cosmically.
As we move across the storyline of Scripture, this initial promise of Genesis 3:15 will be given further definition and explanation. In subsequent weeks we will spend time seeing how this promise unfolds and thankfully, culminates in our Lord Jesus Christ. Today, we ought to be thankful that our God is not only a God of justice but also a God of grace and mercy, and as such, he has not left us to ourselves but he has taken the initiative to redeem.