Monday and only five day until Christmas. All my kids are home in spite of grumpy governors. I hope you’ll get to spend time with your loved ones, too.

As hard as it is to pull my attention away from what is transpiring in the world of politics, I created this blog to write about politics, culture and faith. Most of what I’ve written about in the past nine months is politics with the occasional reflection on a passage of scripture. (I specifically wrote about Palm Sunday here and Easter Sunday here.) I also try to look at what is happening in our culture with a biblical world view and at times try to apply the scriptures appropriately.

I graduated from seminary with an M.Div. in 1992 and the most important thing I learned from my years of study was the congruity of scripture from beginning to end. I learned to appreciate how it hung together as a whole, 66 books encompassing at least six literary genres written by about 40 different authors over a period of 1,500 years. The Bible is not a single book, but a library of books we call “Holy Scripture.”

I offer that background because this week marks the birth of Jesus, the promised Messiah who would take away the sins of the world. We read about his coming in the Gospels, written about 2,000 years ago. But in the earliest of the scriptures, written more than 3,000 years ago, is the very first prediction of the Savior we read about in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

It comes in the context of the very first recorded sin in the book of Genesis. God has just placed Adam in the Garden of Eden and warned him that,

“You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” (Genesis 2:16)

Eve, whose creation is recorded immediately following God’s command to Adam, is confronted by the serpent in the very next chapter. He slithers up to her and immediately begins to undermine her confidence in God.

“Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” he says slyly. Look again at the passage from Genesis 2:16. In my reading of it, he deliberately negates God’s positive command as a hook to get Eve talking. She can reliably correct the serpent because it’s simple math (all v. one), which she does.

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’” (Genesis 3:2-3)

Obviously, Adam had passed along that valuable bit of intel to Eve, which would keep them both alive while living and working together in the garden. She aces the serpent’s pop quiz and even adds the detail that they must not even touch the fruit of that tree.

But the next angle the serpent tries isn’t so easy to refute. He directly contradicts the consequences of disobedience to God’s command.

“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

“You will die,” said God.

“You won’t die,” says the serpent.

Which is it?

I won’t belabor the point because Eve caves and believes the serpent, eating some of the forbidden fruit herself and then giving some to Adam. Verse 7 says, “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.”

Ah—there was some truth to the serpent’s lie: they didn’t die (immediately) and their eyes were “opened.”

Of course, this doesn’t sit well with God, who is loving, yes, but also just. So he confronts the bad actors and begins to lay out the consequences of their disobedience in a bit more detail. He starts with the serpent, the cunning instigator of the offense.

So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all livestock
    and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
    and you will eat dust
    all the days of your life.
And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
    and you will strike his heel.”

(Genesis 3:14-15)

There it is: “He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” The very first prophecy of a Savior. And it comes as a thread woven into the account of the Fall of Man.

Notice that the serpent and the woman’s “offspring” will do battle. The man will be wounded, but not fatally, struck on his heel; the serpent, on the other hand, will be killed—his head crushed, perhaps, under the heel he bit.

There are many of us who have a hard time believing that God can forgive us. We’ve done or said terrible things to other people. We’ve committed crimes against others; we’ve lied about ourselves or others; we’ve indulged our passions at the expense of others. We’ve been selfish, angry, bitter or ungrateful toward others. We’ve blamed, hated or slandered others. We’ve been proud, vain, and jealous. Some of us are caught in addictions that make us cringe in a cycle of shame.

How can God forgive someone like us?

That’s the beauty of this passage. In the very moment that Adam and Eve made a disastrous decision for all of mankind, God was there offering a remedy. He didn’t have to—God was under no obligation to offer us a way out. But He did.

For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous. (Romans 5:19)

Paul’s declaration finds its origin in Genesis 3, meaning that right from the beginning God’s heart has been to rescue us from our separation from Him. Adam and Eve’s sin was huge—on them rests the responsibility for giving sin access to all of humanity. The fallout of their disobedience is prolonged every time a child is born—except for one child born about 2,000 years ago. In Him is the promise of forgiveness and a rebirth.

And God set that in motion at the very beginning for you and for me. He can forgive and He will forgive—that has been His intention all along.

[Image: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, The Fall and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 1509-10. Public Domain.]