Seeds And Sin
Adam Sinned. And the Lord God, in His address to the three participants in that sin, said to the serpent: “Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: 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” ( Gen. 3:14,15).
Now a seed is that which is yielded after the kind of the yielder (Gen. 1:12). So the seed of the serpent is that which the serpent yields after its kind. A brief consideration of things which Scripture designates the seed of the serpent demonstrates that such are men (e.g. Mt. 23:33, where “generation” (gennema) is related to begettal and birth, as is seed). The “kind” after which the serpent yields seed does not refer to its being a “beast of the field” or “cattle”, but to other aspects of being the serpent specified in the chapter, namely its subtlety, its power to beguile and to corrupt (Gen. 3:1,13; 2 Cor. 11:3).
These qualities of the serpent became part of Adam as he changed under the curse of God. The serpent is used as a figure in the words of the Lord for what it had worked and was working in man. The serpent is that in Adam which beguiles and corrupts, the sin and its law in his members feeding upon him (Gen. 3:14,19). A man beguiled and corrupted by its subtlety is yielded by it as its seed after its kind—a seed of the serpent ( cp. Ps. 58:2-4, mg.). “Every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death” (Jas. 1:14,15). “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so . . . “, when Adam “begat a son in his own likeness, after his image”, “death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Rom. 5:12; Gen. 5:3).
Between the serpent so understood and the woman, and between their seeds, God put enmity, until the serpent bruised her seed’s heel and it bruised the serpent’s head. This article examines this promise, perceived as an element of the gospel by Christadelphians, in briefly considering certain Old Testament foreshadowing of the enmity and bruising, and in looking at the fulfilment of God’s promise in the records of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, and the events of the last days and of the age to come, as revealed prophetically.
Serpents and dragons
The next group of incidents after Genesis 3 in which serpents occur as a major theme is in the early chapters of Exodus (3-7), where God appears to Moses and gives him His commission to go to Israel and to Pharaoh, and where Moses, with Aaron, carries it out.
In order that the elders of the children of Israel should believe that God had appeared to Moses, revealing Himself and expounding His name, coming down to deliver His people out of the hand of the Egyptians, and should hearken to His voice, Moses was commanded to perform two signs: “he cast (his rod) on the ground, and it became a serpent. . . And he put forth his hand, and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand. . . And he put his hand into his bosom: and when he took it out, behold, his hand was leprous as snow. . . And he put his hand into his bosom again; and plucked it out of his bosom, and, behold, it was turned again as his other flesh” (Ex. 4:3-7).
Now leprosy is a plague deeper than the skin of the flesh, a scab that spreads in the skin, raw flesh that is unclean, making the sufferer as one dead, whose flesh is half consumed (Lev. 13:3,8,15; Num. 12:12). As such it is a fit figure, like the serpent, for the corruption within men, issuing in death. Both of the signs which Moses was to perform were to signify to him and to Israel their state and their salvation, by belief on Moses and his voice. Moses saw himself to be leprous and then cleansed, and he caught the serpent with his hand (though he had fled from it, cp. Rev. 12:14).
A similar sign to the first is performed before Pharaoh, to harden his heart, that God might show His power in him, and declare His name throughout all the earth: “and Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent. Then Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers: now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments. For they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents: but Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods” (Ex. 7:10-12).
Here the word for serpent changes, from nig to tnyn (meaning ‘dragon’), and the change is significant in the context. The serpent in various manifestations had found a place in the theology of Egypt.’Pharaoh wore a serpent on his forehead, the uraeus, the emblem of his office and status, representing the cobra goddess, a dragon manifesting herself in Pharaoh. Tannin was another god, a dragon, guardian of childbirth and the Nile’s fertility. As manifesting this god, Pharaoh inherited his power and characteristics, being in his image. Pharaoh, before whom Moses stood, was in certain senses the serpent, the dragon.’ He was, according to Egyptian theology, the god-king of the land, its political and spiritual head.
In Biblical terms the serpent in the individual, sin, is manifesting itself, not just in the individual, but also through him, in a false, interlinking system of politics and theology, the dragon. Hence the change in the terminology.
Moses and Aaron, at God’s command, challenged and attacked this serpent-system, and overcame the enchantments of the magicians and sorcerers as Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods. This represents spiritually a conquest of sin and its seed’ in its individual and collective manifestations.
Serpent, dragons, leviathan
The contest before Pharaoh was representative of the contest for the possession of the children of Israel enacted shortly afterwards, as Pharaoh and Egypt strove vainly, against the will of God, to keep them in bondage, afflicted and groaning. Therefore Scripture uses similar language to describe the events at the Red Sea where the host of Pharaoh was overthrown: “God is my King of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth.
Thou didst divide the sea by Thy strength: Thou bra kest the heads (cf. Gen. 3:15) of the dragons in the waters. Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness” ( Ps. 74:12-14); “Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake, as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art Thou not it that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? Art Thou not it Which hath dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; that hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?” (Isa. 51:9,10). Salvation is effected by the Lord individually, in the case of Moses and the serpent, and through Him collectively for Israel in the overthrow of the dragon in the waters of the Red Sea.
From Egypt to Babylon and beyond
Scripture uses the king of Egypt, the political and religious head of the nation, to represent sin manifest The likeness of the serpent-dragon is historically and spiritually inherited by kingdoms whose kind is that of the serpent, deceiving, beguiling, and bringing the holy seed into bondage: “Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon hath devoured me, he hath crushed me, he hath made me an empty vessel, he hath swallowed me up (cf Gen. 3:14,19) like a dragon, he hath filled his belly with my delicates, he hath cast me out. . . shall the inhabitant of Zion say” (Jer. 51:34,35). Thus Jerusalem, desolated by the Babylonians, becomes a den of dragons (Jer. 9:11). Note also that Babylon, like Egypt, was a monarchy with a combined political and religious hierarchy (Ex. 7:11; Dan. 2:2).
Daniel 7 demonstrates that the inheritor of the dragon-figure from Babylon is the fourth Roman beast, dreadful and terrible, part of the same spiritual and political continuum as its predecessors (consider the single image of Daniel 2), and directly involved in the crucifixion of Jesus.
The seed of the woman
“We, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world (referring to the commandments of the Law through which sin, the serpent, became exceeding sinful): but when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law” (Gal. 4:3,4). Here Jesus is clearly identified as the seed of the woman. This is closely related, moreover, to his being the Son of God. As the kind of the serpent was to beguile and corrupt, so the kind of the woman was, with the man, to be made in the image, after the likeness of God (Gen. 1:26,27). Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the brightness of His glory (where glory relates to likeness-1 Cor. 11:7), the express image of His substance. The prophecy of Genesis 3:15 points the way to the conception of Jesus by a virgin, and to the fact that God was his Father.
Enmity
Enmity was to be, according to the Word of God, between the seed of the woman, Jesus, and the serpent’s seed. An aspect of this enmity can be seen amply worked out in the life and death of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels. We have already noticed a reference to the seed of the serpent in the New Testament in Matthew 23:33. Here Jesus, addressing the “scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites” (v. 29), calls them “serpents . . . generation of vipers”. They are so called because they are partakers with their fathers in the blood of the prophets. They kill, crucify, scourge and persecute the prophets, wise men and scribes sent to them by God, “that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel . . . “. Their hatred of Jesus was another manifestation of the old enmity.
The reference to Abel serves expositionally to bring out to the full the extent to which the religious and political leaders of the Jews opposed to Jesus were the serpent’s seed: “Ye (Jews) are of your father the devi1,4 and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it” (Jno. 8:44). Cain hated his brother and slew him, and became a murderer. Thus was the seed of the serpent first manifest, for he was of that wicked one (1 Jno. 3:12,15). The Jewish leaders, shedding righteous blood, and having fellowship with those who did, were going in the way of Cain, opposed to the way of God which Jesus taught.
This enmity worked itself out in the crucifixion of Jesus, in which the serpent, the dragon, the seed of the serpent conspired: “Why did the heathen rage, and the people imagine vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord, and against His Christ. For of a truth against Thy holy child Jesus, whom Thou hast anointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles ( heathen), and the people of Israel, were gathered together, for to do whatsoever Thy hand and Thy counsel determined before to be done” (Acts 4:25 -28).
Jesus describes this event in the brief statement in John 14:30: ” . . . the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me”. The word “prince” is the Greek archon, which is related to archo, translated ‘to rule’, ‘to reign over’, ‘to begin’, and arche; translated ‘beginning’, ‘principality’, ‘rule’. The prince of this world is that which rules over this present world-system, having entered into it at the beginning. Thus sin reigned, and death through sin (Rom. 5:12-14; 6:12). In Bible terms “the prince of this world” refers to the serpent-sin. This, manifest in the heathen kings of the earth, the Roman-backed governors and the rulers of the people of Israel, was coming, yet had nothing in Jesus (cp. Dan. 9:26), having only slanders and false witnesses to bring against him.
It is interesting that Jesus’s statement has its initial fulfilment in John 18:3: “Judas then, having received a band of men and officers from the chief priests and Pharisees, cometh thither. . . “. Judas is here functioning as the representative of those that hated Jesus, as their head. And it was into Judas and into his heart that “Satan” and “the devil” had entered (13:2,27), Judas who was himself a “devil” (6:70,71). The link between this passage and the earlier words of Jesus is made stronger by the word “cometh”, a present tense where one might expect a past. Thus the enmity of the serpent and its seed reached its climax.
Bruising the head
Jesus refers to the “prince of this world” on two other occasions in John: “Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me. This he said, signifying what death he should die” (12:31-33); “the prince of this world hath been judged” (16:11, RV).
The prince of this world is judged and cast out by the death of Jesus, according to the context. How this works is demonstrated by the expositional link provided by the word “lifted up”: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (Jno. 3:14,15). Jesus is referring to an incident in Numbers 21: “The Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died . . . And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live” (Num. 21:6,8).
The fiery serpents, fitting with the Bible figure examined above, are sin, the bite of which issues in death. Deliverance from the bite of sin is brought about through looking upon a “fiery serpent” lifted up and displayed. This figure was fulfilled, in Jesus’s words, in the manner of his death. The righteousness of God was declared in the crucifixion as Jesus, sent in the likeness of flesh of sin, made to be sin though knowing no sin, condemned the sin in the flesh. And so the head of the serpent was bruised just as it bruised his heel.
This triumph fulfils the figurative aspects of the narrative of Moses mentioned above. Salvation from bondage to sin was wrought by means of Jesus, working it through his personal conquest of the serpent. Thus Jesus Christ is the firstfruits of those that live, with sin and death and their powers conquered.
Deliverance from bondage
We have seen, in the case of Moses, how personal deliverance from the serpent preceded and was the sign and assurance of collective deliverance from bondage and of the triumph of the seed of Abraham over the dragon, destroyed by the hand of God. So it is with Christ. He was saved out of death, having, through death, brought to nought the devil and delivered those who were subject to bondage through fear of death. Here is personal salvation from the serpent for the seed of Abraham—Christ and those in him, of whom he took hold. However, the ultimate deliverance from the dragon, and its destruction, is yet to come.
“All things under his feet”
“(God) raised( Christ) from the dead, and set him at His own right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality (arche), and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world (a ion), but also in that which is to come: and hath put all things under his feet. . . ” (Eph. 1:20-22).
Here is recorded the fulfilment of the prophecy in Psalm 8:4-8, itself referring back to Genesis 1, and another aspect of what it is to be the seed of the woman: ” . . . and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (Gen. 1:26). Psalm 8 clearly points to Jesus as fulfilling this in its fullest sense.
But now we see not yet all things put under him. There is further subjection to come, after his coming: “he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed (or brought to nought, cf. Heb. 2:14) is death . . . when he shall have put down all rule (arche) and all authority and power. . . Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father” (1 Cor. 15:24-26).
The above quotations sketch the outline of events during the reign of Christ (events foreshadowed in his death, resurrection and exaltation) which are detailed more fully elsewhere.
Subjection of death
The Spirit, in referring to the abolition of death after the coming of Christ, quotes from the Old Testament: “So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Cor. 15:54). The saying is written in Isaiah 25:8. The context for this verse is Isaiah 24-27 (note the recurrent phrase of these chapters: “In that day . . . “).
“And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall punish the host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings of the earth upon the earth. And they shall be gathered together, as prisoners are gathered in the pit” (Isa. 24:21).
This scene is further described in Revelation 19:
“And I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth, and their armies, gathered together to make war against him that sat on the horse” (v. 19), “called Faithful and True . . . and his name is called The Word of God. . . And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron (quoting Psalm 2, cp. Acts 4 quoted above for the parallel events) . . . And the beast was taken . . . And the remnant were slain with the sword . . . ” (vv. 11-21). “In that day the Lord with His sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and He shall slay the dragon that is in the sea” (Isa. 27:1).
“For He bringeth down them that dwell on high; the lofty city, He layeth it low; He layeth it low, even to the ground; He bringeth it even to the dust (cp. Gen. 3:14, the judgement on the serpent). The foot shall tread it down, even the feet of the poor. . . ” (Isa. 26:5,6). “And it shall come to pass in that day, that the great trumpet shall be blown, and they shall come which were ready to perish in the land of Assyria, and the outcasts in the land of Egypt, and shall worship the Lord in the holy mount at Jerusalem” (Isa. 27:13. For the Exodus language cp. Deut 26:5-9).
At this time, sin manifest in the kingdoms of men is restrained:
“I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent,’ which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years . . . that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled” (Rev. 20: 1-3).
The end
“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about (cp. Ex. 14:9,10), and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone. . . ” (Rev. 20:7-10).
The last resurgence of the collective power of the serpent is put down, as sin and all its powers are destroyed at the end of the Millennium. Contemporary with these events the second resurrection takes place, with the final destruction of death and hell (Rev. 20:12-14), thus putting all things under his feet. The process began with the resurrection of Christ, the first-fruits, continued with the raising of those that are Christ’s at his coming, and culminates
“in that day”: “He will swallow up6 death in victory (for ever, RV; both senses are in the Hebrew); and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces” (Isa. 25:8); “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying (cp. Isa. 51:11), neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away” (Rev. 21:4).
References
- See “Four Short Articles on Egyptian Archaeology”, Arthur Gibson, The Testimony, July 1979, p. 231.
- Consider, in a different time, Ezek. 29:3; 32:2.
- “Seed” (zr’,sperma) is both individual and collective: see Gen. 13:15,16; Gal. 3:16,29.
- For the relationship between the devil, sin and the serpent, see “Why is Sin Personified?”, Stephen Palmer, The Testimony, August, September and October 1979.
- For the origin of the designation “old” consider Psalm 74:12 and Isaiah 51:9 (quoted above), where the phrase refers back to the time of the Exodus. Note Isaiah 51:11, where the earlier deliverance is seen as the earnest of the latter-day one.
- Exodus 7:12, the figure fulfilled in Exodus 15:12.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One