Cheryl Schatz

Mark,

I appreciate your comments regarding Gen 3:15. Let me just say one final thing in case you missed it. I do agree with you that looking bcak at this verse in our position, we can see the prophetic nature of it. I’m just trying to look at the verse exegetically, that’s all- i think this is perhaps where we differ slightly.

One cannot properly do exegesis without understanding the type of writing that you are exegeting. When we are looking to a prophesied future event, where God says what the serpent will do in the future and what the woman’s seed will do, one cannot determine the meaning without an understanding of the prophetic. You cannot just provide a meaning to the time when God said the words. God is defining the ultimate cosmic battle that ultimately draws in God Himself. If we take Genesis and Revelation we will see a prophesy and a fulfillment of the cosmic battle between good and evil. The ultimate victory of Christ using the very cross that satan used as a weapon against Him gives us the very nature of God for us to see.

God’s nature is to take evil and turn it around on its head to turn it into something that is good. And on the flip side God takes what is meant for evil and He gives back to the evil doer a measure-for-measure payment back.

Do you remember the account of Haman and Mordecai and Esther? Haman was asked by the king what he could do to bring honor to a person that deserved honor. Haman thought who could the king want to honor more than himself and he set up what he wanted as an honor. It was a public honor with royal robes and a public declaration of the king’s favor and honor. But then he had to do this for Mordecai whom he despised. This event caused him to hate Mordecai so much that he devised a plan to kill all of the Jews. He planned to take away Mordecai’s public honor by a public hanging and Haman built a huge gallows 75 feet high to publicly humiliate and kill Mordecai. But if you remember the story, God turned the evil around in his own face and Haman and his sons were the ones hung on those 75 feet high gallows.

This is God’s way. He takes the evil that is planned and He turns the evil around into the bosom of the evil doer. How did God turn the evil of satan around?

Is it not true that He brought satan’s destruction through the seed of the one whom satan deceived? Is it also not true that satan devised a plan to kill Jesus with a curse of death by killing him on the cross? Remember that any who is hung on a cross is cursed. And is it not also true that God took this plan and turned it on its head and used the cross to defeat satan?

Colossians 2:15 (NET)
2:15 Disarming the rulers and authorities, he has made a public disgrace of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

There are multiple prophecies of Jesus birth, life, ministry, death and resurrection in the OT scriptures. Where is the prophesy in the OT of God’s turning around the evil plan of satan to kill Jesus on the cross and to use this plan to make a public spectacle of the enemy triumphing over him in it (the cross)? All of this was prophesied the very day that satan deceived the woman. And the type of death was prophesied (crushing of the heel on the cross) before crucifixion was even invented. God gets the glory for all of this.

However, taking your exegesis, all God is saying is that the serpent is going to be hated by people and he will try to bite men on the heel and they will try to kill him because they don’t like each other. And so the curse on the serpent becomes the curse on man with each after the other bruising one another. Does this interpretation fit with God’s way of turning the evil around and bringing the evil planned back on the head of the evil doer? Does this interpretation show that God is able to bring good out of evil? Or does this interpretation fail in bringing God the full glory that His Son brings Him through the destruction of the serpent?

Comparing the two interpretations shows a serious lack of meaning to your view and the fact that the cosmic battle of good and evil and between the serpent and the Messiah was understood long before Christ was born to crush the head of the serpent, showing to me a consistent pattern of God getting the glory. If you choose to reject that after all I have shown and stick to an interpretation of curses between snakes and men giving no glory to God, then I guess you have the right to your interpretation. But I don’t buy it at all.

However i’m not sure i’m ready to accept that the nail through the heel is fulfillment of Gen 3:15. That’s a bit too allegorical for me. You may be right, but i’d hold to that one loosely.

What I find so awesome is that the more evidence archeology finds, the more of a God-pattern we see. When I first saw the pictures of the heel being crushed by the nail several years ago I was jumping inside by the incredible marvel of God’s Word. It wasn’t a “bruising” of Christ’s heel at all and this never seemed to fit. When did this allegorical “bruising” happen to Christ? But when I could see that it was a literal “crushing” of the heel on the cross, it all came together for me. The more I read the Scriptures the more they come to life for me and the more I came to trust the God who can predict the serpent’s plan before it ever entered the serpent’s head. The serpent never got it or he would never have crushed the Messiah’s heel on the cross. If he had really known the character of God that evil is put back on the head of the evil doer, he would have understood that getting Christ on the cross was his death knell. Genesis 3:15 was fulfilled on the day that they nailed Christ’s heel onto the cross and satan never even knew it was coming.