Day 1 of 14 — The First Promise

Fourteen days from today is Resurrection Sunday. And I want to spend those fourteen days walking through the story that Scripture tells about the cross and the empty tomb.

Most of the time, our attention is on the final week, Palm Sunday through the Resurrection, and honestly, there’s a good reason for that. The events of that week are the center of everything Christianity stands on, and they deserve every bit of the attention they get. But that last week was the culmination of everything leading up to it. It was the peak of what God had been building across the entire Old Testament, and the meaning of Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday increases when you’ve followed the road that led there.

So that’s what we're going to do, beginning in Eden.

In Genesis 3, we start to get the picture. This is where everything starts to unravel. We see Adam and Eve eat from the tree they were commanded not to eat from, and the goodness of the world they knew was shattered. They hid from God in shame, a feeling they never knew until this point.

What follows in Genesis 3 is a series of curses that God hands down. The serpent is cursed. The woman will bear pain in childbirth, and the man will work the ground, and the ground will resist him for the rest of his life. Adam and Eve’s sin unleashed consequences that press into every part of creation.

But we also notice something extraordinary in the curse handed down to the serpent. God reveals that the judgment isn’t the end of the story.

“And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel.” (Genesis 3:15)

That’s the first promise of salvation in the Bible. Theologians call it the protoevangelium, the first gospel, because it’s the initial promise of what God intends to do about what just went wrong. So, even as judgment is being pronounced, God’s already revealing the way redemption will come, centuries before Abraham and the prophets.

God says there will be an offspring of the woman, a “seed,” and that this seed will crush the serpent’s head. The serpent will strike at his heel, but the final blow belongs to the offspring. The language is specific. This will cost something, the seed will be bruised, but the serpent will be destroyed.

What Adam and Eve couldn’t fully understand in that moment was that God was describing a person. A specific descendant of the woman who would one day go to war with the enemy and win, but would also sustain damage in the process. The entire rest of the Old Testament will spend centuries filling in the details of who this person is and what His victory will look like. Every promise God makes to Abraham and every lamb sacrificed under the Mosaic covenant traces back to this one sentence spoken in the garden.

And there’s something else worth noticing about the timing. God made this promise before Adam and Eve even asked for it. They were hiding, covered in fig leaves they’d sewn together. They had no expectation of mercy. And God gave them both judgment and mercy at the same time. The way to redemption was already in motion before the ones who needed it ever drew their first breath.

That’s the foundation on which everything else we’ll walk through over the next two weeks is built. The cross started here. It was already in view in Genesis 3. God made a promise in the middle of the fall, long before anything else in the story was written.

Tomorrow, the story continues as we go to Genesis 22.