Promise to Win Over Evil
Genesis 3

Galatians 4.4 tells us that “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son”. The advent of Messiah was crucial to the fulfillment of a number of God’s promises, including His promise to triumph over our enemy. Here are the highlights:

1. Conclusion: future certain
2. Creation: first day
3. Curse: falling down hard
4. Cure: fixing the problem

There is a sense in which the unknown contributes to the excitement of a sporting event. To a certain measure that’s what brings people out. As the teams meet on the field or court and begin the contest we see that nobody has a plan that will always work without a hitch. Athletic competition is a tradeoff of strategies, capitalizing on mistakes, out-maneuvering, out-strategizing, and out-performing the other. If the game is a blowout, it’s not quite the fun of a close contest.

The unknown lends to excitement in sports, perhaps. In other things it makes us anxious. Depending on how high the stakes are when we’re waiting for a prognosis from the doctor, it’s not exciting, it’s anxiety. If in fact, we’re in war and there are two competing sides, the stakes are very high and we’re not excited about that particularly, but we can be anxious.

The Bible teaches and life underscores the fact that there is a spiritual war going on around us all the time. The Bible talks about a devil, about his minions, about a fallen creation, about a constant, on-going conflict between what is good and what is evil. However, there is a difference.  When it comes to our contest as Christians, when it comes to what God is doing in building His kingdom, there is no Plan B, there is no backup, there is no alternative course. What God is doing in His toe-to-toe battle with the devil is not a contest between equals. It’s a done deal and there is no Plan B.

When we come to this time of year we talk about Christmas and the arrival of Jesus as a baby in the manger in Bethlehem as though everything had deteriorated to such a point that God finally had to send His Son, as though there was a question as to how it might turn out. The Bible is so clear that is not the case.

Galatians 4:4 states, “When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son.” Not a moment early, not a moment late, He didn’t send Jesus to Bethlehem because the weather was poor over the South Atlantic, but in accordance with His plan, which He had worked out in the council of His own will, before time began. Everything came together perfectly and continues to do so.

We rejoice at Christmas not because God thought up a way but because God made a way and continues to hold true to that way without any variation whatsoever. When it comes to the kingdom of God, when it comes to eternity and heaven and hell, we don’t want a Plan B. We don’t want ambiguity. We don’t want “maybe.” We want and we have a God who has put it all together.

There are a couple of passages in Scripture that reflect, you might say, the anxiety of God’s people wondering perhaps if God really is in control. I’ll just reference the 5^th chapter of Revelation. This is the scene where the apostle John is transported to Heaven. In the first verse of Revelation 5 the cry goes out: Is anyone worthy to open the scroll to receive the Book from God and to execute justice on earth, because there is no justice there now?

Scripture says they looked all over the place and no one was found who could pull it off. So with the thought that all things are just continuing to be buffeted about by the prince of darkness, by the vagaries of sin, and by the course of this world, the apostle said, “We’re doomed and he cried and cried and cried until the angel said, “Stop. Indeed One has overcome and it’s Jesus.”

The very next chapter, just prior to the judgments being unleashed upon the earth in Revelation 6, the apostle John sees a vision of saints who had been martyred and they are beneath the throne of God. What is their question? “How long, Oh Lord? How long will it be before you vindicate your great name and our sacrifice?” The rest of Revelation is as though God is saying, “We are right on track. We are exactly where God wants us to be.”

God has been on top of things all along. Beginning at the beginning. That’s where we’re going to be today – in the book of Genesis. Beginning in Genesis, He began the restoration process that will take His kingdom right on to Heaven. Christmas fits the program perfectly. If I had to entitle the next five messages, you might say it’s going to be about Jesus in Genesis. How God, beginning very early, began to work the plan that would restore fallen creation and places people where He’s destined them to be all along.

This morning we’ll talk from the earliest parts of the Bible where  God’s promise to defeat His enemy is found.  Know this, God’s chief enemy, Satan, and our chief enemy faces certain defeat and doom. Certain. It’s not up in the air, it’s not a tug of war, it’s not a maybe. It is done. Please understand that’s where this is going and we’re going to hit a few highlights along the way.

1. Conclusion: future certain

God has a time certain and it’s going to be done and there isn’t going to be any tweaking it. God is going to make sure it happens. He has a time certain. I recommend that from time to time we go to the end of the book to remind ourselves where this is all going. We’ll start with that briefly this morning.

When we’re studying God, theology, or Bible truth, let’s remember what His advantage is, among many others. That is, you and I view events as though we were alongside a street watching a parade. We can see it unfold one event at a time. God doesn’t see it that way. He’s in the blimp, above the parade, and He sees the end as He sees the beginning and He runs the parade.

In our experience, standing alongside the street, the end of the parade is not here yet. But in God’s experience from above the parade He sees it and it is now. That’s how it is in Heaven in Revelation 21.

What is certain in Heaven? For one thing, God is there – in person.

Revelation 21
 ²²I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.

They are there! Won’t that be something to have a quiet time with God that way? There won’t be need for light there because God is light. People will be there. Today in our service we have Gentiles from China rubbing up against Gentiles from the United States. People from every tribe and tongue and group and nation will be there, walking the streets of gold.

God sees that now. It’s done in His eyes. That’s good news.

There will be fellowship there, along the order of which we’ve never known. With fellowship and with people will go responsibility. Jesus talked about that. Responsibilities for His people in Heaven. We don’t know exactly what that will involve. There is a river there flowing, a lovely, beautiful river, you might say a river of life. Not surprisingly, a tree of life. Where do we see these things ever before in all time and history in the Bible? In Genesis. In the Garden. Before the fall, that’s how it was. Things were good then. Things will be better thereafter. There will be not only a return to the original bliss of the Garden. It will be an improvement over the original Garden because there will be no evil there, nor will there be the potential for it as there was in the first garden.

2. Creation: first day

I have this point broken down into two; the first is a lot of good was there, the second, not everything was good.

Regarding creation, the Bible teaches the evening and morning there were days. I would consider them to be literal days. One thing we need to understand about the creation God put together back in the early times is that it was good. God saw that it was good and that it met his approval. It then, in a sense, reflected his character. Jesus said there is only One good, and that’s God. So when He declares something good, that’s all we need to know. It reflects perfectly what He wanted it to be.

He got to a certain point, having created all, Genesis 1:31, He saw all that He had made and behold, it was very good! That will be as Heaven, very good. God will approve it and stamp it so. God blessed His creation. He created (verse 21) things in the sea, animals, birds and so forth. Verse 22 – God blessed them. Later on He created people, men and women, in His image as the only creation in His image, the only creation to reflect, in any sense, His character, the only creation with potential for holiness and eternal action, self-awareness and all the good things that only people have as opposed to all other creation. God took a look at that (verse 28) and He blessed them.

What does that mean? Let’s remember the word “blessing” means that God focused His favor specifically there. He blessed them. He favored them, deliberately and by design. The creation was good and it was blessed and for reasons which in some sense are left to our speculation, Lucifer also walked around in the Garden. The Bible doesn’t tell us exactly where he came from. There are indications in the books of Isaiah and Ezekiel that Lucifer was an angel. As the mightiest of all the angels, the most intelligent of all the agents, he rebelled directly against God in Heaven. He vaunted himself (Isaiah 14:12) directly against the authority of God Himself. God tossed him out at some point way back in the very early days before the fall. We do not know exactly when He did that, relative to the order of His creation.

We do know that when Adam and Eve, our first parents, called the Garden their home, there was a creature there who was very attractive. He was the serpent; he was the devil, and he was instrumental in enticing the man and the woman to rebel against God as he had done, making for the greatest tragedy in the history of the human race.

Why did God let the devil in there anyway? Wouldn’t you think that it would serve God’s purposes better if the devil had just been sent to a different planet? A couple of possibilities here: One is to be used of God to test those creatures made in God’s image. “My kids are really good kids!” Have they been tested yet? “I’m a fantastic Christian!” Really? Tell me about the tests you’ve taken and have you passed?

So there’s a sense in which we appreciate God’s beauty more by the contrast introduced by the enemy. Secondly, the devil is judged. The devil and all his thousands, perhaps millions, of demonic hoards are ripe for judgment and they in their misbehavior on this earth are accruing a list of demerits themselves for which they will surely pay and they know it.

What’s bad? Fallen angels, especially Satan, leading to what I would call an infestation of spirits on this earth, evil spirits, who could not beat the Creator and so targeted the pinnacle of His creation. They can’t take out God, but they can sure affect the lives of God’s people and so they do.

How do they do that? Here are some thoughts. Lest you think the enemy is to be underestimated, the Bible is quite clear here. The enemy is a liar. He does not traffic in the truth. He rejoices in a lie, in deceit. He is a murderer, a thief, a destroyer of people and of things that people hold dear. He disguises himself from time to time as an angel of light, looking real good. I believe he did that in the Garden with Eve. He misleads. He distracts. He does what he can do to deter people from the truth in an effort to populate hell to its maximum capacity because misery, even in the spirit world, seems to love company.

Think of this – of your deepest pain, that which is closest to the surface. Let me tell you, the devil loves it. He thinks it’s great that we hurt and why we hurt. He loves fractured relationships and that’s just the beginning. He hates kids. He rejoices in the millions killed before they are born. He rejoices in that. He’s a murderer. He is opposed to life. He’s out to kill and steal and destroy. He loves death. He encourages and applauds pain, your pain and mine. He loves it.

He affects people at every level. At the personal level, this happens when we drop our guard and empty our minds and open our souls to whatever avenue may be open to us, whether the Ouija board, Miss Cleo, or the horoscope. We need to be extremely cautious there. He would love to ruin us personally. He loves the statistics on the fractured family. He will ruin a community. He’s very active at the national and international levels of hatred and killing. His world is a dark one. He’s committed to all these things, knowing his doom is sure. He will go down swinging, kicking and screaming, and dragging as many with him as possible. That’s our enemy.

His hatred has been seething since he was kicked out of the heavenly realms himself, which helps us understand what happens next under the curse. It’s a natural for the devil to want to bring down the first couple. It’s perfectly in keeping with his twisted character. So he, in Genesis 3, goes to the woman and entices her to sin. He deceives her, misrepresents God, goes contrary to the words God gave her through her husband, and brings her to eat the fruit that was forbidden.

3. Curse: falling down hard

God confronts the man, the woman, and the devil and curses them. It’s interesting how Satan listened to his own heart, the woman listened to the devil, and the man listened to the woman, and nobody listened to God. He had spoken so very clearly.

Paul, in I Timothy 2, points out that in the garden, the women was deceived, the man was disobedient. There’s an interesting distinction between the two.

Following the curse, God caught them. God sought them. God covered them. God began extending grace to this rebellious couple immediately and then He levied upon them curses from four different directions.

Genesis 3:16
¹⁶To the woman He said, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children, yet your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."

The woman is cursed from the standpoint of her domestic situation. “I will multiply your pain in childbirth.” It will go beyond what otherwise it would have been and your desire will be for your husband. That is best taken, in my opinion, to mean your desire will be to run your husband, to control your husband. But he will be lord over you. You have that to deal with to remind you of disobedience.

To the man (verse 17) he said, “Cursed is the ground because of you. In toil you shall eat of it.” It’s interesting that these curses are perpetual. Every time there is a scrap in the home, every time there is a baby born, every time a guy goes out to fight the soil, day after day after day, the reminder is graphic, tangible: “We have blown it. Oh my, how we need mercy.”

“As an effect of the curse, you will have to scrape it out, brother, by the sweat of your face. Work is no longer going to be primarily joyous, fulfilling responsibility, as it was previously. Now it’s going to be a constant reminder that you are rolling a rock uphill. You shall eat bread by the sweat of your face until you return to the ground. You are dust. I was there. I made you from it, and you will be dust again. You have settled for a distant, distant second by disobeying.”

Now the business about the cursed ground and so forth was picked up on by Solomon in the book of Ecclesiastes and later by Paul in the book of Romans as a reminder that the whole creation is affected by this curse.

In Romans 8:19, the apostle writes:

¹⁹ For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God.
²⁰ For the creation was subjected to futility (vanity, fruitlessness, frustration), not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope
²¹ that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
²² For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.

The whole creation groans together until now. Every natural disaster reminds us that we live in a cursed world and that is how it is.

Finally – on the serpent, verse 14.

Genesis 3:14-15
 ¹⁴The LORD God said to the serpent,
  "Because you have done this,
       Cursed are you more than all cattle,
       And more than every beast of the field;
       On your belly you will go,
       And dust you will eat
       All the days of your life;

   ¹⁵And 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."

Here’s interesting language. John 3:16 is preceded by Genesis 3:15. As a matter of fact, theologians down through the centuries have labeled Genesis 3:15 theologically as what they call the “proto-evangelium,” the first gospel, talking in terms like this: “There will be enmity between the serpent and the seed of the woman and serpent, you’ll get to snipe at his, but he’ll crush your head.”

He will crush your head. If you’ve ever duked it out with a poisonous snake, there is a certain sense of adrenalin satisfaction that comes when you crush his head because he can’t do that any more and it’s over.

Later on in the book of Romans, the apostle Paul picks up on this in the 16^th chapter, writing to the believers in Rome he says hang in there, brothers and sisters, because the Lord will soon crush Satan under your feet. The picture is the picture of conflict in which one is the clear winner. The seed of the woman will have his foot on the head of the serpent. In ancient Near Eastern culture that was the picture of total victory.

Remember in the book of Joshua, how Joshua and his generals put their feet on the necks of those they had conquered from the north, signifying “we win and you lose.” It’s over and absolutely done with. The curse on the serpent is the first expression that God one day through His Seed will do away with the enemy forever. This, of course we know, Jesus has taken care of.

The seed of the woman will be the deliverer. That’s great news and of course the people picked up on that and waited for it.

4. Cure: fixing the problem

What is the cure – and this takes us to Jesus. Jesus showing up in Bethlehem wasn’t just, “Oh, I wondered if God was going to do anything.” No, when the fullness of time had come, once God had orchestrated history to the perfect juncture, Jesus was born in Bethlehem specifically in accordance with prophecy through the book of Micah, chapter 5, verse 2. Right then, right there, absolutely on time. It’s interesting that the serpent would oppose him from the beginning. It should not take us by surprise that Herod the Great, the paranoid, almost dead king – he had about 2 years to go at the time Jesus was born – ordered all babies in Bethlehem to be slaughtered. I wonder who was standing by applauding that stroke. I wonder who might have put it into the head of that demented king. I wonder where the devil was on that day, or do I really not wonder at all.

Something interesting happened in the early chapters of Luke’s gospel. Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River and upon His baptism a voice came from heaven, as well as a dove that settled upon Him. God’s voice from Heaven said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

Immediately following that, Jesus goes to the wilderness for 40 days and is tempted there by the devil. Isn’t it interesting that in all of Scripture the devil is shown to have only two conversions with people? The first is in the Garden with the first Adam and the second is in the wilderness with the last Adam.

Here is Jesus dialoguing with the devil. Their conversation is very interesting. The devil levies several tests at the Son of God, as if to say, “Are you really the Son of God? Seriously? OK, then command these stones to become bread. Bow down to me and you can have all these cities. Cast yourself off the pinnacle of the temple and see if God holds you up.” In every single case, the devil is testing Jesus’ submission to the authority of God. The test that he himself had flunked. The test that Satan had flunked in heaven he now flings at the Son of God, who in each case comes back with Scripture saying, “It is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. I’m in submission to Him. You shall worship and serve the Lord your God only, he says to the devil, and you shall not put the Lord your God to the test.

In each case, He’s saying, “I’m submissive to the Father,” because Jesus knows that His submission is what will set Him up as the perfect sacrifice, the Lamb of God who will take away the sins of the world. He had to be perfect to do that. He had to submit to be perfect. It’s very important and Jesus knew it. The devil didn’t.

The interesting thing about the devil and the angelic world is that they do not seem to understand redemption and salvation, perhaps because they themselves are not candidates for it. Jesus went about His earthly ministry and a few very interesting things happen.

In Matthew 8,  Jesus was across the Sea of Galilee and these demoniacs come out and now it’s Jesus against the demons. What do the demons say? “Jesus, Son of God.” They know Him. “Have you come to torment us before the time?” They know where they’re going. They know what their judgment is, absolutely sure.

In II Peter 2:4,it talks about God relegating fallen angels to a place in the nether world where they are confined until the judgment. “Send us into the pigs. Don’t send us there! We know what’s coming. Please give us a little more time.”

In John 16, Jesus talks about the arrival of the Holy Spirit and His convicting work. He talks about the role of the Holy Spirit as being a convicting role. He says He’ll convict the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment.

John 16:11
 ¹¹and concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world (Satan) has been judged.

It’s done and Jesus knew it. At the cross, the devil was pushing for the crucifixion of the Son of God. It says in John 18 the devil entered the heart of Judas Iscariot, convincing him to betray Him, wanting Jesus to be killed. The devil knows a lot more than you and I. He’s a good student of history, he made a lot of it. But he doesn’t understand redemption, so he’s pushing Jesus to the cross, working through Judas, working through the betrayal, helping unwittingly to facilitate mankind’s greatest benefit. Because it was there at the cross, Jesus paid for your sins and my sins as the perfect Lamb of God.

Hebrews 2:14-15
¹⁴Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil,
 ¹⁵and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives.

Death, where is your victory. Death, where is your sting? Its greatest proponent is beaten and he’s beaten by Jesus. Jesus, who began his earthly time in a manger in Bethlehem right on schedule.

The Nazis in Germany, the architects of the holocaust of the Jews, had an expression they used for their idea of what it would take to rid the world of the pestilence of Judaism. In their words, they called it “the final solution.”

The Bible has a final solution too, only this one is from the platform of righteousness.

Rev 20:10
 ¹⁰And the devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are also; and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

That’s the final solution, where the devil is concerned, and it’s done, as far as God is concerned.

Where does that leave us? We are with Jesus on this one – and that is this: As Jesus submitted to God’s authority to gain earthly victory over the devil on a day-to-day fashion, that’s where we are to be too. We must submit to God’s authority as well, drawing near to Him.

James 4:6-8
⁶But He gives a greater grace Therefore it says, "GOD IS OPPOSED TO THE PROUD, BUT GIVES GRACE TO THE HUMBLE."
⁷Submit therefore to God Resist the devil and he will flee from you.

Submission to God is resistance to the devil. His agenda is pretty obvious. It has everything to do with sin. When we have the choice to sin the Bible calls on us to submit to God, not to the enemy. Don’t fraternize with the enemy. In our submission to God, God fills our lives, leaving no place for the enemy, and so he will flee from you.

      ⁸Draw near to God and He will draw near to you Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and
       purify your hearts, you double-minded.