With just one more week until Christmas, I hope you are able to find some time to reflect on the real reason we celebrate this season. My hope is that these Christmas cards I’ve been sending you will help guide you during that time and encourage you in your relationship with Jesus.
The oldest Christmas card answers the most profound Christmas question about Messiah: Why was he born? I’m talking about Genesis 3, going all the way back to the beginning. It’s an amazing story about a woman who was tempted, takes the bait and with her husband falls victim to a lie from the serpent in the garden. “The serpent deceived me, and I ate,” she said. So God curses the serpent.
Theologians call this in Genesis 3:14-15 the proto-evangelion. That’s a technical Greek term, meaning the first evangelical statement, the first gospel statement in the entirety of Scripture. And it is also the first Christmas card that comes from the hand of Moses. Found in the Torah, the first five books, God says to the serpent, “Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all the cattle, and more than any beast in the field; on your belly you shall go, and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.”
Now this is poetry. But don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying it’s not true nor that it’s not as powerful and as rich as all the other Christmas cards that God has given us in the Bible.
The context of this “card” is the fallenness of man, the brokenness of the world. Sin is a word people don’t like to talk about much these days, but I don’t know how you can understand salvation and the glory of God’s forgiveness unless you understand the depravity of sin. And so here we have sin marring all of humanity and we see all around us to this very day the brokenness of that reality, the result of this very story.
But here’s the good news: God gives this proto-evangelion, this first word of hope. There’s going to be a seed. Normally when one talks about seed, it refers to the seed of the man. At least that’s how the Bible talks about seed. Yet in this passage it’s talking about the seed of the woman. Why is that? It’s important because this seed will actually crush the head of the serpent. We found out in the previous Christmas card that Messiah was going to be born not of the seed of man but the offspring of a woman, a virgin. So already we’re getting in the earliest Christmas card all the theological complexity of the later Christmas cards.
This seed is referring not just to descendants but to one descendant. In Jewish literature, there is something called the Targums, Jewish translations of the Hebrew Bible into Aramaic. It’s kind of like the Living Bible for Jews in the first century. And the Targum Yerushalmi, which is a very well-known paraphrase of this passage from Genesis, talks about the head of the serpent and the heel of the seed. They say that the seed is none other than Messiah, son of David. Well, what’s the deal with the serpent and the head and the heel? I think you probably can visualize this. When somebody crushes the head of a serpent, it’s dead. But when a serpent strikes the heel, while it’s pretty serious there is still hope. The Messiah, the son of David, the one who was born of a virgin, who is from eternity, will ultimately triumph, crushing the head of that serpent. Crushing the head of the serpent was poetry for how God intended to deal with the problem of sin and brokenness in this world. We needed a Savior. This Christmas card tells us we have one in Jesus Christ. Why would he be born? That well-loved Christmas carol, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” says it best: “Born that man no more may die. Born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth.”
Have a great Sunday, Gary!
Blessings,
David
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Jews for Jesus
60 Haight Street
San Francisco, California 94102 United States
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