THE EARLIEST GOSPEL
‘I will put enmity between thee and the woman,’ etc.
I. The first time Prophecy opened her lips, it was to pronounce these words. To our first parents they were full of hope and consolation. In some mysterious way their loss was to be repaired; a Deliverer was to be provided. This promise was all their Bible. What, in truth, is all the rest of Scripture but the development of this great primeval promise of a Redeemer?
II. Never for an instant was this tremendous announcement absent from the recollection of the enemy of our race. Thoroughly versed in Scripture (as the history of the Temptation proves), he watched with intense anxiety the progress of prophetic announcement to mankind concerning One that was to come.
III. It is not to be supposed for an instant that Satan understood the mystery of our Lord’s Incarnation. Caught in the depths of that unimaginable mystery, he did not know until it was too late that it was Very and Eternal God with whom he had entered into personal encounter. Repulsed in the wilderness, he was made fully aware of the personal advent of his great Enemy. At the death of Christ the kingdom which he had been consolidating for four thousand years was in a single moment shattered to its base.
IV. The history of the Fall plainly intimates that on the side of the flesh man is most successfully assaulted by temptation. Four thousand years of warfare have convinced the enemy of our peace that on this side the citadel is weakest, is most easily surprised, is most probably captured.
Dean Burgon.
Illustration
(1) ‘Let us make it “war to the knife”! Let us hate evil with a perfect hatred. I will suggest a little creed for the day: “I hate meanness! I hate impurity! I hate falsehood! I hate injustice!” I like a good “hater,” but it is sin he must hate. This is the one pardonable “enmity” of the soul.’
(2) ‘We have here the beginning of Redemption. God said to the serpent, “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.” As sometimes in nature we find the bane and the antidote almost side by side—in Corsica, e.g. the mineral springs of Orezza are said to be a specific for the malarial fever produced in the plains below—so in this chapter with its story of defeat, captivity, and ruin, there is the promise of victory, deliverance, and recovery. The words I have quoted are sometimes called “the Protevangelium,” or “the Gospel before the Gospel.” They could not, of course, mean for those who first heard or read them all that they mean to us who find their complete fulfilment in Christ; yet even from them their deeper meaning could not have been wholly hidden. When men who felt the misery of sin and lifted up their hearts to God for deliverance, read the words addressed to the serpent, “is it reasonable to suppose that such men would take these words in their literal sense, and satisfy themselves with the assurance that serpents, though dangerous, should be kept under, and would find in the words no assurance of that very thing they themselves were all their lifetime striving after, deliverance from the evil thing which lay at the root of all sin?” ’