Make Enemies with Sin and Satan

The Covenant of Grace

Our friendships say a lot about who we are. For example, the righteous should choose their friends carefully, knowing that the ways of the wicked lead them astray (Prov. 12:26). Friendships can make or break people, shaping who we are and making us better or worse for the experience. We tend to become like our friends, and our friends become like us. The covenant of grace is about making enemies with sin and Satan, and restoring friendship with God and his people, making us ultimately like Christ, who laid down his life for his friends (John 15:13).

Most of the Bible is about the covenant of grace, and the covenant of grace is about Christ (the Son). Westminster Larger Catechism 31 says, “The covenant of grace was made with Christ as the second Adam, and in him with all the elect as his seed.”¹ We need a better representative than Adam; we need new hearts, and we need to be like God. Put differently, we need Jesus to be our Savior, the Spirit to dwell in our hearts, and God to be our Father. Genesis 3:15 through Revelation 22 is a single story about how God does this great work. Genesis 3:15 gives us the basic ideas of the covenant of grace, serving as a gateway into the rest of the Bible, making it a key to seeing the breathtaking unity of Scripture. This may be both the most basic and most blessed verse on covenant theology in the Bible. To understand Genesis 3:15, we need to get oriented to who’s who.

The text says,

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.

What Is Covenant Theology?

Ryan M. McGraw

This accessible book explores the basics and blessings of covenant theology, revealing the breathtaking unity of Scripture, the glory of the Triune God, and implications for Christian living.

There are three contrasts in this text: the woman and the serpent, the Seed and the serpent, and the Seed and the seed.² “Offspring” in the ESV and “seed” in my translation mean the same thing here. First, beginning where the problem started, Eve fell into sin by making friendship with the serpent and eating the forbidden fruit. God would put an end to this alliance by putting “enmity” between the serpent and her, breaking her friendship with sin and Satan. “Enmity,” like the word “enemy,” means the opposite of friendship. By sinning, Eve acted in enmity toward God, treating Satan as her friend, but God would break this relationship.

Second, skipping to the end for a moment, the serpent would crush the Seed’s heel, while the Seed would crush the serpent’s head. Translating the idea here can be tricky, but “bruise” is a bit weak. “Crush” ups the stakes a bit more appropriately. The Seed is singular, and he singularly suffers and undoes the curse of sin that the serpent brought on humanity. Since the serpent would crush the Seed’s heel but have his head crushed, the serpent gets the harsher outcome of the encounter. Third, in the middle of the verse the seed is also plural, pitting Satan’s (or the serpent’s) people against the woman’s people. This sets the pattern for the division of nations in Genesis, pitting the seed of the woman against the seed of the serpent. Just as the church is associated with Christ, so the world is associated with Satan. This is where the notorious ten chapters of genealogy in 1 Chronicles becomes relevant. Chronicles, and other places in the Bible, mark off the serpent’s seed from the woman’s seed, which marks the division between the world and the church. Though sacraments come later in the story, they will point to the Son saving the seed, following the outline established in this verse. So how does Genesis 3:15 put the covenant of grace in a nutshell? When God saves sinners, he ends our alliance with sin and Satan, like he did with Eve. He does so by sending the Seed, the Christ, to destroy death (1 Cor. 15:54), Satan (Heb. 2:14), and the works of the devil (1 John 3:8). Yet the Seed represents a seed (Ps. 22:30). What Christ did, he did for and in the place of his people, affecting the whole group, which we call the church. Christ saves his people from their sins (Matt. 1:21), keeping them in the world while they are not of the world (John 17:15). It takes the rest of the Bible to show how Genesis 3:15 is a unifying thread running through the whole.

A few examples have to suffice here, promoting clear eyesight to see the breathtaking unity of Scripture rather than commenting on the entire Bible. First, Hebrews 2:14 says that Christ died “that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil.” Destroying the devil explains what crushing the serpent’s head means in Genesis 3:15. Drawing parallels to lots of other related verses shows what this entails. Satan was the “strong man” who bound people in the misery of sin. Now Christ has bound him, plundering his goods (Matt. 12:29). The false “ruler of this world,” Satan, is “cast out” (John 12:31) through Christ’s death on the cross. Though Satan walks about like “a roaring lion” seeking to devour people (1 Pet. 5:8), he is a defeated enemy who has “great wrath” because “he knows that his time is short” (Rev. 12:12). When the Seed of the woman crushed the serpent’s head, Satan’s relationship to the world changed. Though he remains active, he is not alive and well. Jesus destroyed, bound, crushed, and cast him out. As we know by experience, as well as from Scripture, he is not bound or destroyed in a way in which he does nothing. We often wish this were the case! Yet Christ bound him “that he might not deceive the nations any longer” (Rev. 20:3). While we might struggle with such bold statements, we should never underestimate how far and wide the Spirit has spread the gospel to this day, beginning in the book of Acts. Satan is like a fatally wounded warrior, who knows that he is already dead, yet who hates his enemies so much that he continues to claw after them until his dying breath.

Christ gained victory over sin, death, and Satan for his people, and his people share in his victory over Satan.

Both the spread of the church and its suffering through history exemplify these facts. A worldwide church is a clear indicator that the Seed of the woman has crushed the serpent’s head, which should encourage us to pray and persevere in a world that is hostile to Christ and his gospel. Second, Paul told the church in Rome that “the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Rom. 16:20). This statement takes Christ’s victory over Satan from the end of Genesis 3:15 and combines it with the separation of the woman’s seed and the serpent’s seed in the middle. Christ gained victory over sin, death, and Satan for his people, and his people share in his victory over Satan. Through sin, Satan was our “father,” and when we sinned we did his will instead of God’s (John 8:44). Friendship with the world, the flesh, and the devil is enmity with God (James 4:4). Now that Christ is on our side and has made us his friends, our victory over Satan is sure. What greater encouragement could we have in our personal battles against sin and through the church’s fears of wars, rumors of wars, opposition, and persecution?

Third, both the Seed and the seed tie together the covenant of grace nicely in Galatians 3. Without getting into every detail, the fact that Paul has God’s covenant dealings with Abraham and Moses as well as Genesis 3:15 in view makes this example powerful for pulling large sections of the Bible together. In Galatians 3:16, Paul writes, “Now to Abraham and his Seed were the promises made. He does not say ‘And to seeds,’ as of many, but as of one, ‘And to your Seed,’ who is Christ” (NKJV).³ Jesus Christ is the Seed of the woman who would crush the serpent’s head. Yet later in Galatians 3:29, Paul adds, “And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed” (NKJV). This “seed” is the church, which stands against Satan’s seed in the world. Appealing to a sacrament, or covenant sign, Paul brings God’s covenant promises home by saying, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Gal. 3:27), making Jews and Gentiles, slaves and freemen, men and women “all one in Christ” (Gal. 3:28). The Son saves his seed, sealing them in a sacrament, because the Seed of the woman crushed the serpent’s head. Paul explains in this chapter God’s intent in the Mosaic law by appealing to God’s covenant with Abraham, which clearly uses the terms of and applies the promise of Genesis 3:15.

Ideas like this should encourage us because what is true of Christ becomes true of his people. God would as soon reject the Son’s seed as he would reject his Son. Our friendship with God is just as secure as Jesus’s place with God. Genesis 3:15 showcases the breathtaking unity of Scripture in ways that few other verses (if any) can. God makes friends with us, through his Son, and by his Spirit. Jesus’s work results in crushing our enemy, forgiving our sins, changing our allegiances, and making us like God again. Because the Seed of the woman saved his seed by crushing the serpent’s head, we have a friend who changes both where we stand with God and what we are like in our lives.

Notes:

Westminster Larger Catechism (hereafter cited as WLC) q. 31 (CCC 345).
See John White, A Commentary upon the Three First Chapters of the First Book of Moses Called Genesis (London: John Streater, 1656), on Gen. 3:15.
While the ESV translation “offspring” is correct, the NKJV, which is equally correct, stresses the “seed” parallel I am making here.

This article is adapted from What Is Covenant Theology?: Tracing God's Promises through the Son, the Seed, and the Sacraments by Ryan M. McGraw.

Ryan M. McGraw (PhD, University of the Free State) is professor of systematic theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and has pastored in several churches. He has written nearly thirty books, focusing on weaving the Trinity into doctrine and life.

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