I.-THE WOMAN’S SEED
In one way it may seem as though a great division in God's book comes between the second and third chapters of Genesis. From a scene pronounced very good and in full accord with the Creator who has brought all to perfection, we pass to an entirely changed condition in chapter three. We pass from accord to discord, from blessing to curse, from peace to conflict, from innocence to sinfulness, from light to darkness, from contemplation of the goodness of God to that of the evil of Satan.
But here commences that work-so different to what occupies our attention in the first two chapters-which shall not cease until it brings in the day of eternity. Of that day the seventh serves as a type, and the vision of its glory closes the volume of inspiration. So God, His rest broken, His creature fallen, His wisdom and power called in question, now becomes the Worker to reverse the whole condition. This, however, is not to be accomplished by a word like that at the beginning when He spake and it was done, but though a long process of test and trial as decade, century, and millennium roll on; His purpose all the while slowly but surely unfolding as the lessons of the ages are imprinted on the passing years for every rank of His intelligent creatures to read and ponder when Time's great book is finished.
That as much of this as He desired faith to know might be a present possession, God wrote His wonderful Word, itself a progressive revelation which carries us out of eternity along the stream of time into eternity again. With it now completed we, upon whom the ends of the ages have come, can look backward over their record, and look forward to aeons yet to come, the course and end of which faith discerns, in outline at least, from these God-breathed Scriptures of holiness and truth.
Yet after all there is not so much of a division between these first chapters of Genesis as it might seem. Without a doubt the seven days present a kaleidoscopic view of that great moral and spiritual reversal of the ruined state brought about by sin, just as in them we also have a record of the work which changed a scene of chaos to one of order, of barrenness to fruitfulness, of death to life. So that great work, whose record commences in Genesis 3 and comes to its glorious finale in the Apocalypse, is linked with what precedes, as are the means to the end.
By way of introduction, in a few master-strokes God gives a picture setting forth the essential characteristics of His great salvation. By it man is brought out of his moral and spiritual ruin into the fulness of the new creation in which all is of God who reconciles, and in which He finds His eternal rest. How the sublime simplicity of this record brings mind and soul into immediate touch with Him. Beautifully simple, yet divinely emphatic, its language is, "God created," "God said," "God made." It is God's work and rest all through. This wrought all the change. And now as we come to view, not a physical and material ruin, but what answers to it in the moral and spiritual realm, it is God from whom all proceeds by which the work of transformation is effected. Nothing that creature-mind could plan, whether angel or man, could meet the condition. "You… dead in trespasses and sins…but God…hath quickened."
In what God says to the serpent we have what embodies the greatness of His eternal purpose, as we consider it in the light of His completed revelation. It is the bud of promise which shall gradually open and bloom as the flower of eternity-its glory never fading, its fragrance ever filling the universe of God.
If the ages must begin to run their course with a tabernacle* in which the cherubim dwell and the flame of the flashing sword is set, and man driven out of the Garden, they shall end when the tabernacle of God is with men, "and God Himself shall be with them, their God." *The word for "placed" in ver. 24 is shaken, which, in the form here used, means "caused to dwell," and as in Josh. 18:1; Ps. 78:60, "to pitch, or set up a tent." From it is derived the word for "Tabernacle" as used to denote the framework and inner curtains of God's dwelling-place.* How shall these things be? The Seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head, though in this conflict the Victor is to know the bruising of His heel. That smitten head shall find its place for the ages of ages in the lake of fire and brimstone, while the wounded Conqueror shall be seen at the center of God's vast universe of bliss when God shall be all in all. Then shall have come to pass in its full meaning the primal announcement of the serpent's curse, humiliation, and utter impoverishment, which we hear fall from the lips of God in the Garden of Eden. With the last confused sounds of conflict silenced, the great calm of eternity shall ensue, and with the all-pervading peace of God, the God of peace shall be with men.
Here too in this, the first promise and prophecy as the ages are about to begin, there is embedded "the hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised before the ages of time."
But we must turn to what is ever central to all of which we thus speak, and which indeed is the foundation upon which rests the accomplishment of this great program-the Cross. As its far-reaching results pass before Him who is the Seed, He says, "The hour is come that the Son of Man should be glorified." Only by Him being as the grain of wheat that dies can the seed of the eternal purpose yield its increase. Both the glory of the Father and His own glory are connected with this hour. He makes its meaning plain in a way that links with our present theme. "Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out:and, I if I be lifted up out of the earth, will draw all to Me." The inspired comment is, "But this He said, signifying what death He was about to die."
Now the general principles, character, and course of "this world" are disclosed in the actions recorded of the three who first participate in this Garden-scene; and manifestly the spirit-being who initiated this system by his action on this occasion is its ".prince." The judgment of both come to light in the hour of the Cross. It is the hour of concentrated struggle between this "prince" and the "Seed." In one way the noise of battle had rolled down the centuries from the days of Cain and Abel, as the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman – two companies – developed in the course of time; but when He came who was ever first in the mind of God, then, too, the adversary came again into special action to assail this Second Man, as we see he appeared to ensnare the first. Defeated, he "departed from Him for a time" (Luke 4:13, New Trans.); and now in this hour, as the Lord says, "The ruler of the world comes, and in Me he has nothing" (John 14:30).
Had it been said that dust should be the serpent's meat, symbol as that must be of death-for him the second death in abject humiliation-as we have seen the final issue must be? But is this now God's Man, the promised Seed? Ah, he will cause Him to eat the dust of death in all the bitterness and horror of it-crucified; will end the struggle in a show of power which would prove God to be what he had insinuated at the beginning (Gen. 2:17 with 3:5). But the Cross, though such a strange and awful end to such a life as that of this Man, apparently such an utter defeat of God and good, turns out to be the eternal witness that not God but the serpent is "the father of lies." For since "the children"-that seed of the woman which began in its , collective sense with Abel, and so is seen to be the seed of faith-"partake of blood and flesh, He also, in like manner, took part in the same, that through death He might annul him who has the might of death, that is, the devil." He humbled Himself unto death, even that of the cross. He was made some little inferior to angels on account of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God He should taste it for every thing. He does not take it from the enemy, but says to God, "Thou hast laid Me in the dust of death." In this depth of humiliation He put His heel in crushing power upon the head of the enemy, though in doing so He suffers to gain the victory.
If this is the inner meaning of the Cross, we must link it with what it leads to. Does not the heel of the Seed crushing down the head of the serpent tell of His exaltation to a place of power, so that the inner meaning of His suffering shall be translated into acts of irresistible might? In the course of its exercise, He will effectually remove forever this enemy to his own destined depth of abject humiliation and utter poverty. Out of the depths He has ascended into the heights, "above all the heavens, that He might fill all things," and "He has led captivity captive."
Here then, as we view the Cross in its relation to the woman’s Seed, we see the victory over the adversary who wrought to dishonor god and drag down the first man with the race into his own condemnation. That victory makes possible the bringing of a multitudinous seed out of the ruin to abide forever in the perfection of the Second Man and Last Adam, even the new creation composed of those who are of faith, along with all things, in due course, reconciled by Him to the fulness of the godhead, peace having been made by the blood of His cross.
This fittingly appears as the first foreshadow of the Cross, when god became the great Worker to accomplish that scene of perfect blessing in abiding glory fore-shadowed in the first two chapters of Genesis. John Bloore.
(To be continued, D. V.)