THE PROMISED PROGENY
Genesis 3:15 “...He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.”
There were only two humans on planet earth when the Lord first gave the promise that a redeeming Messiah would come through the seed of the woman, and the promise was given while they were still in the Garden
of Eden, for it wasn’t until after they were driven out of the Garden that Adam knew Eve, and she conceived.
And is interesting to note that the promise was first issued to the serpent in the form of a death warrant that proclaimed that a
crushing blow to his head, from the seed of the woman, would be his punishment for leading Adam and Eve in a rebellion against the will of God.
Even though the promise had great implications for the human race, for it implied that from the seed of the woman the redemption would come that would deliver us from the consequences of Adam and Eve’s transgression, but from the serpent’s point of view it foretold his own demise for deceiving Adam and Eve and causing them to fall.
What that means is that the devil fears the fulfillment of the promise more, than the desire of us humans is, to see it come to pass, for he has everything to lose in its fulfillment. Since we humans have everything to gain through its fulfillment, we do not experience the desperation that the devil feels when reminded of the promise.
So that while humanity, the descendants of Adam and Eve, inherited a casual attitude towards the promise of a deliverer, the devil himself became obsessed by it, for he knew that in the fulfillment of the promise, his eternal doom was sealed forever and ever.
The reason why this is a very important subject for us to know today, is because if we know what the number one priority of the devil is, which is to try to stop the promise that God gave from coming to pass, then we can prepare ourselves against the deceptions that he will hurdle against us concerning the fulfillment of the promised Messiah.
Mark 13:22-23 “For false christs and false prophets will rise and show signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. But take heed; see, I have told you all things before hand.”
Biblical history is full of the devil’s attempt to keep the Messianic promise from coming to pass. Since the devil does not know the future, he puts his focus on those with whom God entered into a covenant.
Since the promise named the seed of the woman as the inheritor, the devil perverted the very first seed of the woman, Cain; and got him to kill the second seed of the woman, Abel; thereby taking them both out, for he did not think that God would use a murderer as the Messiah.
And what is interesting about this is that in biblical history many of those who assumed a role as God’s deliverers, ended up somewhere along the line, killing other people themselves. Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samson, David, Paul, to name a few, so that we can see the devil’s pattern against the promise repeating itself over and over again.
Then the devil preceded to pervert humanity through demonic infestation to the point that God had to destroy the human race during the days of Noah, where only eight humans survived.
The devil promptly corrupted Noah’s genes after the flood, so that he could not personally produce godly seed anymore, by a deed done to him by his son Ham, which re-introduced the curse after the flood upon humanity while at the same time taking Noah and Ham out of the line, that left just two sons of Noah to continue the seed line.
As you know, Shem’s seed was selected to continue the Messianic line, which led to his posterity, the Semitic people, out of whom God selected Abraham and entered into a covenant with him and his seed, the nation of Israel.
The devil then tried to kill the Messiah when He was born and came to the earth for the first time as the Seed of the woman.
Matthew 2:16 “Then Herod, when he saw that he was deceived by the wise men, was exceedingly angry; and he sent forth and put to death all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the wise men.”
An angel of the Lord warned Joseph to take the Child and flee to Egypt away from the jurisdiction of Herod, and was told not to return with the Child until after Herod’s death.
By the time that the devil found out that Jesus was the Messiah, the Seed of the woman, it was too late for him to stop His ministry.
Because by the time that the devil finally got his human cohorts to kill Jesus, the foundation of the deliverance of mankind from their sins according to the promise, had been laid, in line with the pronouncement of Jesus, when He said, that He would build His church and the gates of hell would not prevail against it.
On the cross, the crushing blow was delivered that sealed the fate of Satan and all his demons, for it was on the cross that the love of God towards His human creatures was fully revealed, God’s redemptive power could not be stopped, for there God kept the first part of His two-fold promise.
After God chose Abraham and entered into a covenant with him, the covenant was a two-fold covenant; God promised Abraham that his seed would be as the sand of the seashore and as the stars in the sky.
The first part of the covenant was a physical covenant represented by the sand of the seashore, and the second part of the covenant was a spiritual covenant represented by the stars in the sky.
To the nation of Israel, the physical descendants of Abraham, were given the physical land of the Middle East as an eternal possession. Biblical as well as secular history details the struggles of the Jewish nation for over three thousand years, in and out of the land of promise, as freemen and as slaves in their own nation as well as outside of it.
I’m just one generation away, since I was born in 1947, from the slaughter of six million Jews, who were systematically exterminated by a demonic Nazi regime whose leadership was hell bent in trying to keep those who are destined by God to inherit God’s physical promise from being alive to fulfill it.
But just like when they killed Jesus on the cross it only aided in bringing about the fulfillment of God’s eternal promises.
Even today, the devil is hard at work producing weapons of mass destruction and enough human entities to bring about his final solution against the Jewish people, which is their total annihilation in order to keep God from completing His first part of the covenant.
Many reasoning politicians do not believe that Iran or any other hate filled nation would ever really endeavor to destroy the Jewish people and the nation of Israel as they continuously proclaim they want to do. They do not know the history of hate, and they surely do not know the history of the devil.
That is why I am writing this historical perspective, no reasoning politician back then believed that Hitler could or would commit the atrocities that they so fervently, ruthlessly, and efficiently committed.
You cannot take the desperation of the devil or the power of hatred out of the equation. The first decade of the new millennium has seen the rise of an unprecedented and alarming level of hatred, among civil people, against Jews and Christians as prophesied for the end times.
Matthew 24:8-9 “All these are the beginning of sorrows. Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations for My name’s sake.”
By bringing Israel back to the Promised Land in this end of times, God has partially fulfilled His promise to them, He will complete the promise after He destroys all of Israel’s enemies and sets His kingdom age in their midst and rules the nations with an iron rod for one thousand years.
Which brings us to the second part of the covenant, the spiritual covenant which is represented by the church. This part of the promise has also partially been fulfilled, for the penalty for the sin of Adam and Eve was the death of the human race, but Jesus took care of that on the day when He rose from the grave, when all the powers of hell could not keep Him in that grave no matter how hard they tried.
John 11:26 “And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?”
Until the promise is completed and we are fitted with our new eternal physical bodies, our physical bodies can still be killed, but we really do not die, for His promise to us is that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.
Matthew 10:28 “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”
So just like the Jews who do not inherit the totality of the Promise Land until after all their enemies are destroyed and Messiah resides in their midst as King of kings and Lord of lords, we Christians do not receive our immortal bodies until our mortal enemy, death, is finally destroyed.
1 Corinthians 15:54-55 “So when this corruptible has put on incorruption, and this mortal has put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory. O Death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory?’”
Though the promise might be two-fold its still one promise, so that if the devil can stop any part of the promise from being fulfilled, he believes that he can stop the will of God for him which is his eternal damnation.
Of course, we know better, for we are the heirs of the good promise of God, His promised redemption. But since the devil has already lost, he is going down with the ship and aims at taking as many fools along with him as he can.
Psalm 56:13 “For You have delivered my soul from death. Have You not kept my feet from falling, that I may walk before God in the light of the living?”
If we look carefully at the present day isolation of the nation of Israel, and come to realize that basic Christian principals have been rejected at all levels of society, and that Bible believing Christians are continuously targeted for ridicule and rejection, and I’m just talking about the nations of the west, for last year the number of Christian martyr’s double in the nations that for the most part never embraced Christianity.
There is no other conclusion but that the devil is getting ready to strike with his vicious fury those who are the heirs of God’s promises in ways that have not been recently seen, and in places that have not seen such tribulations before, like here in the US.
We cannot stop that which is inevitable, Jesus told us that while in this world we would have tribulations, but it helps if we know where they are coming from and why.
It also helps if we keep our eyes on the final outcome.
Psalm 7:14-17 “Behold, the wicked brings forth iniquity; yes, he conceives trouble and brings forth falsehood. He made a pit and dug it out, and has fallen into the ditch which he made. His trouble shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come down on his own crown. I will praise the Lord according to His righteousness, and will sing praise to the name of the Lord Most High.”