The First Promise

Evening in a garden. A breeze moves through the trees. And two people are crouching in the shadows, holding their breath, hoping they will not be found.

This is the garden of Eden, the first home God made for the first people, Adam and Eve. Everything in it was good. Fruit trees of every kind. Rivers running through. And God himself walked there, close and friendly. God had given them one rule. Do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But a serpent, sly and smooth-talking, had whispered doubts. Did God really say that? Surely nothing bad will happen. And so Eve ate, and gave some to Adam, and he ate too. In that moment their eyes were opened. They felt ashamed. They stitched fig leaves together to cover themselves. Now the day is cooling, and they hear a sound they used to love: the sound of God walking in the garden.

For the first time ever, Adam and Eve hide from God. They slip in among the trees. And God calls out. “Where are you?” Not because God did not know. He was calling them out of hiding. Adam answers, his voice small. “I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked. So I hid.” God asks, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree I told you not to eat from?” And then the blaming begins. Adam points at Eve. “The woman you gave me, she gave me the fruit.” God turns to Eve. “What is this you have done?” And Eve points at the serpent. “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.” Fear, hiding, blaming. In a single afternoon, the friendship between people and God, and between people and each other, has cracked.

Now God turns to the serpent. He does not ask it any questions. He speaks a sentence over it. The serpent will crawl on its belly and eat dust. It is brought low. And then God says something that changes everything. Listen carefully, because this is the very first promise of its kind in the Bible. “I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will bruise your head, and you will bruise his heel.” A battle is coming. The serpent will strike at the heel of the woman's child, and the wound will be real. But the child will strike the serpent's head. The one who brought ruin into the garden will not win.

Think about where this promise comes. Not at the end of a happy day, but right in the middle of the worst one. Adam and Eve have broken trust. Hard consequences will follow: pain, hard work, and one day death. They will have to leave the garden. And yet, before they leave, God gives them hope to carry. A child is coming. Genesis then tells us that God made clothes from animal skins for Adam and Eve and dressed them himself. Even as they go out into a harder world, God is caring for them. And far, far down the years, Christians would look back at this moment and see the first light of Christmas: a child born of a woman, who would win the fight against evil, even though it would wound him.

Christians have read this promise as good news about Jesus for a very long time. Around the year one hundred and eighty, a church leader named Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon in what is now France, wrote a long book called Against Heresies. In it he explained that the child of the woman in Genesis is fulfilled in Jesus, who was born of a woman and defeated the enemy. Later Christians gave this verse a name: the protoevangelium, which means the first gospel, the first announcement of the good news.

The first promise. You can read it in Genesis chapter three, verses eight to fifteen. On the day people first hid from God, God came looking, and he brought a promise with him. So here is a question to carry with you. When you have done something wrong, do you hide from God, or let him find you?