A Garden View of Bethlehem

The world of man's serenity had just fallen apart. The perfect world God had created and given to Adam and Eve was now a broken world. The garden God gave to Adam to tend and manage was soon to be only a memory. All that God had pronounced as “good” was now under the corrupting influence of sin.

But in that moment, as God spoke heavy and ominous words of punishment to a disobedient man and woman, the black clouds of judgment were parted just enough to give a glimpse of hope. Indeed, before God passed sentence upon the offending humans, He first predicted an ultimate sentence of death for the serpent who had deceived the pair.

Genesis 3:15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel. "

Not that day, as Adam and Eve were expelled from their first home, nor in the near future, as they and all their children tasted the bitter fruit of their rebellion, but someday and most certainly, God promised to stage history’s greatest and most decisive battle, pitting the serpent against one of the woman’s human descendants. The man would suffer a wound “on the heel”; serious but not beyond healing. The serpent would suffer a wound “on the head”; fatal and permanent.

It would take thousands of years for the battle scene to take shape, but for all those who waited for that day, the promise had been given, and would be kept. A man would be born of a woman, a man who would enter the world as the Baby of Bethlehem, the subject of the angels’ song; and He would be the One to slay the serpent of sin and death.

Every person born since that day in the Garden begins life under the weight of that burden laid upon Adam and Eve; a burden that remains despite every effort men might make to undo it by their works of religion or altruism. But hope was given from that day unto our own. Christ came, and lived, and died, and rose, and defeated Satan's power of death. And hope remains for all who will receive, in sincere and surrendered faith, the King of kings and Lord of lords, born to a woman, that night in Bethlehem.