By Graeme Innes, serving in Chişinău, Moldova
My children love Christmas so much that they would happily sing Christmas songs all year long! Part of their excitement is because their birthdays fall two days either side of Christmas. When we recently started reading through Genesis together, I asked them to look out for the Bible’s first clear mention of Christmas. It comes as early as the third chapter of the whole Bible, and the context is bleak. Humanity has just sinned. All of creation has been cursed. The Fall has occurred, and God’s very good world is now in dire straits.
Yet it’s precisely at this low point in the Bible story that God first promises the birth of his Son:
And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.(Genesis 3:15)
The question going forward throughout the Old Testament is this: who will be born as this descendant of Eve who will crush the serpent? Time and time again, a leader arises who looks so promising. But he’s never able to do enough, to save God’s people completely from their sin as well as their enemies.
It was always God’s plan that Jesus would be born so that he would defeat Satan. In fact, John tells us that the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work (1 John 3:8).
So,
- when we feel the ravaging effects of sin most acutely,
- when we are afflicted by the lies and attacks of the serpent,
- when we experience the utter brokenness of this world,
- when in Moldova (a stone’s throw from Ukraine) we are regularly and closely confronted with palpable darkness and evil because of the war,
…remember the wondrous first promise of Christmas from Genesis 3:15. Christmas reminds us that Jesus the serpent-crusher was born so that at the cross he would triumph over the evil one. God kept his promise. Jesus has come. And this side of the cradle and the cross, we know that he has already won.