“Unlikely Heroes of the
Faith: Eve”
Grace to you and peace from
God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.
This morning we begin a new
fall sermon series for October and November on “Unlikely Heroes of the Faith.”
Maybe sometimes you don’t feel or act like what we think a “saint” should
be, a hero of the faith. It may
surprise you to learn that the great saints of old often felt that way too.
We begin today “in the
beginning,” in Genesis, with today’s Old Testament Reading and the story of Eve.
Eve is an UNLIKELY hero of the faith for two reasons.
First of all, because Eve is the first SINNER recorded in the Bible.
Like the mythological Pandora, who opened her box and brought misery and
suffering into the world, Eve really did, by her rebellion and sin against God,
bring every kind of misery and suffering into our world.
As Paul says in 2nd Corinthians, “the serpent deceived Eve by his
craftiness.” And in 1st Timothy he says, “[Eve] being deceived, fell into
transgression.”
Eve’s transgression wasn’t
just bad news for her. Like the
mythical Pandora’s box, Eve’s transgression really did have cosmological,
universal, devastating consequences, for us all.
For, as Paul explains in Romans, “In this way death came to all men,
because all sinned. . .
Consequently, the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men. . .”
This infection of sin was
spread from Eve first to her husband Adam: “When the woman saw that the fruit of
the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for
gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who
was with her, and he ate it.” And
from Adam and Eve, this infection of sin has been passed down to us all, what we
call original or inherited sin.
Genesis tells us that
originally, “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created
them.” This does not mean that human
beings are created with a PHYSICAL resemblance to God.
For, as Jesus said, “God is a spirit.”
So, the image of God does not mean a physical likeness, but rather that
humanity was originally created with a SPIRITUAL likeness to God, holy and
sinless, like God himself.
But, because of the fall into
sin by our first parents, we all lost this spiritual likeness, we all lost the
image of God. A few chapters later,
Genesis says, “When God created humankind, he made them in the image of God. . .
[Adam] became the father of a son in his OWN image, according to his OWN
likeness.”
Like a fabulous inheritance
squandered by an ancestor, so that instead you inherit only debts, the image of
God, which humanity was intended to have, has been lost, forfeited by our first
ancestors. So, instead of being born
in the image of God, holy and sinless, Adam’s descendants are born “in his OWN
image, according to his OWN likeness.”
Like a hereditary disease, that sin is passed down to us all; we are all
now born in the image of sinful man.
As David says in Psalm 51, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time
my mother conceived me.”
So, Eve was the first sinner,
who by her rebellion and sin against God, brought every kind of misery and
suffering into our world, and sin and death to us all.
How then can Eve be considered a hero of the faith?
Another reason Eve seems an
unlikely hero of the CHRISTIAN faith is that all this took place in the era we
call “B.C.”, many thousands of years “Before Christ.”
So, how can Eve be a hero of the CHRISTIAN faith?
From a sociological
perspective, Christianity is a relatively new religion.
We are now in the year 2015 A.D., meaning “Anno Domini,” the “Year of the
Lord,” approximately 2,015 years since Jesus’ birth.
But, it is hard to conceive that when Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt with
the baby Jesus some 2,000 years ago, many of the pyramids and great temples of
ancient Egypt were at that time already 3,000 years old.
Confucianism and Buddhism, were already nearly 500 years old when Jesus
was born, as was the temple to the goddess Athena on the Acropolis in Athens.
That is why the men of Athens ask Paul at the Acropolis, “May we know
what this NEW teaching is that you are presenting?”
From a sociological
perspective, that’s what Christianity is, a NEW teaching, a relatively new
religion. But, actually,
Christianity is the oldest religion in the world.
Because, Christianity didn’t just come into existence in 1 A.D. or 33
A.D. The beginning of Christianity
is recorded in today’s Old Testament Reading, and all the faithful throughout
the Old Testament era were actually Christians, believers in Christ, beginning
with Eve.
How can that be?
How could they be believers in Christ in the centuries B.C., “Before
Christ”? Paul says in Galatians that
“[God] announced the Gospel in advance” to them.
Speaking about the people of the Old Testament, today’s Epistle Reading
from the book of Hebrews puts it this way: “For we also have had the Gospel
preached to us, JUST AS THEY DID.”
The beginning of Christianity
is when God announces the Gospel for the first time immediately after the fall
into sin, by declaring to Satan: “I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your seed and her Seed; he will crush your head, and you will bruise
his heel.”
Theologians call that verse,
in Latin, the Proto Evangelium, the “first Gospel.”
Because, it is the first time in the Bible when God proclaims the Good
News that one of Eve’s descendants will be much more than just a man.
He will be the God-man, the Savior, the Messiah, the Christ, who will
CRUSH and defeat Satan. Although
that is very bad news for Satan, for Adam and Eve, and you and me, and all of
sinful humanity, it is THE Good News, the Gospel.
Martin Luther says of this
verse: “These words addressed to Satan are really spoken for the benefit of Adam
and Eve, that they may hear this judgment on Satan and be comforted by the
realization that God is not their enemy, but the enemy of that one who inflicted
so severe a wound on humanity. Here grace and mercy begin to shine forth, here
the Father reveals His heart; not a father who is angry, but one who points to a
deliverance and promises victory against the enemy that deceived and conquered
humankind. Forgiveness of sins and
full reception into grace are here proclaimed to Adam and Eve. Their guilt has
been forgiven; they have been won back from death and already been set free from
hell, because the Seed of the woman will be the God-man, who will come and
destroy sin, death, hell, and all the devil’s power.”
The fact that Eve herself
understands and believes the promise this way is revealed in the next chapter,
the last verse of today’s Old Testament Reading.
When she gives birth to her firstborn, Cain, Eve declares, “I have gotten
a man—the Lord!”
The Lord promised Eve that one
of her descendants would be the God-man, and she believes this promise.
So, when her first child is born, she thinks the promise has already been
fulfilled, she thinks HE is the promised Seed, the God-man.
And so she exclaims, in faith, “I have gotten a man—the Lord!”
Luther comments: “In her great
desire and longing, Eve hoped that her son was the Seed, the Man Jehovah.
This prompted her to exclaim: ‘I have gotten a man—the Lord!’ by which
she meant to say: ‘This is undoubtedly THE Man, the Lord, the Seed of woman, of
whom God spoke.’ Her extreme trust
in the promise causes Eve to reach a hasty conclusion, and she believes that her
first son is the one about whom the Lord had given His promise.
‘This child is surely God Himself, who will crush the serpent, as God
assured us.’ But, poor Mother Eve
was mistaken in her assumption.”
Scripture says that “with the
Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day,” and it
would be many centuries, many millennia, before the promise would finally be
fulfilled. As Paul says in
Galatians, “When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of a
woman.”
Luther adds: “The unusual
feature in this passage is that this Child is called ‘Seed of a woman.’ For
otherwise the word ‘seed’ regularly refers to the seed of a man, or a father.
The solution must ultimately be that this Seed is a true natural son of
the woman, derived from the woman, however, not in the normal way but through a
special act of God, so that he is the Seed only of a woman and not of a man.
Thus this is the first passage in which the mother of this Child is described as
a virgin, who will become a mother solely through her own seed and without the
cooperation of a man.”
As Luther indicates, the
phrase “HER Seed” is a puzzling paradox in the Hebrew language and way of
thinking, and the explanation is that this first prophecy of the coming of
Christ also is a prophecy of his virgin birth.
He will be the “Seed of a woman” ONLY, miraculously born, of a virgin.
As Mary says to the angel, “How can this be, since I have not known a
man?” and the angel replies, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power
of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called
the Son of God.”
The Proto Evangelium,
the first promise of the Savior given back in the Garden of Eden, was fulfilled
by the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. When it says that Satan
will “bruise” his heel, that is a prophecy of his suffering and death.
It means that, like a person crushing a snake underfoot and in the
process getting bit, in the process of crushing Satan the Messiah himself will
be wounded. As Isaiah says, “He was
wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities.”
“I will put enmity between you
and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed.”
We get a glimpse into this ancient enmity when Jesus casts out a demon
and the demon cries out, “Let us alone! What do you want with us, Jesus of
Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!”
That is exactly why the Seed of the woman came, as John writes, “The
reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.”
“He will crush your head, and
you will bruise his heel.” The
enmity between Satan and the promised Savior came to a climax in his passion, as
he was whipped, beaten, mocked, stripped, and forced to carry his cross to
Calvary, where he was crucified, dead and buried.
When Jesus cried out from the
cross “It is finished” and gave up his spirit, Satan thought he had finally won
the ancient battle that began back in the Garden.
He thought that instead of being crushed, HE had crushed the God-man.
But, on the third day Christ rose from the dead, triumphant from the
grave.
His resurrection is God’s
declaration that he accepts his Son’s sacrifice as payment for all your sins.
He crushed Satan for you, he overcame sin and death for you, he made all
things right again between you and God, he earned for you complete forgiveness
for every sin and a place for you in heaven.
There is an ancient Christian prayer which puts it this way: “By the Tree
of the Cross, he gave salvation unto mankind, that whence death arose, thence
life also might rise again, and that he who by a tree once overcame, might
likewise by a Tree be overcome.”
How could Eve be a hero of the
CHRISTIAN faith in the years “Before Christ”?
Because “B.C.” refers not to the promise, but to the FULFILLMENT of the
promise, the birth of Christ. Like
Eve, God’s people in the Old Testament trusted the promise, looked forward in
faith to the promised Savior’s coming, and they were saved the very same way we
are, through faith in Christ. They
looked FORWARD in faith over the centuries to the promised Savior who WOULD
come; we look BACKWARD over the centuries in faith to the promised Savior who
HAS come.
As Luther says: “Christ is
promised for the first time soon after the fall.
This promise of God sustained Adam and Eve and all the faithful of the
Old Testament. They believed in it, and by this faith they were saved.
The fathers, from Adam on, preached and inculcated this Gospel, through
which they acknowledged the promised Seed of the woman and believed in him. And
so they were sustained through faith in Christ just as we are; they were true
Christians like ourselves.”
The word “saint” literally
means “holy one.” We often have the
mistaken notion that a “saint” is an inherently holy person.
But, because we are now all born in the image of Adam rather than the
image of God, there is no such thing as an inherently holy human.
Only the God-man, the promised Seed of Eve, is inherently perfect and
holy. As John says in his First
Epistle, “He appeared to take away our sins, and in him is no sin.”
Paul explains in 2nd
Corinthians, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we
might become the righteousness of God.”
You are a “holy one,” a true “saint” in the sight of God, because his own
Son took all your sins upon himself, and in place of your sins you are credited
with Christ’s perfect holiness.
There’s bumper sticker that puts it this way, “I’m Not Perfect, But Forgiven.”
That’s really what means to be a “saint.”
To trust in Christ and receive the forgiveness he earned for you.
Because she is the first
sinner recorded in the Bible, it would seem Eve is an unlikely hero of the
faith. But, she was not only the
first sinner, she is also the first SAINT, the first person in the Bible to
profess faith in Christ her Savior, when she exclaims, “I have gotten a man—the
Lord!” Amen. Return to Top | Return to Sermons | Home | Email Church Office
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