803. Like a great stone into a calm sea, Satan hurled his social disorder into this world. A billow of the sea does not push the water from one shore to the other; it merely lends its motion to the water just in front of its progress. And a wave, if uninterrupted, does not change its general features. So with the billow of social disorder. It did not die with the individuals who first felt its force. They died, but it rolled on to succeeding generations carrying ever with it the same social characteristics. God and His prophets have been watching the course of that billow from the first, and from time to time telling us about it and opposing fresh obstacles to its progress; but ever it is the same old billow, yet acting upon fresh individuals.
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806. We have described the billow as a wrecking force of evil. But with it is its enemy, the contending force of good,¾the seed of the woman,¾pre-eminently, her great Seed, Jesus Christ. But not only is it prophesied that her seed should be at enmity with Satan, but WOMAN HERSELF shall wage war with Satan. So from the beginning of evil we have the promise of good; even that greatest of all promises, “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”
807. Dean Payne-Smith speaks of this wonderful passage, Genesis 3:15, as “that promise, of which the whole of the rest of Scripture is but the record of the gradual stages of its fulfillment.” But though Jesus Christ has conquered death, by rising from the grave, the enmity still continues; the conflict is still on. Christ is seated at the right hand of God; nevertheless “we see not yet all things put under his feet” (Hebrews 2:8), for He sits “on the right hand of God; from henceforth expecting till His enemies be made His footstool” (Hebrews 10:12-13).
808. The same writer speaks thus concerning this “primeval promise made to the woman in the hour of the first great earthly sorrow: From that day onward one purpose, and one only, is ever kept in view in God’s dealings with His fallen creatures. The promise was that man, worsted in his first encounter with his spiritual adversary, should crush the adversary’s head by means of one of the same nature as himself, emphatically the woman’s seed. That promise contained in outline the whole of prophecy. Of that promise the Gospel is the one fulfillment. From the day on which Eve was comforted by it, all God’s dealings in grace;¾for the Bible has nothing to do with God’s dealings except as they belong to the covenant of grace; it is not a book of natural religion, but of supernatural;¾but all God’s dealings with man in grace, which are the proper object-matter of the Bible, relate to the performance of that promise.”
809. Such being the facts¾and who can dispute them?¾have we not every reason for thinking that God would provide, in prophecy, some vision which would exhibit not a partial, a typical, but a final, complete fulfillment of that Great Promise that He had made regarding woman and her seed?
