Welcome to another week on Things Unseen.

Earlier in the year we spent a week thinking about the way Genesis chapter 3 verse 15 is

like a spine that holds the whole book of the Bible together, or perhaps we could say

is like a seed from which a massive tree eventually grows, and I want to develop that idea

this week in a slightly different way. We often look back to Genesis 3 verse 15, God's promise

that there would be ongoing hostility between the seed of Eve and the seed of the serpent until

eventually the seed of Eve, Jesus Christ, would crush the head of the serpent, although having

his own heel crushed in the process. And we call that the first announcement of the gospel,

the proto-evangelion. But you probably know that theologians and Bible

students through the ages have also looked back to Genesis 3 15, as expressing a new covenant

that God was making. Although it isn't explicitly stated, except perhaps in a single reference in

Hosea 6 verse 7, it seems clear that God's original relationship with Adam and Eve was

covenantal. That is, it involved a bond made by God with them in which he promised the rich blessings

of life and fellowship with him as they lived in harmony with him, but inevitably profound

loss and alienation and death if they turned against his purposes. And what Hosea 6 verse 7 says

about God's people is that like Adam, they transgressed the covenant. So in his wonderful love,

God made a first covenant in which he promised life, but that covenant has been broken,

and as Paul says in Romans 5, sin and death have come into the world and come in turn to each of us.

But rather than leave the world in that condition, God gave another promise. He made a new covenant

that would later be sealed in the blood of the seed of the woman, our Lord Jesus.

I think I've mentioned before that when we think of Genesis 3 15, we can echo the words of the

mathematician philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who said that the history of Western philosophy

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