February 22 — The Seed of the Woman

Hope for Today: A Daily Devotion from Reasons for Hope*Jesus

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“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.” Genesis 3:15

By the “Seed of the woman” is to be understood Christ the Savior, not excluding His friends and followers in every age of the world. This prediction of a Savior signified to our first parent these four things:

1. That the promised Savior was to be born of a virgin.
2. That He was to be a man: “You shall bruise His heel.”
3. That He would break the head of the serpent, or destroy his power and dominion over mankind, and punish him and all his votaries with an utter destruction. And
4. That in order to our Savior’s doing so, He must have His own heel, or human nature, that lowest part of His mediatory person, bruised by the serpent, or persecuted and put to death by the devil and his emissaries.

This was the first intimation of a Savior that was made to the world. It was made to the serpent, for his immediate confusion; made in the sight of Heaven, that the purposes of mercy and the glory of the Godhead might appear complete; made in the presence of our first parents and before their sentence was pronounced, to inspire them with the hopes of pardon and life and with a sense of the distinguishing mercy of God, who, before He denounced so much as any temporal punishment, animated them with the hopes of eternal redemption.

Devotion by Karl Heinrich von Bogatzky (1690—1774)