The First Gospel

Ordinary Means · A Genesis Study · No. 5

This is, in many ways, the most important chapter in Genesis. Everything before it was the goodness that was lost; everything after it is the long work of getting humanity home. The church has called it The Fall. The church has also called it the Protoevangelium — the first gospel. Both names are true, and they must be held together: Genesis 3 is the saddest chapter in the Bible and, at the same time, the chapter in which the gospel is first announced.

It opens not with the man and woman but with the serpent — more crafty than any other beast. Scripture will later tell us who speaks through him: that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan (Revelation 12:9). And his strategy is the one he has used in every temptation since. First: Did God actually say…? — question the word, and twist it (God had said you may surely eat of every tree but one; the serpent makes it sound like a blanket prohibition). Then the flat denial: You will not surely die. Then the lie about God's motives: You will be like God — as if obedience were the only thing keeping the woman from her true glory, as if God were holding out on her. Question the word; deny the consequence; promise that rebellion leads up. Paul saw the same craft still at work in his own churches (2 Corinthians 11:3). The serpent has never had to change his tools, because they keep working.

The woman saw that the tree was good for food, a delight to the eyes, and to be desired to make one wise — appetite, beauty, and the hunger for status, the very three appeals John would later name (1 John 2:16) and the very three the serpent would later try on Christ in the wilderness, where they failed. She took and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Do not pass over who was with her. Adam was not away. He stood there through the whole conversation and said nothing — did not correct the serpent, did not call on the LORD, simply received the fruit and ate. Eve was deceived; Adam was not (1 Timothy 2:14). And so it is through one man, through Adam, that Paul says sin entered the world (Romans 5:12) — which is why the whole doctrine of original sin rests here.

Their eyes were opened, just as promised — but what they saw was not glory; it was shame. And at once they tried to fix it: they sewed fig leaves together. This is the first works-righteousness in history — fallen people using whatever is at hand to cover their own shame and stand acceptable before God by their own effort. The leaves will not last. God will replace them. But they tried first. We always do.

Then comes one of the most poignant scenes in Scripture. The LORD God walks in the garden in the cool of the day, as friends walk — and the man and woman hide. That is what sin does: it makes the creature flee the Creator; the God who was their delight is now their terror. And God calls out the first question in the Bible:

He does not ask because He does not know. The question is for Adam, not for God. It is law's question — it forces the sinner to take stock, refuses to let him pretend nothing has changed. But it is also pursuit. God could have walked past the trees and left them hiding. Instead He comes down, and He calls. Where are you? is the first word of the gospel, too — God seeking the sinner, refusing to let him stay lost. The God who walked the garden calling Where are you? is the same Lord who would one day draw near to two disciples on the Emmaus road, the Son of Man who came to seek and to save the lost.

Adam answers not with confession but with blame: the woman whom you gave to be with me — Eve's fault, and underneath it, God's fault for giving her. Eve blames the serpent. The fallen conscience cannot stand in the light without spreading the blame. The law has done its work; the sin is exposed; the judgment is about to fall. And then — before one word of judgment on the man or the woman — God turns to the serpent and preaches the gospel:

There it is — the first promise of a Savior, spoken in the wreckage of the first sin. A seed of the woman is coming. He and the serpent will be at war. The serpent will strike His heel — a real wound, the cross. But the seed will crush the serpent's head — a mortal blow. The whole rest of the Bible is the tracing of that seed: through Seth, through Noah, through Abraham, through Judah, through David, to the One born of a woman in the fullness of time, who took the serpent's strike in His heel on Good Friday and crushed his head on Easter morning. Before Adam and Eve are sent from the garden, God clothes them — not in fig leaves but in garments of skins, the first death recorded in Scripture, an animal slain so that their shame could be covered by a covering God provided. Their works-righteousness is stripped off; God Himself clothes them in the skins of a sacrifice. Law and gospel, in a single chapter.

Next time, the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent come to their first open conflict — two brothers, two offerings, and a blood that cries out from the ground. Read Genesis 4 before then.