Most people who have never opened a Bible are not against it. They simply do not know what it is about. Sixty-six books, written by many hands over more than a thousand years — where is the point of it all?
There is an answer, and it arrives early. In the Bible’s third chapter, before the story has properly begun, the book tells you how it will end.
By Genesis 3, things have gone wrong. A garden has been given, one command with it, and the command has been broken. The man and the woman cover themselves and hide among the trees; God comes walking in the cool of the day and calls the man out: “Where art thou?” (Genesis 3:9). Then the judgments are spoken, and they are heavy. Work will fight back. Children will come with sorrow. “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19).
And inside the sentence passed on the serpent, a promise is planted:
“And 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” (Genesis 3:15).
No name. No date. No place. One sentence, spoken in a garden on the worst day in the Bible’s story — and it says that the end of the matter will be a wound to the head of the serpent.
The rest of the Bible is the working out of that sentence. The promise is carried by a family, narrowed to a tribe, kept through slavery and exile, spoken of by the prophets — until the New Testament opens with a family line, a pregnancy and a name.
This week the writing reached that chapter. Genesis 3 — the fall and the first promise — is written in the same shape as the chapters before it: what the chapter says, the background behind it, what it shows us of God, what it says of Christ, and how it applies to a life. Genesis 2, the garden and the woman, is finished. And the writing has crossed into the New Testament’s first book: Matthew 1, the family line and the birth, and Matthew 2, where the promise is hunted by a king.
That second chapter is worth sitting with, because it shows the pattern so plainly. Wise men come from the east asking, “Where is he that is born King of the Jews?” — and when they find the child they fall down and worship Him (Matthew 2:2, 11). Herod, hearing the word King, is troubled and moves to kill Him. The chief priests and scribes, who can name the very town of the Messiah’s birth, do nothing at all. And three times in that one chapter Matthew reaches back to the prophets with the same words: “that it might be fulfilled” (Matthew 2:15, 17, 23). The promise is attacked at once, and it holds at once. What God has said, He keeps.
The threads between each promise and its answer are being woven into the work as the chapters are written.
If you believe people who have never opened the Bible should have a way to start — follow the journey. Pray for the work. Help us build it.
CARD: “It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” — Genesis 3:15 KJV