The Cure for the Curse - Part B

I love how Jesus put it this way, Satan has come to kill, to steal, and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it to the max.

That's a Skip Heitzig free translation of having it more abundant. You're going to live life to the max. You're going to have an abundant life and I have come to do that. What he did, I have come to undo. He ruined it.

I came to fix it. Today on Connect with Skip Heitzig, Pastor Skip concludes his message, The Cure for the Curse, and explains what it is that Jesus really offers you. Now, here's more about this month's new resource about the current situation in Israel and how it fits into God's divine plan for his nation. Israel at War.

That's the title of a new book by Skip Heitzig. Modern Israel has been at war from its very first day of existence, as Skip points out. On the day after Israel became a nation, that was May 14, 1948. On May 15, virtually every Arab neighbor attacked Israel to destroy it.

Israel had been a nation one day, they didn't have an organized army. Israel at War is up to date concerning current events in the Mideast and includes Skip's comments during his December tour of the Gaza border and a video link to Skip's interview in Jerusalem. The new book Israel at War is our gift to you this month to anyone who encourages the growth of Connect with Skip with a gift of $50 or more.

Make your financial vote of support at connectwithskip.com or by calling 1-800-922-1888. Israel at War will give you Skip's insight from over 40 trips to Israel and decades of Bible study. I know the Middle East seems like a very complex situation.

It's actually pretty basic. One side wants the other side dead. On one side, you have a Jewish nation, a Jewish state called modern day Israel. Israel wishes to exist as a sovereign state living in peace.

Most Palestinians and other Arab nations, not all but many of them, deny the right of Israel to exist. Receive Israel at War by Skip Heitzig with your gift. Go to connectwithskip.com or call 1-800-922-1888. All right, let's get started. We'll be in Genesis 3 as we join Skip today. We live in a parallel universe. What I mean by that is we live, there's a physical reality but there's a spiritual reality. In our world, we call it the real world. We even say to people, hey, get real, man. You live in the real world.

This is the real world, okay? That's one world. The other world, I call it the really real world.

It's where a lot of the action is going on. It's unseen by us just like you don't see sound waves or TV waves that are in this room but you don't see them. They're invisible but they are here. There's the really real world, a parallel universe of spirit beings, both angelic and demonic forces. 34 books in the Bible, 34 out of 66 books mention these beings, these angels. To be exact, 103 times in the Old Testament, 165 times in the New Testament, angels are mentioned.

The word angel is a word that means messenger. It's a special class of being. They are non-corporeal beings, meaning they do not have a body. Because they don't have a body, they're invisible. They are not subject to human decay.

They are not limited by the same limitations and hindrances we as humans experience. Ever since the fall, there has been this ongoing conflict in heavenly places, spiritual conflict, and invisible war, one author calls it, that has been going on from the fall of humanity all the way through. Now one of the rules of warfare is to know who your enemy is and how your enemy operates.

So first of all, you got to know who your enemy is. And if you don't believe in a devil, well then he's already won. I don't believe. He's not real.

Let's know some real thing as the devil. So he's already won. He's got your life hook, line, and signal.

He's got a sinker. Because he's so powerful, he's got you to believe he's not even there. But then once you know your enemy, you do have to know how he works. Paul in the New Testament said we're not ignorant of his devices.

Sadly, many of us are. So the promise here is that some offspring of this woman will cause a bruising, or the Hebrew word could be translated, crushing of Satan's head. Now that's a pretty ominous promise. Let's say before service, I ran up to you in the foyer and I said, hey, let me just give you a fair warning. After church, I'm going to find you and crush your head.

Fair warning, just letting you know. Now I'd never say that to you. But let's say I said it to you and you really believed I was going to do that. Well, you're going to do one of two things. Either you're going to avoid me and take evasive measures to get away from me because I'm a nutcase, or you're going to strike first, lest I have the opportunity to put you down. So there is an announcement, a revelation that I give you, and you're going to respond to that revelation by countermeasures to take out the possibility of you being crushed.

So that frames for us what we call the invisible war. Let me give you some examples of this in the Bible. The first we come across is in the book of Genesis when Satan motivates Cain to kill Abel, the righteous son of those two. It's an attempt to kill the seed, potentially, that would crush his head. So what does God do? He raises up another child by the name of Seth. Here's another example. The world gets very populated, but gets so evil, Satan so corrupts humanity, that God's only option is to completely destroy all life on planet earth through a flood.

Eight survive. The seed continues. Here's another example. Satan motivates Esau to try to kill Jacob, his brother. Why Jacob? You'll find out in a few moments that God made a very special promise to Jacob about his seed being carried forward.

Here's another example. Pharaoh decides, you know, these Hebrews are populating all around us. We just can't have this growth of these Jewish people around us. So when the Hebrews have their babies, if it's a girl, let it live. If it's a boy, kill it. Drown it in the river, the Nile River.

Why? Why is it so drastic a measure? It's Satan's inspiring Pharaoh to destroy the seed. He is an agent of Satan. Keep following the story. Another attempt when Saul, King Saul, wants to kill David, not for one time or two times, but almost a decade. He chases him to kill him, throws spears at him, hunts him down. Why David?

Why not anybody else? Because God makes a promise to David that his lineage will produce the seed that will destroy Satan's dominion. We get some other wild stories that we wonder about in the Bible, like the court of Ahasuerus, the king of Persia. All the Jews, most of the Jews in the world were living in Persia, Iran at that time. And this court official by the name of Haman comes up with this law and passes a law that every Jew in Persia be killed on the same day.

Mass genocide. His plot gets found out. He is hung on his own gallows.

The story continues. Jesus is born. A few Jews tell Herod the Great about this king of the Jews that may have been born in Bethlehem. He goes nuts, says every male child two years and under destroy in Bethlehem. What's that all about? That's an attempt to get at the seed of the woman. Later on, Jesus goes to a synagogue in Nazareth, reads from the messianic prophecy of Isaiah 61, closes the book, and announces, today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.

And what do they do? Do they all applaud and go, yay, Messiah is here. Let's rally around him. They took him to a brow of a hill to push him over and destroy his life. Well, he got out of that.

We know that. But then Satan appears to Jesus personally and suggests that Jesus might want to jump off the pinnacle of the temple because, and he misquotes the scripture, God will give his angels charge over you to bear you up, lest you dash your foot against the stone. All of these are attempts to destroy a people, a nation, a lineage, and a person in particular. Now, what this will do for you is help you understand the spirit reality behind a certain kind of sin we know as anti-Semitism. All prejudice is wrong. All prejudice is evil. But there's a certain demonic evil behind anti-Semitism.

And here's the premise. If God's plan of redemption required the existence of a nation and the continuation of that nation, if you can destroy that nation, you will defeat God. So as the revelation goes out, the counter-offensive measures by the serpent continue through the scripture.

And they're all focused on one individual. He is introduced, also, in verse 15. Let's notice it. I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed.

Now watch this. He. He. Now, that's singular, right? He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. So now we understand not only will there be conflict, a continuing conflict, but there will be a coming one here called he. See, up to this point, we don't know what God's talking about because seed can either be plural or singular.

There's going to be conflict between your seed and her seed. Okay, that's a broad term. But now we understand it means one person.

He shall bruise. There is a he involved. This is why Genesis 3 15 is considered by New Testament scholars to be the first messianic prophecy ever given. They call it, the term is, you can write this down if you want to impress your friends with it. This is the protoevangelium.

That's the word. Protoevangelium means the first gospel. So it's the first hint or prediction that a deliverer will come who will take away the authority, the rule of Satan, strike a fatal blow to his head. But who is he? We're not told in this passage. All we know is the seed, he, will come from the woman, Eve.

Well, that could be everybody, right? But we keep reading. We keep reading.

And pretty soon we discover that there's a flood. There's eight people, Noah, Mrs. Noah, his three boys, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. They're wives.

That's eight people. And only one of those sons will carry the seed forward, the lineage forward, the plan of God. That is Shem, the Semitic race, the Shemites will carry it forward.

So, okay, now we kind of got that. And then we discovered that through the line of Shem, God makes a special promise to one of his descendants by the name of Abraham. Genesis 12 and Genesis chapter 22, God says, through you and your seed, all the nations of the earth will be blessed.

So now we identify Abraham as part of that. Then God makes a promise not only to Abraham, but to Abraham's second son, not his first son, Ishmael, but his second son, Isaac, Genesis 26, through you and your seed, all the world will be blessed. Then we keep reading and discover that God makes a promise to Isaac's second son, not Esau, but Jacob, Genesis 28, that the seed will continue in the promise through his lineage.

We keep reading the story. And soon we discover that a specific son of Jacob, fourth son by the name of Judah, the tribe of Judah, will emerge to bring forth the hero, the he, the rescuer. But we keep reading the story and we find out that one of those from the tribe of Judah, the family of David, God promises to him an everlasting kingdom. And we keep following that all the way till we get to Jesus in the New Testament. So the bloodline of the Messiah, the scarlet thread of redemption, is the bloodline of the scarlet thread of redemption gets woven through Adam and through Seth and through Shem and Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, David, all the way to Jesus. This is why when you open your New Testament to page one, Matthew chapter one, it begins this way. The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham, they're following that lineage that God promised and preserved throughout the scriptures. So Jesus is the he.

He's the hero of redemptive history and all of Satan's attacks have been to destroy him before he destroys the serpent. Now we're reading Genesis 3 15. Did you know there's a parallel verse in the book of Revelation to this verse? And it is Revelation chapter 12 verse 4. Let me read it to you.

You might want to jot that down for later though. It says, and the dragon, who's already identified as Satan in that chapter, and the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to give birth to devour her child as soon as it was born. That frames the conflict, the ongoing conflict, and the one who will be the coming one predicted in Genesis 3.

So we've covered some realities here, right? There will be a conflict. There will be a continuing conflict. There'll be a coming one.

Let me give you a fourth. This verse promises there will be a confrontation. There's going to be a culmination.

There's going to be a one-on-one grand finale, a showdown, so to speak. Notice verse 15 once again. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head.

And notice this last part. You shall bruise his heel. One is fatal. That's the bruising of the head.

I'll get to that in a minute. One is a temporary minor blow, a heel wound. You will bruise his heel.

So God tells Satan, listen, there's coming a confrontation with this seed. You will only manage to wound him temporarily, but he will crush you ultimately. Now I believe the bruising of the heel is a hint of the crucifixion because I don't know if you've ever had a bruised heel, but it ain't pretty. It's very painful. You have a heel bone that's called a calcaneus, and a calcaneal fracture or bruising is quite painful.

Bruising any bone is painful. So it's a prediction of a of a very painful event that for Jesus was the crucifixion. Now the crucifixion, and we don't have time to really get into the details of that. We have before, but experts will say that it is one of the most agonizing, excruciating forms of punishment and pain a human being can suffer. In fact, the very word I just used, excruciating, is an English word that literally means from the cross. It's a word that we have developed to sum up something deeply agonizing, and so we are referring to the cross of Christ.

It is excruciating. That would be the bruised heel for Jesus. But it would only be a heel wound. Why?

Because it was temporary. You say, well that sounds pretty fatal to me. He died. Yeah, but wait a couple days.

Wait three days. There's a resurrection. So we discover the death and resurrection of Jesus would be the win in this battle. So the bloodline leads to a bloody cross which is actually the lifeline. So the bloodline points to the lifeline, which is Jesus. It takes us to our fifth and final certainty in this promise of Genesis 3.15.

There will be conquest. Go back to verse 15 one final time to look at one phrase, and that is the phrase, He shall bruise your head. The head is the control center of your body.

If you don't have a head, you don't have a you. You strike a person's head, you knock them out. You take away their dominion, their power, their authority. So when all of Satan's counter offensive measures fail, when he failed to pollute the earth, thinking God is going to judge them all, destroy the earth in a flood, God preserves eight. The story continues when all of Satan's attempted to destroy that fail, when he fails to destroy the royal line of King David, when he fails to kill Jesus at Bethlehem because of Herod, when he fails to get Jesus thrown off the pinnacle of the temple or fails to get him thrown off the brow of the hill at Nazareth, he comes up with the ultimate nuclear weapon, the cross. He incites, he influences the Jewish leaders, the mob, and the Roman government to put Jesus on a cross. And don't you know when Jesus was put on that cross and said it is finished, it's over, and breathed his last, that all of hell started a party and said we finally did it, hot diggity dog, the he is gone.

I saved my head another day, no crushing today, I'm good to go. That's why the Bible says, had the rulers of this world known they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. They didn't know. See they're partying in hell thinking it's all over, but it was only a three-day party. On the third day that corpse started moving and he sat back up. And then there was a whole lot of shaking going on when that stone was rolled away and he walked out of that tomb victorious only to live forever and ever. So I can only say that Satan may have been rejoicing but he was too understated, highly disappointed. Let me read another scripture that will now make more sense. Jesus said in John 12 these words, now is the judgment of this world and now the prince of this world will be cast out and if I be lifted up from the earth, that's the crucifixion, I will draw all men to myself.

So what does that mean for us? Studying Genesis 3 15 only this, the darkest day in human history gave way to the brightest hope of human history because the he is coming. The conflict will be won by a hero who will crush Satan's authority over people who give their lives to Christ, the coming one. You know Paul had this in mind, had the Genesis 3 in mind and this concept in mind when he wrote his letter to the Roman church. He wrote these words, Romans 16 verse 19, he said in closing his book, and the God of peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly.

You see Paul knew about the cross, he knew that Jesus had already in effect crushed the dominion, the authority, the power of Satan at the cross, but he also knew the Romans were on the battlefield still in this world being pressured and tortured and persecuted by those around him. So he says the God of peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly. Satan's dominion is taken away from your life if you're in Christ.

He has no control over you. I love how Jesus put it this way, Satan has come to kill, to steal, and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it to the max. That's a Skip Heitzig free translation of have it more abundant.

You're going to live life to the max. You're going to have an abundant life and I have come to do that. What he did I have come to undo.

He ruined it, I came to fix it. Abundant life. So the bloodline begins from the proto-evangelium, the first promise, the first gospel, all the way to the cross and beyond. William Evans, a guy quoted at the beginning, said the Bible is read with redemption truth. This is the truth that we will study in the next few weeks leading up to Easter and I hope at the very least it will awaken your heart to the great love that God has for you. You know we hear of God's love all the time. Every time you come to church you hear it. I fear that we hear it so often it doesn't make an impact anymore in our hearts. We hear Jesus died on the cross.

Yeah, I've heard that. Next, we need, listen, we need to let that simple profound truth of God's elaborate rescue mission to be the lover of our soul sink in and transform us. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.

That's the undoing of the serpent. That's Skip Heintze with a message from the series Bloodline, tracing God's rescue mission from Eden to eternity, encouraging you with the biblical truth about the abundant life Jesus offers you. Find the full message as well as books, booklets, and full teaching series at connectwithskip.com. We're glad you've joined us today. Connect with Skip Heintze exists to bring more people into God's family and connect listeners like you to his unchanging truth. That's why we make teachings like this one today available to you and others on air and online.

If they've helped you connect with Christ today, would you consider giving a gift to help others around the world connect with him in the same way? Just call 800-922-1888. That's 800-922-1888 or visit connectwithskip.com slash donate.

That's connectwithskip.com slash donate. Thank you. Listen again tomorrow as Pastor Skip begins a message that helps you discern what is from God and what is from the enemy.

Here's the big difference. Satan tempts you. God tests you. Satan tempts you to bring out the worst in you. But God tests you to bring out the very best in you. Connect with Skip Heintze is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.