All Christians should know the story of humanity’s fall into sin recorded in Genesis 3. God put Adam and Eve in the garden to work it and to take care of it. But Satan spoke through the serpent in the garden. He tricked Eve into eating the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which God had forbidden. Then Eve gave the fruit to Adam and he ate it, too. Because of this sin, God cursed all humanity, and the great hope of his eschatological kingdom appeared to be lost. But God mercifully introduced a plan of redemption that would rescue individuals through personal salvation, and would restore the hope of his great messianic kingdom on earth.

This plan of redemption was first introduced in Genesis 3:15 when God said this to the serpent:

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.

Theologians call this offer of redemption the proto-euangelion or “first gospel,” because it’s the first offer of salvation after humanity’s fall into sin.

You know, some Bible teachers believe that Genesis 3:15 may be the most important verse in the Bible because there we receive a promise immediately after the Fall that God is going to send a deliverer to deal with our sin problem. He tells the serpent and the woman that there will be hostility between their two seeds. The serpent will bruise the seed of the woman’s child, but that child is going to crush the head of that serpent. And basically, the rest of the Bible unfolds the grand redemptive story of that head-crushing that ultimately took place on the cross at Calvary, a head-crushing we share in based upon Romans 16:20. [Dr. Danny Akin]

When God promised that the seed of the woman would defeat the seed of the serpent, he indicated that humanity would be redeemed from the curse of sin. And throughout the long period of redemption, God continued to affirm this expectation through his redemptive acts — especially those acts associated with his covenants.

This created the expectation that God’s plan for his worldwide kingdom would eventually come to pass. But its growth would be characterized by strife between the children of the serpent and the children of Eve. In fact, Genesis 4, 5 indicate that the descendants of Adam and Eve’s faithful son Seth were in constant tension with the descendants of their murderous son Cain. From the very beginning, the entire human race has been divided between those who serve God’s purposes and those who rebel against God.