The First Gospel

By Justin Rossow

The very first Gospel promise comes immediately on the heels of very first sin. In Genesis 3:15, God says to the serpent,

“I will put enmity [warfare] between you and the woman,
between your seed and her Seed; He will crush your head,
and you will strike His heel.”

That promise is fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and it will be consummated in the New Creation, when Jesus comes again.

But it’s also kind of hard to track: God saying something to somebody, in the presence of some other people, about somebody else…

So I’ve traced the “Protoevangelium” (proto– “first” + evangel-ium “gospel”) from Genesis 3:15 all the way to Revelation 20:2. This way of talking about the Gospel allows us to see the death of Jesus as a kind of defeat and the resurrection of Jesus as God overturning defeat. And that’s good news for people who live under the burden of constant failure.

Jesus enters into your failure so you can enter into His life. Check out this video short!

For more on this theme, listen to these episodes of the Next Step Podcast:

Season 1, Episode 2: “On that Morning” with Kip Fox https://community.findmynextstep.org/on-that-morning/

Season 1, Episode 2.1: “Failure and the Cross” https://community.findmynextstep.org/failure-and-the-cross/

Or the article, “The Resurrection of Christ: Its Important in the History of the Church” by David Maxwell, beginning on page 22 of this issue: https://www.csl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Concordia-Journal-January-April-2008.pdf

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