THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARY by Michael Horton for Core Christianity
The glad tidings of Genesis 3:15—namely, that God will give Eve an offspring who will crush the serpent’s head—creates faith. Yet it also initiates a war between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent that will become the story behind all of the stories in the Bible.
Upon giving birth to her firstborn son, Eve exclaimed, “Behold, I have brought forth [the] man!” Yet he was not the promised Messiah, but the first Antichrist. Already in Genesis 4, the serpent seeks to destroy the seed of the woman who will crush his head, as Cain slays Abel. Yet God replaces Abel with Seth. Each time the baton falls from the hands of one bearer of the promise, God raises up another runner to pass it to the next. This is the ultimate reason why every mother in Israel was so concerned about having children. Who will continue this relay race?
God promised a Savior of the world to Abraham and Sarah through Sarah’s womb, yet she was nearly a century old. This royal couple had to believe God’s promise in spite of everything that they saw in their circumstances or experienced in their own life. They were not holier than others; in fact, they both questioned God’s promise even up to the moment when Sarah gave birth to Isaac. Yet they were blessed, and in their seed, all the families of the earth would be blessed.
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When Paul speaks of Adam and Eve in 1 Timothy 2:15 and adds that enigmatic line about women being “saved through childbirth,” I believe that this is what he had in mind. Israel’s mothers were not trying to save themselves by their act of childbearing; rather, they were longing to give birth to the long-awaited Messiah.
God’s promise is tied to history—so tied to it, in fact, that the Messiah can only come through a single line. The scarlet cord of redemption was threaded through the smallest eye of the thinnest needle. At key junctures, it seemed as if the serpent had triumphed. There was young Joash, the only royal survivor of the wicked Queen Athaliah’s purge of the House of David. Besides direct assassination, the serpent also attempted to lure Israel into apostasy. Eventually, Israel was sent into exile for having so thoroughly violated the covenant. Yet even in Babylon, mothers of Israel continued to hope in the promise that one day, one of them—or one of their daughters—might be the mother of the Messiah.
