Christ in Genesis
Christ in Genesis
Bro Timothy Ting | 19 April 2026 | Genesis 3:15
Genesis 3:15
"And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, And you shall bruise His heel."
This is the second lesson in our series on Christ in All the Scriptures — a journey through every book of the Bible to show that from the very first book to the very last, it is telling one story, building one portrait, pointing to one Person. And Genesis — the book of beginnings — turns out to be one of the richest of all, containing not one but three profound glimpses of Jesus Christ, woven into the earliest chapters of God's Word long before anyone had heard the name Jesus of Nazareth.
As we begin to read the 66 books of the Bible together — Old Testament and New as a unified whole — we start to see that no matter how directly or indirectly, every book has a link to Christ. The pieces of the jigsaw are all part of the same picture. And once you begin to see it, you cannot stop seeing it.
Before the Fall — The Image and the Plan
In the account of creation, God does not say "let Me make man." He says something different:
Genesis 1:26
"Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.""
Let Us. The plural is deliberate — and it is not incidental. John's Gospel opens with the answer to why:
John 1:1
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
Jesus Christ was already present at creation. The Word was with God and was God — and it was through Him that all things were made. The Us of Genesis 1:26 is the first fingerprint of Christ in Scripture.
But there is more in that verse than the identity of the Creator. There is the purpose of the creature. God made human beings in His own image — male and female — and that image carries enormous weight. It is why we have a spiritual nature. It is why we possess free will, the capacity to reason, the ability to love. These are not biological accidents. They are reflections of who God is, imprinted into the fabric of what He made.
Genesis 1:27
"So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them."
Made in the image of God, human beings were entrusted with dominion — caretakers of His creation, stewards of the world He had made. But sin entered, and everything changed. Sin corrupted the earth. Sin blurred the image of God in us. It broke our fellowship with God. It left us no longer able to clearly recognise the divine likeness we were created to carry. And God initiated a plan to restore the true purpose of human beings. That plan is Jesus Christ. And it begins to unfold in the very next chapter where things go wrong.
01 · The Promise — A Saviour Will Come
When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden, they did not run to God. They hid. They covered themselves. They had no plan and no hope — only shame and fear. And then God spoke. But before He pronounced the consequences of their disobedience, before the curses fell on the serpent, the woman, and the man — God announced a solution. Grace came before judgement. This is the foundational posture of God toward fallen humanity: He acts first, He reaches first, He gives first.
Embedded in the curse upon the serpent is what theologians call the Protoevangelium — the "God’s first messianic declaration.":
Genesis 3:15
"And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, And you shall bruise His heel."
Look carefully at the language. The promise speaks of the Seed of the woman. In the ancient world, seed was always traced through the man. Genealogies ran through fathers, not mothers. "Her seed" breaks every genealogical pattern in Genesis — and it breaks it intentionally, flagging that something extraordinary is coming. Women carry no seed in the ancient biological understanding. So what does it mean? It is the first prophecy of the virgin birth.
To defeat sin, the Saviour had to be completely free from sin — not because sin is passed biologically through a human father, but because He alone was conceived by the power of God and lived in perfect holiness. Jesus was not the product of ordinary human conception; the virgin birth declares that His coming was the direct work of God. And yet He had to be “born of a woman” — fully human, sharing flesh and blood with every one of us, not an angel or an apparition, but truly one of us in every way, yet without sin. The absence of a human father does not teach that guilt is inherited through the male line; rather, it shows that this Child’s origin was divine.
As Isaiah prophesied, “a virgin shall conceive” (Isaiah 7:14).
As Luke records the angel’s words, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you” (Luke 1:35).
As Paul summarises in Galatians, He was “born of a woman” (Galatians 4:4).
And as Revelation depicts the final conflict, He is the woman’s Child who defeats the serpent (Revelation 12:5).
The two wounds in Genesis 3:15 encode the entire Gospel in a single verse.
The heel wound — suffering — points to the cross.
The head wound — a fatal blow — points to the resurrection and the final defeat of Satan.
Both the cost and the victory are written into the very first promise God ever made to humanity. And from this point, every genealogy in Genesis is quietly asking the same question: which seed? which woman? Through Seth, through Noah, through Shem, through Abraham, through Isaac, through Jacob, through Judah — Genesis tracks the narrowing line, step by step, toward the one Seed who will fulfil it all.
Genesis does not merely predict Christ in isolated verses. It builds a cumulative portrait so that by the time you reach the Gospels, you are meeting someone the whole story has been expecting.
02 · The Pattern — Substitution & Sacrifice
The second glimpse of Christ in Genesis comes in one of the most emotionally charged passages in all of Scripture — the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22. God asks Abraham to do the unthinkable:
Genesis 22:2
"Then He said, "Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.""
Your son. Your only son. Whom you love. John 3:16 will use almost identical language: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son." This is not coincidence. This is God establishing a pattern — giving Abraham a preview, at full emotional cost, of what He Himself would one day do.
As they walk up the mountain, Isaac carries the wood on his own back. Jesus would carry His cross. Isaac asks the question that must have broken Abraham's heart:
Genesis 22:8
"And Abraham said, "My son, God will provide for Himself the lamb for a burnt offering." So the two of them went together."
God will provide for Himself the lamb. Abraham spoke more truly than he knew. At the last moment, the knife is stayed and a ram is found caught in a thicket — its head entangled by thorns. A crown of thorns. The ram dies in Isaac's place. John the Baptist will one day point to Jesus and declare: "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" And the mountain where all of this happens — Mount Moriah — is the exact same mountain range as Calvary.
Genesis 22 gives the full emotional weight of what it costs the Father before Paul gives you the theology. When Paul writes in Romans 8:32 that God "did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all," he is writing theology. But in Genesis 22, God puts Abraham through the experience — so that we might feel, not just understand, what was given for our sake.
And what of Abraham's faith through all of this? The writer of Hebrews tells us that Abraham believed God would raise Isaac even after the sacrifice — that death was not the final word. That is the depth of faith Abraham carried up that mountain. It is no wonder he was called the friend of God.
The pattern is now established: the gospel is costly. Innocent blood covers the guilty. A substitute must die. And the substitute God will provide — at far greater cost than even Abraham could imagine — is His own Son.
03 · The Portrait — The Rejected Saviour Who Rescues
The third glimpse of Christ in Genesis is the most sustained and detailed of all — the life of Joseph, spanning Genesis 37 to 50. Joseph never speaks a messianic prophecy. He never says "thus saith the LORD, a Saviour will come." He simply lives his life. And yet his life is a portrait of Jesus Christ so precise, so detailed, and so complete that it cannot be explained as coincidence.
The journey map of Joseph's life traces a descent and then an ascent — a pattern of humiliation followed by exaltation that mirrors the death and resurrection of Christ in extraordinary detail.
Jacob sends his beloved son to his brothers — the Father sends the Son.
The brothers say "let us kill him" — His own receive Him not (John 1:11).
Judah proposes selling Joseph for twenty pieces of silver — Judas betrays Jesus for thirty pieces of silver.
Joseph is falsely accused and thrown into prison, condemned on false testimony — Jesus is innocent, condemned by false witnesses.
And then the ascent: Joseph is raised from the dungeon to the right hand of Pharaoh, second in authority over all Egypt — Jesus is raised from the grave to the right hand of the Father, given the name above every name and all authority in heaven and on earth.
And then comes the moment that reveals the deepest parallel of all — when Joseph reveals himself to the very brothers who betrayed him:
Genesis 45:8
"So now it was not you who sent me here, but God; and He has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a ruler throughout all the land of Egypt."
Joseph does not accuse. He does not take revenge. He sees the hand of God in everything that was done to him — even the betrayal, even the pit, even the years in prison. He forgives completely and acknowledges that God was working through every painful chapter of his story.
Jesus, from the cross, prays for those who crucify Him. He provides salvation to the very ones who rejected Him. The portrait is perfect.
What is remarkable about Joseph is the quality of faith he carried through the years when God appeared to be silent. God did not speak directly to Joseph the way He spoke to Abraham or Jacob. There were no angelic visits, no burning bushes. Joseph simply trusted — through the pit, through the slavery, through the false accusation, through the years in prison. He trusted that God was active, working, present — even when everything visible contradicted it. And God was. Every setback was a step in the plan. Every injustice was a piece of the portrait being painted.
Joseph's life is a sustained typological portrait — too detailed and precise to be coincidental.
The Whole Picture — Genesis Does Not Merely Predict
By the time we step back and look at all three together — the Promise, the Pattern, and the Portrait — something extraordinary comes into view. Genesis is not simply a book of origins. It is a book of previews. It does not merely predict Christ in isolated verses. It builds a cumulative portrait so that by the time you reach the Gospels, you are meeting someone the whole story has been expecting.
The Promise declares that a Saviour is coming — and that the gospel is announced before consequences, before judgment, by grace.
The Pattern demonstrates that a substitute must die — that the gospel is costly, that innocent blood covers the guilty.
The Portrait shows that the Rejected One saves — that the gospel is grace, that betrayed and risen, He restores.
These are not three separate ideas. They are three panels of one image — the image of Jesus Christ, visible in the very first book of the Bible.
Luke 24:27
"And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself."
Jesus Himself said that all the Scriptures speak of Him — and Genesis is where He begins. Every piece of the jigsaw was placed deliberately.
The Invitation — Build Your Faith on What God Already Planned
There is something deeply steadying about seeing the plan of God laid out this way. From the very first book of the Bible, before any of us existed, before the nation of Israel had been born, before the Law of Moses had been given — God had already announced the coming of the Saviour, already enacted the pattern of substitutionary sacrifice, already painted the portrait of the Rejected One who rises and restores. He did not improvise. He did not react. He planned.
And that plan had two parts — God's part, and man's part.
God's part was to send His Son — to fulfil every promise, to become the substitute, to be the Rejected One who rises. That part is done. Finished. Complete. The cross happened. The tomb is empty. Christ is at the right hand of the Father.
Man's part is to respond.
To believe — not in fantasy or wishful thinking, but on the weight of evidence that has been accumulating since Genesis 3:15.
To confess Jesus as Lord.
To repent — genuinely turning from the life lived apart from God, with real and visible impact on the people around us.
To be baptised by immersion for the remission of sins.
And to live faithfully — every day, for the rest of our lives — in faithfulness to the One who gave everything to bring us home.
