Last week we looked at the tragedy of the fall of man. We saw how in the beginning everything God created was very good. But then the devil, in the guise of a serpent, deceived the first human beings into disobeying the only command God had given them. Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and this one act of rebellion had three terrible consequences. Evil had entered creation and had a grip on every part of it, including human beings. The very earth was cursed, pain and suffering and death had entered the world. And human beings were separated from God their creator. Because of their sin, Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden.
But in the middle of the story of the fall we found hope. There was the first glimmer of the gospel, the first hint of a Saviour, and it came as God pronounced a curse on the serpent, the devil.
We read in Genesis 3,
14 So the Lord God said to the snake, ‘Because you have done this,
‘Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.
15 And 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.’
He will crush your head. One day the serpent’s head will be crushed, the devil will be defeated and all the damage he had done to God’s perfect creation will be reversed. The ‘he’ who will accomplish this salvation will be an offspring of the woman, literally the seed of the woman. This is the first gospel, the protoevangelium, as we find it in Genesis 3, the first hint of a Saviour, in the promise of the seed of the woman. Tonight we will see how this promise began to be fulfilled in the life of the first true believer, the Patriarch Abraham.
When Abraham was 75 years old, God called him to uproot his wife Sarai and his whole household set out on a journey to a land he would show him. And God made a number of glorious promises to Abraham.
Genesis 12 2 ‘I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you;
As we saw last week in our morning sermon on the Priestly Blessing in Numbers 6, God’s blessings take all kinds of shapes which together would make this one man Abraham into a great nation. There would be children and land and all kinds of material prosperity.

I will make your name great, so Abraham would become important and famous and powerful. But as always, when God blesses people it is not just for their benefit. They are blessed so that they can become a blessing to other people to. So God promises
I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.
Abraham would be God’s agent taking God’s blessing to other people too.

3 I will bless those who bless you,
And God would also watch over Abraham and defend him and keep him safe.
and whoever curses you I will curse;

But more than that
and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’
So God’s blessing would flow out through Abraham, not just to the people he met but indeed to all peoples everywhere. But the primary form of God’s blessing to Abraham would be a land he could call his own, where he could live in prosperity and safety, the Promised Land.
7 The LORD appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land.’ So he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him.
There were so many rich blessings waiting for them in the land flowing with milk and honey. For Abraham and his descendants the curse on the ground would begin to be lifted in the Promised Land. So many blessings, but they are especially for his offspring, his descendants. And as I am sure that you have already guessed, the Hebrew word for offspring there is zera, seed. One day salvation will come through the seed of the woman. But on the way to that salvation, even before that, Abraham’s seed would inherit the Promised Land, and in that way, through Abraham and the seed of Abraham, all peoples on the earth will be blessed.
In Genesis 15 God repeated his promises to Abraham and made a covenant with him.
Genesis 15 After this, the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision:
‘Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward.’

God will protect him, and Abraham would enjoy the very great reward of a relationship with God. But then there was a problem. Abraham didn’t have any children to inherit and pass on God’s blessing. Abraham’s only heir would be his servant in his household. So God made a remarkable promise to Abraham.
Genesis 15 4 Then the word of the LORD came to him: ‘This man will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir.’ 5 He took him outside and said, ‘Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’
Again, you guessed it, the word translated offspring or descendants there is zera. God’s blessings are promised to Abraham’s seed. And this was Abraham’s response to God’s promise.
6 Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.

We will see in weeks to come just how important that verse is to God’s masterplan of salvation. Even though he was over 75 and his wife Sarai was way too old to have children, Abraham believed God. He put his trust in God. And God “credited it to him as righteousness.”
New Living Translation “Abram believed the LORD, and the LORD counted him as righteous because of his faith.”
Good News Bible “Abram put his trust in the LORD, and because of this the LORD was pleased with him and accepted him.
The sin of Adam and Eve had separated them from the Holy God who had created them. But already in Eve’s descendant Abraham that barrier began to be removed.
In Isaiah 41 verse 8 God addresses the Israelites as “you descendants of Abraham my friend.”
The Letter of James 2 explains it like this
James 2 23 And the scripture was fulfilled that says, ‘Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,’ and he was called God’s friend.
So with Abraham, God was beginning to deal with the separation caused by sin. Abraham was called God’s friend.
That day God made a covenant with Abraham to guarantee his promises to him. 24 years later God confirmed that covenant and gave to Abraham the sign of the rite of circumcision.
Genesis 17 When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to him and said, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me faithfully and be blameless. 2 Then I will make my covenant between me and you and will greatly increase your numbers.’
3 Abram fell face down, and God said to him, 4 ‘As for me, this is my covenant with you: you will be the father of many nations. 5 No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations. 6 I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. 7 I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. 8 The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God.’

“I will be their God”. Here we see the beginnings of the reversal of the separation between God and human beings cause by the fall.
So all God’s glorious promises were confirmed to Abraham and to his offspring, to his descendants, to his seed forever. The same promises were repeated to Abraham’s son Isaac.
Genesis 26 2 The LORD appeared to Isaac and said, “Do not go down to Egypt; live in the land where I tell you to live. 3 Stay in this land for a while, and I will be with you and will bless you. For to you and your descendants I will give all these lands and will confirm the oath I swore to your father Abraham. 4 I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, 5 because Abraham obeyed me and kept my requirements, my commands, my decrees and my laws.”
Through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed. And then in his turn Isaac’s son Jacob had a dream at Bethel where God repeated his promises to Jacob.
Genesis 28 12 He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13 There above it stood the LORD, and he said: “I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. 14 Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring.
So the promise passed down through the line from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob,
All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring.
God will bring his blessing to everybody everywhere, through the seed of Jacob.
God’s wonderful salvation would be brought to the world through the offspring of the woman, initially through Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all their descendants. But there is another promise to Abraham which makes us believe that it is one particular descendant who will crush the devil’s head, reverse all the damage caused by the fall, and bring blessings to everybody.
You will remember the occasion on Mount Moriah in Genesis 22 when God put Abraham to the test by asking him to sacrifice his own son Isaac, God’s gift of a miracle child. As Abraham was about to demonstrate his faith and obedience, God commanded him not to make the sacrifice but instead to sacrifice a lamb which was caught in a thicket. We can see those events as prophecy that one day God would himself give up his only son. And some words of Abraham’s were also prophetic. “God himself will provide the lamb for the offering.” Indeed God would give Jesus, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
But listen to what happens next.
Genesis 22 15 The angel of the LORD called to Abraham from heaven a second time 16 and said, ‘I swear by myself, declares the LORD, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, 17 I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18 and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.’
“Through your offspring, all nations on earth will be blessed.”
As we said last week, the grammar of the Hebrew word for seed or descendant or offspring, zera is singular. But, a bit like the English word sheep, it can have a plural meaning. So it can mean one descendant or many descendants. That word zera, actually comes three times in God’s promise to Abraham. Descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Descendants will take possession of the cities. But then to highlight the significance of the third promise, the NIV changes the translation of the same word to offspring. through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.’
The translation of this third promise is deliberately ambiguous. It could mean descendants or it could mean just one descendant, just one offspring, just one seed. In the context of Abraham offering up Isaac, it seems likely to me that this is prophetic and that the reference is to a single offspring, one particular descendant, just one seed of Abraham who would bring blessing to all the nations of the earth. So here we have the second announcement of the gospel, a second hint of a Saviour. The seed of the woman who would sacrifice himself to crush the serpent’s head and defeat the devil. The Saviour who would free us all from pain and suffering and even from death. The seed of the woman who would bring human beings back to God once again.

So what does this have to say to us, beyond marvelling at God’s amazing plan of salvation. Many things but just one for this evening. One of the first things I learned when I was training as a teacher was also one of the most important. It is the concept of “deferred gratification”. If you are teaching young people, you need to help them appreciate that the things they are learning will not bring them immediate benefits. Instead what they learn might be useful to them to get a job one day, or to enjoy the world around them. They will need to give up the exciting things they could be doing right now for the benefits they will receive in the long term – deferred gratification. I was lucky because I was mostly teaching chemistry, where you can always have fun blowing things up and setting fire to things and making pretty colours. And I was teaching computing, and who doesn’t love making a computer do what you want it to. But for most of the time for most teachers at secondary level, you need to persuade your pupils of the value of their education in the long term, in contrast to the effort they need to make right now.
God’s plans promised many blessings to the Patriarchs. But the greatest riches of those blessings were not to Abraham, Isaac or Jacob, but to their seed – their offspring and their descendants. All the peoples of the earth will be blessed, but not directly through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The wonderful blessings of salvation will come through their seed, their descendant, the Lord Jesus Christ. God called the Patriarchs to faith and obedience. But they themselves would not enjoy the greater blessings. Most Christians are quite good at trusting God and obeying God for the all blessings we receive as we do so – love, joy, peace, answered prayer. We are not so good at trusting and obeying when the blessings are not for us but for other people – for our children and grandchildren. We are not so good at trusting and obeying when the blessings will be for strangers. But God blesses us to make us a blessing to others. God calls us to step out in faith for the benefit of other people. Abraham and Isaac and Jacob trusted and obeyed God, and inspire us in our lives to do the same.