After Adam and Eve sinned, they and their predecessors would have to deal with the consequences. But they were not left without hope, for God promised that one day a descendant of Eve would rise up and destroy the serpent for what he had done. And as the Bible continues on, this coming-child’s genetic line is more and more specified, and ultimately assigned to the line of King David via another prophetic promise.
By God’s own declaration, a human descendant would be the one to fix a human problem. And since that human problem was sin, it would take a sinless human to actually pull that off. Of course a “sinless human” sounds impossible (which humanity has proved over and over again), so in order to get such a human, a sinless God would have to become fully human in the person of Jesus and live the life that none of us were ever capable of living.
Demons often called Jesus the “Son of God,” but Jesus’ favorite nickname for himself was “Son of Man.” He was the human of humans (and unbeknownst to many until later, the God of gods). He emptied himself of the kind of God-things that did not allow him to be fully human, lived a sinless life, and then invited all humanity to follow and act like Jesus so that they would be saved from their sins by what Jesus had done for them. Only one descendant of Eve got it right and so only one descendant can free us from the judgment of sin that we all deserve.
*This devotional was created out of the themes of Acts 2:22-36 found in today’s reading at CommonPrayer.net.
Jamin Bradley 