21. Genesis 3

So the LORD God said to the serpent: “Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle, and more than every beast of the field; on your belly you shall go, and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. 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.

God’s covenant of grace is summed up in this statement, which is sometimes called the “protoevangelium” or the first time the Gospel is mentioned in the Scripture. But notice that God takes all the actions. God’s covenant has always been sovereignly administered. This means that men didn’t bargain with God. They didn’t say, “Yeah, I think I’ll serve God in this way.” In the first covenant (the covenant of works made in chapters 1-2) God made man and entered into covenant with man and told man (in effect) “This is the way it is going to be. Here are the rules, here is the kind of relationship I am going to have with you.” In other words, the covenant was God-centered; not man-centered. It was a sovereign gift. Man rebelled and the broken covenant not only impacted Adam, but all of his family and posterity. Men had no choice about escaping the judgment of the broken covenant.

But in this chapter God institutes a new covenant with men. He sovereignly brought Adam and Eve into the covenant of grace made with His Son; the one who would bruise Satan’s head. Adam and Eve didn’t seek Him. They were hiding from Him. God took them by His elective grace and said that they were going to be in this covenant. Up until this verse, Eve was at enmity with God and in league with Satan. God saved Eve by grace and said, “I will put enmity between you and the woman.” God put the enmity there. We don’t decide who will and who will not be put into the covenant. Eve didn’t decide. God took her out of Satan’s family and put enmity between her and Satan and put a covenant bond of love between the woman and God.

Well, the same is true of our children. Our children do not decide if they will or will not be in the covenant. Nor do parents decide who should enter the covenant and who should not. God said “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her Seed.” God had said that they would die when they ate the fruit. And they did die spiritually. They were separated and alienated from God. But now that God has brought Eve into the covenant of grace, he doesn’t leave all of her children dead in trespasses and sins. Verse 20 says that she became the mother of all the living. People sometimes take the promise in the next phrase as exclusively referring to Christ. Christ was one of her descendants, that is true. And it primarily refers to Christ. But Paul by inspiration quotes this verse and applies it to the church. It says, “The God of peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly.” He can say that because the church is united to Jesus, the true seed of the woman, by faith. So who does God include in His covenant of grace in this verse? Is it only Adam and Eve? No. He not only put enmity between the adult woman and Satan, but He also puts enmity between their children and Satan’s seed. In other words, God’s sovereign grace reaches out to save the children of believers. He doesn’t wait for them to grow up and choose Him. He works in their hearts by sovereign grace.

Let me give one qualification, however. This passage implies that children are not automatically saved. There is a warfare, but God starts children out in the covenant. He puts the children at enmity with the world. There is a difference there. Some like Cain would be cut off from the covenant in later life and Cain’s descendants and any other unbelievers’ descendants would be the seed of Satan. Certainly Cain grew up to reject the covenant. Being in the covenant doesn’t save people. But it is not by accident that chapter 4:26 describes Seth’s children as believers in covenant with God. They constituted the church. It is not by accident that chapter 6 describes the children of Seth as the sons of God. It is not by accident that God saved the household of Noah, the household of Abraham and that he continues to say, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved, you and your household.” In Ezekiel God describes the children of covenant as “My children,’ and “children born to Me.”

The point is that in every covenant God has made with man, He sovereignly dictates the members of that covenant, and it always includes the children. His covenants can be summed up in the words, “I will be a God to you and to your children after you.” This is one of the reasons we apply the sign of the covenant to our children. The mode of baptism (pouring) shows that God’s covenant is by sovereign grace, not by man’s initiative. The movement is from heaven to man, not vice versa. Likewise, the vast majority of baptisms are infant baptisms for the same reason — the passivity of a baby symbolizes the fact that we enter the covenant passively — not by our actions, but by God’s sovereign grace. So as we witness the baptism this morning, let us rejoice in God’s covenant that includes children and God’s sovereign grace which chooses us before we choose Him. May that grace be at work in all of our children. Amen.