NOTES for Gen 3:15

If the world is so good, if God Who created it really cares about man, how to explain then what we see around: why man doesn’t know how to live in peace with himself, with his family, with the earth? Why all the domains of human relationships turn out deformed, and to man remains only "to eat bread by the sweat of his face ", to fight with the nature, with woman, with God? This question is put in the culture and the religious myths from the beginning of the human history.

The Word gives again a symbolic and paradoxical answer: the problem is not in the envy of the gods and not in the anger of the devils - man, Adam, each of us, in the depths of his essence wanted to live without God, and received in result a bitter awareness of his powerlessness and his ache, instead of wisdom and power. And what remains from paradise is a gleam of hope: one day man will overcome the snake... It is important that this hope is not only the fruit of an irresponsible human optimism. God Himself, by putting away from eternity the sinful man, so that he does not suffer eternally, gives the promise of victory. This word is addressed properly to the snake - and it gives us the right to believe that the snake will be overcome, and in the history of the universe, and in our own life.