LD 6: The Protoevangelium

Keeping it short today, because I’m sick.  Nausea and a fever aren’t condusive to sane writing.

I covered much of Lord’s Day 6 last week and ended with this statement, which combines LD5 to LD6:

Because our righteous Savior is 100% Man and 100% God, He alone is worthy to be our Mediator who is both willing and able to bear the punishment of our sins and earn for us heaven’s righteousness.

So I want to quickly write about HC# 19 and its instruction on the redemptive historical unveiling of the gospel.  The gospel is first told in seed form in Genesis 3:15.  Coming just after the Fall, God is pronouncing judgment to the serpent:

14 So the LORD God said to the serpent, “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.”
(Genesis 3:14-15)

Tension will always exist between God’s line of people and the serpent’s line.  That tension will be characterized by “enmity” and should not surprise us even to this day.  What should bother us is if there isn’t any tension living as His child in this world.

The enmity of Genesis 3:15 became most pronounced at the cross.  There the Father poured out His wrath on the Son exacting the eternal death that we should have suffered.  Satan thought his “strike of the heel” was a victorious blow.  It was.  By Satan’s apparent victory God was able to secure a people for Himself.  It was God’s victory, not Satan’s.  Christ the Victor “crushed the serpent’s head.”  That is the gospel conveyed to us in the midst of perhaps the darkest chapter in Scripture.  That is the protoevangelium, the first gospel message.  Good is good.

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Lord’s Day 6
Q & A 16
Q. Why must he be truly human and truly righteous?
A. God’s justice demands that human nature, which has sinned, must pay for its sin; but a sinner could never pay for others.

Q & A 17
Q. Why must he also be true God?
A. So that, by the power of his divinity, he might bear the weight of God’s anger in his humanity and earn for us and restore to us righteousness and life.

Q & A 18
Q. And who is this mediator—true God and at the same time truly human and truly righteous?
A. Our Lord Jesus Christ, who was given us to set us completely free and to make us right with God.

Q & A 19
Q. How do you come to know this?
A. The holy gospel tells me. God himself began to reveal the gospel already in Paradise; later, he proclaimed it by the holy patriarchs and prophets, and portrayed it by the sacrifices and other ceremonies of the law; finally, he fulfilled it through his own dear Son.