The Lord Jesus Christ is the key to unlock the whole Bible. The Old Testament foretold and prophesied His coming. The New Testament tells how He came in fulfilment of God’s promises. 

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.
Genesis 3:15

Genesis 3:15 is a key verse of the whole Bible. The rest of the Bible is, in fact, an outworking of this one verse. The verse is set against the dark background of Satan, sin and the Fall. The verse has been well describes as the first gospel promise – the proto euangellion – for the verse is a promise of redemption. And this redemption would be wrought by a Redeemer. In due course a Redeemer – a descendant of Eve – would come, God promised. And this Redeemer would reverse the bad and sad consequences of the Fall. He would crush Satan’s head. He would redeem for the judgment which Satan brought upon the world by enticing our first ancestors to sin against God. He would bring redemption. Yet the redemption wrought would not be without a cost and great pain to Himself. ‘He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.’ Nevertheless, through the Redeemer’s pain, salvation would be procured. Satan’s work would be undone. The alienated sinner would be reconciled to God, and eventually all creation would be restored to its former glory. In a nutshell, Paradise Lost would be Paradise Regained.

With the benefit of our New Testament hindsight, we can see that this first gospel promise was wonderfully fulfilled – and will yet be fulfilled completely – in the Lord Jesus Christ. God keeps His promises. Little by little, in Old Testament times, He revealed more and more about the coming Redeemer. The promises were unfulfilled, and then! The Redeemer came. He was sent by God – sent to execute the plan of salvation that God had both foreordained and foretold. ‘But when the time had fully come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons’ (Galatians 4:4,5). The Old and New Testaments therefore are two parts of a single story.

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