The Endless Conflict

“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” — GENESIS iii. 15.

THE story of how the world began to sin must always have profoundest interest for every man, who, while he cannot remember the beginning of his own sinning, has always present with him the thought of what a dreadful difference sin has made in his own life. In the story of Genesis, this verse which I have read stands in a most critical and touching place. Sin has come. Disobedience is in the world. Now, what will it lead to? What sort of future now is possible? A hush and pause almost seem to fall upon the history, as when some bold, strong voice has spoken out a word, and all the world seems listening to hear in what form the echo will come back from the hillside. Adam and Eve have sinned. The man and woman are no longer righteousness and purity. Disobedience has come in. And as they stand, awestruck and anxious, God’s word comes to them, and they hear what the issue and consequences are to be. It is all in these words which God speaks to the serpent who represents the evil power of their sin: “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. It shalt bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel.” In these words the programme of humanity is told. Man is to be in everlasting conflict with his sin. His sin is going to Wound him sorely. But ultimately he is going to conquer his sin and kill it.

And is it not true that, in every sincere and earnest life, there comes a time which answers to that critical moment in the world’s history? It is the time in which a man finds out his sin, finds that the problem of his life is complicated with the fact of moral evil. Innocence is gone, and lies behind him forever. He has sinned. He is a sinner. What is to come of it? Oh, what a hush and a suspense falls on a life at that discovery! The wanton act of sin has evidently started long trains of consequences, so very much longer than the sinner knew. He listens for the remote reverberations of his wickedness; and to him there comes really the same word of God: “I will put enmity between you and your sin. It shall bruise your heel; but you shall bruise its head.” This is the prospect that opens before the man waiting to know what will become of him now that he has sinned, — perpetual conflict with his sin, cruel wounds and pain and hindrance inflicted by his sin on him, and ultimate triumph over his sin by the grace of God, if he will have it.

If I am right, and the words which God spoke in Genesis, when the new world lay overshadowed by the first sin, do really tell the story of your life and mine to-day; then, for one moment stop and think how wonderful it is. Here is the story of what you and I are, and of what is to happen to us to-day, written away back so many centuries ago that the imagination aches as it struggles on in search of that far-off time. How persistent human character must be! How the lot of the individual is the lot of the race in miniature! How persistent sin is! What is this wondrous Book which so contains the words of God, which prove themselves His words by being eternal and all-reaching in their truth, as He is?

Let us consider this verse in detail, and see how truly it tells the tale of human life, and how nobly it tells it, and in a way that is full of encouragement. I think it ought to bring peace and strength to us, partly from what it has specifically to say to us, and partly from the very fact that to find our story told so far off and so long ago is itself strengthening. It makes us know that we are understood of God.

Take first the fact of the everlasting conflict between man and sin. “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed,” God says to Satan. That enmity between man and sin has been the great impressive truth of human history. Mankind has never been reconciled with sin, never come to have such an understanding with it that the race everywhere has settled down and made up its mind to being wicked, and asked nothing better, and been at peace. That is the greatest fact by far, the deepest fact, the most pervasive fact in all the world. Conscience, the restlessness that comes of self-reproach, the discontent that will not let the world be at peace with wong-doing — it runs everywhere. No book of the remotest times, no country of the most isolated seas, no man of strongest character, no crisis of history so exceptional, but that in them all you find man out of peace because he is in sin, unable to reconcile himself with living wrong — the enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. It is the great fact of human existence.

And is it not a blessed fact? Think how different it would all have been if this fact had not been true from the beginning, if man had been able to settle comfortably into sin and be content. Men read it as a curse, this first declaration of God in Genesis, after the fall. Is it not rather a blessing? Man had met Satan. Then God said, “Since you have met him, the only thing which I can now do for you, the only salvation that I can give you, is that you never shall have peace with one another. You may submit to serve him, but the instinct of rebellion shall never die out in your heart.” It was the only salvation left. It is the only salvation left now when a man has begun to sin, that God should perpetually forbid him to be at peace in sinning. It is what has saved earth from becoming hell long ago — this blessed decree of God that however man and sin might live together, there should always be enmity between them, they should be natural foes forever. No man has ever yet been bold enough, even in any mad dream of poetry, to picture the reconciliation of the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman, man’s perfect satisfaction in sin, as the consummation and perfect close of human history.

This enmity consists, like every genuine enmity, in two parts, on two sides. Each party hates the other party. The parties are sin and man. In the first place, then, sin hates man. The proof of that is the harm that sin does man, a harm that men are always coming to discover in deeper and deeper symptoms of it, and of which even the men who cling most obstinately to its service are aware. It would be a strange question what attitude man would be able to preserve towards sin, if, conscious of its essential nature and hating it because of that, it still did really seem to him as if sin were a beneficent and helpful power, as if it were the giver of true happiness and genuine peace. There would be a horrible contradiction between what man saw and what man knew. It would be strange indeed if the sight did not ultimately triumph over the know ledge and man learn to love the sin that loved him so. But we are spared all that. As soon as we get in the least below the surface of our life, comes the conviction even to the wilful sinner that his sin is his enemy. Do you think he does not know it, the man who, every day while he sins, feels the jewels plucked one by one out of his crown, and the stain sinking deeper and deeper into the very substance of his soul? Do not you yourself know it when you do a wrong act, and almost hear the power of evil laugh as he drags you back one hard step farther from your heaven?

And if sin hates man, man hates sin. Is that true? I do think that the glory of the Bible is that it is full of the idea that the essential humanity, man as God made him, man “pure in heart,” man as the child of God, does not love sin, but hates it. With all the intensity with which it asserts man’s perverse clinging to sin, it implies, it declares everywhere, that that clinging to sin is diseased; that the true healthy manhood which God first made, and which Christ is trying to restore, shrinks from it and loathes it. Of that manhood we every now and then catch glimpses in the vilest men, something which by its look bears witness to us that it is the truest part of them, which has still left in it some thing of that antagonism to sin which is the life of the holy God they sprang from.

I have spoken of the essential enmity between the human heart and sin. They fight with one another, and they will always fight. But there is a more special meaning in our verse. The promise has always been held to refer, and no doubt does refer, to Christ. The “seed of the woman” is not merely man in general. It is the Son of man, who in the fulness of time came for the redemption of humanity. And when we turn to Him whose life gives the Bible its unity, who fulfils in the New Testament what is written in the Old, how clearly the truth of the words comes out. For the fact of the life of Jesus is the enmity between Him and sin. Sin hated Him. Open your New Testament and read the story of how He suffered. Think what came to Him through all those three and thirty years. Think of the poverty and misery of His birth, the homelessness, the exile, the insults — but I need not tell you the story which has become the central story of history. It was mainly woe, pain, and privation from the beginning to the end. And that would be utterly insignificant if it meant nothing beyond itself, if His sufferings had been nothing but what you and I make out our sufferings to be — the casual hitting of our lives against some point of difficulty, some sharp rock of trouble. They would have had no deep meaning then. We could have read them with a sigh of pity, and dismissed them with an easy tear. But how different it is! Who does not feel it, the stress and vehemence with which trouble attacks the life of Christ? It does not merely happen to Him; it is flung against Him with a violence that is nothing else than personal.

I think that we have all sometimes found ourselves a little puzzled to explain the distinctiveness and peculiar character which we yet clearly feel to be in the sufferings of Jesus Christ. It seemed as if we might catalogue the pains of many another man, and find them equal to His. Even to the last agony of the Crucifixion, there were men who had undergone every physical pain He underwent. And yet His sufferings impressed us as no others did. This Cross was the Cross of the world.

The secret lies in the vehemence with which the sin that persecutes Him seems to hate Him. That makes at once the inevitableness and the nobility of His suffering. Do you remember how He Himself asks the disciples upon the road to Emmaus, “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory?” Those words are wonderful, as they come from Him, because they declare such a deep, essential, inevitable enmity between His own holy manhood and the sin of the world. When they come into conflict, His manhood must be bruised. It was the noblest proof of His absolute holiness that sin so hated Him. He took from its hostility the proof of His perfectness, and so of His glory.

Can we not understand this? Shape in your own mind a miniature picture of it. Image your dearest and purest friend, the loftiest soul you know, to be cast headlong into the midst of the most vile and vicious company. You go the next day and listen, like Darius at the mouth of Daniel’s den, to hear what the result has been. You expect that your trusted friend’s soul has escaped corruption. Do you expect it also to have escaped pain? Would you not even be disappointed and shocked if you found that he had escaped pain, and were wholly easy and untroubled? Do you not feel that, in the tokens which you see of how he has suffered written on his face, you are reading really the proof-marks of his nobleness? If you are not equal to under standing that and begin to express to him your pity for his pain, does he not look up at you and, almost echoing the words of Jesus, say, “Ought I not to have suffered these things, and to enter into my glory. How could I have helped suffering them, without being wholly inglorious and base?”

Oh, when you send your boy to college or into the world, remember that, and do not ask for him a wholly easy life, no obstacles, a cordial, kindly reception from everybody. Do not expect to see him free from anxious doubts and troublesome experiences of soul, and cruel jarrings of his life against the institutions and the men whom he finds in the world. It would be very strange if they did not come to him, if he is genuinely good and pure. “Marvel not,” said Jesus Christ, to His disciples,” if the world hate you; ye know that it hated me before it hated you.” He takes the enmity for granted as a first fact. He being what He is, no other reception is conceivable by Him. If we try to conceive of any other, and set our Christ a welcome and honored guest in the midst of men’s wickedness, then when we look round at Him whom we have set there, He is our Christ no longer. We do not know how precious is every pang of that pain which the Redeemer suffered, if it can only bear us witness, as we look at it, of how sin hated Him, — of the essential enmity between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman.

And then add the other thought of how He hated sin, how he hated it for itself, and the impression is complete. I think that anybody who hears Christ speak, whether in rebuke or pity, to any poor creature who is in the power of sin, gets this idea — that He hated sin not merely for its consequences, for the ruin which it works, as we do. He did that as we do not begin to do it, but He hated it also with an intuitive and native hatred of the thing itself, such as is very rare in any strong degree with us. Put these together, Christ’s hatred of sin and sin’s hatred of Christ; see them in the long and weary struggle, of which the Temptation in the wilderness was only the picturesque dramatic utterance, — see this, and then you have seen how, upon the crowning heights of human history, that was accomplished which was promised upon its very earliest verge: “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed.”

And now, if we have thoroughly set in our minds this fact of the world’s history — the hatred of Christ and sin, — the question will come: What is the meaning of that fact to us? What does it signify to us that the Son of man had, from the beginning to the end of His life, a constant fight with sin? And we answer: It must be first of all a representation of our own lives. It must open and expound our own lives to us. Is not this a great meaning, almost a worthy meaning of the Incarnation, even if there were no other? For to understand our condition is the first step to the mastery of our condition. To understand our life is the first step towards the living of our life. So when some poor soul is bewildered with the endless obstacles it meets; or some brave man, fighting against wickedness, conceives, perhaps out of the very pleasure which he finds himself taking in the strife, a misgiving lest this endless fight be wrong; — to both of them there comes this fact, that the Man who was most man lived a life of obstacle and struggle, just as they are living. Down from Jerusalem there streams the light that makes their careers intelligible. On the light there comes a voice speaking the words: “Marvel not if the world hate you; ye know that it hated me before it hated you.”

So Christ’s enmity to Satan is representative of ours. But if really representative, it must be some thing more than representative. That, I think, is always true. He who sets forth distinctly the character of a group or of a race of men, thereby changes, clarifies, establishes, that character. Whenever the nature and destiny of man have found a supreme embodiment in some grand specimen of human life, he has done more than simply show men what they were; he has opened before them new regions, new things to be. When David stands out from the host of the Hebrews, a stripling strong in the strength of God, and, smiting Goliah with the stone out of the brook, shows to his countrymen how strong they are with such a God to trust in, he really works a change in them. Their cowardice is turned into bravery, and they arise and shout and pursue the Philistines.

And so let us not undervalue the blessing which would come to us if Jesus Christ were simply one of us, setting forth with marvellous vividness the universal conflict of the world, the perpetual strife of man with evil. Surely that strife becomes a different thing for each of us, when out of his own little skirmish in some corner of the field, he looks up and sees the Man of men doing just the same work on the hilltop where the battle rages thickest. The schoolboy tempted to tell a lie, the man fighting with his lusts, the soldier struggling with cowardice, the statesman with corruption, the poor creature fretted by the thousand little pin-pricks of a hostile world, — they all find the dignity of their several battles asserted, find that they are not unnatural but natural, find that they are not in them selves wicked but glorious, when they see that the Highest, entering into their lot, manifested the ‘eternal enmity between the seed of the serpent and our common humanity at its fiercest and bitterest.

But yet this is not the full meaning of the battle of Jesus Christ with sin. We know it is not. He was like us. He was, He is, eternally our representative. We have a right to all the strength and comfort, to all the new aspect which is given to the battle of our life by the firm assurance of that. But, along with His true likeness to us, He was some thing unspeakably different from what we are. When He fought with sin and overcame the world’s pain by undergoing it, He not merely left all other fighters stronger because He was human, and therefore their Brother; He left sin weaker because He was divine, and therefore its Master.

Our Christian faith is this: that the struggle of Christ with sin was more than one event in the long fight of humanity with sin, however splendid that event might be. It was the consummation and essential completion of the struggle. It was the victory. It was the King coming down into the battle to finish it, to give the blow that should assure its end. The struggle still goes on, each soldier struggles still; but each struggles in a strife already won, and lays hold of a victory already certain. Do we understand that truth, — how great, how deep, how glorious it is? Let us know the Life of Christ more deeply. Let us read it and meditate upon it, and let it freely in to show its power upon our lives; and then, when we have laid hold of His Divinity, it will seem simply impossible that such as He is should have lived and died in strife with sin, and yet left sin as He found it. No power of victory that is attributed to such a life as His can seem too great to be true.

But what should be made the most of just here is, that in Jesus the fact of the essential and eternal enmity between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman, between sin and man, was supremely manifested. It is not strange or unnatural. It is most natural. Oh, if we could all learn and believe that! Try to remember it in your lives. You live in struggle, and you think it hard. But if you were not in struggle you would be disowning your manhood. You are simply meeting the necessity of being a man. O struggler, take that necessity, and be thankful and struggle on! And if you are a coward, and want to run out of the battle, get courage from the thought that you cannot run out of it. It reaches everywhere that manhood reaches. You might as well fight out your share of it upon your little plot of ground as upon any other.

And if you are looking up at another man, and admiring him and envying him, and thinking how calm and free from struggle his life is, and getting discontented and discouraged because yours is so different from his; it will relieve all that if you can know that he certainly has his struggle because he too is a man; and that just so far as it is different from yours, just so far very likely it is harder than yours. Or yet again if you want to save some fallen brother, and try to make a bad man good again, it certainly will help you to know something of the fight in which he fell, to be assured that the poor fellow has not gone abroad to find his ruin. It has come to him. He is simply a wreck on that same sea where all of us are sailing; and the more we have been beaten by the storm ourselves, the more we shall understand where his masts have gone to, and how his bulwarks came to be beaten in. Every where life is clearer to us by the old truth of Genesis.

But as yet I have spoken of only half that truth. I have dwelt only on the fact of the enmity between man and sin. I must speak very briefly of the remainder of our verse, that which declares what the issue of the long struggle is to be. “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. It shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel.” The wounded heel of man! The broken head of sin! Is not the promise this: that man, trusting in God, shall come out of the strife wounded but victorious, victorious but wounded; and so, that in the expectation of both, of the wounds by the way and the victory at the end, is the true disposition of man towards life?

If this be the promise, it is perfectly verified in the supreme seed of the woman, in Christ and the struggle of His life. He was wounded sorely; a life all torn and bleeding He dragged out to the end; but when the end came it was victorious. Look at Him on the cross. What words could tell the story like these: “He shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel”? Sin has taken the Saviour and fastened Him there. It has driven in the nails and crowded down the crown of thorns upon the forehead. It has seemed to have its own way with Him, and all the while, with those hands closing in agony over the nails, He is crushing its life out. As we read the story, what sin is doing to Christ and what Christ is doing to sin take their true places and proportions. Sin is tormenting Him, but He is vanquishing sin. And what took place upon the cross has taken place ever since. Sin hinders the work, and insults the name of Christ; but Christ in the long run and in the end overcomes sin and insult and scorn. It bruises His heel, and He bruises its head.

And what is true of Himself, He makes true of the world which He is leading on to ever better things. I think that the prospect of human progress against the powers of ignorance and brutality and selfishness which stop its way, reduces itself more and more clearly to this: They shall bruise its heel and it shall bruise their heads. Not without wounds, not without mortifying and distressing disappointments shall any good cause advance to its success. He is a foolish dreamer who expects an easy and bloodless victory for any noble plan. But yet, success waits before every good cause, if it can only persevere and struggle on with its wounded heel. He is a foolish slave to first appearances who lets the immediate wound shut the final victory out of his sight. It is in this truth, pervading all of human history, that there lies the secret of that strong presence of pathos in every enthusiastic hope and triumphant thanksgiving of mankind. It grows more and more solemn and touching to us, I think. The highest hopes and loftiest rejoicings always have a touch of sadness to them. The flowers of our Decoration Days are always laid on graves. It is because deep into the convictions of men’s hearts has sunk this truth of long experience, that there is no victory except by wounds. That truth has made all the larger and better actions of the world sober with a fine soberness. It has caused soberness in deed to be the necessary accompaniment and warrant of true strength. The coward who shrinks from the wounds, and the boaster who forgets that there are wounds, are both ruled out of the best work of the world.

And when we turn from the world’s large experience — of which it is not well to speculate and talk too much — and look at our own private lives, the same truth appears there, too. Every earnest man grows to two strong convictions: one, of the victory to which a life may come; the other of the obstacles and wounds which it must surely encounter in coming there. Alas for him who gains only one of these convictions! Alas for him who learns only confidence in the result, and never catches sight of all that must come in between — the pains and blows and disappointments! How many times he will sink down and lose his hope! How many times some wayside cross will seem to be the end of every thing to him!

Alas also for him who only feels the wounds and sees no victory ahead! How often life will seem to him not worth the living! There are multitudes of men of this last sort; men with too much seriousness and perception to say that the world is easy, too clear-sighted not to see its obstacles, too pure not to be wounded and offended by its wickedness, but with no faith large enough to look beyond and see the end; men with the wounded heel that hinders and disables them, but with no strength to set the wounded foot upon the head of the serpent and to claim their triumph. Only, friends! do not expect to win the battle of your life without wounds. Do not expect to be good with a goodness unscarred by temptation, and untorn by the rocks of doubt and difficulty on which you have fallen. If you do, you will surely come to disappointment which may grow into despair. But, on the other side, do not let any certainty of wounds deter you from the battle; do not let any assurance that you will fail, and fall, and sin again and again and again, shut out from you the brighter certainty that if you will cling to God He will bring you to His holiness. Be watchful to keep your strength as strong as possible; but be happy if in the vision of the future you can just see yourself crawling up, all wounds and blood, to the fountain at the end, and laying yourself, ready to die, in that water which is eternal life.

And do not spread it out too thin, this truth of ours, by applying it merely to your whole life. It must be that many a one of you has some special task upon his mind which needs its application. You are asking yourself, “What will happen if I do this duty, if I resist this temptation in order to be dutiful to-morrow?” Get your answer out of the old Book of Genesis. That temptation is your Satan. “It will bruise your heel, but you shall bruise its head.” Do not think the victory will be easy. Do not think the precious fruit will drop of itself into your open hands. You must wrench it off of the tree of difficulty; but it is certainly yours if you will take it. It would be good indeed if this verse could to-day give strength to some one of you to do a duty to-morrow which he had been almost ready not to do.

And now, come back to Christ. Let Him stand clearly before us as we close — Christ with His wounds and His victory. His wounds and victory were both for us. He promised them both together to us, because, for us as for Him, they were inseparable. He promised them both together when He stretched out His hands and said: “If any man serve me, let him follow me; and where I am there shall also my servant be.”