Reading: Genesis 3:1-24

Both Adam and Eve knew from the irrevocable curse of Satan that redemption was not offered to the fallen angels. Sadly however, they would later learn through their son Cain that redemption was not applied to all humanity. But in the garden immediately after the fall they knew that the redemption offered to them was not a possible, or even, a probable redemption, but a particular redemption. God pursued Adam and Eve with particular purpose and with definite results.

God did not just come to seek Adam but to save him (Luke 19:10) and He pursued him until He had worked out all Adam’s fears and excuses (verses 10-13), stripped him of all his self-sufficiency, and clothed him with sufficient covering for sin (verse 7, cf. verse 21).

But our first parents were also aware of God’s particular redemption from the words of the Lord’s first gospel promise (Genesis 3:15). The enmity that God placed between the serpent and humanity was on three levels. First, it was between the serpent and the seed of the woman whose heel would be bruised (which pointed to Christ, the ultimate and quintessential enmity); there was then the enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, which pointed to the hostility between believers and unbelievers, the church against the world (1 John 3:13).

But the Lord promised a personal enmity between the woman and the serpent. Believer, hear that declaration! The Lord has placed a barrier between you personally and the devil that he cannot remove. That particular redemption was confirmed when the Lord clothed Adam and Eve  with coats of skin. The regrets of former sins and present sorrow may be deep and lasting but, like Adam, we know that our redeemer lives for us, that we live in Him and will therefore live with Him (John 14:2–3).

“The purchase of redemption and its application are co-extensive. … Christ will not lose one for whom he diedGeorge Smeaton (Christ’s Doctrine of the Atonement, page 376).

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