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October 3, 2019

Last night, after connecting with each other while playing a game, and spending time in worship, we focused our efforts on seeing what God had for us in Genesis 3:14-24. The last couple weeks, we’ve read the intro to God’s story, how God creates order out of chaos, and we’ve read the introduction of the problem in the story, how mankind sinned against God. This week, we took a look at what God will do about the problem of sin in the story of the bible.

At first, Genesis 3:14-24 seems like merely the consequences of sin. Indeed, there are consequences for sin. But, the big thing we focused on was the curse on the serpent, in which God says that the offspring of the woman will one day crush the head of the snake, but the snake will bite his heel. THIS is God’s solution to the problem of sin and evil. With sin entering the world, every human is now born into the sin of Adam and Eve. But God foretells that one day, a son of the woman will come and crush the snake so that he can no longer tempt humanity. We briefly traced this theme all the way through the scriptures, pointing out that God ALWAYS has the offspring of the woman in mind, and that offspring will one day be Jesus! It’s amazing! Genesis 3 talks about Jesus, ya’ll!

We made mention of much more in our observations of the text, but we ended by talking about God’s final act before removing Adam and Eve from the garden. We noticed that, although God curses the snake, he does not curse Adam and Eve. He curses the circumstances around conception and childbearing, and the circumstances around subduing the earth. Instead of cursing Adam and Eve, God actually clothes them! He kills an animal, and gives both of them a covering that their nakedness and shame would be covered! God’s grace abounds throughout the whole Bible, even in the very beginning of the story.

Here’s some questions to follow up with your students:

• What did you learn about “the snake crusher” in youth group?
• Based on your knowledge of the Bible, who is the snake crusher? How will he crush the snake? How does the snake bite his heel?
• Why does God clothe Adam and Eve?
• How does God “clothe” us in our sin and shame?
• What did you take away from youth group this week that you can apply to your life right now?

We had a really good night. Some light bulbs went on, and there was lots of good discussion. The students had a million questions about Heaven, and the garden, etc. The one question that really matters about Heaven is: Will you be there? There’s only one way! And it’s by grace, through faith in Jesus.