The New Man and the New Woman

One

Genesis 3:15 is one of the most important passages in the Bible.

The scene is the Garden of Eden, just after the fall of Adam and Eve. Satan, in the form of the Serpent, has brought about the downfall of the human race. Now God addresses the Serpent. Now God speaks directly to the devil. And this is what He says, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and hers. She will crush your head, will you strike at his feet.”

Modern versions of the Bible translate the last line with, “he will crush your head.”

The Hebrew word is “Ipsa” or “she will crush”, which St. Jerome, Augustine, Chyrsostom, Ambrose, Gregory the Great and others translate in this way. I guess they were not a smart as modern scholars, especially St. Jerome who became a master at Hebrew in the Holy Land!

In those few words, the Lord God declares that Satan and Sin and death will be Defeated. And they will be defeated by a woman and her offspring. 

Sin and Satan and Death will be defeated by Jesus and Mary

Two

Satan and Sin and Death

The great poet Milton described, in his masterpiece Paradise Lost, the way Satan has a kind of unholy trinity that makes war against the Holy Trinity. The Father generates the Son, and then from the Father and the Son there proceeds the Holy Spirit. In a perversely analogous way, Satan generates Sin, and then from Satan and Sin there proceeds Death. Thus the Serpent is Satan, and his seed, his offspring, is Sin. And between the two of them, they wreak spiritual and physical death throughout the whole of creation.  

These are the masters, the chains, the bondage our first parents chose.

These three, that is, Satan, Sin, and Death, are the horrific forces we are subjected to in this life. These three are the ones the first man and the first woman made us slaves to. 

So God sent us a new man, and a new woman, to free us from them.

Three

The Woman and Her Seed

Just as there was a first woman and a first man, so there would be a new woman and a new man.

St. Paul tells us explicitly that Christ is the New Adam. And the Fathers of the Church tell us that Mary is the New Eve.

Do you think it’s any coincidence that Jesus always calls her “Woman” – whether at Cana or at Calvary itself? And by the way, have you ever thought about what a strange expression God uses in this passage from Genesis? That He will put enmity between Satan and his seed, and between the woman and her seed?

The idea of a woman’s seed is pretty strange. Men have seed, women don’t. Nowhere else in the Bible is the expression “woman’s seed” or “her seed” ever used. 

So why is it used here? To show that the Woman God is talking about, the Woman who will, along with her seed, make war on evil – in the case of this woman, the reproductive process will not begin with a man. The reproductive material will not come from a man. This woman will have a child that is not from man’s seed. This woman will have a child from a reproductive process that begins inside herself.

In other words, this Woman we’re talking about, the woman who will battle against Satan, she will conceive as a virgin. And there was only one woman who ever did that.

Four

The Defeat of Sin and Satan and Death

The first woman, and the first man, they lost to Satan, and Sin, and Death. 

The new Woman, and the new Man who would be her seed, they would defeat Satan, and Sin, and Death. They would defeat Satan. They would defeat Sin. This new man and new woman would come into the world the way the first pair did – immaculate, pure, holy. And they would resist the devil’s temptation throughout their earthly life. They would keep their purity. They would be beyond sin’s power. And so they would defeat death too.

The new man would die, but would defeat death by His bodily resurrection and ascension into Heaven. And the new woman would feel the pain of bereavement, the loss of the one she love most but she would gain Him back, and then she would defeat death herself by being miraculously assumed into Heaven.

This is what God told the Serpent, way back at the beginning. “You may feel like you’ve won. But I’m sending new warriors. I’m sending Mary and Jesus. And they will destroy you. And they’ll win back everything you took. They’ll win it all back for Me.”

Five

Satan, Sin, and Death cannot win against Jesus and Mary.

Of course, the war is still going on. Satan is still trying to get each human being he can to become his slave through sin, and so enter into endless death. And God is still offering everlasting happiness to those who choose to return to Him.

The problem is that sometimes it seems as though Satan’s victory is inevitable. There is just so much sin. The world is riddled with it, it’s everywhere, in the most unimaginably awful ways. And not just in the outside world. Sin is eating away at our souls too, all the time. And death is coming, and coming soon. But remember this, Satan and his seed will always lose to Jesus and Mary. In fact, Jesus sent Mary to Fatima to give a very important message to the world. She came as Our Lady of the Rosary and she promised the Triumph of Her Immaculate Heart and an era of peace. 

Jesus and Mary will do their part. But we also have a part to play, a responsibility. We are called not to be passive spectators, cowardly complainers, we are called to enter the spiritual battle and fight with them. We do so through consecration to Jesus through Mary, praying a daily Rosary, and by fasting from destructive uses of free-time that are poisoning our mind and emotions like social media, news, and entertainment. For all of this we must make sacrifices. Accept what you did not choose do not like and cannot change and offer it up to Jesus.

In this spiritual battle you have three choices: you can be a hero, a coward or a traitor.

You must choose who you will be.