Caller: I was just wondering about where the Bible says the woman’s seed bruises the serpents head and I just wondered what that meant.
Pastor Doug: When you read there in Genesis, where the Lord said to Eve—He gives a prophecy to Eve, who is a symbol of the church, saying that her Seed, meaning her Descendant, who would be the Messiah, would bruise the head of the serpent but the serpent would bruise his heel. The only way to kill a serpent is, you don’t bang it on the tail, you have to smash it on the head, and the word ‘bruise’ there means to smash the head of the serpent.
When a person is bitten on the heel, it means it impedes their progress, and the devil has successfully hindered the progress of the church but it has not been a mortal wound. It has not stopped its motion. So it’s telling about the war, the enmity, between the children of the devil and the children of the woman, or the church, of Christ, and it’s an allegory of that battle between good and evil. Incidentally, if you go to Revelation 12, and read about the dragon pursuing the church, that is a bigger picture of that prophecy.