“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed.”
Genesis 3:15
What happened in Eden?
Most churches teach that Adam and Eve fell by eating a piece of fruit. We believe the Bible points to something deeper. The serpent was “more subtil than any beast of the field” (Genesis 3:1). He was not a snake on its belly until after the curse (Genesis 3:14). He was the closest creature to man, and Satan used him.
When God spoke the curse, He spoke of seed: the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman (Genesis 3:15). Seed means offspring. Eve said, “The serpent beguiled me” (Genesis 3:13). Paul used the same word when he wrote of presenting the church as “a chaste virgin to Christ,” afraid that “as the serpent beguiled Eve,” the church might be corrupted (2 Corinthians 11:2–3). The language is the language of purity and corruption.
Cain and Abel
Scripture says plainly that Cain “was of that wicked one, and slew his brother” (1 John 3:12). Abel was a righteous man who offered by revelation (Hebrews 11:4). When the Bible later gives the generations of Adam, it traces them through Seth, not Cain (Genesis 5:1–3; Luke 3:38).
We believe this shows two lines of seed running through human history: one that came from God through Adam and Seth, and one that came through the serpent’s deception through Cain. The two lines are seen again in the days of Noah, in the wheat and the tares that grow together until the harvest (Matthew 13:24–30, 36–43), and in the religious leaders Jesus told, “Ye are of your father the devil” (John 8:44).
Why it matters
This teaching is not about blaming women or about any race or nation of people. It is about the nature of sin and the reason redemption had to come through a virgin birth, outside the normal line, by the Seed of the woman who would bruise the serpent’s head. It also explains why the two spirits, the true and the false, grow side by side in the church until the end (Matthew 24:24).
Scriptures to study
Genesis 3:1–15, 4:1–2, 5:1–3; Matthew 13:24–43; John 8:44; 2 Corinthians 11:2–3; 1 John 3:10–12; Jude 11.