“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”
Genesis 3:15 (ESV)
The Question from Class
We often say in class that Jesus was not Plan B. The objection came back at once: if God regretted that he had made man (Genesis 6:6), then the sending of Jesus certainly sounds like Plan B. The objection is a fair one. A Plan B is what a man draws up after his first plan has failed. If Jesus were Plan B, two things would be true. God would have been caught unprepared by the ruin of the world, and the sending of his Son would have been thought of afterward. The companion sheet on Genesis 6:6, It Grieved Him to His Heart, answers the first: God was grieved, and he was not surprised. This sheet takes up the second.
The Promise Is Older Than the Regret
Genesis itself gives the first answer, and it is the answer that was given in class. On the day of the fall, before he pronounced any sentence on the woman or the man, God spoke the words printed above to the serpent while Adam and Eve listened. The Lutheran Study Bible calls the verse “the first promise of the Gospel” and says of that day, “The only way for Adam and Eve and their descendants is forward to the cross.” The Apology of the Augsburg Confession teaches that the promise of grace in Christ was delivered first to Adam, and that “all the saints were justified by faith in this promise” (Apology XII 53–54).
The chapters that follow show the promise at work before the flood is ever mentioned. Eve bears her first son, and as Luther reads Genesis 4:1 she hopes that she has already “gotten” the one who will bruise the head of Satan. Lamech names his son Noah, and in Luther’s words he commits “a similar pious error”: he hopes that this child is the promised Seed who will lift the curse. Both were mistaken about the child, and both were right about the promise. The regret of Genesis 6:6 falls in the middle of a story that is already moving toward Christ.
| Genesis | What Happens | What It Shows |
|---|---|---|
| 3:15 | God promises the offspring of the woman, who will bruise the serpent’s head. | The Gospel is spoken on the day of the fall, before any sentence on Adam and Eve. |
| 4:1 | Eve bears Cain and says, “I have gotten a man.” | She is already looking for the promised one (Luther; The Lutheran Study Bible). |
| 5:29 | Lamech names his son Noah: “this one shall bring us relief.” | He hopes that Noah is the promised Seed. Luther calls it a pious error. |
| 6:6 | The LORD regrets that he has made man, and it grieves him to his heart. | The grief falls in the middle of a promise that is already under way. |
| 6:18 | “But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark.” | Luther: the covenant is the promise of the Seed, “the second promise of Christ.” |
| 9:26 | After the flood Noah blesses the LORD, the God of Shem. | The promise passes to the line of Shem, and from there to Abraham (Luther). |
What God Carried Through the Water
The flood looks like a fresh start with a new plan. The chapter that records the regret says otherwise. Twelve verses later God tells Noah, “But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark” (Genesis 6:18). Luther takes that covenant to be “the promise of the seed, which was to bruise the serpent’s head,” and he writes, “When God destroyed the whole original world, he manifested the promise of the seed to that wretched and tiny remnant, Noah and his sons.” From Noah it passed to Shem, and Luther follows it from there: “It proceeded from the race to the family, and from the family to the individual,” through Abraham and David “down to one virgin, Mary.” While the world perished, Luther says, Noah “consoled himself and his family with the hope of promised seed and dwelt more upon this promise than the destruction of all the rest of the world.” A God who had changed plans would have let the old promise drown. He brought it through the water with Noah.
Before the Foundation of the World
Why the Cross Was Never an Afterthought
The Plan Is Older Than the Promise
Genesis 3:15 is where the plan was first announced. It is not where the plan was first made. Heinrich Schmid, summarizing the old Lutheran teachers, puts it exactly: God “did not then, for the first time, form this purpose of redeeming man; for, as He foresaw from eternity that he would fall, He determined at the same time both to create and to redeem him.” The New Testament says the same in one place after another.
| Passage | What It Says About the Plan |
|---|---|
| 1 Peter 1:19–20 | Christ, the lamb without blemish, “was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times.” |
| Ephesians 1:4 | The Father “chose us in him before the foundation of the world.” |
| 2 Timothy 1:9 | God’s own purpose and grace were given to us “in Christ Jesus before the ages began.” |
| Titus 1:2 | Eternal life is what “God, who never lies, promised before the ages began.” |
| Acts 2:23 | Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.” |
| Revelation 13:8 | “The Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world” (Brighton’s translation; the ESV joins the phrase to the names written in the book of life). |
The Lutheran Study Bible comments on 1 Peter 1 that “even before creation, God knew that mankind would fall into sin,” and that “in His love, before the world was made, He determined to send His Son, the unblemished Lamb, to be our sacrifice.” Reed Lessing, in the Concordia Commentary on Isaiah 40–55, is blunter: “The events on Good Friday and Easter were not a stopgap measure.” He adds, “The cross was drawn into the original blueprint, written into the first script.” A stopgap measure is another name for Plan B.
Why It Looks Like Plan B to Us
W. H. T. Dau, introducing his translation of Walther’s Law and Gospel in 1928, admitted how the matter appears: “To us this second manifestation of the divine will looks like an afterthought.” He then corrected the appearance: “To God nothing is an accident.” God “had foreseen in eternity” the entrance of sin, and “in eternity had prepared” the remedy that he afterward announced in his promises. We live inside time, and we meet these things one after another: creation, fall, promise, flood, cross. Scripture tells the story in that order and speaks of God in our language as it goes, which is why Genesis 6:6 sounds as it does. The order in which we learn the plan of God is not the order in which he made it.
Two Things That “Not Plan B” Does Not Mean
First, it does not mean that God planned the fall. He foresaw it, and he did not will it. The Formula of Concord says that “the beginning and cause of evil is not God’s foreknowledge” but “the wicked, perverse will of the devil and of men” (Solid Declaration XI 7). A. L. Graebner’s definition of the decree of redemption speaks of a human race “whose fall He had foreseen, but not decreed.” Second, it does not explain why God permitted the fall. Scripture does not say, and Luther refused to guess. His answer to those who asked was to point to what God has done: the devil deceived Adam and Eve, and God sent his Son into the world.
One Plan, One Savior
No one has ever been saved in any other way, and so there has never been any other plan. Luther preached that the faith of Adam and Eve differs from ours in one point only: they believed that the Seed of the woman would come, and we believe that he has come. He came on schedule. “When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son” (Galatians 4:4), at the time that the Father had set. On the cross the serpent struck his heel, which Lessing calls “a mortal wound that only lasts from Good Friday until Easter morning,” and there the head of the serpent was crushed. On Easter afternoon the risen Jesus walked two disciples back through the Old Testament, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets,” and showed them “in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). God did not discard his creation and begin again. Thomas Winger writes on Ephesians 3 that “the God of creation will set right what has gone wrong,” and that the new creation “is not an abandonment of the old, but its perfection.” The cross was not the repair of a plan that had failed. It was the plan. The promise of Genesis 3:15 is still running, and it now includes those who hear it: “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Romans 16:20).
Genesis 3:15 · One Plan, One Savior