Gen. 9:20-29, The Mosaic Messiah: Semite (3)

Let’s make a few other notes about Gen. 3:14-15.  Jesus recognized throughout His life and ministry that the serpent, Satan, was the enemy.  Both He and John the Baptist connected the religious establishment with Satan, calling them a “brood of vipers” (Mt. 3:7 23:33).  In Jn. 8:44 Jesus referred to the devil as the “father” of the Jews because, like him, they were conspiring to murder Him and they were justifying it by a pack of lies.  Jesus’ battle with Satan at the beginning of His ministry was recorded (Matt. 4:1-11), with the promise that he (Satan) would return at other opportune times.  The cross and the resurrection was, among other things, a crushing victory of Satan and his angels.  He made a spectacle of them (Col. 2:13-15), defeating the one who had the power of death (Heb. 2:14-15).

What Christ is in the believer is essential to the believer’s walk.  We, like Him, need to remember that our battle is not against people but against spiritual forces of darkness (Eph. 6:12).  We, like Him, find victory in His death and resurrection.  This is Paul’s point in Col. 2:11-12: In Him you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, buried with Him in baptism, in which you also were raised with Him through faith in the working of God who raised Him from the dead.  What Moses recorded, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, was God promise to crush the serpent by the Man He would send.  What the New Testament tells us is that God has kept His promise.

Gen. 9:24-27

The “proto-evangelium” made it clear that God would provide a solution, a Savior, for the guilty sinners, and that Savior will be a Man, of the seed of the woman.  This means that the Savior will be a historical figure.  He will be born of a woman, whose historical setting will become the historical setting of the Savior.  Thus, some of Moses’ recorded prophecies concerning the Savior serve to place Him in that historical setting. 

This prophecy, involving Noah and his sons, places the Savior in the line of Shem.  Gen. 9:27 says: may he dwell in the tents of Shem.  Who is “he?”  Is it God or Japheth?  If it is God, then this is clearly about the Savior, that He is not only Man but is God, and that He will be a Semite.  We ought not pass this possibility as not likely.  It is quite possible that the active subject of the first line of v27 (God) is also the active subject of the second.

If it is Japheth, as the NIV translates, it at least shows the ascendency of Shem and thus has Messianic implications.  In Gen. 10:19, Canaan is given the land that became known as “the land of Canaan.”  That land would eventually become Israel’s, and those Canaanites who still were living in the land became the servants of Shem.  And, of course, Gen. 11:10-32 gives the lineage of Shem down to Abram.