This Christmas season as we prepare our hearts to celebrate Christ’s incarnation and birth, I thought it would be encouraging for us to trace the redemptive family line of our Savior throughout Scripture.

I pray that as we reflect on the journey of Mary and Joseph, the Shepherds, and the Magi, we too would see the worn pathway of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation as the Holy Spirit points to the glorious person and work of Christ.

As you are reading from Creation in Genesis 1 to the New Creation of Revelation 22, you will quickly notice a unifying theme that emerges in the Paradise of Eden in Genesis 3:15 and runs into the Paradise of the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21 and 22. In Genesis 3:15, God promised He would grant Eve a Seed, an appointed man, an offspring who would crush the work of the Serpent, the devil.

Unsure of the timing of God’s promise, but convinced that God would be faithful, Eve named her third son Seth “for she said, ‘God has appointed for me another offspring” (Genesis 4:25). Her son, Abel, had been murdered, so she concluded rightfully that God’s appointed one was not Abel, nor was it Cain who murdered his brother, Abel. Consequently, Eve interpreted the promise of God to come through Seth.

What we find then as we are looking upon the pages of history in Scripture is that God is working to secure a promised line from Eve, through whom the anointed one would come.

Two great lineages begin to emerge in Scripture, like two mighty rivers, namely, the seed or offspring of the Devil and the seed or offspring of the Promise. Genesis 12-22 encapsulates God’s seed or offspring promises to a man named Abraham.

In Genesis 22:17, God provides a promise that uniquely stands out in the midst of the plethora of God’s promises to Abraham: “And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies.” Within the many (the “offspring”) the one (“his”) would arise who would rule over his enemies. And yet the river of promise has not run its full course. Indeed, while we may see it narrowing through the lives of Isaac and Jacob, Abraham’s son and grandson respectively, we see it powerfully erupt again in Genesis 49:8-10.

Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, uniquely blesses his son Judah employing the promise of power over enemies, reiterating the promise that God had made to Abraham in Genesis 22:17. Jacob blesses Judah, saying, “your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies” (8). Jacob continues, “the scepter shall not depart from Judah nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet” (22:10). The promised seed will come through the line of Judah.

While Abraham and Judah continue to have a central place in the testimony of the Old Testament, David also rises as a central figure. According to 2 Samuel 7, 1 Chronicles 17, and Psalm 89, God established His seed promise with David that He would secure the promised one through his lineage so that the Anointed One would be identified as the son of David.

As we come to the closing books of the Old Testament, we find this promise in Micah 5:2, “But, you O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me, one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.” 

The thread of the promised seed, will run through the house of David in Bethlehem. It is there we must look for the Anointed One, the Promised Offspring.

When Peter identified Jesus in terms of the Christ, He was interpreting Jesus in light of the testimony of Scripture – You are the Anointed One, the Christ. Peter was in effect saying that Christ was more than a prophet.

Jesus was the Anointed, the appointed one of whom the prophets spoke. In fact, Peter interpreted Jesus to be the Anointed One, the Son of the living God. What a confession!

Peter confessed Christ’s essential deity. He recognized that Jesus is the Son of the living God. The Bible is God’s Story, a plot whose beginning and end is summed up in the person and work of Christ, the Savior of sinners.