We understand now that the ultimate fulfillment of God’s curse on the serpent, namely, that the seed of the woman would crush his head (Genesis 3:15), is Jesus. It is similar to Paul’s explanation of how Jesus is the one seed fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham, “promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, ‘And to offsprings,’ referring to many, but referring to one. And to ‘your offspring,’ who is Christ” (Galatians 3:16). There is no doubt that Jesus took all the devil’s teeth.

But that’s not all. Near the end of his letter to the Romans Paul wrote:

The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. (Romans 16:20)

Passing over the deliberate word play between divine peace doing divine crushing, look who is the divine instrument of the crushing: “your feet,” that is, the believers reading the epistle. If Jesus were the crusher in this passage, Paul would have started the benediction earlier. “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under Jesus’ feet through whom you have grace.” Instead, the collective church is the offspring of the woman who crush the serpent’s head.

How do we do that? By the grace of Jesus with us. That’s got to be part of the reason why the benediction of grace follows the promise of victory. His grace enables us to escape the snare of the devil (2 Timothy 2:26), to resist him (1 Peter 5:9; James 4:7), and to fight and defeat him. The saints crush the serpent in Christ.

We are not a defeated people. This does not mean that we are out of the the enemy’s cross-hairs, it does mean that his shots will backfire. We may be worn out, beat up, or even killed in the battle, but we cannot lose.