The Defeated Serpent

Two hundred fifty miles northwest of São Paolo, Brazil, a brave sixty-six-year-old man saved his eight-year-old grandson from certain death.

An anaconda had coiled itself around the boy and was attempting to suffocate him. It is said that it takes one man for every three feet (one meter) of snake to be able to subdue a creature of that size, but the determined grandfather did battle with the sixteen-foot-long (five-meter-long) snake for over an hour on his own.

He managed to fight off the snake using rocks and a knife and save his grandson’s life. “When I saw the snake wrapped around my grandson’s neck, I thought it was going to kill him,” the heroic grandfather said.* A spiritual parallel isn’t hard to see. In the Garden of Eden, a serpent tempted Eve to eat the fruit growing on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Paul wrote that “the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness” (2 Corinthians 11:3), and in so doing, plunged the human family into defeat, despair, and disarray. There are approximately six hundred different venomous snakes in the world.

The deadliest include the inland taipan, Dubois’ sea snake, and the eastern brown snake, all of which are found in or near Australia.

The deadliest serpent of all, however, is the one that led Adam and Eve away from obedience to God, opened up the floodgates of sin, and unleashed misery upon the world. But the deadliest serpent is also a defeated serpent.

Jesus came into the world “that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14).

Christ’s death on the cross ensured that the enemy of souls would not succeed in forever separating the human family from a loving God.

Although the serpent bruised Jesus’ heel, the Savior secured salvation for the entire human family.