And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

(Genesis 3:14-15)

With this prophecy God gives us the first outline of His plan for the world. Satan, through the serpent, has brought about the fall of mankind. But God gives us a glimpse of things to come. He tells us that there will be struggles between the woman’s seed (the faithful followers of God) and the serpent’s seed (those who give in to Satan’s temptations).

Then He describes the seed of the woman bruising the serpent’s head and the serpent bruising the seed of the woman’s heel. This imagery brings several things to mind. First, it brings about the image of someone crushing the head of a serpent by stepping on it and being injured in the process. Second, a head injury implies a fatal injury, but a person can recover from an injury to the foot.

In this brief prophecy God gives the first clues to how the world’s ultimate history will unfold. Someone descended from the woman will completely defeat Satan. He will suffer terribly in the process, but will recover. This is how we know that, in the end, good will prevail.

God spent quite a while patiently preparing things. He revealed much truth and there are many prophecies. But it was in the prophecies of Daniel that He began to reveal the overall big picture of how future world events would fit into the plan of salvation. This is a very brief outline of the way God prepared His people for the implementation of the plan of salvation. It is all worth studying but, as we are focusing on the prophecies concerning world history, we will simply recap some of this.

For thousands of years the faithful followers of God waited for the promise made to Eve that her seed would crush the head of the serpent.

The world became full of evil. So much so that God could stand by no longer and He decided to destroy the world. Even in this act he provided mercy to any who would accept it. He instructed Noah to build an ark and warn the world that in 120 years the world would be destroyed. Anyone who wanted to be saved simply had to get on the ark. That was it. Nothing difficult or complicated. Simply get on the ark. Unfortunately, Noah’s family were the only ones who got on the ark and were saved.

As the population began to regrow, they challenged God by building a tower to reach unto heaven as an act of defiance. God decided it was necessary to scatter the people across the world. So He broke up their speech into various languages so they could not communicate and were forced to stop work on the tower.

When the people journeyed to the far corners of the world they generally forgot about God and began worshiping other gods. God decided to set up a nation of His own that would act as a shining beacon preserving the knowledge of God through the ages and pave the way for that promised seed of the woman who would bring an end to the serpents reign.

He found a man living in Ur (located in Iraq) named Abram who had the kind of heart He was looking for. He called Abram (later renaming him Abraham) and brought him to Canaan (roughly modern Israel) and told him that that land would be the homeland of his descendants. Abraham’s family lived in Canaan for several generations.

One of God’s promises was that he would be the father of many nations and the genealogical tables in Genesis mention many of these peoples who formed a significant part of the nations of the ancient Middle East. Two lines in particular were specifically blessed by God. One was the line of Abraham’s oldest son Ishmael and the other is Abraham’s grandson Jacob (later renamed Israel). Jacob’s line received the primary blessing of God making the Jews God’s chosen people. But the children of Ishmael would have a part to play too, however that is a story for another time.

Abraham’s family resided in Canaan and bore witness of God to them. God also warned them not to continue in their evil lifestyles by destroying a selection of cities that were so wicked not even ten righteous people could be found within them (Sodom, Gomorrah, and several other cities in that plain).

And it is evidenced that God was being very generous in His definition of righteous people since the only people that were saved were Lot, his wife and his two unmarried daughters. Lot offered his daughters to the men of the city to save his guests (who turned out to be angels) from being raped. Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt for turning back to the city. And his daughters later raped him in order to have kids since they had wandered up into the wilderness and there were no men nearby to marry and have kids with. I digress, but the point is God didn’t simply choose cities at random or ones that simply weren’t pious. He only targeted those cities that were so wicked that, even by a very loose definition of righteous people, He could not find even ten righteous within them.

Later God moved Abraham’s great grandchildren and their families into Egypt in order to protect them from famine. It also gave the Canaanites several centuries to reform. When the Jews had grown into a full sized nation and the peoples of Canaan had generally digressed to the point that most of them were beyond redemption (one of the few notable exceptions being the prostitute Rahab, who saved the lives of the spies) God brought them out of Egypt and established them as the nation of Israel.

God established the nation of Israel and guided them over the centuries. Unfortunately, like most people, they were stubborn about following Him. They were split into two kingdoms. The northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah.

Eventually the kingdom of Israel rejected God’s warnings to such a degree that He was no longer able to protect them from growing Assyrian Empire and, like so many other nations around them, they were conquered and taken away. Scripture doesn’t specify what happened to them afterward, although there are a lot of theories. But that’s an entirely different discussion.

The kingdom of Judah ignored God too, and was conquered by the Babylonians. But there was a core group within them that remained faithful to God. After 70 years, the Iranian (or Persian as we usually refer to them during that period) emperor Cyrus the Great, who had conquered the Babylonians, released the Jews from captivity so they could rebuild the nation of Israel.

It was during the years they spent in exile that God began to reveal the outline of world events important to the Plan of Salvation, not only for the Jews, but for all that will accept it.