Reading… and Thinking

The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

— Genesis 3:4-5 (NASB)

Lies! All lies! Nothing the serpent said was true.

The first lie of all is the one that continues to deceive mankind: “You surely will not die.” Surely not. The Creator would not go to all the trouble to make us and then kill us. He’s not like that. Besides, we can’t conceive of ourselves not existing. So we surely must not really die.

When it became all too apparent that people do die, this comfortable lie didn’t go away. Whether it’s the Egyptian concept of the afterworld, or the Eastern concept of reincarnation, or the European concept of ghosts, just about every religious system has had some way of convincing themselves that they don’t really die.

But the serpent wasn’t just lying. It was calling God a liar, since God had said that they would die. This is the most incredible blasphemy. Mankind continues in this blasphemy as well. Whenever things go bad for people, they tend to accuse God with wrong.

And this isn’t the only way in which God is maligned. What kind of character does the serpent ascribe to God? According to the serpent, God is jealous in a petty way. He is worried that he’ll lose his superiority to the man and woman, and that’s the only reason He doesn’t want them to eat the tree. Notice how small this makes God! He’s only a little bit above us, and by simply eating of this tree we could be equal to Him. Here are two more facets of many false religions. They give their gods human characteristics, and they make their gods weak and barely above mankind (if at all).

Why are people so perverse? Because we have the serpent living inside us. Jeremiah put it this way: ” The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9) The deceit of the serpent is now in our own hearts. We need to remember that what comes out of our own minds is suspect, and needs to be measured against Scripture. It’s not that we are incapable of right thinking—it’s just that we’re bent, inclined to wrong thinking. We will twist facts, ignore facts, invent facts in order to justify what our heart wants.

In fact, whenever we sin, we are following the serpent. We are saying (in effect), “God doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, or can’t stop me. I surely won’t really die for this.” In effect, we elevate ourselves to the position of God in determining what is acceptable. We make Him small and weak, and magnify ourselves.

But of course, our pretending that God is weak doesn’t make it so. Our pretending that we won’t really be destroyed doesn’t make it so. In the end, the seed of the serpent will be destroyed by the Seed of the woman. We don’t want to be the seed of the serpent!