"the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field" (Gen 3:1)
The first tactic that Satan used against Adam and Eve was to use a simple and innocent animal as his messenger. Satan has always done this. He tries to appear as something innocent or beautiful or familiar (cf. 2 Cor 11:14). He disguises himself in such a way as to not be discovered for what he really is, so that people may listen to his poisonous words.
APPLICATION: The Bible offers this phrase probably to alert us to what is about to be said. God wants us to be guarded against the deception of the devil, even before he speaks. The devil has been from the beginning seeking to devour and corrupt humanity (1Pet 5:8), since God seeks to glorify Himself through those who bear His image. Satan undoubtedly hates humans because of their image and likeness with God. So, here in the beginning of man's existence, Satan was quickly seeking to deceive and destroy humanity.
The devil and his legions are very cunning in their deceptions. We should always be on guard and ready with our feet solidly on the Truth. There is great wisdom in being familiar with the Word. All of us are in a spiritual battle against hosts of wickedness (Eph 6:12).
"And [the serpent] said to the woman" (Gen 3:1)
This was perhaps the second tactic that Satan used against mankind. He chose the woman as his target. The woman is said to be the weaker vessel in the New Testament (1 Pet 3:7) and the one who was deceived rather than Adam (1 Tim 2:14), though those are very unpopular teachings today. I believe that Satan had been watching them and had already determined that Eve was the weaker one who would more easily be deceived by him. For that reason, I think that this was a specific strategy of the devil's. He will target our particular weaknesses. (I know this is controversial. Obviously, not all women are more prone to deception, and I have no statistics to back up a generalization, but I do believe that the Bible teaches women in general are weaker both physically and emotionally. If that offends you, then I apologize. I may be wrong.)
"Has God indeed said" (Gen 3:1)
The devil here gets Eve to question the wisdom and validity of what God said. The inference that the devil seems to make using the word "indeed" is that the Lord was being unreasonable or unfair. It was something similar to saying, "He said what?!" perhaps. It was meant to be a mental challenge to the fairness of God's command. This is the third tactic Satan seems to use: he uses an unspoken inference that God is unreasonable or ridiculous.
We see that Satan is one who knows God's words. He is not ignorant. It seems from other passages that Satan is very familiar with the Word and that he often quotes it (or misquotes it). Beware of those who quote Scripture vainly or rashly. Satan is one who misuses the Bible in an attempt to deceive people.
Also, another possible tactic is that the serpent drops the word "Lord" (Jehovah), which speaks of the personal covenant relationship of God. Both here and in vv.4-5, Satan only says, "God," rather than "Lord God" as in v.1 and elsewhere. This tactic is about de-personalizing God and getting a person to think of God as an impersonal force or being who has no love or feelings of kindness. Some religions believe in such a false god. Satan likely wanted Eve to think of God in more logical terms rather than personal terms.
APPLICATION: We must be exceedingly careful not to ever assume that our wisdom or intelligence can be better than God's. We should never question God's commands in a skeptical way. God is worthy of our absolute trust. He only commands what is best, because He is love. He is never unreasonable or unfair. Satan, however, wants us to question everything He says and be unbelieving. There are two ways to deal with God's commands and Word: either endlessly question everything in doubt, or simply trust His wisdom without seeking proof of it being wise.
"You shall not eat of every tree of the garden?" (Gen 3:1)
The fourth tactic the devil uses is focusing on the negative. God had started with the great positive that all the trees would be available to them for food, except for the one. The devil flips this around and puts all the attention on this one excluded tree. The implication that the serpent was making was that Eve was entitled to every tree and that God was unreasonable to place a restriction on them. He wanted Eve to question God's motives for keeping Eve from eating from this particular forbidden tree. He wanted Eve to think that God was somehow purely selfish in His command -- that Eve was hurt by this restriction and not helped.
APPLICATION: Our flesh and the devil will both attempt to get us to obsess about those things that we are not morally allowed to have. The end result of such obsessing is that we begin to lust for those things, and the rest is history (cf. Jam 1:14-15).
"You will not surely die." (Gen 3:4)
Here is the direct and blatant denial of God's Word. Apparently when the serpent had detected that Eve was not so much in love with God any longer so as to take offense at the serpent's derision, he attacked the Lord God's veracity directly and head on. This is a possible fifth tactic that Satan may use against those who are open to this attack: a direct denial of God's truthfulness. Satan was trying --and succeeding-- to get Eve to directly consider that God could be absolutely wrong.
APPLICATION: The devil is called a liar (Jn 8:44) and the "father of lies." He was apparently the first creature to lie. We are to be on guard against lies. To be armed against the lies of the devil we need the shield of faith and our waists girded with the Truth (Eph 6:13-16). We should reject the lies of Satan by confident faith that God is true and right and everyone else who contradicts is wrong and a liar (Rom 3:4). We are not called to systematically tear down every lie and false argument that the devil makes, but to outright reject his lies without needing proof that he is wrong. In fact, perpetually facing his lies can be devastating to one's faith, I believe, since the effort is great and sometimes too much for us feeble humans.
However, literally speaking, everything that the serpent said was technically true. Adam and Eve were not going to immediately physically die. Their eyes were opened, etc. The serpent was cunningly trying to deceive Eve by confusing Eve using technically true statements that he knew Eve would apply as contradictory to the Lord's word. He intended that Eve take his words as contrary to God's words, thus he was as good as lying.
(Beware lest we lie to other people by speaking technically true words that we know they will misunderstand leading to their deception. This is wrong. A lie, then, you could say is anything that is spoken with the intent to deceive someone to their harm.)
"For God knows that in the day you eat of it" (Gen 3:5)
The devil uses his sixth tactic with Eve, which is to provide a logical rationale for why God should be considered wrong. He uses God's name here in vain, it seems. Notice how he tries to redefine God by suggesting that God was opposed to Eve eating for His own "selfish" reasons.
This perhaps could be considered a so-called "begging the question" fallacy, also called Petitio Principii. The devil tries to use some of God's words to try to establish that Eve could not die, even though that directly contradicted God's statement. Basically, the serpent says something like, "God said it Himself, so it must be true!"
"your eyes will be opened" (Gen 3:5)
The seventh tactic the devil uses is that he tries to put the most positive spin upon the results of sinning. He claimed that Eve's eyes would be opened, as if they were currently darkened and she were blind to reality. Some truth is here spoken, since later it says that Adam and Eve's eyes were opened (Gen 3:7), but this was a very negative thing rather than a positive thing as Satan wanted Eve to think.
I suspect that the serpent also wanted Eve to think in terms of her physical eyes and what she was seeing. He probably used the word "eyes" so as to subtly get her to pay more attention to the appearance of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Supporting this is the next verse that says that Eve considered that the fruit was pleasant to her eyes. This could be the eighth tactic he uses: appealing to the fleshly senses and appetites. (Compare this with Satan's temptation of Jesus, also appealing to appetite: Mt 4.)
APPLICATION: Satan will often try to tempt people by their physical senses, since people are sensual creatures often guided by their physical appetites. Many of our fleshly desires are not inherently evil, if controlled properly and confined to the limits God set. But, we should never be ruled by our fleshly desires.
The literal meaning here is that supposedly Eve's understanding would be opened and she would break free from a limitation that God had put her under, resulting in a new-found awareness of reality. The lying supposition was that Eve was limiting her potential by virtue of her innocence. She needed, the serpent told her, to be given the "truth" and set free by it. This might be wisdom if she would find greater truth (as opposed to a lie) by eating, but instead she found death and embraced a lie in her sinning against God.
"and you will be like God" (Gen 3:5)
Wow. Here was a massive appeal to Eve's pride and self-interests, which is the ninth tactic (compare with Mt 4:8-9). Eve knew full well that God was incredible and intelligent and full of knowledge. The serpent use suggesting that Eve could become more God-like by sinning. No doubt she had understood that being made in God's image was good, and certainly she wanted to imitate God in the ways that she could. Christians understand that being "godly" involves being more like God in our behavior and attitudes and actions. Therefore, Satan appealed to Eve's good and natural desire to be more like God -- the Perfect Being.
Actually, again, the devil was using an element of truth to deceive Eve. Consider that the Bible does say that Adam and Eve became "like God" in Gen 3:22 by "knowing good and evil," similar to what the devil says in this verse. However, the devil was painting this as a good thing, by getting Eve to think that her knowledge would be similar to God's holy knowledge of good and evil, when in fact our knowledge is not entirely like His knowledge. We have experiential knowledge of evil, but God has intellectual and observational knowledge of sin. We are intimately aware of sin, since it is a part of our fallen nature, but God is holy and does not have this intimate knowledge of sin in the same experiential way. Eve, though, had no knowledge of sin before the Fall.
Perhaps this idea of being like God was partly that Eve would get to determine for herself what was good and what was evil, even as God determines what is right and what is wrong. It seems that the serpent was saying that if Eve defied God, she could set her own rules of right and wrong and become a self-made 'god'. This is a common lie of modern society.
APPLICATION: Satan is often appealing to people's pride and self-interest. He makes claims to people that they can become powerful, if only they do things in various ungodly ways. He suggests that sin leads to all kinds of satisfaction that cannot be obtained by following God's ridged standards of holiness.
"knowing good and evil." (Gen 3:5)
Lastly, the devil uses a tenth tactic of appealing to the natural desire for knowledge. All people desire knowledge, to some degree or other, and this desire is not inherently wrong. God designed us to be learning and wishing to learn (i.e., to gain knowledge). In this particular case, God did not wish for Adam and Eve to gain this knowledge, since it was harmful for them.
Satan here directly uses God's own words to deceive Eve, for God Himself had called the tree "the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil" (Gen 2:9,17). And, the devil may have possibly been arguing that Eve could not die and obtain knowledge, simultaneously. One could argue that if she died (depending on the nature of death), she could not gain the knowledge. Again, we see that Satan twists God's words in order to deceive.
It seems that the devil was arguing that God was somehow afraid of what Adam and Eve could become if they gained fuller knowledge. He was suggesting that God was unlovingly holding them back due to fear of them, or simply because He selfishly wanted their "slavish" service. Either way, Satan was asking Eve to doubt the goodness of God and seek her own interests above all. In short, she would become her own god, determining truth for herself and seeking her own good above all else, rather than submitting and serving the True God.
The problem with Satan's temptation is that Adam and Eve already knew about good. The part that they did not know about at all was evil, and evil was harmful for them. Why should Eve want to know of evil and all of its miseries? It seems the only reason for wanting to know about good and evil was because she was beginning to doubt that God really knew best and what was truly good or truly evil. Her faith in God was waning. However, if we cannot trust God, and we seek to determine truth on our own, everything becomes relative, since we are so finite and cannot adequately and wisely determine absolute truth and absolute good and evil. Only an infinitely wise and knowledgeable God can perfectly discern between good and evil, perfection and imperfection, and wisdom and foolishness.
APPLICATION: God often places meaningful and helpful restrictions on us, even our knowledge. God does not tell us everything. He has His secrets (Deu 29:29) that we do not need to know immediately, or perhaps ever. Some things are better not known immediately. We are finite, and there will always be things we will not know. God knows all things and He knows what is good for us to know and what is unhelpful for us to know. We must trust His wisdom and be content, in many cases, to be ignorant. This can be especially hard when we really want to know why He is doing something to us that we find painful. Sometimes we will not get a solid answer from Him, however.
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