Up to this point, our stroll in God's garden has turned up nothing but artful flowers and cheering sunshine, sparkling rivers and luscious fruits and critters in harmony, and noble people crowned and commissioned, with an even more awesome glory ahead of them. Well, that all isn't going to survive the day, I'm afraid. In these few short verses at the opening of Genesis chapter 3, groundwork is laid for a grave fall. For into this idyllic scene has slithered an intruder.
“Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made” (Genesis 3:1). Let's start with the obvious: at the literal level, we're confronted by a “beast of the field,” a wild animal. Before whatever else we can say, this is one of God's creatures which has an assigned role to play in God's good world and which, when it was first made, was pronounced good.1 It's one of those same “beasts of the field” which, in the last chapter, the human had rejected as a potential partner but given a name, an identity (Genesis 2:19-20). That means its proper place is under human dominion, a creature subject to their “rule over every creeping thing that creeps on the land” (Genesis 1:26). And as a “beast of the field,” the serpent is alien to the garden.2
Now, how were the humans just described? They were “naked and unashamed” (Genesis 2:25). What you see is what you get, and with them you see everything. They're innocent, devoid of guile. They speak plainly exactly what they mean. But here comes the serpent, and he's crafty, cunning, sly, shrewd. It's interesting that Genesis describes the humans as naked, 'arummim, and the serpent as cunning, 'arum – those words sound the same. Just like others in this story, this pun is meant to provoke thought.3 The serpent is so cunning that it seems as openly transparent as the humans – but actually the transparency is camouflage. But to what end?
His goal is to misrepresent and mislead, to deceive and delude, and ultimately to prey on the bearers of God's image. It's a rejection of God's decree putting the serpent under human dominion. It's also vindictive retaliation for his own rejection: if the man prefers the woman to the serpent, the serpent will seduce her out of spite.4 So the serpent's shrewd rhetoric and tempting promises aim to undercut her trusting relationship to her LORD God.
Notice, by the way, that ever since the Eden story began, the Creator has consistently been referred to as “the LORD God,” Yahweh Elohim. 'Yahweh' – in our Bibles, 'LORD' with all caps – is his covenant name, his name for relating to the people whom he's chosen, and it emphasizes his eternal faithfulness. The commandment came from 'Yahweh God' (Genesis 2:16). But the serpent only wants to discuss what 'God' has said. Now, of course the serpent's got no right to be on a first-name basis with God. But it's also a tactic. He wants the woman to mentally disengage from thinking about God on a level of personal relationship.5
So the serpent begins by setting a framework of his choosing: “Has God really said...?” On the surface it looks almost friendly, but the serpent is opening up the possibility of putting God into a question.6 The tone that comes through is a feigned confusion: “How could it be that God would say...?”, “Isn't it outrageous that God said...?”, “Really! It's unbelievable that God would say...!” Implied is the idea that God's word is an appropriate topic of debate, something on which creatures get to pass judgment.7 It's a totally disingenuous question, without an ounce of sincerity. The serpent doesn't want to be informed; he wants to scoff, mock, manipulate.8
Next, the serpent attributes to God the exact opposite of what God said. The LORD God commanded humans, “You shall eat of every tree of the garden” (Genesis 2:16). The serpent quotes those words exactly, but sticks a 'not' at the very front of them (Genesis 3:1). What a massive difference it makes, that one little word! In what the LORD God really said, he spread forth almost limitless fields of freedom in front of us and urged humans to go enjoy ourselves, to make the most of it, to receive the world as sheer gift and to live in it without anxieties or fears. But the serpent turns this truth on its head. The serpent caricatures God as a stingy miser, a God whose first instinct is to forbid, restrict, oppress.9 In the serpent's telling, this is a God who surrounded us with delicious delights and then effectively condemned us to slowly starve as we stare at the taunting treats we may not eat.10 And so the serpent pits God against blessing, God against humanity, God against life.11
Even now, this is one of the devil's favorite opening gambits. When he wants your mind and heart to accept sin, either he'll convince you that God is less generous than he really is (and therefore you're entitled to do whatever was unjustly withheld from you) or else that God hasn't said what you thought he said (and therefore the sin isn't really against God's law after all). So be on guard whenever either kind of thought begins to probe the boundaries of your mind. If clever justifications explain why sin isn't really sin, watch out. And if the voice whispers that God is a stingy naysayer, there's the serpent's other angle, getting you to mistake the God of Yes.
Okay, so put yourself in the woman's place. The serpent – unbeknownst to her, the deceitful voice that tempts – has introduced this question implying a totally reversed view of God. What are the woman's options? What are our options? The first option would be to realize that the serpent is an unclean trespasser who doesn't belong in the garden to begin with, and so for the humans to judge it and silence it by casting it out of God's garden.12 If possible, the best answer to the deceitful voice when it aims to weaken your faith or rationalize sin, is expulsion. Take dominion over your passions, over your beliefs, over those inner voices and intrusive thoughts.
A second option would be to silently snub the serpent. “There was no need for her to get involved in conversation with him in the first place.”13 She owes the serpent zero attention. If you can't get that deceitful voice, out of your head, you can refuse to engage. Give yourself critical distance: notice it, then walk away. Recognize that the whisper has no power over you but what you give it. So give it nothing. “When temptation comes, never dialogue. Close the door, close the window... We do not converse with the devil.”14
The third option, if the woman insists on speaking, is: just say no. The LORD God didn't give his commandment to snakes, did he? So it's none of the serpent's business. The woman can just tell him, “Wrong!”, and go about her day. “Let your yes be yes and your no be no; anything further comes from the Evil One,” Jesus pointed out (Matthew 5:37).15 Faced with the voice that misrepresents God, all the answer you need give is simply “No.”
But the serpent was oh-so-clever. His caricature of God was so insane, so ludicrous, that the woman opened a deeper dialogue with the serpent. She means well! She's speaking up to set the record straight. She hopes to help the serpent by correcting his ignorance with gentleness and respect. She aims to serve the LORD God by defending his honor.16 But that's what the serpent wants. He used his absurdity as bait, a way to lure the woman in. He aims to exploit her good intentions. In proving the possibility of wrongness, the serpent has gotten his nose in the door.17 Paul would've told her: “Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted” (Galatians 6:1).
So the woman answers the serpent, not by quoting God's word precisely, but by paraphrasing it. What had the LORD God said? “Of all the trees of the garden, absolutely you may eat” (Genesis 2:16). But how does the woman say it? “Of the fruit of the trees of the garden, we may eat” (Genesis 3:2). She adds the word 'fruit' – no problem there – but what words does she subtract? 'Absolutely' and 'all.' Her portrayal of the permission is muted, less forceful than what the LORD God actually spoke.18 In letting herself be put on the defensive, she's tacitly been drawn a half-step closer to the serpent's point of view. And that's part of what the serpent will do to us, too. If the serpent uses a voice of presumption, smuggling in false promises under God's name, then we're liable to get carried away. But if the serpent uses a voice of doubt, then even as we defend our faith, we'll be prone to waffle a little bit, to shave the edges off, to make our faith more palatable – and so we'll understate the raw audacity of the gospel. The woman's defense understates the raw audacity of God's gracious invitation.
But it's worse than that. She doesn't actually say the permission comes from God at all. She only mentions God once she speaks, not of what she can have, but of what she can't have.19 So she fails to relate the bounty of the garden to God its Giver. She fails to highlight how every fruit is a sign of ongoing relationship with a God of generous love.20 How typical for us, too! When we find ourselves pushed toward that borderland between faith and doubt, it's not uncommon to begin to mentally connect God more with his apparent failures than with his abundant faithfulness. In those dark and lonely hours, our thought might be, “God isn't visible here in my hurt, here in my prayer.” But we forget to think, “But God is visible in making my heart beat, in giving me food to eat and water to drink and air to breathe, in raising up friends who love me, and in countless other blessings.” So here, in the woman's misstep, we notice a bypassed off-ramp in temptation: explicitly thank God for all the blessings you do enjoy, and it will put into perspective any dos and don'ts he's given alongside them.
Then the woman continues: “But God said” (Genesis 3:3). There it is: taking her cue from the serpent, she's implicitly downplaying that this God is Yahweh, the Eternally Faithful One. The devil would love to get us to do that, as he whispers in our ear. It's easier to find fault with a generic God than with a God we know by name. So when you face the serpent, remind yourself: “This word I stand on is what Jesus, my Jesus, my Jesus who loved me all the way to the cross, is saying to me.” What doubt can't we defy if we look our Jesus in the eye?
Now the woman explains God's law to the serpent. “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that's in the middle of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die” (Genesis 3:3). Here's what she gets right: there is only one exception to the blank-check freedom the humans have to enjoy the garden's fruits. Only one tree is off-limits, so she recognizes that the law doesn't imperil human life or human plenty. But notice where the woman goes off-script. Which tree was the one at the heart of the garden? First and foremost, it was the Tree of Life (Genesis 2:9). But now, in the woman's eyes, the garden's heart has been replaced. The garden is recentered around the one thing she's saying she can't have. And that's a sure recipe for discontentment.21
God had designed the garden with his own life-giving presence at the center, but the woman has remapped it. Only now does the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil take center-stage, precisely because it's the one in the commandment. Therefore, the humans' world is portrayed as all about the rules, about the law. Instead of being focused on living life to the full within God's gracious boundaries, instead of having her eyes fixed on the God of Life, now her eyes are anxiously aimed at the sin she ought to avoid. But the more this becomes her center, the more obsessed she gets about this tree and the rule, letting it loom larger than the God who gave it. If 'legalism' is a meaningful word, this is the perfect example.22 What makes life life is lost.
When you're faced with temptation, don't lose sight of the commandment, but remember that it's a means to an end. The point of God's no is to preserve God's bigger yes. We don't love God in order to obey him; we obey God for the sake of his love. Because God is Love, because God is Life, we trust and obey. We can run our race better by fixing our eyes on Jesus, in whom God's Love has a face, than we ever could by fixing our eyes on all the pitfalls to avoid. If you can remember what you're obeying for, if you keep your eyes not on the sin to be resisted but on the Spirit who supplies the strength, then you'll be better able to keep the faith with gusto.
Back to the woman, and what she says about the tree she's misplaced. “You shall not eat..., neither shall you touch it, lest you die” (Genesis 3:3). Now, this might have been part of the original command, since dietary laws often ruled out both eating and touching (Leviticus 11:8), and since this tree was like the Ark of the Covenant which even the Levites “must not touch..., lest they die” (Numbers 4:15).23 But on the other hand, she might have been trying to enhance the commandment by putting a fence around the law.24 If you shouldn't eat from it, why even get close enough to touch it? Better stay back, just in case. It makes sense! But the trouble with building fences around the law is, if we forget what we've done, then God seems more restrictive than he really is.25 Then this fence makes the law seem harder to keep, which can in turn rationalize despair: why bother trying, why not just give in?26 And then the fence around the law ties the Lord's command to human wisdom: if we breach the fence and no disaster hits, we might assume that the whole law has no bite.27
But the way her final words came out, the woman portrays her reason for not eating, not as love for God, but as self-preservation – lest she die, for the sake of not dying, she won't eat.28 But that leaves the serpent an opening: if loving God is her motive for obedience, the serpent has no argument, but if she obeys out of fear, once neuter her fear and her obedience might fall. So again the serpent quotes God exactly, but prefaces it with a 'not': “You shall not absolutely die!” (Genesis 3:4). Before, the serpent was content to insinuate, to question; now he out-and-out contradicts the God of Truth by an open challenge, confident the woman will be receptive.29 Next, he offers a plausible-sounding theory for why God would have lied: “For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened...” (Genesis 3:5). Now the serpent, in portraying the woman as blinded, has piqued her curiosity. We always want to know what someone doesn't want us to know. We always think that our wish to know gives us a right to know, and therefore anyone preventing us from knowing is opposed to us.30
And so God is caricatured as a lawgiver motivated not by justice, generosity, and love, but by envy, selfishness, and fear. In the serpent's telling, God gave this command as a way of keeping us docile, to prevent us from having the power that could set us free to pursue our desires unconstrained. And this is what the serpent's whispers to us often amount to: that either God doesn't even know what's really good for us (and therefore we should just make up our own mind), or that God does know but is against our good (and therefore we need to escape his control). Which lie we buy doesn't really matter, so long as it avoids the truth which works by love.
Finally, the serpent dangles the deceitful delusion, some candy to be coveted. Whereas the LORD God had said “In the day you eat of it, you shall absolutely die” (Genesis 2:17), the serpent promises that “in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be as gods, knowers of good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). In the pagan religions that tempted Israel, the last step in turning an idol statue into a god was, they believed, a ritual opening of its eyes.31 So that's what the serpent professes to offer the humans: godhood in their own right. The serpent says that God knows that humans could become gods who are knowers.32 In becoming “knowers of good and evil,” humans would be capable of laying down their own law, of blessing and cursing with divine power.33
Of course, the serpent is a deceiver, a false prophet calling the woman not just to worship a false god but to try to turn herself into one.34 The serpent is the forerunner of every blasphemer who slanders God, every heretic who twists God's words, every voice of doubt and contradiction toward the true faith. And in service of this, the serpent's final twist is that, in telling the humans they need this one extra things to be 'like gods,' he tricks the woman into forgetting that humans are already made “in the likeness of God” (Genesis 1:26). He's given her a false insecurity he promises he can remedy, as any savvy advertiser does.35 And he'll gladly, he suggests, smuggle to the woman all the hidden treasures God's been selfishly hoarding for himself.36 Picture the serpent here as a sketchy guy pulling his van up beside a kid and offering her a little bag of white powder, saying, “C'mon, forget your parents, this'll make you grow up real fast.” Well, maybe in a way, but not in any way the kid should want. Actually, he wants her hooked, vulnerable, “captured by him to do his will” (2 Timothy 2:26).
But now the serpent is able to posture falsely as the humans' liberator, defender, teacher, and friend, as if to say: “Look, God is all bark and no bite on this. He's just jealous, he's afraid, he's hiding something from you. God isn't looking out for you. Stuffy and uncool, oppressive and obstructive, God is keeping you down, drugging and distracting you from getting what you really want. I, on the other hand, want you to succeed! I want you to be reach your fullest potential! Don't you want to be sly like me, godlike like me? I, not God, have your best interests at heart. I, not God, am the one who loves you. You can trust me: I've told you the whole story, the naked truth. God's commands were just a way to control you, but now you can break free. You can imitate me. You can please yourself. You can grab power. I know you want to see what you've been missing.”37
And there, for today, we leave their conversation. Having planted and watered these seeds of pride and greed and unbelief, the serpent has nothing more to say. He never outright tells her to take the fruit; he only sets her head spinning and watches things burn.38 When the conversation started, she lived by faith in the goodness of her LORD God's provision. But now she's been forced into a self-consciousness where nothing can be taken for granted, not even God.39 She hasn't yet surrendered. But her faith is at a decision point, for her ears have been opened to suspicion and doubt. And the serpent's call is played out in our lives day after day, as the serpent tries to reframe our thinking to be more like his.40 Paul tells us: “I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be corrupted from the sincerity and the purity that is in Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:3). Facing the Tempter daily, “we are not ignorant of his designs” (2 Corinthians 10:11). But we have help from “One who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15), a Savior perfectly qualified “to help those who are being tempted” (Hebrews 2:18). Thanks be to God! Keep the faith.