Genesis 3:4 “And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:”
This is the point where the serpent goes for the throat with a direct contradiction of God’s Word. God said "you will surely die," but the serpent says “that’s not true,” essentially accusing God of the same evil dishonesty that he is guilty of practicing at that very moment. It’s a technique that every brazen criminal understands: the best cover is to loudly accuse others as guilty of your own crime while passing yourself off as a friend of the people, solicitous of the common welfare.
Also to the serpent’s advantage was the woman’s ignorance of death. How could she understand what death is? She had nothing to compare it to, no point of reference. Explaining death to Adam and Eve in their immortal state would have been like trying to explain dry to a fish, except Adam and Eve’s mental acuity was far beyond any fish. If Adam thought to ask God what it meant to die, God surely explained it to him the same way He did to Solomon, as a return to the pre-creation state of non-existence. "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it" (Ecclesiastes 12:7). Eve should have had that explanation from Adam, but maybe she thought it didn't apply to her since God made her from a rib, from dust once-removed. The serpent of course would appeal to all kinds of fanciful imaginations and "logical" arguments like “death is impossible! Why it goes against the laws of nature and against science itself! Has anything ever died before? Look at me! I'm all over this fruit and I'm talking now! Imagine what you will be able to do when you take this fruit!" The same kind of reasoning still turns people away from God's Word with far too much success.
Despite the death all around us today, the world’s oldest lie is very in vogue and still among the most pervasive and popularly accepted falsehoods of all time. If there is one cardinal doctrine shared by every world religion, it is the natural immortality of the soul, or stated more simply, that the dead are not really dead. Belief in this lie manifests itself from Animism to Hinduism to mainstream Christianity in a myriad different forms bolstered by mountains of personal testimonies of paranormal experiences. Even atheists and secular scientists give unwitting credence to the lie with the popular platitude, “death is just a part of life.” But death is not a part of life at all, it is the absence of it.
What about you? Do you subscribe to the original deception? Do you live life as though you don't expect to die, without a thought of your moral accountability?
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