Genesis 3:1 “Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?”
If you can get past the first surprise and distraction of a talking serpent, you will notice that the serpent is quoting the Word of God with a small but critical twist. God had said, “[…] Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it:” (Genesis 2:16-17a). God’s emphasis is that Adam and Eve may eat from every tree in the garden with one crucial exception. The Serpent also begins with an affirmative, but of His own devising: he prefaces his question with “yea,” or “yes,” as if to subliminally suggest the acceptance of what he will say next. Then, he plants doubt in regard to God’s Word with the question “Hath God said […]?” In other words, “did God really speak to you, or did He really say something so particular?” The sly snake immediately nurtures the doubt he planted by ever-so-slightly changing God’s Word. He takes the “not” from the prohibition of the forbidden tree and tacks it onto God’s affirmation that Adam and Eve may freely eat the fruit of every other tree of the garden. With this little cut and paste job on God’s Word, he places the negative front and center and generalizes it to all the trees, insinuating that by forbidding one tree, God is really withholding from them every good thing.
Just in case Eve should become defensive, he has an alibi in his own first seed of doubt: “Hath God said? — I’m just asking,” he could say. “I’m just making sure I have it straight. Do you have it straight? Are you sure? How do you know?” Subtle indeed. The serpent is testing Eve’s knowledge and commitment to the Word of God.
The serpent still works the same way today. He surprises and distracts by shocking the senses, thus hoping to replace attention to God’s Word with attention to what you feel and get you to react to what is going on around you. It's a two-pronged attack: if you trust the reliability of your senses to guide you even when he shocks them, then you are wide open to trust everything else he presents to you. If you doubt your senses when he shocks them, then you are prone to doubt your senses to have received correctly the Word of God in the first place. Either way, as soon as he gets your focus off the primacy of the Word of God and onto your senses, he already has you licked. You are wide open to receive his tweaked version of what God said. Today the Serpent still comes quoting the Word of God, for the parasite of error cannot survive without latching on to the truth which it perverts and distorts to its own end.
Just in case Eve should become defensive, he has an alibi in his own first seed of doubt: “Hath God said? — I’m just asking,” he could say. “I’m just making sure I have it straight. Do you have it straight? Are you sure? How do you know?” Subtle indeed. The serpent is testing Eve’s knowledge and commitment to the Word of God.
The serpent still works the same way today. He surprises and distracts by shocking the senses, thus hoping to replace attention to God’s Word with attention to what you feel and get you to react to what is going on around you. It's a two-pronged attack: if you trust the reliability of your senses to guide you even when he shocks them, then you are wide open to trust everything else he presents to you. If you doubt your senses when he shocks them, then you are prone to doubt your senses to have received correctly the Word of God in the first place. Either way, as soon as he gets your focus off the primacy of the Word of God and onto your senses, he already has you licked. You are wide open to receive his tweaked version of what God said. Today the Serpent still comes quoting the Word of God, for the parasite of error cannot survive without latching on to the truth which it perverts and distorts to its own end.
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