Dissecting Deception

A line to a movie from a generation ago told us that, “The greatest lie the devil ever told was to convince the world he didn’t exist.” That sounds profound, and it is certainly a main tool in Satan’s bag of tricks, but it doesn’t go back far enough. It reminds me of that statement by C. S. Lewis in his Screwtape Letters,

“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”1

In asking about the identity of this serpent,2 we should begin where the Bible is clearest. First, John explicitly calls the dragon that rules spiritual Babylon “that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, vthe deceiver of the whole world” (Rev. 12:9). Second, Jesus traces the chief servants of evil in His day back to their “father the devil” and adds,

“He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (Jn. 8:44).

Third, in our passage today in Genesis 3:1-7, the character who is on center stage—the one who is on a clear mission here—is all about opposing God. Putting those three passages together by itself forms a biblical doctrine of the deceiver. But what about the act of deception? That is what the truth of this text shows us. And I’m going to use a term PRIMAL DECEPTION to refer to that first deception in history, but also how that echoes down in every lie of the devil (how it first strikes).

• The primal deception questions God’s word.

• The primal deception slanders God’s goodness.

• The primal deception reverses God’s creational order.

Doctrine. The primal deception is to question God’s word, slander God’s goodness, and reverse God’s creational order.

The primal deception questions God’s word.

There are four aspects to the devil’s lie about God’s word.

First, it shows up in the form of a question: ‘Did God actually say…?’ (v. 1b) The whole world can turn on an insincere question. A question that doesn’t ask, but that deconstructs, we used to call a “dragon-like question.” It is asked in bad faith. It is a set-up. But it comes in the form of humility: “for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14).

Secondly, there is the core of the question itself: ‘Did God actually say’ (v. 1b). ACTUALLY says, “Never mind if I’m sure—Are you sure?” Really? Seriously? These are the ways we sow seeds of doubt today. But if the liar is truly crafty, such words are not harsh or demeaning in an obvious way. Just the opposite, as Waltke comments, “the adversary speaks as a winsome angelic theologian.”3 He’s just checking. He’s just wondering. He’s just making sure that you don’t get too arrogant in your certainty. Beyond that, Hughes adds, “he introduced the assumption that God’s word is subject to our judgment.”4

Thirdly, attached to this, there is a subtle moving of the goalposts: ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’ (v. 1c). The devil was the first mainstream journalist: the soundbite, edited for effect. And what is the effect? All restriction, all the time—the cosmic killjoy! That’s where the devil wants to drive you toward if he could. But it can work if the same true words are used, but turned inside out. God has said they are given every tree, so they may eat from any of them. But the serpent plays to our autonomy: Who is anyone to tell you what to do?

Fourth and finally, once the victim is stunned by the question, then the declarative blade is ready to thrust in: ‘You will not surely die’ (v. 4). Now, you have to understand, this still doesn’t strike her with the open challenge of GOD HAS LIED, but rather the more subtle suggestion of, “He didn’t mean that, but this.” Nevertheless, he is calling God a liar, and so is anyone else who plays fast and loose with God’s word in that way. Anyone who says, “Well, that was just a cultural rule” or “According to their limited understanding.”

The primal deception slanders God’s goodness.

Before seeing how the devil slandered Gods goodness, don’t miss how Moses was inspired by the Word of God to show us the sovereignty of God over even this. It begins: ‘Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made’ (v. 1a). God made the serpent. God ordained that he would enter the Garden. Yes, God prescribed that Adam prevent the serpent getting in the Garden, but God ordains all that comes to pass, so that God’s decretive will contains even every violation of His prescriptive will—and no act of disobedience or deception ever took Him off guard. Paul said,

“For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope” (Rom. 8:20).

So before we stand in judgment over Eve for failing to believe in God’s goodness, let us keep watch over our own serpentine judgment of God for letting it happen to begin with.

Satan steered Eve toward suspicion. She caught the overt misrepresentation—‘any tree in the garden’ (v. 1c)—and so she stood her ground around the “any tree” provision, but her hands were nowhere near where her feet appeared to stand firm, as she seems to add to God’s prohibition: ‘neither shall you touch it’ (v. 3). This is a debatable point about whether this is really meant to communicate an addition by Eve, suggesting a divine stinginess in how she is now interpreting it.

Today we call this a “shift in the Overton Window,” that is, a movement down and to the left in what is acceptable to say, and to think, and to do. It is a downgrade of sentiment which is at the level of the affections. It bypasses critical thinking, so that you can even think critically on the surface, but if you are unaware of how the fortress of your heart has been invaded, your whole soul has shifted underneath your mind. Eve was the first person to ever be counseled, “Follow your heart.” And she did; but her heart had shifted underneath her mind.

There is a freedom element to this attack on goodness: ‘For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil’ (v. 5). It is easy to miss, but the serpent begins to switch the divine name back to Elohim, meant to be generic, whereas YHWH began to be used in Chapter 2. The difference is the Covenant LORD, who has personally bound Himself as a Father to us, versus God who, for all we know, may be distant and indifferent. God was all they ever knew. Goodness was all they ever knew. In his commentary on God’s command to Adam from 2:16, Matthew Henry said something that is pertinent here:

“Though Adam was a very great man, a very good man, and a very happy man, yet the Lord God commanded him; and the command was no disparagement to his greatness, no reproach to his goodness, nor any diminution at all to his happiness. Let us acknowledge God’s right to rule us, and our own obligations to be ruled by him; and never allow any will of our own in contradiction to, or competition with, the holy will of God.”5

Both the KNOWING (v. 5) and the being WISE (v. 6) were really paths to power. Our first parents would have had no interest in speculative knowledge in its own right. So we are warned against being “man who is wise in his own eyes” (Prov. 26:12).

The primal deception reverses God’s creational order.

The very next words after first introducing the serpent: ‘He said to the woman’ (v. 1b). When I had preached on this text fifteen years ago back in Boise, I called it “Doctrinally Desperate Housewives.” No further commentary required. I can also remember telling them the story of a job that I taken right here in Orlando back in 2001. It was a telemarketing job selling vacation time shares. When we were on the phone, our supervisors who were training us would speak to us in our other ear to coach us (as they listened to the call). Naturally, since we were calling during business hours, we would invariably have a housewife on the phone. And every time the wife said something like, “Well, I have to talk to my husband about it,” we were instructed to say: “Do you let your husband make all your decisions for you?” I quit the job, if you are wondering. But this became for me a parable of Satan’s strategy on that first separation of wife from husband. Paul spoke of those servants of the devil, that,

“among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions” (2 Tim. 3:6).

Satan was intentional about aiming for the man’s weak point—which was not his woman per se. Remember, the woman was made a helper for him. So she is not his weak point in and of herself. But does she have a weak point that, if exploited, becomes the man’s weak point? Yes. Suppose that instead of helping him do his job, she stepped into that place? You may say, “But there was no sin yet.” Sure, but Satan isn’t waiting for that! He creates the new space at the front door, but he has to appeal with a temptation that she will care about—namely caring, as she was taken from the side. He will change the subject. He will talk about relationships. He will say, “What about the children? What does that make you feel? Why do the boys get to?”

The serpent may have moved the goalposts, and Eve fought back, but in the process, her own moving of the goalposts comes to the surface. Listen carefully to her rebuttal:

“And the woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die’” (vv. 2-3).

The text does not leave us to guess how Eve was persuaded. It draws what she now saw: ‘that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise’ (v. 6). John describes the same in all our sins in his epistle: “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life” (1 Jn. 2:16). Note that the order is the same. Did John have Genesis 3:6 in mind here? I don’t know. But the desires of the flesh—GOOD FOR FOOD—is the lie of pragmatism. The desires of the eyes—DELIGHT TO THE EYES—is the lies of sensuality. The pride of life—TO MAKE ONE WISE—is the lie of self-exaltation … The order of creation is reversed in terms of the goods we receive from God, as the temporal is placed over the eternal, the creature placed over the Creator.

We find out where Adam is at the end of the section: ‘she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate’ (v. 6). He was where? Out in the garage? Working late again? Out with the guys? All of that would come. But, no, here, it all starts with something much more puzzling. The text says HER HUSBAND WHO WAS WITH HER. This is supported by the masculine plural participle (יֹדְעֵ֖י) that is used in verse 5, so the Hebrew carries the sense of “like gods [the two of you] knowing.” He became a pathetic, passive audience in the face of the most absurd delusion. You have a man silent by the woman’s side, and the woman taking orders for the man from a talking animal. This is a reversal of the hierarchy of Day 6. When man stands behind woman, mankind bows to the beasts.

PRACTICAL

Use 1. Exhortation. I said, When man stands behind woman, mankind bows to the beasts. You cannot reverse the orders of creation without unleashing hell upon the earth. When the Apostle Peter refers to woman as “the weaker vessel” (1 Pet. 3:7), he is speaking of the whole of the woman—body and soul—as we have seen, and not simply the body. The task here was not deadlifting in the Olympics or even acting as a Secret Service agent. The task here was repelling the lie which is the fountainhead of bodily bloodshed. So when Paul says, “but the woman was deceived” (1 Tim. 2:14) and when the prophet threatens Israel that “women rule over them” (Isa. 3:12), the issue is not IQ or some other absence of honor fitting to her glory-seeking for God.

The issue is what we have been seeing. God made men to stand at the door and at the gates against the serpent and his servants; and accordingly, God designed men’s soul to think about these things all the time. Not coincidentally, when we abdicate that ground, we spend our time that are like play-versions of this spiritual war, whether it be binge-watching sports, playing video-games, fighting on social media, or embracing a form of politics that is like a distant big-stage version of WWF wrestling—no involvement and incredibly fake. So the action item is simple here: Put the fake war down. Get back to the front door, or the gates of the city—in your home, your local church, and the public square.

Use 2. Admonition. Be warned that the devil has the most hate for and reserves his mightiest forces for those who are most devoted to Christ.

Thomas Cartwright wrote of this,

“Satan is most busy to assail them in whom the image of God, in knowledge and holiness, doth appear, not laboring much about those which either lie in ignorance or have no conscience of walking according to knowledge, as those are his already.”6

When Peter writes, “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Pet. 5:8), who is he writing to? Pagans? No—the warning is to believers, and the fact of the matter is that we don’t take this seriously enough.

Use 3. Consolation. John tells us,

“The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 Jn. 3:8).

The one who first lied about God’s word has been conquered by the One who is the Word.

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1. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Introduction.

2. Victor Hamilton comments, “This chapter does not refer explicitly to Satan. The tempter is simply called nāḥāš, which is a common Hebrew word for a serpent” (The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1-17, 187). Although Hamilton does not appear to be engaging in deconstruction, some do bring up this point to dismiss the connection between this figure and Satan.

3. Bruce Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 90.

4. R. Kent Hughes, Genesis (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), 67.

5. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1991), 9.

6. Thomas Cartwright, A Treatise of Christian Religion (Sacra Press, 2023), 53.