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 Hearts Revealed, part 1: The Serpent
Genesis 3:1-13
October 13, 2002
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?”
He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
The story of the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden is one that has been scrutinized, categorized, analyzed and criticized so much that most of us just want to be anesthetized. That’s what happens when we take the story out of the story and lose the grandeur of how it shows the heart of the characters.
When you think of God, what do your think of him as a person? Does he have a good heart? Or is that a category of thought that is completely foreign? Do you simply think of God as some super-brain that runs the universe like some cold, mechanistic computer? Or have you discovered the person of God?
When you think of people, what do you suppose is in their hearts? Are most people good, or are most people selfish? Is the first inclination of the human heart to “look out for number one” or is it “to love your neighbor?” Do people naturally seek to submit to others or to seek to take control of others?
And when you think of the Devil or Satan, what do you think of? With Halloween coming up, many people will be dressed up in red tights and carrying around pitchforks—is that your image of the Devil, just a comic character? Or is he real to you? And if he is real, what is his heart? What makes him tick? How does he operate?
In the third chapter of Genesis, we come to the next scene in the drama of the Garden of Eden. At the end of chapter 2, we had the first two humans pure and innocent; they knew nothing but goodness and innocence and purity. Then along came the serpent. In the next three weeks, I want to look into the hearts of the characters in this story. Today, we will look at the heart of the serpent.
The Heart of the Serpent
a. He is crafty (shrewd)
The first thing we learn of the serpent is that it is “crafty.” The word “crafty” tells us that maybe we better watch what he says—for what he says probably should not be taken at face value. This is wordplay in the original language of Hebrew (ar?m, “naked” sounds a lot like arum, “crafty”). The first couple was nude, and the serpent was shrewd—he was going to take advantage of their vulnerability.
The serpent asks, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The answer, of course, in NO! God actually said, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden…”! The only restriction was on ONE tree! “…but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”
The devil is crafty, shrewd, and dangerous. His evil genius is not that he is so blatant that we shudder and withdraw from him; it is that it appears to be the right thing. He distorts the truth just a little, but just enough that it is no longer truth. Here he takes the wonderful provision from God of all the trees in the garden and overemphasizes the prohibition, thus seeking to cause doubt in God’s sincerity and motives.
b. He tells half-truths
The shrewdness of this snake is found in how he
cunningly distorts God’s words just enough to no longer reflect the whole truth. His half-truths subtly distort God’s words so that they are totally distorted, but they do not appear distorted if you are not paying close attention!
The first half-truth was when the serpent told the woman, “You will not surely die.” In a sense, he was right. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they didn’t immediately choke and grab their chests and keel over dead. Satan takes advantage of the ambiguity of God’s warning of death by telling Eve that they will not die when they eat the fruit—Adam lived 930 years!
But maybe God meant that when they eat that fruit they will be on their way to death. When God told Adam not to eat that fruit, he said Adam would be a “dead man walking!” But the serpent isn’t interested in what God meant; he is just interested warping the words of God to tell half-truths.
The second half-truth is when Satan says, “for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” In a sense, Satan is right. When they ate the fruit, their eyes were opened! But whereas Satan makes that sound like a good thing, it is actually tragic! Sure, their eyes were opened, but Satan neglected to tell them that they were not going to like what they see!
Satan takes advantage of Eve’s relative ignorance because she was not there when God gave the command to Adam concerning not eating the fruit of the tree. Adam had certainly told Eve what God had said, but if Eve is not careful to understand and keep God’s Word exactly, then she will be open to twisted teaching that sounds right! Half-truths are the most powerful lies because they sound like truth to those who do not know any better.
Satan tells no outright lies here, merely suggestive half-truths to get the couple to decide for themselves to rebel against God.
c. He appeals to our pride and need for self-righteousness.
We decide for ourselves to rebel against God because in order to yield to God, we must be humble and admit that only God is righteous. More often than not, our ideas about life appeal to our own pride and our need for self-righteousness.
And that is exactly where Satan’s influence is the strongest! He never directly demands that Eve and Adam should eat; he understands the art of temptation. Instead he appeals to their pride and need for self righteousness. “…for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
The serpent calls into question the very heart of God! “God is holding out on you! Why doesn’t God want you to eat from that tree? It isn’t because he has your best interest in mind, oh no! He knows that if you eat it you’ll be like HIM! He doesn’t want you to be like him! He wants you to be less! You deserve to be like God! You should have the right to know the whole spectrum of good and evil for yourself!”
And ever since, we have taken pride in our ability, on our own, to decide what is right and wrong. One person actually told me, “I’m trying to figure out life on my own. Maybe after I work this out, I will check my results with what God has to say in the Bible.”
The Devil is Real
What do you think of when you think of the Devil? Is Satan real or some mythological character? I submit to you that Satan is very real and that his most effective means of opposing God in this world is to have people believe that he is fictional. If you do not believe he exists, then he can do things even more deceptively, even more craftily, even more shrewdly. Satan actually wants you to picture him in red tights and with a pitchfork. Halloween is coming up--we have made it a holiday to dress up as evil things like witches and devils and corpses. Satan loves this! The more we make him into a cartoon character, the better!
But that is not the image of Satan that we find in the Bible. The word “satan” means “adversary,” he is the chief antagonist to God. The word “devil” is actually the Greek word “diabolical one,” which means “accuser.” He is also called “the destroyer,” “the tempter,” “the evil one” and “the prince of this world.” If you doubt that Satan actually exists, you must deal with the fact that Jesus spoke of the devil as if he really existed, saying that the devil “is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). The book of Revelation refers to him: “that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray” (Revelation 12:9).
But the key to exposing Satan is this: He is not very often blatantly satanic—we often think of late-night horror films with images of pentagrams and heavy metal music and people walking around in black hoods seeking to make bloody human sacrifices. Satan’s main method of operation is found in 2 Corinthians 11:14—“Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.” In other words, Satan is still as crafty as ever—still very good at taking the truth and twisting it just a little so that, if we are not careful, we will not catch his devious warped agenda.
He is the one that promotes such warped thoughts as “A woman has the right over her own body.” “Yes,” we would say, “that sounds right.” But we miss the fact that the agenda in saying something very positive like that is the destruction of a defenseless human being in that woman’s womb.
He is the one that promotes an idea like, “The poor do not deserve anything, and they should go out and get jobs and quit mooching off society.” “Yes,” we would say, “that sounds right.” But we miss the fact that Jesus said that the Kingdom is reserved for those who, when they see the poor, do something to help them. “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” (Matthew 25:35-36)
Satanic ideas are not blatantly evil. They actually appear as if they are enlightened thoughts. “Surely, this is the way bright people would see this issue,” Satan says. And we think, “Yea, that makes logical and ethical sense. That seems right. I agree!”
The problem is this: Satan has it so much easier in our day! Satan’s greatest ally is our ignorance; ignorance of his existence and ignorance of God’s Word.
If we are ignorant of his existence, he is that much freer to be cunning and crafty in his manipulation of us. And if we are ignorant of God’s Word, we are more susceptible to his twisting God’s Word to make it say what it never was intended to say.
Today, many people who do not know God’s Word. I am shocked at the number of professing Christians who do not understand even the most basic Christian teachings.
And, of course, moat of us in our culture are extremely ignorant of what God has actually said in the pages of Scripture. And what makes matters worse is that most of us think we know what the Bible says, so we do not bother to find out on our own. Our ignorance is made worse by our presumption of knowledge.
People’s answer to the tough questions of our lives is usually, “This is what I think…”
“This is what I think…” is more often than not, “This is what the common thought of our day thinks…”
But what we do not realize is that a lot of the “common thought of our day” is influenced not by God, but by “the prince of this world,” Satan. And what we have also not come to grips with is that the “common thought of our day” will no longer be the same “common thought” a hundred years from now. That is the essence of “common thought”—it is always changing. We get on our high horses and scoff at what people believed a hundred years ago, as if we have arrived and know it all, but we give little thought as to what people a hundred years from now will think of us.
Another way to do things is this: To become rooted in timeless principles of living that are God-breathed and intended to give us a proper grid on which to live our lives (while taking into account that the principles given in the Bible must be understood in light of the cultural milieu in which they were first revealed). We must not be so presumptuous and arrogant to think that our generation is the most enlightened, and that our cultural milieu has not influenced our ideas of right and wrong as much as any in the past.
But principles are timeless. Principles are cross-cultural. Principles span all time. That is why Christianity is still alive and well some 2000 years after its leader left the planet—his principles and primary teachings have successfully crossed cultures and time. And Jesus Christ, through his church, has consistently exposed the half-truths that Satan has woven into diverse cultures—what we in our “enlightened way” have called the “world religions.”
But, we have to be careful! We Christians can be just as guilty of arrogance and presumption! We think that our 21st Century, white, middle-class, American, quasi-Fundamentalist ideas about Christ and life are the only possible ways to think. We, very often, are just as guilty of adopting our own particular “common thought of the day” as the only legitimate way of seeing life—only our “common thought” is our cultural understandings in our current Christian subculture. That is why it is always valuable to weigh our thoughts against past Christians’ thoughts—reading the works of the ancient Church Fathers, the Reformers, and the Christian leaders throughout the history of the church—in different cultures and at different times. That is why it is always important to seek to not allow our own preconceptions to rule our interpretation of the Bible. When we approach the Bible, we must realize that we do not come to it as a clean slate. We have preconceptions that will cloud our proper interpretation. We must commit to come to the God’s Word to have God shape our thinking, not to shape God’s thinking as revealed in the Bible.
We, too, need to get back to principles. God’s timeless principles do not change. But our preconceptions certainly do!
If God is good, then we can trust that he has given us timeless principles upon which to build our understandings about life and the world and people and culture and issues and God. The question is this, then: Is God good? Is his heart the kind of heart that I can trust my heart with? What is God’s heart?
That is the topic of next week’s message. I won’t be giving away the ending if I tell you now that I believe that God’s heart is indeed VERY GOOD.
But it should be clear from today’s message that Satan’s heart is not good at all. He is the liar; he is “the destroyer;” he is “the tempter;” he is “the evil one;” he is “the prince of this world.”
The number one defense against the devil is the Word of God. When Jesus was in the wilderness, Satan came to tempt him. What did Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, do to rid the devil? Did he zap him with supernatural power? Yes, in a way he did. That power was in the very Word of God. Satan tried to feed Jesus half-truths, but Jesus retorted three times with, “It is written…”
Paul warned the Ephesians that Satan is real and that he is dangerous.
“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” (Ephesians 6:10-13)
I think it is not a coincidence that the first item in the symbolic “armor” is “the belt of truth buckled around your waist” (Eph. 6:14). If Satan is always out to craftily twist the truth into nice-sounding half-truths, then we had better purposely start out by putting on the truth revealed in what has been written.
If we know what is in the Bible, then when Satan says things like “Did God really say…?,” we can say to him, “It is written…!”
When Satan begins to appeal to our pride and self-righteousness, we can humbly say, “It is written, and I submit to God!”
That is one of the reasons one of our Core Values in the Evangelical Free Church and here at Vanguard Church is “The Centrality of God’s Word.” We intend to know this Word, found in the Bible, so as to stand our ground against the devil’s schemes.
That is why I encourage you to read your Bible on your own on a regular basis. That is why I want everyone to be in a group of friends that can discuss this word in depth; so that we can make sure we understand it properly and are applying it consistently. That is why we need to encourage one another to make this Word central in our lives, and to hold each other accountable to living in light of the principles revealed here. Relationships and the Bible go hand-in-hand.
Satan is very real and very dangerous. Here (the Bible) is your primary weapon against him—what are you doing to harness its power to rid yourself of the evil one?
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