n chapter two we examined the creation of human beings. I suggested that the drive for perfection within people may well be connected to the fact of being made in the image of God and that the original couple were created sinless. Some suggest that Adam and Eve were ‘perfect’ as God is perfect; however I disagree with using this word. Perfection suggests a lack of nothing, yet Adam and Eve were not perfect in knowledge, indeed, they were like infant children. Knowledge often comes through experience and the experiences of the primal couple were very limited. God has the advantage of foresight, human beings, generally speaking, do not, therefore a human couple with no ancestry or history would have very little knowledge. It was this lack of knowledge which became part of the temptation of Adam and Eve.
At the beginning of the Biblical book of Job we read about a conversation which Satan had with God. Satan accused God of protecting Job and he suggested to God that if he was allowed to test Job, then Job would turn against God. People sometimes ask me why God placed Earth in the center of this huge bubble we call space, considering the fact that Satan and his demons are Lords of this domain. I think that it is very possible that Satan suggested to God that He should place us in here so that we would have the choice of following God or him. After all – he may have argued - he does have his own kingdom and followers. However, I also believe that knowing the future, and having experienced the rebellion of Lucifer and his followers, God had always planned to use this scenario to test the love and loyalty of human beings. God wanted us to have the opportunity to experience the power and possibilities of autonomy, even though He knew what it would cost in human lives lost to people like Stalin, Hitler and others.
Satan waited for the creation of woman before entering Eden to tempt the humans. I suspect there are two reasons for this. Firstly, before the creation of Eve, Adam was whole; this being was the image of God, with the intuition of a female and the logical reasoning of a male. These are gross generalizations about men and women, but, as we shall discover, there is a lot of truth in them. The second reason that Satan waited was that he had seen the creation of the animal kingdom, and he speculated that the human would need a mate, therefore he decided to wait and use the tactic of ‘divide and conquer’. Frankly speaking, I think that he recognised that he was going to have a very hard time convincing the complete Adam to rebel.
After the creation of woman Satan chose theperson with whom he figured he’d have the best chance of success. Women, generally speaking, seem to be far more conscious of the spiritual world. This is perhaps why over 90% of all spiritists, Satanists, mediums, witches, psychics, and clairvoyants are women. So, Satan enters Eden. We are not told why he chose to use the serpent, but the connotation is that the serpent allowed Satan to use its body. If Eden was truly an eternal and holy place, then Satan would indeed have needed to use something other than his angelic body to enter for he could no longer dwell in God’s presence without being destroyed. I am suggesting that he simply possessed the snake and spoke through it, in a similar way that God spoke through the mouth of a donkey when he was rebuking Balaam. However, it seems that the snake was in on the deal as God later curses the snake to crawling on its belly for allowing Satan to use it.
The book of Genesis, and all of the Old Testament, is basically the history of the Jewish people’s dealings with God and the culture developed through that relationship throughout the centuries. If you have a Bible, you may like to open it to Genesis Chapter three and we will examine the account of the Fall and analyze the pattern of temptation. If you don’t have a Bible, here are the first six verses of chapter three in the New International English version.
(1) 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’?” (2) The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden, (3) 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.’ ”(4) “You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. (5) For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (6) 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.
Satan often uses and I have listed it in five main points. Verse one begins with the interesting fact that Satan already knows about the prohibition of eating from the tree in the center, so perhaps he had been listening in on the conversation between God and Adam in Chapter 2, verse 15. Nowhere does the Bible suggest that Eve was given this information after her creation, so perhaps this is more evidence that Adam was androgynous. Eve speaks as though she was there when God gave the order, however, some people who consider that the original person created was only a normal man, assume that Adam told her second-hand after she was created.
We should also be aware that it appears from verse six that Adam was with Eve throughout the temptation, and yet he said nothing to contradict the serpent. For me this raises the question of whether or not Adam was even aware that this conversation was happening. Was this a verbal or mental conversation? How can we explain his silence in the face of such an important event? The pattern of temptation Satan uses is very interesting. The following few points show his deceptive cunning well.
Verse 1 continued. “Did God really say”…..Point One. He sows a seed of doubt. This is a very common beginning to Satanic temptation. We may know outright that something is a sin, but we get this thought of doubt, the beginning of trying to find some loophole.
Verse 2-3. Eves reply is… “God did say, ‘ you must not eat….”
Point Two. Eve knew that the fruit was forbidden, she confirms that she knows the prohibition, and it would seem then that she has no excuse. Notice too that she does not say that her husband told her.
Verse 4. “You will not die”. Satan is the ‘father of lies’. Here he totally contradicts God, but like most of his lies, there is an element of truth. He knew that they would not physically die immediately, but eventually. He did know however that they would ‘die’ spiritually. Death in the Bible generally means ‘separation’, so the death they were to die was a separation from God.
Point Three. Satan sweetens the lie with a little bit of truth.
Verse 5. “Your eyes will be opened, you will be like God”. Satan is suggesting to Eve that she is ‘missing out’ on something. She has a knowledge of good, but no real knowledge of evil. She has never experienced it, so how does she know that she won’t like it.
Point Four. Your missing out. Try it you might like it.
Verse 5 continued. He appeals to her pride and ego by suggesting that she will be wise, she will be like God. This point underlines the lack of knowledge of Adam and Eve, and also the desire for autonomy.
Point Five. He appeals to the pride and ego.
Verse 6. ‘Good for food’. She wanted to experience it.
‘Pleasing to the eye’. It was seductive .
‘Desirable for gaining wisdom. Appealed to her ego.
There are a few points here which are important to discuss. Firstly, it is important to recognize the difference between testing and tempting. The main difference is in the desire for the outcome. God tests a person with the hope of a positive result which improves the person, makes them more like him. Satan tempts a person with the desire of bringing about their destruction, his motive is to harm.
Secondly, I have often wondered why God chose to tell Adam and Eve that they would die. What would the word ‘die’ mean to these two creatures who had never seen anything die? Did God tell them they would cease to exist; did He explain that it would be a spiritual death, a separation from Him? We don’t know the answers to these questions, but we do know that Satan used this particular area to contradict God, and perhaps this ambiguity was the loophole through which Eve jumped and succumbed to temptation.
The couple both failed the test. They were not willing to trust God. It is obvious that Eve desired wisdom, not a sinful desire in and of itself when we consider that she was like an infant. Satan promised her that she would be like God knowing good and evil, and in this he told the truth (Genesis 3:22). This raises the question, ‘is it really possible to know evil without experiencing it’? The answer must be ‘yes’ because God knows good and evil, and yet He chooses to not commit evil.
Sometimes it is difficult to understand the Fall especially as we do not know which parts of the story to take literally or symbolically. Should we believe that there was a tree which bore the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, or is this merely an analogy of the knowledge which comes from a taste of evil, the voice of conscience which both Adam and Eve experienced immediately after they sinned. They ‘knew’ they were naked and hid. Personally I do not think that there was a literal tree in Eden which gave knowledge of good and evil. For me the tree symbolizes the decision of the couple to want to make their own destinies without God, to declare their independence of their Creator. They can only do this by disobeying Him. There may have been a tree, but it is not the fruit of the tree which changes them, but the act of disobedience.
The sin of Adam and Eve has affected the entire creation of God. Adam was given authority over the creation and when he sinned this affected everything under his authority. Although human beings are in the image and likeness of God, we are also in the image and likeness of our ancestors; we receive the mutant genes they pass on in their imperfect DNA. The animals began to change and adapt to what we have today. The Bible suggests that canine creatures such as cats and dogs originally ate grass.1 Interestingly, whenever these animals become sick, they eat grass as a kind of medicine.
Spiritually, Adam and Eve had changed dramatically. Their intimate relationship with God had been severed because now they were not holy. This was equivalent to a spiritual death. God no longer walked with them as in a physical presence, for His holiness would have destroyed them. Outside of Eden God’s presence spoke in their minds or appeared in other ways, but they never again saw the Lord as they had in Eden. God chose to sacrifice an animal and gave them the skins as clothes.2 As we will examine in detail later, this sacrifice was to pay for their sin, a life for a life, the animal’s life for their spiritual life. The clothes covered their bodies which were now corrupted by sin.
On a physical level they began to age, to deteriorate. They were beginning to die. It would seem that the first couple’s sin affected even their DNA, because all human beings are born with a sin nature, that is, a desire and capacity for sin which eventually leads all of us to rebel against God. I do not believe that we are born as sinners in the sense that we are responsible for Adam's actions, but, rather that the inclination in us is so strong that all of us follow its leading and rebel, firstly against our ownparents’ authority, and later, when we are aware, against God.
And what of Satan? This world was now his world, indeed the Bible calls him the ‘god of this world’3 because all human beings since Adam and Eve have chosen to follow him. Satan now had extreme power; indeed the word dynamite comes from the word used to describe his power in the Bible. He wasted no time at all in dominating his own influence on this world, and as we shall see the result was that evil became the way of the world. God also had a warning to him concerning a child who would be born in the future. The Lord prophesied in Genesis 3:15 that this child would crush Satan’s head, a reference to destroying his authority. From this time on Satan was looking for this particular child, and doing all in his power to prevent the birth of a person with that kind of power.
And the snake: Well, it was cursed to crawl upon the ground forever. Does this mean that snakes once walked around on legs? Interestingly, recent fossil discoveries have found that ancient snakes had a pelvis, attached to their vertebrae. Sebastian Apesteguía, a researcher with the Argentine Museum of Natural Science, says a new fossil, named Najash rionegrina, is the earliest limbed snake ever found in a fully terrestrial deposit. N. rionegrina was discovered in Argentina’s Rio Negro province, about 700 miles (1,130 kilometers) southwest of Buenos Aires. Many living snakes, such as pythons, have the vestiges of legs that are not attached to the backbone and simply hang from the body. However, Apesteguía discovered that in Najash the hip was connected to the vertebrae, so it has a sacrum. The sacrum is the bony structure that connects the spine to the hips in vertebrates, including humans.
Were snakes once creatures that walked as humans walked? I do not know the answer to this question, but it would seem that it is quite possible.