The Enticement of Evil

At the battle of Gettysburg, at one point in the action, a Southern general was supposed to get his unit to move up to the front lines to attack the Union forces. For some reason, he was unable to bring his men forward. He sheepishly reported this to General James Longstreet, his commanding officer. Longstreet replied sarcastically “Never mind, just leave your men where they are. The enemy is soon going to advance and spare you the trouble.”

Today we come to that crucial turning point in human history where the enemy of God and man soon advanced into the Garden of Eden. Genesis 3 may be the most important chapter in the entire Bible because it provides the reason for everything else that happens in the rest of the Bible.

We learn here about the origin of evil, and about the campaign of the great Prince of Evil who sets himself against God and man and attempts to destroy God’s creation. Who is he and where did he come from?

He is introduced to us here in Gen. 3 as the serpent, and it is not until you have read the whole BIble up to the book of Revelation 12:9 that you learn that the serpent in the Garden of Eden was in fact a creature called Satan.

It is significant that he comes into the Garden in the form of a serpent , for the Hebrew word for “serpent” is the word “nahash”, which means “shining one”. There are clues elsewhere in the Scriptures which indicate that Satan was indeed a shining creature.

Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 tell us that somehow, at some time before the creation of earth, Satan - a shining angel - fell from heaven because he wanted to become like the Most High God. He had been created to be a reflector of the light and the glory of God, but he rebelled and sought to be a source of light in and of himself. The name Lucifer, from the same Greek root from which we get our words luster, lucid, illustrate, and translucent, means “the bringer of light”.

2 Corinthians 11:14 …Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.

Why did God allow Satan to come into the garden? He could have stopped him if he wanted to. The answer lies in the fact that God had given man a free will. If God had set things up so that the only thing man could do would be to obey God, then man would be nothing more than a robot, programmed by his maker. But God gave man a free will. And a free will implies the freedom to choose more than one alternative: man can either choose to serve God or to rebel against God. If God had prevented Satan from entering the Garden, then he would be shutting man up to only one alternative - in other words, he would be restricting the exercise of man’s free will.

People often say things like “How can you believe in a God of love when the world is such a mess? How can a good God allow such terrible evil to take place in the world?” H.G. Wells once wrote that, faced with the world’s evil we must conclude either that a good God has the power to do something about it but doesn’t care to, or cares but doesn’t have the power to do something about it.

Well, the Bible is all about the fact that God not only cares about the problem of evil, and has the power to do something about it, but that He in fact has done something about it. But in addressing the problem of evil, God so respects our freedom to choose that He will not violate our free will, even if it means that we choose to rebel and become evil. The fact that the world is full of evil today reflects the fact that God respects our freedom to become evil, and that is precisely what we have chosen to do.

How did Satan tempt Eve? What was his strategy? What devices did he use?

Genesis 3:1 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’?”

We know that when God put Adam in the garden, he told him that he could eat the fruit from any tree in the Garden, but that he must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when he ate of it he would surely die. That is found in Genesis 2:16-17.

What was so special about that tree? What kind of tree was it? Was it an apple tree? Did it have some sort of magical power? Why was it called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?

We are not given answers to these questions in Genesis. But let me suggest to you that the tree was not so important for what kind of tree it was, or for any special qualities that it may have had, as for what it represented.

In order to understand this, we must ask a very fundamental question. How, ultimately speaking, do we know the difference between good and evil? What is our reference point for measuring what is good and what is evil? Is it not the character of God Himself? Everything that is in accord with the character and the will of God is good. Everything that goes against his character and his will is evil. The laws of our society, though they are imperfect, are based upon the Ten Commandments, which themselves are an expression of God’s will and God’s character. The Bible says that when God made us, He wrote His law on our hearts in order that we might know the difference between good and evil. We call this our conscience.

Now here is something that is very important to understand. When we say that God is good, we are not saying that there is some impersonal standard of good and evil against which we measure God. We are not projecting some independent standard of good upon God and saying “Yes, He measures up to what we understand is Good.” When we say that God is good we are simply saying that God is himself. Because God Himself is the standard. God is Goodness itself. We measure good and evil in terms of the person of God, not the other way around.

When God placed Adam in the garden of Eden and told him not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he was saying to Adam “Don’t try to decide for yourself what is good and what is evil. That is something that only I can do. Don’t try to make yourself the reference point for what’s right and what’s wrong, because when you do, you’ll actually separate yourself from the true point of reference. If you set yourself up as an independent judge of right and wrong, of good and evil, you’ll die. A creature who tries to become like God in this way dies, not because God punishes him, but as a consequence of the fact that he has cut himself off from the source of life and goodness.

Now Satan comes to Eve and tries to separate her from God in two ways:

1. He questions God’s character

2. He alters God’s word.

What he’s saying to Eve in v.1 is “Do you really think a good God would say something like that? Do you really think that a God who loves you would want to keep something away from you?” Do you see what Satan is doing here? He’s encouraging Eve to evaluate God’s motives - whether they are good or not. He’s saying “Eve, you be the judge of God. You decide what’s good for you and then you decide whether God is acting in your best interests.” He sowed doubts in her mind about God’s goodness and the purity of His character.

Of course we have to note that Satan altered God’s word. Satan twisted the Word of God to make it say something that it didn’t say. God never forbid Adam and Eve to eat from any tree in the Garden. He gave them every tree but one.

You’ll find that Satan’s temptation strategy hasn’t changed much from the dawn of time. In that sense, he isn’t terribly original, although he is terribly effective. When he tempts us today to sin, he does these same two things:

He tries to sow doubt in our minds about God’s character. He tries to persuade us that God doesn’t really care about us or want what is best for us. He gets us thinking that if we want the best, we’d better take it for ourselves. And he gets us thinking that God’s Word doesn’t really say what it seems to say. There are many people today who are sinning on the basis of what they think the Bible says. There’s no more sorry spectacle than a person who twists God’s Word to rationalize his own sinful behavior.

Now look at how Eve responds to Satan’s question. Incidentally, you might be interested in knowing that this is the very first question mark in the Bible. It comes when Satan questions God’s Word.

Genesis 3:2 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.’”

One good thing and one bad thing about Eve’s answer. The good thing is that she corrected Satan’s version of God’s Word. The bad thing is that she corrected it not with God’s version of God’s Word, but with her own version of God’s Word. She used the NEV - the new Eve version. So far in Genesis 3, everybody’s quoting God’s Word, but nobody’s quoting it properly! The devil changes it. Eve adds to it. We run into problems when we start tampering with God’s word.

Proverbs 30:5-6 “Every word of God is flawless; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him. Do not add to his words, or he will rebuke you and prove you a liar.

Eve added to God’s Word. She claimed that God had prohibited her and Adam from touching it. And her adding to God’s word makes us wonder whether she was already thinking that God was being a little unreasonable and mean about this particular tree. Eve’s error in putting words into God’s mouth was compounded by the error of entertaining doubts about God’s character. So at this point, Satan was halfway home. And now he plays his trump card.

Genesis 3:4 “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.”

There it is. An outright lie. An absolute contradiction of what God had said. A lie. But a lie dressed up in very attractive clothes. Satan is called two things in the Bible.

1. the deceiver - because he seeks to alienate us from God by deceiving us about the true nature of God’s character and God’s Word.

2. the accuser - because he seeks to alienate God from us by accusing us before God. That’s precisely what he did in Job 1 and 2.

So you see, he’s working both sides of the street.

Here, he is the deceiver. Satan has already set himself up as an independent judge of God’s honesty, and now he’s trying to get Eve to join him there on the bench. He lures her on by promising her enlightenment. He is saying “Look Eve, if you disobey God, He says something terrible will happen to you, but I’m here to say that something wonderful will happen to you. Trust me - God is holding out on you.” Satan always dresses up sin to make it look like enlightened self-interest.

Now in Satan’s lie, there are seeds of truth. That always makes for a better lie, when you can mix in a little truth. He said “your eyes will be opened”. Well that’s what happened alright. Their eyes were opened, but not in a happy way. Look at v.7. And they became like God, knowing good and evil alright, but it wasn’t a delightful experience. Look at verse 22

Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, because they had set themselves up as independent moral agents from God. They tried to measure good and evil on the basis of their own experience, not on the basis of God’s character and God’s Word. They tried to become like God and know things that only He can know. As creatures, they simply weren’t capable of having such knowledge. It severed their relationship of love and trust with God. It destroyed them.

But at the moment of temptation, all that lay in the future. Satan always lies about the consequences of sin, but he always does so in the realm of the future so that we can’t check the results. He says “Go ahead and have sex with that person. Nothing will happen, nobody will be hurt. Go ahead and steal that item. You won’t get caught.”

This is the enticement of evil - to doubt God’s goodness and disobey God’s Word in the vain hope that something good will come of it. And this is what Satan wants us to believe. He wants us to believe, when he tempts us, that his way is the better way.

If you ever drive into Manhattan on the LIE, just before you come to the Queens Midtown tunnel, you will see on either side of the road there are huge cemeteries. The tombstones are jammed in next to one another, row upon row upon row. Multiply that millions upon millions of times for all the graves of all the people who ever lived on planet earth from the very beginning of time. Then you’ll have an idea of the enormity of Satan’s lie when he said “You will not surely die.”

Satan hates you. He has devoted his life to destroying you. He will tell you any lie he can think of in order to pull you away from trusting God.

Adam and Eve were created innocent. They were not created righteous. Righteousness is innocence maintained in the face of temptation. The only way that you and I can be righteous is to face the tempter with the power of Jesus Christ. Eve tried to face the tempter in her own power and she failed. He was too smart for her.

A student once asked Martin Luther how he resisted Satan. The great man said, “Well, when Satan comes knocking at the door of my heart, and asks “Martin, are you in there?” the Lord Jesus Christ goes to the door and says to the devil “Martin Luther used to live here but he has moved out. Now I live here.” Satan takes one look at the nail prints in the Lord’s hands, and his pierced side, and he flees.”

Galatians 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

Satan’s strategy in enticing us to evil is twofold:

1. Get us to mistrust God’s love for us.

2. Get us to disobey God’s Word.