Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

“Now the serpent was more subtle than any animal of the field which Yahweh God had made. He said to the woman, “Has God really said, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?”“
Genesis 3:1

The devil used the serpent’s gift. The serpent was not bad in and of itself. When used properly, a subtle attitude is a BENEFIT, not a hindrance (Matthew 10:16). However, when the serpent used his gift improperly, he reaped the appropriate punishment. “more sublte than any” led to “cursed above all” (Genesis 3:14).

“Has God really said” casting doubt on what God said. This IS the devil’s playbook. He hasn’t changed. There is ALWAYS doubt about what God said or didn’t say. Here there is doubt cast about something that was NOT true in order to provide the opportunity to question something that WAS true, from another direction. Seeking to smear BOTH statements with the same doubt. If you refuse to engage with doubt, it becomes that much harder to create more. In fact, it is by standing on the truth of the Word without doubting the Word that causes the devil to flee (James 4:7). He CANNOT stand against the truth of the Word. That is why he is always seeking to discredit it. It is a dangerous path to tread. God’s commandments are not a subject for philosophical inquiry. They are His commands that He says are right from His point of view. They are not up for debate – whether we like that or not is immaterial.

“You shall not eat” The ‘you’ in Hebrew is plural, clearly referring to the both of them, even though it is directed solely at the female. The woman was spoken to, not the man (who we will shortly see was also there) because the man had received the command directly and the woman had not – it was given before they were separated, but clearly it is insinuated only the male heard it. A second-hand testimony is always easier to refute and attack than a direct one. This is corroborated by 1 Timothy 2:14 “Adam wasn’t deceived, but the woman, being deceived, has fallen into disobedience”. This shows that the woman was not the cause of the Fall. Her being deceived was only an element that led to it. The ultimate responsibility lay with Adam (which Romans 5:12 corroborates).

Did the snake actually speak? Well, God enabled a donkey to speak – but He COULD have done that by allowing an angelic spirit to speak through the donkey (Numbers 22:21-39). God doesn’t temp, so this snake could not have had an angelic spirit speaking through it (James 1:13). I think the best explanation I have found is from the sage Or HaChaim: ‘Prior to the sin, man was able to comprehend the language of the animals, even the conversation carried on by the inert parts of nature. Every creature G’d created was equipped with a means of expressing itself to enable it to praise its Creator. Our sages base this on Proverbs 16,6: כל פעל השם למענהו, “G’d has made everything for His sake.”‘ To look at it another way, we can turn to the sage Radak: ‘Why did the Torah have to write: “and the serpent was the wiliest of all the beasts of the field, etc.?” If the serpent was unable to speak, i.e. to communicate with Chavah in his own right, how do we know that it was such a clever creature? If we are to assume that the angel was dispatched to subject the woman to a test of her faith and obedience, how was the serpent to blame for the outcome? Besides, it would have been so much more appropriate for the angel to test Adam himself, seeing it was he who had been commanded by G’d not to eat from the tree of knowledge? Chavah had heard of this only second hand from her husband!” The truth is we cannot be sure how it worked. After all, this was BEFORE the fall, so there was a perfect system with perfect living creatures and humans, working in a way we cannot examine, probe, or even truly imagine. My personal opinion is that perfected human beings are fully capable of discerning the minds/communications of perfected living creatures because otherwise they wouldn’t be perfect stewards able to fulfill their mission in perfection. It is something we lost when we rebelled. Perhaps it will exist again in heaven, when we are again all perfect. Until then, anyone’s opinion might be correct. We have no way of knowing.

A final point. Some sages teach that the serpent saw the human beings naked and copulating, and so he coveted the female. That is their explanation as to why the serpent started this whole thing. Get rid of Adam by making him disobey God and die, serpent gets the woman. I think this falls apart because prior to the male Adam rebelling against God, Sin as a THING hadn’t entered creation. If there was no SIN, there could be no coveting – which is CLEARLY and REPEATEDLY designated sin throughout the Word (Exodus 20:17, Mark 7:20-23, for example). Whatever the reason or motivation of the serpent, it would have been DECEIT based not SIN based because the devil is a liar but sin wasn’t a force inside of creation yet (John 8:44).