Fear No Fear

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

“The serpent said to the woman, “You won’t really die,”
Genesis 3:4

This is the ultimate lie. The finest splitting of the most spiritual of hairs. I have heard this ‘preached’ by atheists as ‘proof’ that the scriptures contain lies, contradictions, and falseness. In fact, I heard one person who went on and on about how the devil through the serpent was the only one speaking truth in this scenario. This simple verse, however, is the biggest lie the world has ever swallowed and we continue to swallow it to this day. God told humanity that if they ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that they would DIE die. Another translation puts it like this: by dying they would die. The first is a SPIRITUAL truth, and the second is a PHYSICAL truth. Prior to eating the fruit of that tree, they were immortal. Death was NOT part of reality on Earth. They would have lived and continued living and NEVER died. It is only in disobedience that they began to die, to deteriorate, and through that process they WOULD die. God spoke the COMPLETE truth. They spiritually died IMMEDIATELY upon eating the fruit, and they physically began dying IMMEDIATELY upon eating the fruit. They DIED died. In DYING they died. God did NOT lie.

As the sage Sforno writes: ‘G’d did not forbid this fruit because it is lethal, but because He knows that through eating it you will attain additional knowledge so that you will be just like G’d, possessing total knowledge.’ God didn’t do this to KEEP knowledge from humanity. He did it to PROTECT humanity from knowledge they were not ready for. By knowing only GOOD, only God’s moral character, and the words of His mouth humanity would AUTOMATICALLY know what was NOT good, what was NOT according to God’s moral character, and what was against His words. We do NOT need evil to understand or appreciate good the same way that we do NOT need darkness to understand or appreciate light. The more we know of evil, the worse it gets for us (1 Corinthians 14:20). The reason is that we simply CANNOT be tempted by what we don’t know. James puts it this way: “Let no man say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God,” for God can’t be tempted by evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust and enticed. Then the lust, when it has conceived, bears sin. The sin, when it is full grown, produces death. Don’t be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom can be no variation nor turning shadow. Of his own will he gave birth to us by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures” (James 1:13-18).

According to the sage Rashi, this expression means that the serpent had first pushed the woman against the tree to demonstrate that though she had touched it, she had not died. Neither would she die by eating from it. The sage Chizkuni further writes: ‘A different interpretation of the words: לא מות תמותון: the serpent told the woman that she now risked nothing by eating, as if she had said that also touching had been forbidden, she could not die more than once anyways, so what did she have to lose by also tasting the fruit of that tree? The literal meaning of the words: לא מות תמותון, would therefore be: “you cannot die twice.”’ Dying twice is of course EXACTLY what God said would happen and EXACTLY what DID happen – first spiritually, and then physically. This argument, however, is how temptation gets traction in our minds. It’s the idea that IF caught, the punishment will not really be that great.