Fear No Fear

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

“Yahweh God said to the serpent,

“Because you have done this,
    you are cursed above all livestock,
    and above every animal of the field.
You shall go on your belly
    and you shall eat dust all the days of your life.”
Genesis 3:14

God is done asking questions because people are done passing the responsibility which gives the legal right to authority. Neither the snake nor the snake’s backer, the devil, are saying anything. The devil WANTED the legal right to the authority humanity was given. It was his ‘in’ to creation. It was his ‘in’ to mess up God’s system. He took it, and he wasn’t about to let it go. That’s how he got his position (2 Corinthians 4:4) and was able to enact his vision (John 10:10; 1 Peter 5:8). The authority on this planet was to re-create the vision God had given. The devil took that authority and twisted that vision (he is unable to create anything, not even a plan) to break as much as he possibly could. Everything is designed to rob humanity of the promises of God in order to make them vulnerable and to destroy them. All the systems of the world rob humans of something. All the promises of the devil are based on lies and half-truths to the end of robbing them of all protection so he can kill them.

The snake is punished because it chose to use its talents in service to an ungodly voice (the devil’s). Prior to this punishment it was able to walk and talk because it loses these two things from this moment onward. It is forced to walk and is cursed above all livestock in the same way it previously was blessed above them (Genesis 3:1). Its cleverness now only served death and selfishness. It was no longer a blessing to the world. As the sage Sforno puts it: ‘The serpent was condemned henceforth to attain its needs as well as its desires only through experiencing more pain and greater lack of pleasure than all the other creatures.’

A spiritual result of this punishment is that if we are to listen to the words of the snake, we have to stop standing (James 4:7); we have to crawl in obeisance that is the opposite of how we are to exist on Earth (Isaiah 5:20); and only then can we ‘hear’ its words, which are twisted and wrong (Psalm 36:1-4). If we did as we were meant to, evil would have no opportunity to subvert our thinking (Genesis 4:7).

Of all four parties involved, only the snake and the devil are cursed. They are the most culpable in the situation. Also, they are NOT be beloved creation of God so they do not get the same mercy. They were created to serve humanity and failed in their most basic nature and assignment.

The sage Or HaChaim writes: ‘ויאמר השם אלוקים אל הנחש. The Lord G’d said to the serpent. The serpent had caused three kinds of harm by its words. 1) It caused the withdrawal of the glory of G’d’s light which had hovered over Adam and Eve as we explained previously. This is the real meaning of the כתנות אור, the garments of light. [this spelling is reported to have been found in the Torah scroll of Rabbi Meir. Ed.]. 2) It resulted in Adam and Eve both becoming mortal, losing their immortality in this world. This was the punishment G’d had threatened would result from eating of the tree of knowledge. 3) The serpent caused even man’s limited life on this earth to be of an inferior quality, outside the confines of גן עדן. G’d therefore punished the serpent separately concerning each one of these losses it had caused man. 1) G’d cursed the serpent because it deprived man of his blessing, i.e. the presence of G’d’s glorious light. 2) G’d deprived the serpent of the legs it used to walk on because the serpent had deprived man of eternal life on earth. Prior to the sin the serpent possessed the kind of stature that enabled it to share all the advantages of the world with Adam. It would have been an honoured houseguest at Adam’s all its life. As a result of its sin, co-existence of man and the serpent in this world became almost impossible. 3) The serpent was condemned to eat dust for having deprived Adam and Eve of the enjoyment of life in גן עדן. Our sages explain this to mean that the serpent does not enjoy any of its food, just as one does not enjoy eating dust (Yuma 75). G’d’s words: כי עשית זאת, “because you have done this,” which introduces the serpent’s punishment, are a reminder that the serpent’s words were considered its deeds.’