And the serpent said to the woman, Ye will not certainly die;
God had warned that eating from one tree brings death. Here God's enemy speaks for the first time and denies it outright — and all human history turns on which voice Eve believed.
The denial did not come first. Answering the serpent's first question, Eve had already turned God's certain warning into a mere possibility. That small change opened the way for an outright denial.
She first adds to the prohibition, then she weakens the penalty. Instead of "you shall surely die," for her it is only "lest you die." There is no real certainty that death would be the result. So the question of God's love becomes a question of His truth as well. I do not want on the throne a being I cannot trust; that is where the tampering with His word comes from. The heart deceives the head. If I do not want it to be true, I soon learn to question whether it is so.
Up to this point the serpent had only hinted. Now he drops the hint and calls God a liar, giving the woman a reason to stop fearing death.
The serpent now takes a bold step and dares to call God a liar. This soon follows, once the heart starts to distrust His love. "You will not surely die." "Fear nothing of the sort. On the contrary, keeping away from the fruit of that tree means giving up hopes that are rightly yours. God does not want you to know good and evil as He does. He wants you to stay children and slaves. Do not fear death. Claim your independence." So the serpent attacked God's truth and His majesty alike.
The lie did not stand on its own. It worked because of the true statement attached to it, and the one thing the serpent left out.
Men do not know how deep Satan's deceit goes. His plan is not to put forward at once a broad, plain falsehood that carries the lie on its face. Not so; he puts it forward under the guise of truth, in the form of truth, and in some sense mixed up with the truth. This is how he deceived Adam… He says, "You will not surely die!" That was an obvious untruth. But he adds, "You will be like God, knowing good and evil." This we know was in part the real truth. At once we hear God saying, "The man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil." So the lie came partly in the form of truth. But he kept back entirely the truth man most needed to know: what would follow from taking his advice. He did not tell him it would end in death.
People repeat the same denial whenever they expect sin to cost less than God has said. One writer says ordinary human happiness depends on it.
Men say in their hearts that sin will not bring the consequences God has said it will — "the wages of sin is death." No man could go on if he believed God's word instead of Satan's. Man's happiness rests on faith in Satan's lie… So all the devil can do is hide the consequences of sin. He could only keep men going by keeping that truth out of their sight: "You shall surely die." Terror of it would not change their hearts. But if they truly believed it, they would not have one happy day here.
The denial changed nothing. The death it dismissed came to every human being.
The serpent approached Eve, as we all know, and challenged God's word about this. He said plainly, "You will not surely die." But the word of God stood anyway, and so it must always be. "Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned."
One writer sets the serpent's work in Eden beside the work of the Son of God.
The serpent found in Eden a scene of purity and happiness. He entered it intending to corrupt and ruin it. "He was a murderer from the beginning." And the deadly weapon he used was a lie… He got what he wanted. Through his lie he ruined the creature whom God had just made and blessed. But now, in contrast to all this, the Son of God had begun His work. He came and found a scene nothing like Eden. Misery and death because of sin filled it… But He had come to save. And the instrument of His ministry was the truth: "He who sent me is true, and I declare to the world what I have heard from him."
- Doubt — before the serpent denied anything, Eve had softened God's certain penalty into a maybe. A weakened word invites a denied one.
- Denial — once the heart distrusts God's love, the hint becomes an open charge that God is lying.
- Disguise — the lie travelled inside a half-truth, and the deadly consequence went unmentioned.
- Delusion — men still prefer the serpent's word to God's, because today's happiness depends on keeping death out of sight.
- Death — the word the serpent denied proved true. No argument answers it — only the Son of God, whose instrument is the truth.
but God knows that in the day ye eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and ye will be as God, knowing good and evil.
The serpent's last word before the fall is a promise, not a command. He tells Eve what God is thinking, and what she could become. Two questions sit at the centre of it: is God holding something back out of jealousy, and is the offer even true?
The serpent does not begin by denying that God spoke. He begins by hinting that what God said was not said in kindness.
Notice how the serpent tried to shake Eve's confidence in God's truth. He wanted to bring her under the power of unbelieving "reason." He did it by shaking her confidence in God's love. He made what God had said look as if it did not come from love. In other words: "There is a real advantage tied to eating that fruit, and God is trying to deprive you of it. Why then should you believe God's testimony? You cannot trust someone who clearly does not love you — for if He loved you, why would He forbid you a real privilege?"
Once that suspicion lands, the whole conversation changes hands.
God has lost His character in the heart of man. All man's confidence in God is gone, and man believes Satan, the liar and chief deceiver. Now the devil can say whatever he likes, because he has the confidence of the heart instead of God… He began by hinting that God knew the fruit would make her happy but grudged to give it. Then he questioned God's truthfulness. Now he adds, "you shall be as gods." He tempts man to take up the privileges of God Himself.
The ESV has "you will be like God." Older translations read "as gods." The Hebrew word behind it matters.
The serpent's words to Eve set out this other ideal: "You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." Remember, too, that the Hebrew word Elohim, translated "gods" here, is the same word translated "God" elsewhere in these chapters. That makes it bolder and more blasphemous still.
The serpent's offer was not a flat lie. That is what made it deadly.
If Satan said, "You shall be as gods (Elohim)," One far above all created beings repeated, "The man has become as one of us, knowing good and evil." But oh, what a store of evils and ruin came in with that act of disobedience! It was built on a truth the devil used. He used that truth out of place. He hid what went with it when man acted on it. That was the foundation of the ruin that came upon the world.
Man did gain something real in the fall. It was not what the serpent had promised.
The Lord God had arranged it so that in and through the fall man would gain what he did not have before: a conscience, a knowledge of both good and evil. The very first effect of that conscience was to make him a coward. Satan had completely deceived the woman. He had said, "your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." But he left out a vital part of the truth. They would know good without the power to do it. They would know evil without the power to avoid it. By trying to lift themselves higher in the moral scale, they lost true elevation. They became degraded, powerless, enslaved by Satan, struck by conscience, terrified creatures. "The eyes of them both were opened," no doubt — but to what a sight! Only to discover their own nakedness.
What began in a garden did not stay there.
The deceiver baited the first man with the words "You shall be as God." Independence and self-importance have been natural to the human family since that fateful day. These evil traits have not only dishonoured and insulted the Creator. They have also plunged people into continual sorrow. The history of the world has been an endless struggle over who should be greatest.
Set beside this verse, one Man's path runs in reverse.
The tempter drew our first parents to grasp at something far above them — at becoming as gods, as Genesis 3:5 shows. That place was not for them, and their grasping at it was sheer robbery. But there was nothing of that with our Lord. In His case equality with God was not something to be grasped at. It was His to start with, for He was God. He could not be higher than He was. Before Him lay only the choice of staying as and where He was, or of coming down in humiliation.
- Suspicion — the temptation makes God's love look like jealousy. Once the heart distrusts God, it will believe anything the tempter says.
- Substitution — "like God" uses the very name for God found in these chapters. It offers the creature the Creator's place.
- Half-truth — God Himself later confirms that man came to know good and evil. The lie lay in what the serpent left out and where he put the truth.
- Shock — the eyes did open, but on good they had no power to do and evil they had no power to escape. Their first sight was their own nakedness, and their new conscience made them cowards.
- Reversal — man grasped at what he could not hold. Christ already had it, did not clutch it, and came down instead.