Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Genesis 3:1-6

And we’ll read through verse 6. Genesis 3:1-6.

Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” And the woman said unto the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden. God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.” And the serpent said unto the woman, “Ye shall not surely die.

For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, that your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat.

Let us pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the Holy Spirit, and we thank you, Lord God, that you give us a clear, sure word. Help us to see with clarity then the instruction from this passage that we might glorify you better and enjoy you as well. In Jesus’ name we ask it and for the sake of his kingdom, not ours. Amen.

Please be seated. Rest in the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I saw a fellow named George Steiner on a television show being interviewed by Bill Moyers. Steiner—I don’t know if he’s still alive or not—he’s a brilliant man. At that time, he was the chief literary critic for the New Yorker magazine, and this full hour interview was just fascinating. I was so fascinated by the interview that I actually sent off one of those transcripts you can get, and I’ve kept that in my files for probably fifteen years.

Steiner said many things in that interview which were fascinating, but I’m going to mention three real quickly here in terms of introduction to this sermon.

Steiner said that for him—and Steiner also writes books, he’s an author—the chief influences for him were the Bible and Shakespeare. These are the great literary works from which Western man develops and grows. So he’s well acquainted with the scriptures.

Steiner said that mankind really began when the first caveman replied to a question without telling the truth. You know, one caveman says to the other one, “Where’s the water hole?” And he says, “It’s over there,” knowing that really it’s somewhere else. The first lie, I don’t think he used the term lie, but the first counterstatement of reality is, for Steiner, the beginning of humankind. That’s fascinating, isn’t it?

Because in a sense, humankind as we have known it by direct experience since the fall—that is, fallen mankind—but to equate that with humanity itself, of course, is a horrendous perversion of the truth. It’s natural for men to deceive now, but it’s not really natural. It is highly unnatural, because “natural” should be defined by how God’s first creation existed, and man was to speak truth.

The second thing Steiner said was that another tremendous step of advance for humankind was the present tense—or rather, the future tense—the ability to speak about the day after one’s own funeral. Because we have this horrendous, stinking, terrible fact: none of us get out of this alive. We all die. But in the face of this horrendous fact, man has refused to lay down. He counteracts that reality and he builds the future tense. So man refuses to lay down in spite of his own death. He speaks of the day after he dies.

Well, he may speak of it. That doesn’t alter the fact, does it? The day after he dies, he will either be in the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ and being comforted by our Savior and delighting in him, or he’ll be in the throes of hell and judgment and damnation. That’s the fact, no matter what we say with the future tense.

The third thing Steiner talked about was the great Jeffersonian hope that the way out of all of this mess is through culture and particularly education and knowledge. The great Jeffersonian hope that intellect and culture would produce a society that was good and pleasant as opposed to sinful and wicked.

But he and Mr. Moyers lamented the fact that Nazi Germany had the height of German intellect, knowledge, and culture. And yet we had the camps. Nazis would go from attending a great Wagner opera, seeing some great cultural event, some great philosophical lectures, and they would leave that and go to the death camps and kill more Jews and kill more people that they saw as unfit for whatever reason, and skin them and make lamps out of their skin.

Didn’t work.

The devil in the temptation that we read of today brings deceit. He brings a challenge to the idea that we shall die. He tries to counterstate that reality, and he says what we really need is more education, more knowledge, as opposed to obedience to God.

Steiner, brilliant as he is and informed as he is in both Shakespeare and the Bible, still is essentially parroting the serpent’s great lies. And so it is today. That’s the culture in which we live.

We want to look at Genesis 3 and the temptation of Adam and Eve. And we’re going to make some application to marriage along the way. But really, it’s a little more directed personally at each and every one of us, to see the nature of temptation—that it comes by way of language—and to know the subtlety, the great subtlety and craftiness of our enemy.

So that’s where we’re going with the outline. You’ve got an outline. You’ve got a children’s worksheet. Children, it’s fairly simple to fill in those answers. You probably know a lot of them already, most of them hopefully. But if you don’t, if you’re young, listen up and you’ll get to fill in those answers.

And there’s one other handout, and that’s a handout that I came across just this last week in a book that I mentioned at the top of the outline that shows this chiastic structure that I mentioned last week from Genesis. So I thought it would be good for you to keep that, if you’re keeping the outlines of this series, or at least to look at it during the week and see again the flow of this text and where we’re at in it. We’re in that third chunk down on the left-hand side, and that’s what we’ll be discussing today at some length.

Now, just by way of notation, you might want to make a few notations on this chiastic structure thing, this flow of the literary text. It’s helpful to kind of remember where you’re at.

Up on the first major portion on the left-hand side where the arrow that moves through the text begins—that’s the development of the garden and man’s being put in the garden for the task and rule. And you see on the right-hand side, it’s the expulsion from the garden—that’s where the text, this particular piece of literature from God that is true historical fact but is also great literature, ends with the expulsion from that very garden.

Remember we talked about east of Eden, how the garden was planted in the east. There were guarding and tilling words here used as well. The angels are now guarding because man doesn’t guard. His tilling is going to be hard as he’s expelled into the howling wilderness. That is a major theme, by the way. Just tuck it away in your head that these two blocks are a huge theme that runs from one end of the scriptures to the other.

We’re either moving closer in terms of communion with God and fellowship with him and life, and the great pictures of all that life in the garden, or we’re moving away from him into the howling wilderness, the wind blowing forever and dust blinding our sight, et cetera, et cetera. The howling wilderness is a major theme. We move from this to this. And in Christ, we’re brought back. In fact, we’re matured even from where Adam and Eve were, but we’re brought back into a sense of communion with God.

And the second block down, we talked about that several weeks ago. This is the creation of woman for man, right? So “woman” here is what you’d want to put on this second block down. And we said that if you look at its corresponding block on the right-hand side of the page, man sings praises here for the creation of woman on this side—poetry—and he moved over here to accusation against that very wife.

So in that interrogation by God of what happened, that’s what’s going on in this text. Man blames woman.

Okay. So we’ve got “woman” here, “interrogation” here, and the thing that links them is the speech of the man relative to his wife. And then we’ve got the block we’re going to talk about today, which is the block of temptation. This third one down on the left-hand side: temptation is over here, and over here on the right-hand side will be the inquiry into the fact, and then the center at the bottom is the actual act of the fall itself.

Now, I read one verse into that for the sake of today’s sermon, but we’re basically dealing with the text in terms of temptation. And at the center, by the way, of the whole thing is eating—a simple act that we do. And the question is: are we going to eat to the glory of God? Are we going to eat to the glory of what we think is ourselves but actually is the glory of the devil, the serpent rather? That’s the question for all of us.

Now, let’s move on then into the actual outline itself and into the text. And you’ll see that I’ve structured it here the way it is in the text. It’s a narrative. It’s a dialogue. The serpent speaks and a woman responds. Serpent speaks again, and then the woman does something, and then she takes an action. So that’s the way the outline is read.

But it begins with a textual introduction: verse one. “Now, the serpent was more crafty or cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.”

This is not to be overlooked. When you have these structures—particularly these structures that are so highly developed the way that Genesis 1 through 3 is—you want to take careful note of an introductory statement like this.

You know, later on when David sins with Bathsheba, that’s a literary divide. There’s a tale told in a particular way by God recording that historical narrative. It begins that whole section with David being tempted to sleep with Bathsheba and falling into that sin. It begins by saying that it’s the time of year when kings go out to war, and then it says that David is at home in his castle looking around. The idea is he’s not going out to war.

So it’s very important. The introductory phrase really sets up a narrative and tells us some very important things.

And specifically, what I’m suggesting is that this narrative tells us three very distinct things.

First of all, it tells us that we must be alert to the speech of this particular beast, this particular serpent. He’s cunning. He’s subtle. When we read his words, we want to read them with some degree of acuteness. We want to look at them. We want to think about what he’s really saying. Okay? So he alerts us to the speech of the serpent itself.

Secondly, we have here at the very beginning the fact that this dialogue is initiated by the serpent. So there’s an inversion of order that goes on here. God creates man to rule over the animals, and God gives man a wife to help him rule over, in a proper sense, the creation including the animals. But here what’s happening is we begin with a description of this serpent. So the serpent is going to speak to the woman, who will then involve the man. So there’s this inversion of order. There’s a bad deal going on here.

And third, the text tells us that this is indeed—if we look at the New Testament—that this serpent is Satan himself. On this inversion of order, by the way, notice that in Matthew 16:22-23—don’t bother turning there. You know this pretty well. Remember Peter tells our Savior, “No, you shouldn’t go to the cross. That’s not what’s going to happen to you. Far be it from you, Lord. This shall not happen to you.” Jesus turns and says to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan.”

Jesus knew the Genesis account, and he knew that when temptation comes, it is frequently Satan working through a subordinate to us to try to urge us to some ungodly action. And so Jesus wasn’t being mean to Peter. He was identifying that the source of Peter’s sin was the great tempter of old, Satan. And so that should alert us to subordinates and the fact that God frequently attacks the seed by way of the subordinates.

Now, the New Testament tells us quite clearly who this serpent is. There’s no doubt about it. In John 8:44, turn there, please.

By the way, as you’re turning, I can—you can still listen. When our Savior rebuked Peter, “Get behind me, Satan,” he identified what Peter was doing as being concerned about the things of men, not the things of God. So there’s the big issue: Are we more concerned about the things of man or the things of God? Do we want to glorify man or do we want to glorify God? And Peter was concerned with man, not God.

But in John 8:44 gives us a description of who this was in the garden as well as several other texts:

“You are of your father, the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources. For he is a liar and the father of it”—that is, the father of all lies.

So this enemy is explicitly described as father of lies, who was the murderer from the beginning, who brought death to Adam and Eve.

John 8:44 our Savior identifies the serpent as the devil. Now, the word “devil” means slanderer or accuser. So the devil is he who is the father of lies. He does not stand in the truth. And we’re exhorted not to be around people who are sinful scorners who despise the truth, because they are of their father, the devil.

This verse will be very important too, later on, when we talk about the antithesis that God builds in between the serpent’s seed and the woman’s seed. It doesn’t just talk about snakes and men there. Jesus says that the serpent’s seed includes all of those who are not elect and who really are serving their father, the devil, as opposed to the Lord Jesus Christ. So there’s two kinds of people out there, and Jesus identifies him—the liar, this devil—for us.

As I said, he speaks from his own resources. He is a liar and the father of lies.

Now, worship is an action. Worship is service. The word “worship” in the Bible either means to bow down before or to serve, to do something. The devil is the father of all lies. And we’ll see here, as we go through this, that he’s going to lie to Eve. He’s going to lie to the woman.

When we tell a lie, we are imaging the father of lies. We’re imaging Satan, the devil. When we tell the truth, we’re imaging God.

Now, this should be obvious to us, but I want us to understand that. Children, I want you to know that there’s a sense in which when you tell a lie to your parent—and a lie, I mean, not telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth—you are worshiping the devil. He’s the father of lies. God is the God of truth. It is an attribute of our God that he is a God who tells truth. And God is worshiped and served by his people when we speak the truth as defined by his word.

Well, the New Testament tells us other things about this, other correlations. We read in Romans 16:20 that “the God of peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly.”

Now, when God gets around to cursing the serpent later on in this narrative in Genesis 3, he’s going to tell him that you will bruise the man’s heel, and the seed of the man, but the seed of the man will crush your head—Jesus ultimately. But see, so again, there’s an identifier here. Paul knew quite well that serpent is Satan, and Satan’s going to be crushed under the saints’ feet as we progress into the future.

So we’re actually going to crush the devil under our feet in fulfillment of the promise of God relative to the punishment that he puts upon the serpent later on in Genesis 3.

Again, in 2 Corinthians 11:3, “I fear lest somehow as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.”

And later in verse 14, he talks about Satan himself transforming himself into an angel of light. So the context says that this serpent that deceived Eve is Satan.

Finally, we have a couple of texts from the book of Revelation 12:9 and 20:2.

In Revelation 12:9: “The great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, the serpent we read about in the text today, called the devil, which means slanderer, and Satan, which means opponent or adversary, who deceives the whole world. He was cast to the earth and his angels were cast out with him.”

So here we have it all kind of wrapped up, don’t we? The serpent that we just read about—Jesus says—is the devil, the slanderer. He is Satan, our opponent. And he deceives the whole world.

Now, after Christ dies and is ascended to the right hand to the Father, Satan can no longer deceive whole nations, but he can certainly still deceive individual people.

Again, in Revelation 20:2: “He laid hold of the dragon, that serpent of old who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.”

So the scriptures identify this serpent for us as a subtle, crafty guy. You got to watch his speech. It identifies him as a subordinate to the woman because it says that he’s wiser than any beast of the field. He’s included in that category. So she shouldn’t have given way to a subordinate. And then finally, it tells us by way of the rest of the Bible that this is the devil. We’re talking about the slanderer, Satan, our opponent.

Now, 1 Peter 5:8 makes it very clear that this opponent is your opponent. We read, “Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary, not just a general adversary to Christ or his people, your adversary, the devil, walks about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.”

We have an enemy as we walk in this world, and that enemy seeks to devour us. And that enemy is more subtle, more crafty, wiser, more intelligent, sharper than any other beast of the field. This guy is shrewd. And we’ll see his shrewdness in the text that’s before us.

God has promised that we’ll be able to crush his feet. But what happens here is the woman gets as shrewd as the devil. She bears the image of the devil in rejecting the image of God. And men, that’s what we all tend to do. And that’s what we want to warn ourselves against and strengthen ourselves not to do.

Okay, let’s go then to the specific way that this temptation occurs. First statement by the serpent in the second half of verse one.

He said to the woman. The shrewd, crafty opponent uses language as the means by which the woman is tempted. The word he doesn’t, you know, put a gun to her head. In fact, he doesn’t even tell her, “Eat the fruit.” He’s more sharp than that. He knows what seduction is.

We don’t need to worry so much about people putting guns to our heads. We buy a lot of self-defensive weapons. That’s fine. But understand that your opponent in the world is the one who uses language to attack you. And men, he will attack you through your wives. And he’ll try to attack your children through the wife and through you, because that’s the future of the church—the children of the church.

Okay. So the serpent begins by using speech, and he says, “Has God indeed said, you shall not eat of every tree of the garden?”

Now, this is interesting language. And as you read commentators on it, you get a lot of diverse opinions as to what it means. Some people say this is a question: “Really, did God really say that you couldn’t eat from any of the trees of the garden?” Other people say it’s a statement: “You mean to tell me that God told you not to eat of these trees?” He’s not really asking for an answer.

What he’s doing is insinuating that God is bad for giving us that command. There’s no punctuation marks in the Hebrew, but either way, what he’s doing, of course, is attacking the command of God.

Luther said that the way he reads this text in the Hebrew is that the serpent uses this word as though to turn up his nose and jeer and scoff at God.

Another commentator named Spicer said, “The serpent is not asking a question. He is deliberately distorting a fact. The tempter makes a massive affirmation, adopting a tone of surprise and indignation, or else of feigned compassion, because he wishes to make the facts seem outrageous that God would put such a prohibition on the woman.”

Playing craftily on the denial, “You shall not eat of any tree of the garden,” he presents the ban as a monstrous deprivation. It is not so much God’s word on which he casts doubt, but instead he casts doubt on God’s goodness to the woman.

God did that to you. He doesn’t say, “No, God didn’t really do it”—yet. He’s going to get to that. But here he attacks the goodness of God, of the God who is generosity itself. He sketches a portrait of miserliness. He projects the false perspective of a rivalry between God and man. He suggests that man will be less free as God will be more sovereign and vice versa.

Let me read that last quote again. Satan suggests that man will be less free as God will be more sovereign. If God is sovereign, that means you’re not free. That’s a bad deal. Sound familiar? Well, that’s what we hear throughout the ages is that same refrain.

Satan tempts Eve and he begins his temptation with an attack first of all on the woman and then secondly an attack upon God’s person and word.

I want to say something about this attack on the woman. Again, these are massive themes that run through the whole Bible. Revelation talks a lot about the serpent trying to kill off the seed and he does it by attacking women. And in your lives, Satan attacks by way of the wife to get to the man and to get to the children.

Now, the woman is the weaker vessel. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on that today. That’s a future sermon when we get later into this series. But let me suggest something at the outset in terms of how we should look at that.

You’ll notice here that Satan says something and woman responds. And Satan says something and woman responds. Woman is made—her function in life is to respond to her husband. She is created to be a helpmate to him. It doesn’t necessarily imply—now I know there is a physical weakness that women have generally to men. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here primarily.

Woman is weaker in terms of the temptation from the serpent or an opponent because she is created by God to be open and receptive to commands and language from her husband. She is made to be a responder. She is made to enter into that dialogue receptively with her husband.

The problem here is that her husband is not guarding her. Her husband allows her to enter into this dialogue with Satan, either allows or actually commanded her. I don’t know, but at least allows her to do it. The text in the Hebrew is clear. He is with her in the context of this temptation and the eating.

So you know, this is why you’ve probably heard me say this before. Why do we have female astronauts? We have female astronauts in case they get lost up there and somebody needs to ask directions about where to go, and you know, it’s that—it’s humorous, but it’s sad and tragic to me. It makes me feel guilty every time I tell that little joke, because I know that in my life I have frequently had my wife ask directions for me. I mean, I don’t know the gas station attendant, and I’m sending my wife out to dialogue with him.

My wife, who is supposed to be—is created to be receptive, as it were, to her husband and to leadership. I’m now making her out there receptive and in a weaker state as a result of her receptivity and a responsive nature. I’m putting her out there to dialogue with a guy that I have no idea is being motivated by the devil or is trying to glorify God.

Now, we could, you know, go too far with that. I mean, the Bible obviously doesn’t say that women are weak in the sense of not being able to do things. Deborah was the great warrior, and the Proverbs woman is a strong, capable woman. I’m not saying anything about that.

But it’s only as women take on, let’s see—it’s only as women take on, to a certain degree, a masculine frame of mind that they’re able to enter into that conflict. Now, men are created as leaders, but we also are created as responders to God. Yeah, we all are part of the church, and the church is a bride. The church is a woman. So man has this woman side of him, as it were—a woman component in terms of his responsiveness to God.

And I think the scriptures tell us that women have, to a degree, some degree of masculine component or perspective, because Paul tells us in the epistles: “Quit you like men, gird up your loins, be strong, do the right thing. Acquit yourself like a man.” Women, there are times when you’re not going to be in a guarded position, when your husband does tell you to go talk to this person or that, or somebody comes knocking on the door. And there’s a sense in which—I don’t know if I say it too much—but there’s a sense in which you want to kind of take a non-responsive mode, put into that, as the guy knocks on the door and says, “Hi, I’m here for the Jehovah’s Witnesses.” You got to be kind of—you got to acquit yourself like a man.

Say, “No, I’m not talking to you. Close the door.”

Now, that’s unusual for you to do. You don’t like doing that because God’s made you differently. But that is a part of the role which you have to fulfill.

In any event, the serpent begins by attacking the woman, not the man. And men, that means that we must guard women. And that’s why we in this church should train the boys of this church to guard the little girls in this church, because that’s the big pattern that God wants men to do—to guard and nourish his wife, his small garden.

And when we don’t do that, as Adam didn’t do it, a disaster is frequently the result.

Calvin on this says, “The craftiness of Satan betrays itself in this: that he does not directly assail the man, but approaches him as through a mind in the person of his wife. This insidious method of attack is more than sufficiently known to us at the present day, and I wish we might learn prudently to guard ourselves against it. For he wearily insinuates himself at that point at which he sees us to be the least fortified, that he may not be perceived till he should have penetrated wherever he wished.”

Now, do you see? There’s huge themes we could go off on, but do you see here how deadly egalitarianism—the idea of equality, no distinction between the sexes—is in our culture?

We went to the Albertsons across the street the other day, and the checkers all have on the same outfits. They’re not similar outfits. The women are wearing men’s clothes. There’s no distinction between the men’s clothes, the men’s pants, and the women’s pants. There used to be. There are in a lot of fashion places. No, it’s a unisex outfit. And so what they’re saying is it doesn’t make any difference at the workplace if you’re a woman or a man.

And our culture is filled with that. And that is a lie from the pit of hell, because that’s exactly the lie that Satan wants us to do—to say women are not necessary, not as it’s necessary to help them, to guard them, protect them from his wiles.

If we’re all put on the same plane, if we don’t make a distinction between men and women, then we’re going to fail, as Adam failed, to guard properly the wives of our culture, of the church, and of our families. And the result of that isn’t good for Eve. It’s not good for Eve to go talk to the serpent. She ends up naked, ashamed, feeling awful, dying, being thrust out of a beautiful place of protection and security.

Horrific results issue from a failure to make proper distinctions among the sexes as the scriptures tell us.

Now he also attacks—as we said—God’s person and God’s word. The attack really is upon the goodness of God.

What he gave you that command? And people, this is where doubt begins to come in. When we doubt the goodness or love of God, it’s a real simple lesson. God wants us to be assured of his love. And when people—anybody, our wives, our husbands, our children, our friends, our neighbors, our workers—when they cause us to begin to doubt the goodness of God, we want to shut them up or walk away from them. That’s the serpent speaking, who begins to be a sinful scoffer.

And what does it say? We’re not supposed to sit with those people according to Psalm 1. Sinful scoffer.

God attacks God’s person and he attacks God’s word. He attacks man’s dependence on Father Sovereign’s sure word.

“Father Sovereign” is a word that goes throughout the outline at several points, because remember, the text up to now has referred to God as “the Lord God,” the covenant name of God, and then God being sovereign. So “Father Sovereign” is what “Lord God” means. And that’s the way we should think of him. We should think of God as sovereign, but we should think of him as Father.

Well, the serpent, when he begins this attack, he drops the name “Father.” And so all you’re left with is “Sovereign.” And the woman will repeat that same name. So the attack is on God’s goodness. He’s not the Father. He’s just the Sovereign. And he’s a stringent, mean guy—that is what Satan begins to tell the woman.

Additionally, Satan asks the woman, “Why would this be?” That’s the intimation of the temptation. Why would God give you this kind of a command?

And let me read Calvin’s comment here. “Under the pretext of inquiring into the cause, he would indirectly weaken their confidence in the word. And certainly the old interpreter has translated the expression ‘Why has God said?’—which, although I do not altogether approve the translation, yet I have no doubt that the serpent urges the woman to seek out the cause for the command. God told you that command—like the idea is, ‘Why would he do that? Your husband told you can’t do this, that, or the other thing. Why would he do that?’ You see, the attack upon the authority and the love of the husband is imaged here, and the attack upon the Father to Adam and Eve.”

Calvin goes on to say, “Very dangerous is the temptation when it is suggested to us that God is not to be obeyed except so far as the reason of his command is apparent. The true rule of obedience is that we, being content with a bare command, should persuade ourselves that whatever he enjoins us is just and right. We do not insist to know why God tells us something before we obey him. We can’t know why, in the ultimate sense of the term, because we’re creatures. He’s Creator. His thoughts are not our thoughts. We know generally his motivation is his good pleasure, and it is for the well-being of his elect. But we can’t know why.”

Children, this is why your parents get a little disturbed when you’re perpetually asking “why.” Now, it’s good. We want you to grow in knowledge. God wants us to grow in our knowledge of him and his ways. But he doesn’t want us to ask that question by way of making a determination if we should be obeyed, or if he should be obeyed, or if your parents should be obeyed or not.

Children, your dad or mom tells you, “Do this,” and you say, “Why should I do that?” What’s your thinking there? Instead of doing it and then saying, “Why did you have me do that, Dad?” You see, you’re moving toward this first temptation of the devil. You’re getting to question whether or not you should obey a command based upon the reason it’s given.

Now, what should you say? You should say, “Mom and Dad love me. Must be a good reason for this. They’re smarter than me. Even if they’re not, I’m supposed to submit. God’s going to work through my parents.”

The devil, children, wants you to doubt whether mom and dad love you. Does God—does mom and dad really love me?

And parents, God is not—Satan is going to be tempting your children to doubt your love for them. He won’t have usually—it’s not an outright denial. As I said with Eve, he doesn’t tell Eve, “Eat the fruit.” But he causes her to doubt God’s goodness. And our children be tempted to doubt God’s goodness and our goodness as well.

What does that mean we should do? Well, one thing it means is we should work real hard to tell our children how much we really do love them—reminding them over and over and over of that love.

And husbands, what are your wives going to be—what are they going to be given doubt relative to? They’re going to doubt your love for them. And what does that mean we should be doing as husbands to protect our wives from temptation? We should be telling them again and again and again, “We love you.” Not just with words, with actions as well.

Today is Mother’s Day, right? Children, also reciprocate that love for their parents. And the parents do the same way. Even though it’s a subordinate role, parents begin to doubt the love of their children for them, and husbands doubt the love of their wives.

This doubting of God’s love as it works through the relationships of life is central to the temptation of our wily and crafty adversary. And so an affirmation, a trust, a presupposition of the parents’ love, the spouse’s love, the children’s love should permeate our relationships. And attempts on the part of each of us to assure each other of our love for them should permeate our relationships.

Here at the church, the same thing. If a person have never really been told in different ways of the love of the church for them, in the context of the body, when discipline time comes around, they’re going to be more likely to fall into the temptation of stiffening against that, because of the temptation on the part of the devil saying, “The church isn’t doing this out of love for you. The church is doing this because it wants to control you.”

Remember that wicked God who wanted to control Adam and Eve? Same temptation runs right through all these relationships.

Again, to quote Calvin on this: “Yet the artifice of Satan is to be noticed, for he wished to inject into the woman a doubt which might induce her to believe that not to be the word of God for which a plausible reason did not manifestly appear.”

Now, notice the next point in the outline: the intentional fallacies, logical fallacies that Satan enters into in his speech. We’ll just go over these briefly.

A fallacy is something that’s wrong. It’s fallacious in terms of an argument or reason. And if you look at what’s going on here between the serpent and Eve as a dialogue, an argument, a debate, as it were, you can see that we should analyze this to see how Satan debates.

I mean, the scriptures tell us you’re supposed to know the ways to a certain degree, the ways of the serpent. How does he work? If he’s an enemy and an adversary, we want to know how he works to some degree so we can oppose him successfully.

Plato said that arguments, like men, are often pretenders. A fallacy is simply a faulty argument. It’s a pretender to be an argument. And what are the specific logical fallacies that Satan employs?

Well, first of all, he uses equivocation. I told you that you can find ten good godly commentators, and they’re going to disagree about Satan’s speech—not just here, but the second thing he says as well. Why is that? Because Satan wants you to be confused by it. He intentionally uses vague terms. And that’s the fallacy of ambiguity. Or another term for that is equivocation.

When people engage in a debate and do not define their terms clearly, they’re using ambiguity or equivocation, and it’s a fallacy. It’s a pretender to an argument. And Satan uses that. That’s why you can’t figure out what he’s saying, because he doesn’t want you to be able to figure it out. The whole point is not clarity. Satan, like the octopus or the squid that throws the black ink everywhere, makes things unclear for you.

God’s word is clear. It is certain. And it’s right to where you need to be. Satan’s word is ambiguous and equivocating.

Now, husbands, what does that tell us right away about our relationship to our wives? We should use clear language. When we use ambiguity, when we use equivocation, when we use unclear terms, because we don’t really want to enter into a forthright discussion with our spouse about a particular matter, we’re playing Satan’s game. We’re imaging not God now, but we’re imaging the serpent, that great deceiver of old.

Secondly, Satan uses an ad hominem attack. That means attacking the man against the man, uses an ad hominem attack. You know, if you got two debaters going out and one says, “You know, you’re pretty ugly looking,” it’s an ad hominem attack on the guy. That’s pretty obvious.

Satan’s ad hominem attack is subtle. But remember what I just said. What he’s really saying is: this is not a good God. So in trying to evaluate whether or not Eve should submit, he attacks the man. He attacks God himself, which is not really proper reasoning, and it’s fallacious.

And so again, in our dialogue within our families, we want to train our children that we stick to the point of what’s being discussed. We don’t use ad hominem, personal attacks to an argument. That’s Satan’s way. Logical fallacies find their origin in the father of all lies. They’re pretenders. They’re deceits to true reasoning and communication.

And our Savior has told us that they come from Satan, because he is the father of all lies.

Third, he uses an ad misericordiam argument. I’m not sure I’m saying that right. It’s Latin. What it means is he appeals to emotions. And specifically, he’s appealing to self-pity of the woman.

It may not be obvious, but think about it. “Oh gosh, your husband told you can’t, you know, work full-time, and you can’t put those kids in public school, and you can’t put the kids in daycare. Gosh, that’s too bad, isn’t it? I feel sorry for you.” Satan does that to Eve.

“What? Your husband says you—your Father here, supposedly your Father, your Sovereign, your stringent God—tells you can’t eat of some of the trees here. What’s that all about?” You see, he appeals to herself, to self-pity. He wants her to feel sorry for herself.

And you know, when we’re tempted to feel sorry for ourselves, it’s a horrendous temptation from God. And it is one that goes on regularly in this world. The world is filled with this kind of attack and appeal to self-pity.

I’ve noticed an odd phenomena over the last, you know, decade and a half that I’ve been involved in church discipline matters. And the odd phenomena that I’ve seen over and over—it’s not odd, it’s what happens—is that frequently when you’ve got two parties in a case and one has acted pretty good and the other’s acted pretty bad, you will see a particular number of people who start to line up with the guilty party—with Clinton in the case of the national political scene right now. That’s because they feel sorry for him.

Satan, one of his ways of getting us to make bad decisions, is to make this appeal to emotion or to pity. Now, that’s a pretender to a real argument. It’s got nothing to do with what’s going on. It’s not factually based. It’s thrown in by the serpent to get you off track and not to think about what Clinton did wrong, but to think instead, “This poor guy, gosh, going through—his all his information on everything else. I’d hate to be that way myself. We all know how crummy we are. We all know how sinful we are.” So it’s very easy for Satan to get us to be sympathetic to people that are in great sin.

You just got to factor it in. I mean, you just have to factor it in. And after a while, you get used to that kind of thing and it doesn’t bother you so much. But that’s the way it works. And it works that way because Satan deliberately lies by appealing to your pity for someone else as opposed to an objective evaluation of the facts.

He uses half-truths. He was partly right. God did prevent—he did give her a command to not eat of one of the trees. But it’s just a half-truth, because he says, “God told you can’t eat of every tree.” Now, what does it mean? God says you can’t eat of any of the trees. I don’t know what it means. The point is he positions the truth and uses half-truths in his arguments.

And as one commentator said, the end result of the whole thing is he involves Eve in getting her to use what’s called the hermeneutics of suspicion. You cast a little doubt, and that reinterprets the way the woman looks at how she’s going to look at the evidence. And now she’s looking at it not as she should—with acknowledging God’s goodness and grace—but rather she’s looking at it in terms of suspicion. She’s become slightly doubtful of God. Satan has brought a wedge in, and he’s brought it in through these specific logical fallacies.

I mean, it sounds like I’m talking about some art, but this is what happens in everyday life. When we talk in private conversation, when husbands and wives talk, when we talk to our children, we engage in communication. And we try to get people to do certain things. And the way we get them to move from here to there must be, if we’re going to image God properly, by appealing to truth—by appealing to truth as defined by God’s word—and not allowing ourselves, even for the sake of something that we think is good, to use half-truths, deception, attacks on the other person in our arguments, in our discussions, appeals to pity.

“Look at poor me, if you won’t do this for me.” You see, it’s an appeal to pity. Or these attacks, or this dialogue that is ambiguous and deceitful, so we can get our wives or our husbands to do what we want them to do. That’s imaging Satan.

These terms I’m using are from the debate arena, but they go on every day in the context of our conversations, and their origination is right here in the serpent’s temptation of Eve.

He smuggles in the assumption that God’s word is subject to Eve’s judgment. And I call her Eve, who wasn’t named Eve yet, but to the woman’s judgment. He smuggles that in: “Is God’s word true? It’s up to you to decide whether it’s true or not true. It’s subject to our judgments.”

He draws her into debate on his terms, on his playing field. He doesn’t directly demand that she eat from this particular tree. He knows the art of seduction. He brings in doubt.

Okay, moving on. What’s her response to this? How well does she do?

And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’”

Well, first of all, what didn’t she do? What she didn’t do is to punish the serpent.

Calvin here says, “As often as they beheld any one of the animals which were in the world, they ought to have been reminded both of the supreme authority and of the singular goodness of God. But on the contrary, when they saw the serpent, an apostate from his creator, not only did they neglect to punish it, but in violation of all lawful order, they subjected and devoted themselves to it as participators in the same apostasy.”

The point is every time they saw an animal, they should have thought about God’s authority and the goodness of God that he gave us these wonderful creatures around us to train us and cause us to have discernment. And instead, what she should have done is she should have rebuked that serpent: “You’re challenging the Creator’s word, Father Sovereign’s word. Well, that’s terrible of you. He loves us dearly. You’re awful. Off with your head.”

That’s what she should have done. But instead, she enters into the dialogue. So she’s half lost the game already.

You know, when somebody tempts you in this way, they should be rebuked.