God's Sabbath

H OW I T A LL B EGAN

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Satan said, “‘You will not surely die,’ the serpent said to the woman. ‘For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’” Genesis 3:4, 5.

Eve’s Solution

The poison of flattery must have seriously dulled Eve’s men tal perceptions, for Satan’s argument was quite unreasonable and illogical. But she allowed her feelings to rule her mind, and chose the path of sentimentality. All around her she could see created works which spoke of a flawless God, able to do any thing He desired. It was absurd to suggest that He had so seri ously erred in His creative work that a tree had appeared in the Garden which was both an embarrassment and a decided threat to Him. God had of course planned the entire Garden down to the last tiny atom, and everything was exactly where and how He had designed it should be. Far from being a threat to Him, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil had been spe cifically placed in the center of the Garden of Eden as a test for the holy pair. God certainly did not need to lie to protect Him self from it. Yet Satan blatantly and successfully proposed to Eve that God had blundered, and to extricate Himself from this self-imposed problem, He had resorted to deception. After unwisely listening to Satan’s flattery, Eve’s trust in the serpent grew and she was ready to accept his false assertions about her Creator. Once she had believed his lies, it was easy for Satan to con vince Eve that she had an actual problem, when in fact, she had none at all. He deceived her into imagining that a self-centered and despotic God was deliberately preventing her from achiev ing her real destiny, and that it was up to her to solve the prob lem. The last thing Satan wanted at this point was for Eve to carry this difficulty back to her husband or to turn to God. If she had gone to either of them, Satan would have been thoroughly defeated, for in order to achieve his malicious objective, he had to entice Eve to take matters into her own hands and become her own problem solver.