Deceit and Promises

"Faith stands or falls on the truth that the future with God is more satisfying than the one promised by sin. Where this truth is embraced and God is cherished above all, the power of sin is broken. The power of sin is the power of deceit. ...[In] Satan's first great success on the earth...the deception was just this: God cannot be trusted to meet your needs and satisfy you.

"...John Sailhamer sums up the scene like this:

The snake speaks only twice, but that is enough to offset the balance of trust and obedience between the man and the woman and their Creator. The centerpiece of the story is the question of the knowledge of the 'good.' The snake implied by his questions that God was keeping this knowledge from the man and the woman (3:5), while the sense of the narratives in the first two chapters has been that God was keeping this knowledge for the man and the woman (e.g. 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31; 2:18). In other words, the snake's statements were a direct challenge to the central theme of the narrative of chapters 1 and 2; God will provide the 'good' for human beings if they will only trust him and obey him.

"Satan began by calling God's goodness into question and that has been his primary strategy ever since. His aim is to subvert trust by influencing us to believe that the promise of sin is more satisfying than the promise of God."

--John Piper, Future Grace (Multnomah, 1995), p. 326-27. Includes quote from John Sailhamer, The Pentateuch as Narrative (Zondervan, 1992), p. 103-4.