Genesis 3:5 Commentary and Bible Study

He proceeds with further persuasions and arguments. He flatters her and makes himself out to be her friend, interested in her good and in her gain. There is nothing that he says that is not a lie, and extremely dangerous to her, but she forsakes her own protection which is to hold on to the word of God. ‘Your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’ Well, we might say that this is half true, but it is half lie, and that is the worst kind of lie. Yes, if she ate and if Adam ate, their eyes would be opened to good and evil. They already knew good, of course, but they did not know evil, and they were not yet contaminated with evil. In fact, in their domain, in their realm, in their world and in that paradise, there was no evil. It had not appeared yet. It was going to be introduced by their disobedience. Their eyes certainly would be opened to evil, but they would not be as gods. That last part was an outright lie. They would not have, like God, total control over evil. They had been able to resist. In a sense the temptation is this: ‘Oh, if you were to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil then you will be independent from the standards of God. You would know the opposite to God, the alternative to God, the alternative to all God’s commands. Every command he has given you, there is an alternative to it that you do not know about. There is another way. You do not have to obey these things. And you will be able to weigh them for yourself. You would not be tied in to the decisions of God in these things. You would be as God, alongside him, free to command your life and your destiny’, and that proved highly attractive.Here was a situation in which they must either trust God and believe his word, or trust the serpent and believe what he said. Trust is an essential ingredient to any proper relationship between man and God; man is finite, God is infinite. He must always remain beyond our complete knowledge. The things he reveals to us are trustworthy and should be fully embraced, but there will always be works of God that we cannot trace. Do we have to wait until we know all that there is to know about God before we can trust him? Are we always afraid that there is some dark secret lurking in some corner of God’s being that we have not yet explored? Since there will always be more of God that we have not yet known, this means that we will never arrive at the point where we can be entirely sure that God is good. Trust is not sight; it does not get withheld until it has seen everything. Trust takes hold of the whole of God’s being, not just the part we have seen. It credits the Lord with goodness and truth, even when he acts alone in the secret of his own being. It was God’s intention that Adam and Eve should from the beginning have some part of their world in which they were required to trust God. Satan was at work to incite the maximum prejudice in Eve against the commandment and to focus on what she was being denied. Satan starts with a question in order to set Eve at ease and make her think she was still in control. But he leads her mind into an area where she was only safe while she trusted completely in the goodness of God. He invited Eve to look for a reason for this commandment and to test its reasonableness by her own judgment .Of course, it was also desperately ungrateful, desperately disloyal, full of mistrust of God. The sin is forming, and forming rapidly, and yet it is deliberate. It is not that Eve was taken in, and she claimed, beguiled by the devil, and fell not knowing what she was doing. She is an intensely intelligent person. Yes, she was deceived, but she was not innocent in that deception. She chose to believe the lie, even though she could not do so without calling into question the truth of what God had said. John Bunyan points out that man was made as a being that could not be forced to sin. He was so constructed by God that he had adequate defences against evil and would only become vulnerable if he threw down his own defences. Therefore Satan approaches not by force but by stealth.