We move too fast over God’s Word. We skim lightly over the very voice of God, and so miss its thundering, reverberating tones. We are too hurried to allow the tension to build, the drama to heighten to just the right pitch. And so the fireworks fizzle. It might slow us down, it might help us enter into the story if we would enter into the telling of the story. Imagine then that you are in the desert. You have just witnessed the all powerful hand of God most high bring down your former master. He is taking you to a land flowing with milk and honey. You are on the other side of the drama, just the turn of a page away from “And they all lived happily ever after.” As you sit with your family, free, around a fire at night. Moses begins to tell you the beginning of your story. He describes that power that freed you as it first freed the light from the nothingness. He explores not just the power of God, but His wisdom as God separates day from night, land from sea.
Moses paints the picture of God painting His garden, and setting His children therein. Eden has all the glory of the Promised Land. And you are almost there. Almost there. Moses sips from his wineskin, takes a deep breath, and continues the story- Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the beasts of the field. Wait. What?! You are jolted, alert, your attention focused like a laser. A cloud has passed over, chilling your bones. An owl in the distance hoots. All the portents have come out to play.
This changes everything. Would you be tempted to rush on to the next verse, or would you stay a spell? What is this serpent, slippery, slithering into paradise? And what is his crafty craft? Therein lies the tail. The serpent’s goal is less crafty, more crass. He is at war with God. He seeks to topple Him from His throne. His seething hatred of God drives him to a seething hatred of man. His rage at the grandeur of the power of God’s Word, that has just fashioned the whole of the universe leads Him to speak his lie to God’s truth.
His enemy, ultimately isn’t obedience. His weapon, ultimately, isn’t pleasure. It is indeed a part of his craftiness that we think his strategy is to set before us illicit pleasures to tempt us away from the living God. But pleasure is God’s gift so even illicit pleasures are anemic evils. The great evil is when we fail to believe God. The first temptation in the garden wasn’t the fruit. That, after all, would have eventually been given to Adam and Eve. Indeed the serpent didn’t begin his beguiling by talking up the fruit. Instead he began with a question- has God indeed said? The serpent invited Eve to do something truly evil, to doubt the truth of God’s Word. And so he has been doing ever since.
This is why Satan is called the Father of Lies. It isn’t merely that he lies a great deal of the time. It isn’t that he isn’t shy about lying. It is that lying is essential to what he is; it is part and parcel of his nature. It defines him. We must remember, however, that he is crafty. A crafty liar doesn’t tell us black is white, up is down, evil is good. That’s too direct an approach, to ineffective a strategy. No, the craftiness of the devil is that he melds together just enough truth to get us to buy into the lie.
Consider his name. Satan means the accuser. His delight is to remind us of the depth of our sin, to fill us with discouragement and doubt. His accusations hit their mark, they sting, precisely because they are true. The devil tells us we are guilty of this, that we are tainted by that. He shows us the sins we have committed and reminds of the terrible truth that we are apt to commit them again. Here his failure to tell the truth isn’t because he is overstating his case, but because he is understating it. His error is because he doesn’t know us well enough. We are far, far worse than he says.
He accuses, however, not to get us to believe the truth that we are guilty, but to get us to believe the lie that we are not forgiven. The unspoken lie, the one he is so desperate to persuade us of is- God could never forgive and love someone as vile as you. The first premise is true – we are wicked, wicked people. But the second, but unspoken premise, that God could never love and forgive wicked, wicked people, is false, which leads us to the false conclusion, God could never love and forgive me. The devil doesn’t want us to doubt our guilt, but to doubt His grace.
The solution then to fighting the devil is less resolve not to fall into sensual sin, but resolve to believe God, beginning with His promises to us in the gospel. It is to embrace the totality and immutability of our forgiveness in Christ. It is to rest in, give thanks for our adoption as His sons. It is resting in His grace that quenches his fiery darts. How then can we believe? It begins with heeding what God says. When our diet is His Word, when we feast upon His promises written in His book, our faith grows stronger. When we read account after account in the Scripture of God rescuing His own, forgiving His own, delighting in His own we not only have no reason to fear the devil, but can laugh in his impudent face.
Our Father has given us food for our strength. When we come to His table we feel the weight of the accusations. When we behold the broken body and spilled blood of our Lord we remember that we crucified the Lord of Glory. But we do not go to our Father’s table to be condemned but to be welcomed. We are the olive plants that adorn His table (Psalm 128). His table is a place of welcome, of peace, of family. It is a foretaste of eternity, a look forward to the marriage feast of the lamb. He prepares a table for us in the presence of our enemy. There we see and taste all that we have been promised. There he sees all that he has lost. We rest; he rages.
With His first step out of the tomb, our Lord crushed the head of the serpent. The glorious truth is that for all of his bluster, all of his fury, the devil is defeated. He is Hitler in his bunker as the allies descended on Berlin. He’s already dead; he just won’t admit it. The serpent is more crafty than any of the beasts of the field. He was a liar from the beginning. And he will lie to the end. Then however, through clenched teeth and bitter tears he will speak the truth with all of creation- Jesus Christ is Lord.