Get ready to start a journey…a journey through the pages of the Bible and the pages of your life.
Satan attacks us in our times of strength and in our times of weakness. He came aggressively after Adam and Eve in the garden during a period of perfect communion with God. He did the same with Jesus in the desert when he was physically vulnerable. Today, let’s compare the garden and desert temptations. I will borrow from the excellent work of William Cook and Chuck Lawless to make these comparisons.
Satan is not particular about when he attacks. He went after Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. At their strongest point, he convinced them that God was holding out. He also attacks us in our weakest moments. That’s what he did when he tempted Jesus in the desert.
God’s grace is amazing! He gives us what we don’t deserve. He offers the free gift of grace without conditions or strings attached. And it all started with his grace in the garden.
Temptation appeals to our senses—our spiritual, emotional, and physical senses. That was the lure for Eve in the garden, and we have followed the pattern ever since.
Does God really love me? Is this the best God has for me? Why is God holding out on me? These questions, which have echoed through the ages, started in the garden when Satan showed up to bring down Adam and Eve. After Satan told Eve that God’s Word was not true, he moved to God’s motive.
When there is an opening in our battle gear, the enemy aims for that vulnerable spot. After Eve’s weak response to Satan’s question, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1), he went from a seemingly innocent question to an attack on God’s integrity.
A small error makes a big difference. Check this out. If you started walking on a straight path toward a destination and were one degree off course when you started, after one hundred yards, you would end up 5.2 feet from your destination. Not that big of a deal, right? However, in that same scenario, you’d be off by 92.2 feet after a mile. If you were driving in a straight line from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., and started just one degree off, you’d miss the nation’s capital by 42.6 miles. One more…in a rocket going to the moon, one degree off at blastoff would cause you to miss the moon by 4,169 miles. A small error makes a big difference. We see that in the first temptation.
In the beginning, “the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2). Then God created the heavens and the earth. God’s crowning creation was man and woman, made in his own image. God placed this sinless couple in a perfect environment, the garden of Eden. They had everything they could ever want or need. There was, however, one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, from which they were not allowed to eat. God’s instruction regarding the tree was to allow his creation to obey him or not. The first sin centered around the tree.
What causes us to sin? Is it our environment? Does it have to do with our family of origin? Is it in our genes? Let’s consider these questions as we look at our passage today.
It all started in the Garden. In that perfect sinless environment, Satan came to Adam and Eve. There in the Garden, the deceiver twisted the truth and convinced Adam and Eve that God was holding out on them. They bought the lie. When God confronted Eve and asked, “What is this that you have done?” she replied, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate” (Genesis 3:13). Through the deceiver, sin and death entered humanity. That’s why Jesus says Satan is a murderer and a liar “from the beginning.”
Peter wrote this passage around the time the Roman emperor, Nero, was persecuting Christians. Many followers of Jesus were led to the Roman Colosseum to be mauled and torn apart by lions. Peter used that relevant picture to remind Christians that Satan, our adversary, the one called the devil, the slanderer, seeks to defeat and destroy us.
“You are not worthy.” “You failed again.” “How could God ever love you?” “How could God ever use you?” “You might as well give up. You will never be anything but a second-rate Christian—if you are a Christian at all….”
Where do those voices come from?