One of the interesting things about the account in Genesis 3 of humanity’s fall into sin is that it gives us an inside view—not a blow-by-blow account, but the highlights—of the process of temptation. As I noted a few days ago, the snake begins the temptation not with a question, but with a deliberately false statement, because he wants to provoke his target into reacting without thinking. It works for him, as the woman immediately comes back with a correction; indeed, it works very well, because she’s so focused on correcting his misstatement (“God didn’t say we can’t eat from any of the trees”) that she makes a misstatement of her own (“He said we can’t even touch the tree in the middle, or we’ll die”).
The serpent, of course, doesn’t correct her. Instead, he comes back with a most interesting response: he says, “You shall not surely die.” This does a couple things. In the first place, it’s a direct contradiction, a direct challenge to the word of God—he’s calling God a liar, straight out. Genesis doesn’t say, but at this point, maybe the snake took advantage of the woman’s misstatement; I can imagine him saying, “Go on, test it—touch the tree. Touch the tree. See? You’re not dead, are you? You just have a little sap on your hands.” He calls God a liar, and the woman lets it stand; and with that, the first seeds of doubt are sown.
More than that, though, this statement by the serpent shifts the focus of the conversation. Starting off, the focus is on what God said, which means ultimately it’s on God; now, the serpent has changed that, and instead of being on God, the focus of the conversation is now on death. The question of whether or not to obey God is no longer a matter of the character and goodness of God; instead, it’s a matter of whether God is serious about the punishment he promised for disobedience.
This is a necessary shift for the snake. If he’s encouraging her to disobey God and she’s thinking about God, she’s going to come back and say, “No, I don’t want to do that because God is good and he knows what’s best for me and this is what he wants me to do”—and there’s really nothing the snake can say to that. But if he can instead get her thinking about punishment, then when he tempts her, then her response will be, “No, I don’t want to do that because if I do that, God is going to hurt me”—and that, he can argue about. To that, he can say, “No, God isn’t going to hurt you, no, you aren’t really going to die, and really, God’s only saying this because he wants to keep the best stuff for himself.”
You see, the tempter wants to get us into a cost/benefit analysis where he offers the benefit—whatever the temptation of the day is—and God offers us the cost—whatever our punishment is going to be for giving in to temptation; he wants us to see God simply as somebody who punishes us when we do wrong, because if the tempter can do that, then he can always convince us that what he’s offering us is worth the price. If our reason for obeying God is positive rather than negative, though—not just because we don’t want God to punish us, but because we love him and want to please him—then the devil has a much harder time with that.
(Adapted from “The End of the Beginning”)
And when he gets us to see God as punisher, and someone who holds back the best for himself, that in turn (maybe even subconsciously) causes us to attempt to drag God down to our own level. We forget the 'holiness' part, and focus on the 'punishing spiteful' part that we think God is, and that's someone we are more comfortable comparing ourselves to. Sometimes I think we are conditioned that way and it takes years to even begin to realize the depths of love God has for us.
Good point.