A Snake in the Grass
A mind operating “independently” of God. Musings presuming to operate outside God's pre-interpreting Word. To mankind now, this is “deja-vu all over again”, to quote Yogi Berra. Thinking neutrally, or in a way that presupposes from the outset that God and His Word is external to, and outside of me, is Athens stock-in-trade―now. It happens everywhere, on every hand, in every place. But universality is not an evidence of truth―regardless of how “natural” it may seem.
In Genesis 3, we are confronted with evil. Sin―which is “every want of conformity unto, or transgression of the Law of God”―(Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question 15) enters into the world and human history. How it enters is most critical, most instructive. Mind and thought preceeded action. Before disobedience of God acted, it thought. In Genesis 3 we are confronted, for the first time, with the Unbelieving Mind―a Mind which is now both universal and “normal.” So universal is Unbelief that it has become normative. To recover the Christian Mind, we have to lay aside thought frames and patterns that have become normative―the lie―and return to the original―the truth.
The serpent comes to Adam and Eve as a creature―one of the creatures created on the sixth day. While the text is not explicit, subsequent scriptural revelation confirms that the serpent was animated by Satan, a created heavenly being who, shortly after his creation, had rebelled against God. Satan comes to enlist man, the one creature made in God's image, to his ranks. But Satan is incredibly clever. He does not come directly, but obliquely. He chooses the most subtle or clever animal as his emissary. His sole objective is to encourage the man to think “for himself” outside of God, as if he were an independent being. Therefore, the temptation comes “from below” which plays to Adam through the position of authority which Adam held.
How often we have seen this satanic and demonic pattern repeated. Satan will ever take our strengths, play to them, magnify them, exalt them―until they pervert us and lead us into evil.
If Satan had come to Adam in all his malignant demonic power and confronted him as an enemy, demanding his fealty, Adam would immediately have sought security in God. Instead he comes obliquely, indirectly, and seeks to insinuate himself subtly into the mind of man. Adam's defences were down. So the serpent speaks, not directly to Adam, but indirectly. He speaks to Eve.
We can assume that Adam knew that the serpent was acting beyond his created abilities and that he was being animated by another, external being. The assumption rests upon Adam's already demonstrated and confirmed ability to discern the true nature of all the creatures on the earth, and name them accordingly. Further, the text confirms that Adam was present throughout the interchange. Adam was “with her” when Eve took the fruit and ate (Genesis 3:6).
In order to enter into this interchange, Adam had to tolerate a perversion of the structures and order of creation itself. Both Adam and Eve had to allow themselves to be led by an animal. Adam relinquished his God-given duty to exercise dominion and rule over all other creatures upon earth. Secondly, Adam allowed himself to be led by his wife. Tolerating and acting within this perverted order was already to be outside the pre-interpreting Word of God. At the very commencement of the interchange with the serpent, Adam was thinking sinfully.
The serpent leads the woman and the man to a position where they are exercising judgement over God's Word. God had commanded that, whereas they could eat freely from every tree in the garden, there was one from which they were not to eat―the one designated the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis 2:17). Firstly, the serpent asserts a rule that is more restricting than God's command and attributes the more restrictive rule to God. “Has God really said you should not eat from any tree in the garden?” Satan has always delighted to entice God's people to add to God's Word―to make its commands more high, more restrictive, more exacting than God has actually commanded―because that very action makes man the lawgiver, the lawmaker, and implicitly over God. Man's word is thereby more important than God's and carries higher authority. The generation that sets itself up to be stricter than God's Word will be followed by a generation that denies the authority of God and His Word totally.
Next the serpent openly denies the truth of God's Word: “you shall not die!” (Genesis 3:4) God is lying. Neither God nor His Word is true. As Adam and Eve entertained that hypothesis as a possibility, they sinned in their mind, in their thoughts. But to strengthen the proposition, the serpent attributed a motive of envy to God. His explanation as to why God might lie and deceive the woman lay in God's envy of man. In other words, God did not have Adam's best interests at heart. The fallacy of attacking the “man” not the proposition was present right from the first entrance of evil into the world. He also appealed to human pride: if they ate, they would be divine, equal with God. They would know good and evil for themselves. They would be able to determine their own law, independently of, and equal to, God.
Here, then, is the essence of sin and evil. Man, the creature, arrogates to himself the position (the “right”) to work things out for himself, independently of God. Neutrality towards God is actually a position of enmity toward, or rejection of, God. The Unbelieving Mind―for by the stage Eve had gone over to the Dark Side―began to consider two conflicting propositions: either God was true or the serpent was true. Mmm. Let me see now, which is right? That frame of mind is the mind of Unbelief. It is the very essence of Athens. It is when Athens first appeared in human history.
Then Eve engaged in a bit of neutral empirical research. She “saw” that the tree was good for food. That is, she formed the view, contrary to God's command. Her empirical research led her to the conclusion that the tree was a delight to the eyes―it was indeed beautiful. She had forgotten that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that by now her eye was well and truly corrupted. She was no longer seeing things as they were, but was seeing things as she wanted them or constructed to be. Similarly, the tree would make her wise. All of that empirical research on the tree was not neutral; it was informed by and animated by a growing rebellion against God.
So she and Adam ate.
Rationalism and humanism began in the Garden of Eden. Rationalism is the belief that human reason is sovereign over life. By means of reason, man can discover and determine truth for himself. Man can determine truth independently of God. Man can determine God's existence, God's commands on his own authority. Man can verify the Word of God. This belief isas innate to fallen man now, and as unconscious to mankind, as breathing. It only changes when someone is born again from above, by God. When we are born again, when we are subsequently converted from unbelief to belief in God and His Christ, then we are able to stop being rationalists. In principle we move back to the position of Adam before God, before the Fall. We are able, once again, to think God's thoughts after Him. We are able, once again, to see the world truly and truthfully―as it really is. We are able to see and know the world as pre-interpreted by God and His Word.
Humanism is the belief that the ultimate being in the universe is man. Man is the measure and standard of all things. Man is god. All citizens of Athens, all unbelievers, are both rationalists and humanists―regardless of whatever denominational stripe they may adopt. Of course, rationalism and humanism are in themselves idolatries, and, like any and every idolatry, will be ultimately destroyed. Pity the unbeliever who clings to his idols.
But―and here is where Jerusalem needs to grow up―the currency of the realm of rationalism and humanism is neutrality. Athens both presupposes and asserts that data and truth have an objective reality―a meaning that is of itself and from within itself. When Eve conducted her empirical investigation on the tree, deciding that it was desireable and so forth, she was framing reality according to her (already) sinful mind. But the assumption, the presupposition upon which she proceeded was that these supposed characteristics of the tree existed independently of God and had reality apart from God. She could investigate, learn, prove, and conclude these things whether God existed or not. (Which is to say that Eve had already decided that God did not exist. She was already replacing Him mentally with a false god―one who was envious and evil.) Man, likewise independent of, neutral toward, and objective over the data can discover and determine truth for himself. Man can prove God, or disprove God. It matters not.
To assert that man can prove or establish God, is to assert that the God revealed in the Scriptures cannot possibly be true. In “proving” God, the rationalist by that action or proof disbelieves the God of Scripture. There is no other possibility. There is no neutral, middle ground. Either God establishes and pre-interprets man, or man establishes and pre-interprets one or more gods.
When Christians―no doubt with all the best intentions in the world―seek to clothe themselves with the garb of rational neutrality so they can go down to the Athenian market place and seek to discuss the “facts” with Unbelievers in an effort to get them to believe, they regress to the lying attitudes adopted by the serpent and Adam. They have compromised the truth of God and His world before they start. They have again put on the smelly rags of Unbelief. God, as Calvin says so acutely, is not served by our lies.
Or, to approach the issue in another way: the Believing Mind knows that there is not one atom or sub-atomic particle in the universe that does not depend for its existence utterly and completely upon God. To enter a discussion where man is invited to consider, determine, or confirm for himself whether that might be the case is to take the form and shape of the serpent. It is to make man the measure of all things, including God.
Athens is idolatry. Everything it is and does is idolatrous. Jerusalem has been delivered from Athenian idolatry, but like our fathers in the desert who longed to return to Egypt, many citizens of Jerusalem employ rationalist and humanist modes of life. Nowhere is this more evident than at the point of interchange between believers and unbelivers. Many Christians think the only way they can appeal to unbelievers successfully is to go and stand with unbelievers on their fields of idolatry and lead them step by step to the Christian faith.
A favorite approach has been to argue the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. If we reasonably consider the evidence for Jesus' resurrection it becomes clear that overwhelming evidence is attached to the event. As we work through the evidence and the rational arguments arising out of the evidence, unbelievers will be confronted by the truth and will be lead to faith―or so it is claimed.
This leads us to ask whether the problem that confronted Adam and Eve in the garden was a lack of evidence. Adam had the facts, the truth, all around him. The problem was not the facts or the obscrurity of the evidence. The problem lay in Adam filtering the evidence through mind of Unbelief―the mind of sin. How could that happen? It happened as soon as he asserted a “right” to examine the evidence “neutrally”, outside of God, for himself.
Thus, to return to the issue of leading people into the Kingdom by means of objective, neutral, “just the facts, ma'am” consideration of the resurrection or any other Christian doctrine, the rationalist will say, in heart, “Even if I am persuaded that the facts indicate that Jesus did actually rise from the dead, they are utterly uncompelling in convincing me to become a Christian. For if I can establish such truth for myself, why do I need God at all? If I can establish that Jesus rose from the dead, I can un-establish it. After all, in a random world, such things as resurrections may actually occur. But the significance and meaning of that random event, I will determine for myself.”
God is not well served by our lies. If we stand with Unbelievers in the field of Unbelief and join with them in their lies agreeing with them that they we can verify and establish God as it seems good to them, we are promulgating a lie. We are entering into the age-old Satanic deceit. There is a snake in the grass.
God alone is true. Every man, apart from the One, is a liar. And Satan is the father of lies, from the beginning. So entered sin into the heart and mind of man.
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