Blog
“Temptation by Overstatement”
Categories: Meditations
During my Texas travels a couple weeks back, I worshiped on Sunday morning with the Kleinwood church in northwest Houston, where my in-laws are members. That evening, Brent Moody preached on Genesis 3. He pointed out that the devil still tempts us today using the same strategies that he used to tempt Eve in the garden of Eden.
I thought Brent made several good points in the course of the sermon, but his first particularly stuck with me. He focused on the devil’s statement in Genesis 3:1, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?”
As Brent pointed out, this was not a diabolical request for information. The devil knew perfectly well that God had not said any such thing. Indeed, he knew that Eve knew that God had not said any such thing.
Instead, the devil’s goal was to sow doubt. It would have been unreasonable, irrational, for God to command Adam and Eve not to eat from any of the trees in the garden. What else were they supposed to eat? God didn’t say any such thing, but the devil’s suggestion that he did cast doubt on God’s wisdom, with later, catastrophic effects.
If we pay attention, we will see that the devil frequently tries the same strategy with us. The most obvious case I’ve ever encountered was in a study with a young woman who was a new convert. She had had some association with the churches of Christ in her past, but she knew very little.
During this study, which took place shortly after she was baptized, she asked me, “Now that I’m a Christian, I can’t listen to any more music in my car, right?” She had confused the Bible’s teaching about a-cappella worship with a general prohibition of listening to any instrumental music, ever.
As with not eating of any of the trees in the garden, such a prohibition would be ridiculously overbroad. In fact, it would be impossible to live in our society if such a commandment existed. Music is everywhere, and we wouldn’t be able to watch TV, sit in a doctor’s office, or even walk down the street without sinning.
Once the devil puts the notion in our minds that God might be so unreasonable, though, he opens the door for the suggestion that God’s actual commandments are either unreasonable or much less restrictive than we think. “God doesn’t really expect me to be intimate only with my spouse, does He?” All of a sudden, the devil has maneuvered us into the seat of judgment ourselves, and once we start living based on what is right in our own eyes, we’re dead meat! Indeed, after a short while, I never saw this sister in Christ again.
Ignorance of the word can be much more dangerous than we think. It leaves us vulnerable not only to direct temptation, but also to misrepresentation of the Scriptures, if only by ourselves to ourselves. The only cure for the disease is to hide the word of God in our hearts, so that no satanic overstatement ever can find any room there.
