The Deceiver’s Great Lie

Satan’s hatred of God is so great that he desires the image-bearers of God to hate Him too. Today, Sinclair Ferguson pinpoints the fundamental lie that the devil purveys in order to stifle our love for the Lord.

This week on Things Unseen, we’ve been reflecting on the events that are described in Genesis 3, on the nature of the original temptation and the significance of the fall, and then on the strategies of Satan. I said yesterday that Satan’s chief motive in dragging Adam and Eve into sin was not just his hatred of them, but behind that, his hatred of God. He desperately wanted to destroy what gave God so much pleasure: the man and woman He had made as His image and likeness, made for fellowship with Him, made to love Him.

I think it’s actually very difficult for us to take in how much Satan hated, and hates, God. Surely one of the devices that he uses to deceive us is that we often reserve all our blame for things for other people, and sadly, sometimes for our fellow believers, and forget that we have a supernatural enemy who wants to stir us up in hostility so that we no longer reflect the image of God.

So, we need to remember Paul’s words that we’re not wrestling only against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers in the heavenly places. One of the big reasons we need to learn this hatred of Satan, without developing a kind of neurosis, is because he is actually a deceiver. I want to think with you today about one important aspect of this—it’s the great deceit of the great deceiver.

This is what Paul refers to in Romans 1:25. He says that men “exchanged the truth about God for a lie”—the result was that they were deceived—and “they worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever.” That is an amazing deceit when you think about it. I mean, at first glance, how could this be? Satan’s object was to get Adam and Eve to make what is the ultimately irrational exchange—to exchange the truth about God for the lie. Actually, the Greek text has the definite article here. They exchanged the truth about God for the lie about God. Not just a lie, but the lie, the big lie, the fundamental lie.

So, the question is, What is it? We surely need to be able to recognize it when we see it, or maybe I should say recognize it when we’ve so often failed to see it. Here’s one of those places I think it’s important for us to remember that the Apostle Paul had given very careful attention to reading and studying the early chapters of Genesis. So, we’re not left to our own devices to say, as we sometimes hear people say, for example, in group Bible studies, “Well, the way I like to think about it is . . .” What we need to do is to get back to Genesis 3 and ask, What is the lie that Satan was purveying?

And we find it in his words: “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” Now, Eve puts up a defense, but the seed thought is already planted. And I think it’s significant that when she responds, she actually adds something to what God had said—not only not eat, but neither shall you touch it, lest you die. It was almost as though she was adding a law to the commandment that God had given.

I actually wonder if that little addition is an indication that the seed was beginning to take root. I know it seems trivial, but it is a little step towards the lie that the serpent has been purveying to her, which is this: “God says He’s loving and generous, but He’s actually mean and restrictive. Is He really the kind of God who would put you in this magnificent garden and then said, ‘Ah, none of it is to be yours,’” as though He were some kind of twisted, malicious father taking his little boy into a toy store at Christmas showing him the toys and then laughing in his face and saying, “And none of this will be yours.”

What’s the point? It is that Satan so hates God that he wants you to hate God too. To do that, he wants to twist your view of God from that of a loving, generous, heavenly Father into someone you can’t fully trust because you’re not fully sure He really wants the very best for you. So you suspect He basically wants to restrict your joy and pleasure, and you cease to love Him and begin to hate Him.

It’s very interesting to me that the great masters of pastoral ministry have often noticed that this suspicion of God the Father is not always immediately removed by regeneration. It can remain deeply embedded in many Christian souls. So, I suspect maybe we should draw reflections today to a close by simply asking ourselves, “Have I too continued to exchange the truth about God for the lie?” That’s worth reflecting on, isn’t it? But I think maybe we’ll need to return to it again tomorrow. I hope you’ll join us then.