The Strategies of Satan

Eve was the first person deceived by Satan, but she would not be the last. Today, Sinclair Ferguson identifies common tactics our enemy uses against the people of God, helping us be prepared for when temptation comes.

Welcome again to Things Unseen. This week, we’re thinking about what Christians have long referred to as the fall, the events described in Genesis 3.

As a young Christian, I grew up not knowing one Bible commentary from another, and I confess that the first one-volume commentary I bought when I was in my mid-teens, I bought because it was cheap. And I didn’t know it was full of old-fashioned liberalism until I took it home and then discovered that it viewed the events of Genesis 3 as what they called “etiological myths.” That is, for example, a story made up to explain why snakes slither rather than walk. But the truth is that if Genesis doesn’t record actual historical events, the rest of the Bible begins to fall to pieces, including the teaching of Jesus and the Apostles.

So, for example, while Genesis 3:21 doesn’t give us details of the divine tailoring by which God made garments of skins for Adam and Eve after they had sinned, it does tell us that these events really took place in our world. So, what we read in the early chapters of Genesis is a record of once-and-for-all events, just as once and for all as the incarnation and the crucifixion and the resurrection. But that said, at the same time, it’s clear that there are important patterns in what happened in the garden of Eden. And Scripture teaches us that there’s a pattern of disobedience and its consequences here that Christ had to come to reverse in order to save and restore us and the world. And the New Testament records and explains how He did that.

So, while Genesis 3 records specific events in the temptation of Adam and Eve, I think we’re right to see a pattern here of the way in which Satan continues to tempt us as God’s people. We saw one element of that yesterday: he uses God’s best gifts to tempt us to make bad choices. No wonder Genesis 3 calls the serpent “the craftiest beast of the field.”

Today, I want to draw attention to a statement Paul makes in 2 Corinthians 2:11. He says to the Corinthians, he doesn’t want them to be “outwitted by Satan; for,” he says, “we are not ignorant of his designs.”

I think Paul is suggesting here that Satan has regular ways of pulling the saints down into sin. He uses the same strategies again and again, but Paul adds, “Our strength lies in this fact: we are not ignorant of his strategies or designs.” Sometimes I wonder if that’s true of us as Christians today. It might make for an interesting fifteen minutes of your life to take a blank piece of paper and write at the top a checklist of Satan’s strategies and make a list of them. It would certainly help us to be on the lookout for him and to detect his clammy hand at work.

I wonder if James had Genesis 3 and 4 in mind when he spoke about the strategies of Satan in the way temptation takes place. Remember James 1:14–15? He doesn’t specifically mention the devil there, but he does seem to outline his strategy, and it has echoes of Genesis 3: “Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.” There’s a kind of echo there of Genesis 3 and 4. And don’t you think it’s significant that James’ next words are, “Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers”?

Those words echo Eve’s words in Genesis 3:13 where she says the serpent deceived her. She was lured, wasn’t she? In Genesis 3, you can almost see the serpent leading her right through the garden to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil so that she would see how delicious the fruit was instead of remembering what God had said about it. And then her desire was stimulated—the desire for something the serpent said was better than what she already had: being as God rather than being made as the image of God. And then the conception took place—the seed of opportunity was joined to the egg of desire. And death followed—the death of her happy fellowship with God, the death of her sweet relationship with Adam, and then alas, the violent death of her firstborn son recorded in Genesis 4.

“We are not ignorant of his designs,” says Paul, but is that really true? There are some basic factors in military strategy that are certainly true of the Christian warfare, aren’t there? And one of them is know your enemy. So, let’s not be ignorant of Satan’s devices.