Embracing the truth of God found in Jesus Christ sets us free from ourselves. We are the worst wardens of our soul. We choose paths that are bad for us and hurt us. When we buy the lie of the serpent, and think that God is not good, and that maybe he is not even God at all, we confine ourselves to live out a pathetically lonely and futile existence—always trying to assert our way over everyone else’s and yet somehow never arriving at the happiness we thought a “my truth” kind of life would offer. The truth of Christ sets us free from the rat race, from works righteousness, from depression, from loneliness. 

It’s official: Truth is dead. Facts are passe.” So declared The Washington Post back in 2016 when they reported on Oxford Dictionary’s decision to select for their international word of the year: “post-truth.” The official definition reads: relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

Well, that definitely sounds like today, but it also pre-dates 2016 and our modern era of post-truth and post-everything else. In fact, that definition is a fairly good summary of the beginning of Genesis 3 and the Fall. The objective fact (“you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”) becomes less influential in shaping the public opinion—namely of Adam and Eve—than an appeal by the serpent to Eve’s emotions and belief. And he makes this appeal with a question: “Did God really say….?”

The Ancient Question

It’s the first question mark in the Bible. Fitting that the curving and slithering serpent is the first to form that sly punctuation mark. It’s an insidious question. Derek Kidner says the question is “disturbing and flattering: it smuggles in the assumption that God’s word is subject to our judgment.” This is patently false, of course, but it’s a new concept to Eve. The thought had never even occurred to her or her husband before to question God. Maybe “his truth” wasn’t the only truth out there.

The serpent thereby introduced two disastrous lies to Eve in this one seemingly innocent question. The first is that maybe God isn’t that good after all. The implication is that what God has instructed Adam and Eve regarding trees in the garden is cruelly restrictive. He asks, “Did God really say you shall not eat of any tree in the garden? This God that made you, Eve, did he really prohibit your enjoyment of any tree in this beautiful and luscious garden?” God did not say that, of course. In fact, he said the opposite. He said to Adam and Eve, “You may surely eat of every tree in the garden” with only one exception (2:16). He was completely generous in his provision to them. But Satan introduces the idea of “divine stinginess.”

The serpent’s first lie is that God is not good. The second is that God is not God. That is to say, he gets Eve to buy into this idea that whether God’s prohibition is cruel or not, he doesn’t have the ultimate say in the situation. Eve is able to make her own law. She is the master of her fate, the captain of her soul. God’s position of authority is not exclusive to him, but something that she herself could be promoted to: “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” (4–5). Apparently, Eve didn’t need to wait to eat the fruit to think she had become like God. Verse 6: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food…” Sound familiar? The author is intentionally drawing us back to chapter 1 where we heard the constant refrain: “And God saw that it was good.” Now the woman becomes the surveyor and the determiner of what is good or not. The creature is trying to overthrow and rebel against the Creator. She is living out her truth: “I can do whatever I want.”

The Ancient Question Alive and Well Today

These twin lies are the bedrock of the devil’s initial temptation: God is not good, and actually he is not God at all. This is what the devil has done from the beginning, and he has been doing it ever since (John 8:44). When we sin against God’s commands it is because we have accepted that lie that 1) God is not good, and 2) God is not God—or at least, not the only god. In other words, we tell ourselves that God’s commands are restrictive and cruel. Not only do we believe we have a better plan for our life, we convince ourselves that we have the authority to act on it. We elevate ourselves to the position of God. And that’s how you get a world in which phrases like “your truth” and “my truth” make total sense; a world in which “live your truth” is a slogan for self-empowerment.

While I was typing out that previous sentence an ad came up on my Spotify playlist that wanted me to pay for premium membership so that I could “stay true to you.”

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