When Questioning Becomes Distrust: The Serpent, Temptation, and God's Word

Read these two passages before reading anything below them. The study will keep returning to their exact wording, and the wording matters more than any summary of it.

These passages are read later in the chapter as well, and each of them can be opened in full in the translation you have selected.

Before the serpent is examined at all, it is worth reading what Scripture does with honest questions, because a study of Genesis 3 can easily leave a reader thinking that faith is silence.

Psalm 13 opens with four questions in two verses. How long will you forget me, O LORD, forever. The psalm does not answer them with an explanation. It asks God to consider and hear, Psalm 13:3, and then it says, I will sing to the LORD, because he has dealt bountifully with me, Psalm 13:6. The questions are inside the prayer, not instead of it.

Habakkuk 1:2-3 does the same thing about public injustice. O LORD, how long shall I cry, and you do not hear. The prophet is not describing someone else's crisis; he says he is looking at violence and that judgment appears not to come. God answers him, Habakkuk 2:2-4, and Habakkuk 2:1 shows what the prophet did in the meantime, which was to stand on his watch and wait for a reply.

Psalm 73 records a worshiper who nearly lost his footing, Psalm 73:2, because of what he saw of the prosperity of the wicked. What changes in the psalm is not his circumstances. Psalm 73:17 says, until I went into the sanctuary of God, then understood I their end. The struggle was carried into God's presence rather than settled outside it.

Job speaks at length out of suffering, and God's answer in Job 38 to Job 41 comes as a long revelation of divine wisdom rather than as an explanation of Job's particular losses. Job 42:3 has Job saying he uttered what he did not understand.

Luke 1:34 belongs in the same list. When Gabriel announces the birth, Mary asks, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man. She is given an answer, Luke 1:35, and she replies, Be it to me according to your word, Luke 1:38.

So the difference this chapter is following is not between people who ask and people who do not. It runs somewhere else. In each passage above the question is brought to God, and the person remains under his word while waiting for an answer. In Genesis 3 the question is put about God to someone else, and it is used to make his word doubtful before any answer is sought from him.

The serpent does not open the account. God does. By the time any question is asked about God's word, that word has already been given, and it has been given generously.

Genesis 2:15 places the man in the garden to dress it and to keep it. He is given work before he is given a prohibition. Genesis 2:16 then says he may freely eat of every tree of the garden. The permission is wide and it is stated first.

Only after that does Genesis 2:17 name a single tree and a consequence. One tree is withheld out of a garden full of them, and the reason given is not arbitrary secrecy but a stated outcome: in the day you eatest thereof you will surely die.

This ordering matters for everything that follows in this series. When Scripture later speaks about food, fasting, hunger and self-control, it is always speaking to people who have already been given far more than they were denied. The first word about eating in the Bible is a permission.

Genesis 3:1 introduces the serpent as more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. The first word out of its mouth is a question, and the question is about speech: Yea, has God said.

Nothing is commanded. No case is made for the fruit. The opening move is to put God's word up for discussion.

Read as a sequence, these are steps down. The first move does not require the woman to believe anything false. It only requires her to hold God's word at arm's length long enough to examine it. Once that distance exists, the later moves have somewhere to stand.

The woman's own reply, Genesis 3:2-3, is worth reading carefully before the serpent speaks again. She answers accurately about the permission and then adds to the prohibition: neither shall you touch it. Genesis 2:17 says nothing about touching.

Set the two chapters beside each other and read the wording rather than the summary. The differences are small on the page and large in effect.

Genesis 3:5 is the turning point of the conversation. Up to here the argument has been about words. Now it is about the one who spoke them.

The claim has two parts. The first is that God knows the real outcome, which implies that his stated reason was not the true one. The second is that the outcome he is withholding is desirable: your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

The effect is to reframe the single prohibition of Genesis 2:17 as evidence of something in God's character. A boundary that had a reason attached to it becomes, in the serpent's telling, a boundary with a hidden purpose.

Genesis 3:22 is worth reading alongside it, because the LORD God there says the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil. Part of what the serpent said turned out to describe what happened. What it did not describe was the cost, and Genesis 3:19 and Genesis 3:24 record that.

A half truth is the shape of the deception here. Nothing in the sentence is easy to refute point by point, and taken whole it is false about God.

Genesis 3:6 begins with seeing. The tree had presumably looked the same the day before. What has changed is not the fruit but the frame through which it is now being assessed.

The verse gives three assessments in a row and then one verb. She saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise. Then she took, and did eat, and gave.

Notice that the first assessment is about food and the last is about wisdom. Appetite is present in the verse and it is not alone in it. The series will return to this repeatedly: hunger in Scripture is rarely the whole story of a wrong choice, and it is almost never absent from it.

Notice also who is present. Genesis 3:6 says she gave also to her husband with her, and he did eat. Genesis 3:17 records that the man is addressed for hearkening to the voice of his wife and eating, so the account holds him responsible for his own act.

If someone were asked what went wrong in Genesis 3, most would name the eating. The eating is one clause in the middle of a chapter that spends its attention elsewhere.

Read as a movement, the chapter shows a long approach and a long aftermath around a very short act.

The pastoral use of this is direct. Anyone trying to change a habit by attacking only the visible act is working on one clause of the sequence. Genesis 3 puts most of its weight on what was believed about God before the hand ever moved.

It is also worth noticing what God does in the aftermath. He comes into the garden and asks questions, Genesis 3:9 and Genesis 3:11. He clothes them, Genesis 3:21. And within the sentence on the serpent he places a promise, Genesis 3:15.

Genesis 3 has an external tempter in it, and Scripture never lets that become the whole explanation of human sin. Both realities are taught, and they are taught in the same books.

James 1:13-14 is the clearest statement. God tempts no man, and every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. James 1:15 then describes a progression: lust conceives and brings forth sin.

James is not denying that there is an adversary. James 4:7 tells the same readers to resist the devil. He is denying two other things: that God is the source of the enticement, and that a person can locate the whole problem outside themselves.

Jesus says something similar about what defiles a person. Mark 7:20-23 traces it to what proceeds out of the heart, and the list given there is long and specific.

1 Corinthians 10:12-13 holds the two sides together without softening either. It warns the confident to take heed lest they fall, and it says that no temptation has taken them but such as is common to man, and that God is faithful and will make a way to escape.

Read in order, these passages give a working account: there is a tempter, there is a heart that answers him, there is real responsibility, and there is a faithful God who provides a way out.

Genesis itself holds the same two truths together. Genesis 3:13 has the woman saying the serpent beguiled her, and the text does not treat that as a false report; 2 Corinthians 11:3 takes it up as a real deception. Yet Genesis 3:17 addresses the man for his own act, and Romans 5:12 and Romans 5:19 trace the entry of sin and death through him.

So the account gives a deceiver and two responsible people. Neither half cancels the other, and Genesis 3 does not lay the fall on the woman alone.

The Genesis 3 pattern has now been traced, and it would be easy to draw the wrong conclusion from it. So the four passages named at the start of this chapter are worth reading properly rather than in passing, because they show what faithful questioning looks like in Scripture's own words.

Psalm 13 runs to six verses. The first two carry the questions, the third and fourth carry the requests, and the fifth and sixth carry the trust. Nothing in the psalm suggests that David had received an answer between verse 2 and verse 5. What changes is where he is looking.

Psalm 73 is longer and more detailed about the crisis. Psalm 73:3 names envy of the arrogant as the cause, and Psalm 73:13 admits the conclusion he had begun to draw, that he had cleansed his heart in vain. Psalm 73:15 shows him weighing whether to say any of it aloud. Then Psalm 73:17 marks the turn, and Psalm 73:23-26 states what he ends with, which is God himself rather than an explanation.

Habakkuk is a short book built around this exact issue. Habakkuk 1:2-4 is the complaint. Habakkuk 1:5-11 is God's first answer, which raises a further difficulty for the prophet, and Habakkuk 1:12-17 is his second protest. Habakkuk 2:1 has him taking a position to watch and see what God will say to him, and Habakkuk 2:4 gives the line Paul later quotes: the just shall live by his faith.

The end of the book is the point most relevant here. Habakkuk 3:17 lists the failure of every crop and flock, and Habakkuk 3:18 says, yet I will rejoice in the LORD. The circumstances have not improved by the end of the book. The prophet's confidence has.

Job asks from a much deeper place. Job 1 and Job 2 record the losses, and Job 1:21 and Job 2:10 record his early responses. From Job 3 onwards he speaks at length, and much of it is question rather than statement.

God's answer, Job 38 to Job 41, is a series of questions put back to Job about creation and providence. It is not an itemised account of why Job suffered. Job 42:2-6 records what Job says afterwards, which is a change in posture rather than a receipt of information.

Luke 1:26-33 records the announcement. Luke 1:34 records Mary's response, which is a question about mechanism: How shall this be, seeing I know not a man.

She is not rebuked for it. Luke 1:35 gives her an answer about the Holy Ghost and the power of the Highest, and Luke 1:36 adds a sign she can verify, that Elisabeth is already six months pregnant. Luke 1:37 states the ground of the whole thing, that with God nothing shall be impossible. Luke 1:38 then gives her reply: Behold the servant of the Lord, let it be to me according to your word.

The value of this passage for the present chapter is limited and real. Luke does not set Mary alongside Eve, and this study will not construct a comparison the text does not make. What the passage does establish is that Scripture contains a faithful person asking how, receiving an explanation, and then placing herself under what God had said.

That is enough to rule out one wrong reading of Genesis 3. The problem there was never that a question was asked.

Matthew 4 and Luke 4 place the Son of God in a wilderness rather than a garden, hungry rather than surrounded by fruit, and alone rather than with another person.

Matthew 4:2 says he had fasted forty days and forty nights, and was afterward an hungred. The hunger is real, and the text says so before the tempter speaks.

The first approach concerns bread, Matthew 4:3. It is important to say plainly that bread is not evil and that hunger is not sin. Jesus later feeds thousands with bread, Matthew 14:19, and teaches his disciples to ask for daily bread, Matthew 6:11.

The issue in Matthew 4:3 is the opening words: if you be the Son of God. The suggestion is that he should use what he is to meet a need in a way the Father has not given him, at a time the Father has appointed for fasting.

All three answers come from Deuteronomy, and all three come from passages about Israel in the wilderness. Where Israel failed over food, water and worship, the Son of God is being tested on the same three matters and answers from the book that recounts those failures.

Luke 4:1-13 gives the same three approaches in a different order and adds two details worth noticing. Luke 4:1 says he was led by the Spirit, and Luke 4:13 says the devil departed from him for a season, which tells the reader the wilderness was not the end of the conflict.

Hebrews 4:15 draws the pastoral conclusion. He was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin, and therefore the throne of grace can be approached with boldness, Hebrews 4:16.

This matters for a series about appetite. The one who tells his people to exercise self-control has himself been hungry in a place with no food, and has been offered a legitimate good at an illegitimate moment.

In Matthew 4:6 the tempter quotes Scripture. He cites Psalm 91:11-12, a psalm about God's protection of those who trust him, and he cites it with reasonable accuracy.

The problem is not that the verse is false. The problem is what it is being used to produce: an action God has not asked for, undertaken to prove something that has already been said from heaven at Matthew 3:17.

Two things follow from this for anyone who studies the Bible. A verse quoted correctly can still be handled falsely, and Scripture is the instrument that corrects the misuse of Scripture. Jesus does not answer the misquotation with an opinion.

2 Timothy 2:15 speaks of rightly dividing the word of truth, and 2 Peter 3:16 acknowledges that some things in Paul's letters are hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest to their own destruction. Scripture itself expects that its words can be twisted.

This is one of the reasons Audela reads passages in their context and shows the whole passage rather than a fragment. A verse pulled loose from its paragraph can be made to serve almost any purpose.

Scripture describes this enemy in several ways, and each description comes from a specific passage rather than from a general impression.

Job 1 and Job 2 are the clearest texts on the question of power. In Job 1:12 and Job 2:6 a limit is set, and the limit is set by God. Whatever else is happening in those chapters, the adversary is answering to someone.

Zechariah 3:1-5 shows the same figure standing to resist Joshua the high priest, and shows him rebuked by the LORD, Zechariah 3:2. The filthy garments are then removed and replaced, Zechariah 3:4. The accusation is not answered by denying the guilt but by God clothing the accused.

Revelation 12:7-12 should be read whole, and its own conclusion noticed. Revelation 12:11 says they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and Revelation 12:12 says his time is short.

The pattern of Genesis 3 does not stay in Genesis 3. Once a reader has seen its shape, it becomes recognisable elsewhere in the Old Testament.

The New Testament refers to Genesis 3 directly, and it does so in order to teach rather than to retell.

Ephesians 6:10 begins with being strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Every piece named afterwards is God's own provision. Ephesians 6:17 names the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, and Ephesians 6:18 attaches prayer to the whole of it.

James 4:7-8 puts the two halves in order: submit to God first, then resist, then draw nigh to God and he will draw nigh to you. Resistance is not presented as a standalone technique.

He speaks before he tests. Genesis 2:16 gives freedom before Genesis 2:17 gives a boundary, and the boundary is stated with its consequence rather than left obscure.

He tells the truth about outcomes. Genesis 2:17 warned of death, and Genesis 3:19 and Genesis 5:5 record it. The serpent's you shall not surely die was the false sentence in the chapter.

He comes looking. Genesis 3:8-9 has him walking in the garden and calling to the man. The first thing he does after the sin is put a question to the people who hid from him.

He covers. Genesis 3:21 says the LORD God made coats of skins and clothed them, which is more than the fig leaves of Genesis 3:7 could do.

He promises before he sentences the man and the woman. Genesis 3:15 stands in the middle of the chapter, and the whole biblical story about the serpent's end follows from it.

James 1:17 gathers this up for the rest of the series: every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and with him is no variableness. The God who set one boundary in a garden full of food is the same God who gives the food.

He works through speech. In Genesis 3 he never touches the fruit and never gives an order. He asks, he restates, he denies, and he attributes a motive.

He aims at God's word first and God's character second, Genesis 3:1 and Genesis 3:5. John 8:44 says the same thing about him in different words.

He can use true material. Psalm 91:11-12 is a true psalm, and Matthew 4:6 shows it used to press an action God had not asked for.

He accuses. Job 1:9, Zechariah 3:1 and Revelation 12:10 show the same activity in three different settings.

He is limited. Job 1:12 and Job 2:6 place the boundary where Scripture places it, in God's hands, and Revelation 20:10 states his end.

1 Peter 5:8-9 gives the practical instruction: be sober, be vigilant, and resist stedfast in the faith, knowing the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren throughout the world.

We are able to hear God's word accurately and still repeat it inaccurately. Genesis 3:2-3 shows both in the same reply.

We can be persuaded to read a boundary as a sign of ill will. That was the work of one sentence, Genesis 3:5.

Our desires attach themselves to what we have already been convinced about. Genesis 3:6 evaluates the tree only after the conversation has done its work.

Our first instinct after failure is to cover and hide, Genesis 3:7-8, and our second is to explain, Genesis 3:12-13. Both are recorded without comment, and both are recognisable.

And we remain responsible. James 1:14 puts the drawing away inside the person, and Genesis 3:17 holds the man to account for his own act even though the fruit was handed to him.

1 Corinthians 10:12 is the sentence to keep: let him that thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. The verse immediately after it is a promise, and the two belong together.

Scripture does not leave the serpent's speech as the last word on the matter. Genesis 3:15 opened a line that the New Testament follows to its end.

Romans 5:12-21 sets two men beside each other. By one man's disobedience many were made sinners, Romans 5:19, and by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous. Paul's argument is not that the two are balanced. Romans 5:15 says the gift is much more than the offence.

Revelation 20:1-10 should be read whole rather than in fragments, and Christians differ over its timing and its relation to history. What the passage states is that the deceiving comes to an end and that the end is God's act.

The Bible closes with the two things Genesis 3 lost. Fellowship with God is restored, and the curse is removed.

Revelation 21:3 says the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them. Revelation 21:4 says God shall wipe away all tears, and that there shall be no more death, sorrow, crying or pain, for the former things are passed away. Revelation 21:5 has him say, Behold, I make all things new.

Revelation 22 goes further back still. Revelation 22:2 names the tree of life, the tree the man was kept from in Genesis 3:22-24, and it is here bearing fruit and giving leaves for the healing of the nations. Revelation 22:3 says there shall be no more curse. Revelation 22:4 says they shall see his face.

The Bible begins with a garden, a tree, food, a word from God and a question about it. It ends with a city, a tree, food again, and no serpent in the account at all.

That is the frame for everything else in this series. Food is present at the beginning of the Bible and at the end of it, and in both places it belongs to God's provision for people who live in his presence.

Everything above can be gathered into one distinction, and it is worth stating carefully because both halves of it are found in Scripture.

In Psalm 13, Psalm 73, Habakkuk and Job, the question is directed to God, the person stays within reach of his word, and the outcome is trust rather than a full explanation. In Luke 1 a question about mechanism is answered and then submitted to. In Genesis 3 the question is asked about God rather than to him, it changes what he said, it then denies what he said, and it finally suggests a reason for his saying it.

Stated that way, the line is not about the presence of a question. It is about whether God's word remains the authority while the question is being carried. Habakkuk asked for years' worth of clarity and got an answer he had to wait for. Genesis 3 sought no answer from God at all.

Each of these can be worked out from Scripture. Read the passage before answering, and answer from what it says.