Want to know what the serpent’s voice sounded like in the garden?

Mrs. Prophecy Dude said to me, “That’s exactly what the serpent sounded like in the garden,” when we listened to the new humanism ads that are out. She’s right; she’s so smart! Now we have a voice to clarify the message and to which we can assign a personality. The words may not be exact, but the intent is—to create doubt about the authority of what God says by contrasting, or trying to contrast His word to humanistic “rational” thinking.

The big mistake humanists are making is they are taking God’s word out of context—wait, that is exactly what the serpent did in the garden! Well, the message is the same; the words might be different. The mission of humanists is to attempt to destroy confidence in God’s word. Take a look at what happened in the garden:

 The serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild animals the Lord God had made. One day he asked the woman, “Did God really say you must not eat the fruit from any of the trees in the garden?”

 “Of course we may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,” the woman replied. “It’s only the fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden that we are not allowed to eat. God said, ‘You must not eat it or even touch it; if you do, you will die.’”

 “You won’t die!” the serpent replied to the woman. “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil.”

The woman was convinced. She saw that the tree was beautiful and its fruit looked delicious, and she wanted the wisdom it would give her. So she took some of the fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it, too. At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves. (Genesis 3:1-7)

First of all, we have to go back to the original source; what did God really say? That is found in Genesis 2:15-17:

The Lord God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and watch over it. But the Lord God warned him, “You may freely eat the fruit of every tree in the garden— except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat its fruit, you are sure to die.”

Now, there is a lot of great theological stuff in these three verses where a student of the Bible could spend hours, but the main thing to get is they were free to eat of every tree, except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He told them that if they ate it they would die. Notice he said nothing about touching it.

Deception is one of the most powerful tools of the devil. For more about that, read my blog The Sign of Deception  and False Prophets: A Sign of the End Times.  Deception takes just enough truth and torques it with raw purpose. There is always a purpose in deception. Here it was to destroy God’s ultimate creation, man. Satan, in the form of a serpent, purposely cast doubt on God’s word by “reasoning” with Eve. She bought it hook, line, and sinker and so did Adam. In fact, Adam really failed doubly here. He was charged with protecting the garden and it was he who allowed Satan to visit with Eve. He had the authority to run the serpent off.

This is exactly what the humanists are doing—casting doubt on the validity of God’s word and presenting it as unreasonable, “God really wouldn’t do that, would He?

Honestly, though, the approach of the serpent is much more subtle than what the humanists are taking. The serpent presented himself as one who knows and understands what God really means. The humanists are pretty much saying that the whole “God-thing is a joke—He doesn’t exist—look at how screwed up the Bible is—it’s unreasonable, but we are more reasonable.”

So here we have two approaches. One approach goes after the believer by casting doubt on the literal meaning of God’s word and takes a “reasonable approach’ resulting in diminishing separation from the world and letting everything mix in together and calling it all right. The other approach is for the nonbeliever and it serves the purpose of keeping the nonbeliever a nonbeliever by taking scripture out of context making it look ridiculous and unreasonable.

But the voice is the same—it’s coming from the serpent, Satan, who we also call the devil. It’s full of deceit with enough validity to make the message deathly dangerous. If they haven’t done so already, humanists will take prophetic revelation and step all over it saying, “What happened to the promise that Jesus is coming again? From before the times of our ancestors, everything has remained the same since the world was first created.” But, then they would be fulfilling Peter’s prophecy (2 Peter 3:3-4) which they don’t believe is true, even though they are fulfilling it.

For those of you who are reading the paper version, you’ll need to go to www.prophecydude.org and click on Prophecy Dude’s Blog , and then the name of this particular blog to see the humanist’s video and hear the sound of the serpent’s voice...

Consider Humanism - Richard Dawkins from American Humanist Association on Vimeo.