Charming Snake Talk

Bottom line, Satan desires and intends to do whatever is necessary to hijack the glory and worship that is entitled to God ALONE! Satan, who is undeserving and holds no entitlement to man’s worship, yet will do anything to entice, dominate, manipulate, oppress, enslave, ensnare to get and feed on man’s worship. His gross appetite for worship is a narcissistic preoccupation with himself, it is unnatural – it is beastly. He feeds on darkness, deceit, uncleanness, and every perversion he grins behind. 

Unlike the Holy One, he demands worship by undeserved and unmerited entitlement. And here is a clue, for all of us who believe we are entitled to a self-centered abundant life without thinking how our actions and attitudes effect others, without us making proactive contributions to our community, without sowing and reaping, without taking personal responsibility for our thoughts, emotions, actions to hold ourselves accountable to the Personhood of God Himself, then it is likely that we are under the influence, possibly adjoined to, the King of Entitlement himself, Satan! Friend , we can not demand what only right alignment and choices merit!

Satan wanted access to man and what man had – the Image of God and His likeness. Satan wanted to exalt himself and be “like” God. Selah, pause and calmly think about this: we Beloved, in the very crib of our genesis, were created in the likeness of God! We didn’t have to do anything to be like God, He made us like Him – our first existence before the fall was god-like (godliness) and we lived in a very high place with Him. However, we need to understand the difference between image and likeness. 

Everyone on this planet has been created in the Image of God and within that Image is the potential, factory default hard-wiring so to speak, to be like God, but not everyone has His likeness. We can look at a picture of a father and son and be unaware that the son may not be anything like his father. We still bear His Image, but we fell from His likeness. We must be born again back into His likeness. 

Being born again is the beginning of a journey of sanctification where we collaborate with the work of the Holy Spirit in our life – the Kingdom is righteousness, joy and peace IN the Holy Spirit. God created Jacob (image), but He formed Israel (likeness) – this is a very deep principle in understanding the word of God and the power of His Spirit forming His likeness in our hearts.

Satan’s Why is his motive and intent to hijack the Image of God in Mankind and procure glory and worship for himself. Satan can not hijack the glory of God, but he can hijack the Image of God within man, and this is how he does it.

Satan’s How are his strategies and tactics to gain access! Before the fall, Satan needed granted access. He could not violate or impose access upon us. By virtue of who we were and the power of God’s likeness residing and vested within us, we had the power to squash his serpentine spirit like a fly with just one word, more specifically, God’s Word! 

Even though we were not aware of the concept to militate on behalf of righteous rule, which was a communal extension of God’s rule in the earth, we were well able of annihilating evil, all evil! Satan, knowing this, needed to trick us into giving him access legally. So what does a fallen, outlaw of heaven care about playing by the rules or being legal? Nothing! But he knows that God keeps His own Word and will not violate it – God allows free choice, so if Satan coerces and schemes to get us to choose disobedience. 

The slimy, charming snake talk begins as a seduction to yield the desires of our heart over to defilement – and if we cave, that is Satan’s legal access to our heart. As mentioned earlier, the Bible categorizes our desires into three divisions: the desire of the body, the desire of the eye and the desire to glorify. Satan hits all three in his seduction of Woman in Genesis 3:3-6. Question, was the desire for good food, aesthetics and wisdom wrong? Absolutely not! For that matter, is God against pleasure? Absolutely not! They were already living in the Garden of Pleasure (Eden) and in the abundance of pleasures! There is no end to the pleasures in righteousness – it really is the good life! As written in Ps 16:11,

You will show me the path of life; in Your presence is fullness of joy; at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

The fact of the matter is that Woman was already eating and already enjoying the fruit of the Kingdom, she was already wise through the internalized clarity of God’s Word, and she was already like God! It really couldn’t get any better! Friends, everything she was tempted with, she already had – she was enticed to get what she already possessed – with one exception, and that was to have it separate from God! 

The price for her to have that one fruit was to leave her one God to get it - the ultimate alternative to being in echad with God is self. Like all of us who take that bait, we find ourselves in a state of counterfeit identity - some of us yearn to be restored to an authentic true state of being and some of us harden and demand that our counterfeit be accepted as true!