Edward Donnelly is minister of Trinity Reformed Presbyterian Church in Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland, and Professor of New Testament Language and Literature at the Reformed Theological College in Belfast, Northern Ireland.1

This promise from the Bible was a lie, because the speaker was the devil. He whispered these words to Eve in order to ruin our first parents: “[W]hen you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God. . .” (Gen. 3:5).

“Like God”—that’s what Satan himself had wanted to be. He wouldn’t submit, couldn’t bear second place, and so, “puffed up with conceit,” he fell into condemnation (1 Tim. 3:6). And Adam and Eve bought his lie, for the temptation was hellishly appealing. Rejecting God’s Word, they became their own authority and decided to eat the forbidden fruit on the basis of autonomous human appetite, aesthetic sense, and reason (Gen. 3:6). They acted, in other words, as if there were no God in heaven.

Which is precisely what their descendants have been doing ever since. “[A]lthough they knew God, they did not honour Him as God” (Rom. 1:21). From the tower-builders of Babel to the final antichrist who “takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God” (2 Thess. 2:4), imagined self-determination is a mark of the devil and his followers. It is the common denominator of 21st century society—resentment of authority, a resolve to be master of my fate, to live as I please. “I choose, therefore I am” is the slogan of our age. The manifestations differ, the underlying cause is the same: “[S]in is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4).

Each time we sin we are deciding against God, believing Satan’s promise, trying to usurp control. The thousand daily choices we face are opportunities to “let God be God” or to make a god of self. A major reason for the Church’s weakness today is her indistinguishability from the world, for the lives of too many professing believers are self-centered, and, to that extent, are listening to the lie of Satan.

Of course, Satan’s promise is a lie, the assurance empty. Satan, himself, isn’t like God. When the Lord enters the Garden, the tempter metamorphoses into a cringing cur, not permitted to make a sound. Instead of becoming godlike, Adam and Eve degenerate into frightened, shame-filled mortals. Similarly, our culture, in spite of its ludicrous boasting, is increasingly degraded and confused, self-harming, and lonely.

Contrary to New Age fantasies, we are not divine and never can be. We can only destroy ourselves, like Icarus, whose pathetic wings fell off when he flew too close to the sun. God alone is God, and we must repent of our disobedience, our foolish notion that we know better than He does. We need to yield gladly to His rule and have no other gods before Him.

Though Satan’s promise was an intentional falsehood, his words contained a germ of truth, which he did not suspect: By God’s grace, men and women can become godly. The very ground of this possibility was God’s decision in Creation: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). So Satan was too late. In a sense, Adam and Eve were like God already! Not independent, but ruling the world on His behalf and reflecting in themselves His moral beauty. Though the image is now defaced, God is undefeated and still intends humans to become what He created them to be.

That is why He sent His Son, “the express image of His person” (Heb. 1:3 NKJV). And the paradox is that Jesus maintained godlikeness by insisting on remaining man, for the devil assailed the last Adam with the identical temptation with which he overcame the first: “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread” (Matt. 4:3). “Reach out for your own fulfilment. Be independent. Be like God.” “Man,” said our Lord, (and with what adoring gratitude we hear that emphatic word!) “shall not live by bread alone” (Matt. 4:4). “He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped” (Phil. 2:6). Man He was, and it was by staying in man’s place that He saved us.

For He is now gathering a people to Himself, “created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:24). This is what being a Christian is all about, what Christian growth means—becoming more like God in Christ. Here then is our task as pastors—to help produce Christlike people. This is the hope we have to offer lost, disillusioned men and women; this is the reality God will sovereignly and certainly accomplish in His saints.

The apostle John reminds us that there is much about our destiny which we cannot yet know. “But we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure” (1 John 3:2-3). Two voices, employing different meanings, promise, “You will be like God.” To which will we listen? To the father of lies? That is the way to impoverishment and everlasting death. Or will we believe the great God, come to Him through His Son, and be received and transformed as His children?

Footnotes:
1
His books include Biblical Teaching on the Doctrines of Heaven and Hell (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2002).

article adapted from Kairos Journal

First Baptist Church of Perryville is located one and a half miles east of Rt. 222