One of the things we see in this chapter is how the devil works to ruin God’s good creation, as well as some of his tactics in doing so.

The devil is very cunning and he has many tactics to try and lead us astray. Many of us too easily assume that we understand how the devil will deceive us. It’s all too common to practically assume that the devil will attack “from the front”, and not see the many ways he seeks to creep about or undermine us. The devil (and demons) are also thought of in a way of superstition, imagination, and over spiritualization. All of these things fall short of a sober, wise, and right understanding of the tactics of the enemy.

The enemy works harm and misery, and every form of this is something we must see as his work. In the garden, the devil worked a terrible decay into the goodness, healthiness, and peace of God’s creation. To see the workings of the devil, often all we have to look at is what is contrary to what is truly good in spirit and nature.

When it comes to our ideas of how the devil deceives us, we often only think of his work as coming in the form of temptation—the desire for a forbidden thing, like Eve with the forbidden fruit. And certainly this is a very real way temptation works, but that is often all we see of the account in Genesis 3, when there is much more here.

The devil seeks to poison the good ways of God. We see this here with what the devil says to Eve—he twists the command of God into a form God never intended. A form that makes God appear harsh and unreasonable. “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (v1) “What? How unreasonable! How bitter! How miserable the commandments of God are!” The devil uses this tactic today just as much as he has always done—working to make God appear unreasonable, harsh, and causing bitterness.

The challenge for us in seeing what is truly good in nature or sinful in nature, is that we cannot do this on our own. We need God to teach us what is good and what sin looks like. The attack of the enemy with Eve went upon this very place of dependence upon God.

The devil has two common tactics he works today in this place of dependence upon God.

One is that he gets people to feel his twisted commands are the commands of God! He makes people afraid they are disobeying God if they put off his twisted form of the commandments of God, thereby getting people to obey them. This subverts people from actually building upon what is only of God, and actually gets them building upon the enemy’s twisted commands. This is why it is very important for us to understand that nothing about true obedience to God will go contrary to reason and health, goodness, and fairness. God never asks us to abandon our eyes and ears in the name of faith and obedience to Him.The rejection of this very simple truth leads many people into fanaticism and harm in the name of “obeying God”. God’s purpose is always about setting mankind in what is truly good. Rejection of this is one way the devil is able to lead many people into cruelty and harshness, to go against reason and the common sense that God wrote into all of us, and deceive them away from God.

In getting people to act as slaves to such commandments, the devil is able to make people act foolishly, unreasonably, and walk in harm and darkness, and go against what is truly good in nature (light).

All of this leads to the second tactic of the enemy: leading some people to imagine that they do not need God in order to discover what is truly good and wise, because they see the first “group” of people and the darkness they walk in, and so they reject GOD as evil because of what those people profess to do in the name of “God”.

The devil does the ultimate “flipping of the script”, deceiving us. Getting us to walk in what is truly of his nature and is evil, by twisting God’s Word, and he deceives others away from God by casting the devil’s own image upon God’s name. And while some people might escape certain forms of this darkness, such as the religious darkness many fall into, they also are deceived away from their Creator and the only Living God. They do not see how they throw off Life itself, and live by the changing currents of this world, governed only by the current “fashion” of their desires. And they do not see that while they discern certain evils (this is good!), that still this discernment is not the depths of all knowledge of all that is pure, good, and upright. The depths of how to lead a life in honor, meaning, purpose, and goodness, nor does it reveal the knowledge of the one true God to them.

And for many Christians, they escape certain kinds of worldliness, but they are actually brought into a deeper self deception, because they are not truly built upon God, but only in name. It is important for the Christian to understand that the only difference in us is if we are actually living upon God. A pretense to this is nothing but another layer of deception.

The devil is always working against what is good, poisoning us away from it, blinding our minds. And today, these two tactics are his greatest strategies. That is why we must see beyond pretenses of knowledge and learn to truly spiritually discern what is of God and what is actually of the devil. Because the sad truth is that so many of us are satisfied with the appearance of knowledge, rather than seeking the true form of it. We want the image of the scholar, the “Doctor” before our name, but true knowledge is found only in a real plain seeking of it for the purpose of goodness and godly wisdom. These foolish images of ourselves we serve are one of the great ways our sin blinds us away from the true knowledge that would persevere us from the devil and his ways.

Failing to recognize what the devil’s tactics are in our day, many people busy themselves with battles that ended hundreds of years ago, or that never existed at all… The devil loves to get believers to waste themselves in running around fighting imaginary battles and building towers of their own ideas, oversimplifications, ambitions, images, and pride, blinding them from the true attack. All of this is done from the sin in us, the sinful desire to FEEL we are safe and wise, rather than seeking the true substance of these things.

So often we can hardly get at the true nature of these actual things because we are collectively all too convinced that we understand truth and goodness on our own. The first group cannot hear correction because they are convinced they obey God, not seeing how their obedience is immature, naive, born of prejudices, filled with self and pride, harmful, and darkness, contrary to the true Spirit of God. “And Jesus said to them, ‘I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?’” (Luke 6:9) They have fallen into the very same error of the Jewish people in Christ’s day who could not hear correction because they assumed that being “Jews” meant they were right. And this is exactly what so many believe is true of Christians today.

The second group cannot hear the great goodness and wisdom of God because the devil blinds the minds of these people with the bitterness and misery done in God’s name. They deny their equal responsibility to know God rightly, and turn their backs on God, failing to see how dark and sinful this is as well. They refuse to hear a right rebuke upon this point, to be shown that their discernment and goodness is only a fraction of all that is truly needed, and that none of us are truly wise without truly seeking the Living God.