The sin has been committed. This devotional reading looks at the punishment for Satan, aka the serpent/snake.
Nuggets
- Basically, the snake was going to slither on the ground and not be liked.
- But the serpent wasn’t the one calling the shots – Satan was.
- Satan’s offspring act just like him.
We get the mistaken notion that we can hide our sin from God. How can we hide from an all-seeing Sovereign God?
“The Lord is watching everywhere, keeping his eye on both the evil and the good” (Prov. 15: 3 NLT).
Yes, God can see everywhere. He can see our deepest secrets. He knows our every thought.
God is the Judge of the world. He created it. He entered into a covenant with humankind. He alone can judge whether we have kept that covenant or not.
Each of the three parties involved in the original sin received judgment. Their punishment addressed them individually.
It looks like God didn’t take any time before He meted out the punishment. The serpent was told his punishment first.
Well, that’s logical. The serpent was the root of sin.
Let’s look at this curse two ways. The serpent was punished, and Satan was punished.
Let's Put It into Context
To read devotions in the Creating Everything theme, click the button below.
Devotions in the Celebrating Creation’s Story series
Crawl on Your Belly
“Then the LORD God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all animals, domestic and wild. You will crawl on your belly, groveling in the dust as long as you live’” (Gen. 3: 14 NLT)
Basically, the snake was going to slither on the ground and not be liked.
It is hard for us to visualize the serpent/snake doing anything but slithering on the ground. But that brings us back to the question of whether it was a snake or a serpent.
We don’t really know. We will need to put that in the UNR book – understanding not required.
Either way, we can read the animal used to walk upright or on fours. After the judgment, it couldn’t.
Winterbotham argued just the opposite. He wrote,
“Unless all science is a lie, there were plenty of serpents on the earth ages before man was made, and these serpents precisely like the present ones in their general construction. If our serpents may be said to go on their bellies and eat dust, so might those. From the creation of the world — long ages ago — it has been “their nature to.” Further, I must maintain that the structure and habits of the serpent tribe bear no trace of any designed degradation.”
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There may have been serpents prior to this who had crawled on their bellies. That does not mean this serpent did.
It also does not mean this variety of serpent isn’t extinct, and none of its fossils have been recovered.
We don’t know a lot about things – or for sure – in the Bible.
- We don’t know where the Ark ended up.
- We don’t know where the four rivers in the Garden really flowed.
- We don’t know for sure where Jesus’ tomb was.
That doesn’t mean things didn’t happen as they are recorded in God’s Word. We must believe without man-made evidence – because that is what science is – it is human interpretation that we have deemed as definitive evidence.
Winterbotham also based his opinion on the belief that a loving God wouldn’t punish a creature that had not really sinned. He also felt validated by Isaiah 62: 25.
“The wolf and the lamb will feed together. The lion will eat hay like a cow. But the snakes will eat dust. In those days no one will be hurt or destroyed on my holy mountain. I, the LORD, have spoken!” (Isa. 65: 25 NLT). He argued we could not believe that judgment was going to be enacted after the Day of the Lord.
But then I wonder if Winterbotham felt that those who had not ABCDed would be allowed to enter Heaven because God, as a loving God, wouldn’t willingly cast anyone into the fires of hell.
That isn’t going to happen.
Personally, I think Winterbotham forgot one major principle about God’s Word. While it does talk prophesy about what will occur in the future, it does talk about what was occurring then.
God cursed the serpent/snake on that day, the punishment to being that very minute. Whatever punishment it will suffer through eternity is up to God.
It is easy to look at the passage and say the serpent — what we usually depict as a snake — was tricked just as much as the man and the woman were. Or maybe we like to think that he was just taken over by Satan, like he took over demoniacs.
Didn’t matter. The serpent was punished regardless of how it was taken over. It was punished because it was taken over. “… Because you have done this …” (Gen. 3: 14 NLT).
It was perfectly within God’s authority as Creator of the serpent/snake to punish it. We shouldn’t argue against that any more than we should argue that He has no authority over us.
If Satan uses us as an instrument to cause someone else to sin, we share in the blame. We will be punished. “… Surely you repay all people according to what they have done” (Ps. 62: 12 NLT).
Look at it this way. If it wasn’t the physical serpent being punished to crawl on his belly, it would be Satan himself as the object of this punishment.
Do we visualize Satan as crawling on his belly? No.
Remember. Satan had been an angel before he rebelled. He did not crawl. We assume he had wings, which he may or may not have lost.
If our upright position raises us above animals, wouldn’t Satan’s position as an angel have raised him above us? All we read in God’s Word is Satan was kicked out of Heaven. We are not told if or how his appearance changed.
We can’t just assume that nothing has changed in the thousands of years since this occurred. We can’t base it on our time constraints.
In other words, just because we don’t want our present to change, we shouldn’t assume that there hasn’t been changes in the past.
We do need to read God’s Word literally. God isn’t going to hide the important things from us.
The important thing is that Satan tempted the couple to disobey God, and they did.
But what does “… cursed more than all animals …” (Gen. 3: 14 NLT)? Does more than mean all animals were cursed in the original sin? Bonar thought so.
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I can see Bonar’s first argument. We think sin only affects us, but it doesn’t. Sin spreads to others and contaminates relationships and integrity. Bonar warned of the ripple effect.
Creation does depend on each other. We depend on animals for food, just as they have a feeding chain. We are interdependent on each other.
Sin does have to be tangible – if not visible. How else do we know if its existence? And Satan sure does want us to know of its existence!
But then, God, too, wants us to know what happens when we disobey Him. Think if the couple hadn’t sinned – and no one from that time until now had either.
If no one had ever sinned, we would not know the value of obedience or the true cost of disobedience.
Cause Hostility between You and the Woman
“And I will cause hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel” (Gen. 3: 15 NLT)
But the serpent wasn’t the one calling the shots – Satan was.
Satan was the real tempter in this occurrence. He enticed the couple to disobey God, not the serpent/snake.
We have to believe Satan had already been kicked out of Heaven. So, he had his major punishment already — separation from God. Or was it?
No, there will be a new — and more definitive — judgment. But this is the punishment for Satan, not the serpent/snake.
Have we ever considered why Satan tried to tempt mankind to sin in the first place? Was he only trying to steal us away from God? Or was he trying to get us to ally with him against God?
Exell argued that Satan’s hostility toward humankind existed from the beginning of the world. From the very beginning, he wanted to come between us and God.
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I can see that. It can be argued, if God created humans because of Satan’s revolt, that would escalate his hatred of us.
On the other hand, Satan may have been trying to extract revenge. If he knew how greatly God valued humankind, he may have been jealous of our relationship with Him.
This is especially true if Satan knew of God’s Plan of Salvation before the promise in Genesis 3: 15. He knew mankind would be restored where he and the other demons wouldn’t.
Satan succeeded in the first option: he did separate us from God. But he failed in the second: he did not win our full-blown allegiance.
God stepped in so that allegiance didn’t happen, His first act of grace. He was going to set up His own kingdom on earth.
Animosity had to be established between Satan and humankind.
God didn’t want Satan and humankind to expand their newly formed relationship, so He established a hostility between us. God did not want to make it easy for us to sin.
If Satan was an adversary with God, He wanted him to be an adversary with us. In fact, the word Satan means adversary in Hebrew.
Even more than the hostility, God gives us power to overcome Satan’s temptations when we ask. He wants us to succeed in withstanding sin. As Arnot said, we cannot quit sin on our own.
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That may be why sin is so prevalent. We think we can come and go into a sinful situation on our own, never realizing it is beyond our abilities. It is then we must cry out, “Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a loyal spirit within me” (Ps. 51: 10 NLT).
Cause Hostility between Satan’s Offspring and the Woman’s Offspring
“... between your offspring and her offspring ...” (Gen. 3: 15 NLT)
Satan’s offspring act just like him.
Yikes! Satan is going to have offspring????
Gibson helped us understand this. He directed us to several Scripture passages. The first was Jesus’ go around with the Pharisees, who were trying to justify themselves by being children of Abraham.
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“For you are the children of your father the devil, and you love to do the evil things he does …” (Jn. 8: 44 NLT).
Jesus was telling the Pharisees that they were not the spiritual children of Abraham. Spiritual children would believe what Jesus was telling them, and not be trying to put Him to death.
The second passage was where Jesus was again talking with the Pharisees. “Snakes! Sons of vipers! How will you escape the judgment of hell?” (Mt. 23: 33 NLT). That does bring it back full circle, doesn’t it?
Jesus also referred to the sons of Satan in the Parable of the Tares. “The field is the world, and the good seed represents the people of the Kingdom. The weeds are the people who belong to the evil one” (Mt. 13: 38 NLT).
John also addressed this in one of His epistles. “But when people keep on sinning, it shows that they belong to the devil, who has been sinning since the beginning. But the Son of God came to destroy the works of the devil” (I Jn. 3: 8 NLT).
It is more than not being a child of God we are a child of Satan. We are a child of Satan when we are following his ways and disobeying God.
Making the Connections
From that time onward, humans were in conflict with Satan. Gibson reminded of a verse. “As a result, you will be held responsible for the murder of all godly people of all time — from the murder of righteous Abel to the murder of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you killed in the Temple between the sanctuary and the altar” (Mt. 23: 35 NLT).
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Yeah, murder is a big one. Murder of innocents is even bigger.
But let’s back up. The sermon Jesus is preaching ends in verse 36. “I tell you the truth, this judgment will fall on this very generation” (Mt. 23: 35 NLT).
The whole thirty-six-verse sermon criticizes the religious leaders. And boy, He doesn’t hold back.
- The Pharisees did not practice what they preach, making them hypocrites.
- Jesus railed on them for placing unbearable religious demands on the people, causing them a burden.
- The Pharisees did things more for show than to honor God.
- The Pharisees were not leading the people to God’s kingdom. In fact, they made the people even worse than they are.
- They expected their tithes, even though carefully measured, to replace justice, mercy, and faith, which was not what God wanted.
- The Pharisees were more concerned about the physical aspects than the spiritual aspects.
- The Pharisees believed that they would not have killed the prophets as their ancestors did, but they were not accepting Jesus as the Messiah.
That led up to the Abel/Zechariah reference.
We know who Abel was. Some say we don’t know who Zechariah, son of Berekiah, was. All we now is he was killed in the Temple between the sanctuary and the altar.
Others think it is the prophet Zechariah (as in the Book of Zechariah). The only kicker is that Zechariah wasn’t murdered.
The Abarim Publication noted that – if the was the Zechariah to whom Jesus was referring – we’re talking about 500 years before Jesus made this reference.
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Ooo, baby! That is a long time for no innocent blood to be shed.
But that may not be it, if we think about it. There was a 400-year time of silence between the Old and New Testaments.
Scratch that. Jesus would have known, even if it wasn’t recorded in God’s Word.
There was another prophet Zechariah (II Chron. 24: 21) that was murdered right after Judah and Israel broke into two kingdoms. (That is an even longer time than 400 years for no innocent blood to be shed!) On top of that, the father’s name is different.
The last Zacharias that we know of before Jesus’ time was John the Baptist’s father. But we don’t know who his father was or that he was killed in the temple court.
Moral of the story is – if it was a Zechariah from the late Old Testament, it was still a long time for no innocent blood to be shed. That is surprising since we are in a huge conflict with Satan.
Hmmm. It really didn’t gain us anything trying to figure out who Zechariah was. It is one for the UNR book – understanding not required.
But the list of sins of the Pharisees was interesting. They were sins, even though they were the religious leaders. No one is immune from sin.
How Do We Apply This?
- Don’t dishonor God by committing sin.
- Admit when we sin and ask God’s forgiveness.
- Use the punishments God has meted out in His Word as instructions for us not to follow suit.
- Accept God punishes only the deserving.
- Ask Jesus to help us overcome sin.
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Father God. Satan can be so deceiving when he tempts us to sin. Help us to know Your Word, so that we know what sin is. Help us to recognize when Satan is tempting us. Help us to stay obedient to You. Amen.
What do you think?
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