The Deception
Genesis 3:1-7 ~ "1-Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? 2-And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: 3-But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. 4-And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: 5-For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. 6-And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. 7-And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons."
The scripture referenced is fundamental toward developing our understanding of the nature of the devil (serpent) and his method of evil (deception) Many lose focus, claiming that God didn't call the serpent the "devil", and that teachings toward this are somehow invalid. We know that, although the relationship of the devil to the serpent was a later ascription found within Judaism, the point was not to confuse that this correlation was meant to indicate the personification and literal existence of the devil and evil.
As scripture clearly ascribes, the devil, satan or in this case, the "serpent" was not just a fantasy, or a myth, he was a literal reality. The devil, personifying evil, had a motive and a means to damage mankind. His aim was the subjugation of men to him, and his plan was to use deceit distorting what was plainly seen and known, claiming that God refused to share certain things with his creation and that he had the key to certain knowledge that God had not distributed.
In the early second century this type of thought gave rise to the teachings of gnosticism, claiming that the God described in the Old Testament was an evil God who withheld knowledge from the masses. In 140 AD Marcion presented his version of the cannon of scripture claiming that nothing pertaining to God in the Old Testament was authentic and that the God described within it was a demiruge or an evil God. This was the basis for "secret knowledge" or what the Greeks termed as "gnosis" in which the goal was to arise to a higher consciousness or state of mind among other things.
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