Confronting Satan's Deception

It is the nature of Satan to be deceptive. Scripture says he has been a liar from the beginning. His first appearance in Scripture comes under the guise of a serpent. The credentials of this malevolent creature are announced in his introduction: "Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made" (Gen. 3:1).

These words fall as a sudden intrusion into an otherwise glorious account of God's majestic work of creation. With the words "Now the serpent," the whole atmosphere of the biblical record changes dramatically. A sudden and ominous sense of foreboding enters the narrative. An uninspired author of Genesis 3 may have introduced the record of the fall by saying, "It was a dark and stormy day." But such hackneyed prose would have failed to yield the foreboding dread contained in the words "Now the serpent was more cunning."

Cunning. Craftiness. Subtlety. Guile. These are the descriptive qualifiers that paint the biblical portrait of Satan.