What Happened to Us in Eden? - Psychology of the FallSample

THE CANCER OF POWER GAMES

Thankfully, Satan did not succeed in tempting Jesus in the wilderness—or in later attempts to keep Him from the cross of suffering He came to bear as the substitute for our sin and our misuse of freedom. For that, we are forever indebted, and before such an unimaginable triumph, all we can do is say thank You—and worship.

Wrapped in the serpent’s disguise, Satan projected—as psychology would describe it—his own traumas onto humanity, telling the woman: “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

The conflict between Satan and God went back a long way. Satan longed to be like God—something utterly impossible. And because of his own history, he knew all too well what stirs in us as creatures when we even begin to imagine the possibility of being like God.

And honestly—who wouldn’t want that? To be all-knowing, all-present, all-powerful… That desire for power, wrongly aimed, is exactly what has us writing these pages today. Because all of us, like Satan, so easily fall into that pit.

The devil, immeasurably more powerful than any human, took his rebellion to the ultimate consequences. And on a smaller scale, we’ve been playing the same game with one another ever since Eden. Out of this come “hatreds, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envy, and even murder”—just to name a few that Paul lists. And all of them are directly tied to the problem of power.

Every sin is a kind of arm-wrestling match with God—and a foolish one, because it is a fight we are destined to lose. And yet here we are, still trying—just like Satan.

Woman and man, at different moments, both fell into this trap. If only the hearts of both had been turned fully toward their Creator, if only His voice had been the loudest above all others…

But the woman was the first to turn her ear toward a dangerous voice, and from there she made the most tragic decision in history: choosing other voices above God’s—which is nothing less than idolatry.

And yet, the sin of that first woman and that first man is more alike than we might think.