Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
(Genesis 2:15-17) NKJV
Did the curse on the serpent happen immediately, or did it occur in the first generation of offspring? We could make the case either way, but, since we don’t know for sure let’s consider what God said to Adam about the tree of knowledge.
God said that in the day that Adam ate the forbidden fruit he would die, yet he didn’t die right away. The Hebrew may also be translated as; dying thou shall die. We have made the case that, clearly Adam didn’t drop dead when he ate the forbidden fruit, but the biological process of senescence began and so, quite literally, he died of dying.
As such, the curse on the serpent could very well have been something which wasn’t seen until the first batch of eggs hatched. When we put all of these pieces together we get a coherent narrative which combines biology with scripture in a way which makes sense. We can do this because we’ve dispensed with the assumed necessity of having Satan be in the garden of Eden.
For those of you who are determined to cling to this outdated and unnecessary interpretation, you now have to resolve Satan as being the cockatrice too. Although you can gloss over this problem because it all falls back into your bowl of theological spaghetti.
What do you want, sense or nonsense?
Salvation
- Call upon the name of Jesus Christ,
- believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead,
- confess your sin.
