"You Will Be Like God"
You will be like God, knowing good and evil.
Genesis 3:5b
Be honest. Why did you click on this devotion? Was it because you were ready to wring my neck for giving it such a brazen title? Or was it, perhaps, because you were just a little interested in finding out where the Bible says that you will be like God?
From the very beginning, the devil has used this temptation against us. Those are Satan’s words quoted above. God had told our ancestors Adam and Eve not to eat from a certain tree in the middle of the garden he created for them. If they did, they would die.
All it took for them to disobey was for the devil to prey on their egos. “You will not certainly 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” (Genesis 3:4,5).
In this case, the temptation was to know what God knows. Even in perfection, Adam and Eve didn’t know everything. They had to rely on God. But if they knew what God knew or even knew just a small part of what God had decided not to reveal to them, they could rely on God just a little bit less. They could instead rely on themselves.
Their eyes indeed were opened. But it wasn’t power that entered their hearts. It was fear. They hid. It wasn’t divine glory that radiated from them. It was shame. They covered themselves. In their desire to become like God, they had made themselves less like him. They destroyed the holiness and righteousness that came from being made in his image.
What did God do? He spoke to the devil: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” He pronounced the judgment on the man and woman: “Dust you are and to dust you will return.”
In other words, he said, “You need me now more than ever. I am here. I will come to rescue you from the serpent’s bite.” Jesus came, the long-awaited offspring of Eve, and he crushed Satan’s head through his death on the cross.
The devil still casts his line with the same bait. “You will be like God.” And just as the fruit of that tree seemed so pleasing to the eye back in Eden, so the allure of sin dangles before us. The seduction of power, to be our own masters, to rely only on ourselves.
The devil tempts us with delusions of becoming rich like God so that we abandon our Father to serve wealth. He persuades us with the promise of God-like power to control the chaos of our lives so that we don’t need God to do that. He lures us in with a promise of self-made righteousness that still allows us to live how we please and not to please God. “You will be like God. You won’t need him anymore.”
Where are we left, however, when our wealth, power, and righteousness fail? They always fail in the end. We are left naked and afraid.
And it is then that God comes to us and says, “You need me now more than ever. I am here. I have sent my Son to rescue you from the serpent’s bite.” And through his Son, he restores the relationship he created at the very beginning: He, our Father; we, his children. We, relying on him for everything; he, always giving us all we need.