Did God really say?

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1)

The first words of Satan recorded in the Bible – spoken in the form of the serpent in the Garden of Eden – come in the form of an insidious question: “Did God really say?” Thousands of years later, this question remains arguably our enemy’s most effective weapon.

The fact is that what you believe about the divine inspiration and authority of the Bible is critical to your life and faith. Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 3:16–17 that “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” The word “God-breathed,” or theopneustos in the original Greek, was deliberately chosen to emphasize the divine inspiration of the Bible. As the very Word of God, the Bible claims authority over our lives. As we read in Hebrews 4:12, “For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”

Given the spiritual power found in the Bible, it makes perfect sense that the enemy would try to derail our faith by asking in one way or another, “Did God really say?” The Bible is full of laws, stories, and truths that will offend our modern sensibilities or grate against our beliefs about freedom and happiness. Consider passages on human sexuality, or our finances, or the radical demands of discipleship, and how tempted we are to reject, rationalize or reinterpret God’s Word until we are no longer submitting to it, but it is submitting to us and to our will.

Charles Spurgeon once said, “The first step astray is a want of adequate faith in the divine inspiration of the Sacred Scriptures.” When we start reading the Bible and deciding for ourselves which parts we like and which parts we don’t like, or which parts we will obey and which parts we decide are outdated or unenlightened, we have effectively kicked God off of His throne and declared that we will be the arbiters of God’s Word. Inevitably, we will end up following a god of our own creation, not the holy God revealed in the Bible.

The next time you are tempted to dismiss something you read in the Bible as antiquated or as something that is not binding on you today, listen carefully, for that voice you hear is the voice of the enemy whispering the same question he spoke to Eve so many years ago: “Did God really say?” Resist his deception, and put your trust in God and His timeless Word.