LEAVE COMMENT ON ARTICLE
When Adam and Eve were tempted in the garden of Eden, it is revealing to remember that the Tempter avoided the covenant name for God that Adam and Eve were probably using and used a more general and less relational name for God. Eve then followed suit and began to use that less personal, more general form that the serpent is using. This set the stage for the Fall that had already begun. The temptation after all was a temptation to movement away from personal relationship WITH Yahweh to the notion of merely being LIKE God even in the sense of being equal to God.
How different a thing it is to be godly by virtue of being in fellowship with God, from the idea of being God-like apart from God in one’s own right. The former godlikeness is incidental and secondary to the desired fellowship which is primary, while the latter Godlikeness becomes an end in itself, regardless of the fellowship. The former is an unconscious kind of godliness, the latter is a self-conscious counterfeit which calls attention to itself.
It seems likely that Lucifer himself succumbed to this very counterfeit through an excess of praise and through flattery, including self-praise and self-flattery, directed his way due to his beauty and giftedness. Little by little he was thus led away from an awareness of the glorious Giver to an infatuation with his own formidable gifts, though they were received from the hand of the Giver.
We must learn from this and ever be careful that we don’t desire more to be LIKE Christ and on display than we do to be IN (communion with) Christ and on the way! We don’t have as much to overcome as Adam and Eve did in order to be deceived, since we have built-in inclination toward it that they lacked. (That very lack though, as C.S. Lewis reminded us, is what made their sin so monumentally world-changing.)