“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. . . . Then the man and his wife . . . hid from the Lord God” Genesis 3:6, 8
I don’t think it’s any secret that we have an enemy of our souls. I don’t usually like talking about Satan. I’d much rather focus my thoughts on the One who has already defeated him. But lately I’ve been struck by how much power we want to give him. And that makes sense. If Satan is the one who is causing us to sin, that takes the responsibility off our shoulders, doesn’t it? Or maybe we think that any difficulty or heartache we may be facing must be Satan causing those problems. That thinking also absolves us of responsibility if the heartache is caused by our own poor choices. Then there’s the sticky question of asking if God has caused something “bad” or even if He allowed it. It’s so much easier to not deal with that question by just assuming the “bad” was caused by our enemy. All of these viewpoints are giving Satan power and authority that I don’t believe he has.
Satan appears at the very beginning of human history. Adam and Eve are in the garden God had created for them. This serpent appears to Eve and tempts her to eat what God has told her not to eat. All he did was lie about what God had said. That’s it. He didn’t force-feed that fruit to Eve. He didn’t threaten her. He didn’t even tell her how delicious the fruit would taste. She came to that conclusion all by herself. The word translated “food” just means that it’s something to eat. If it was food needed for fuel, a different word would have been used. So this is just a gluttonous craving. Then she gave it to Adam. Again, it wasn’t forced on him. It doesn’t say there was an argument about it. Adam didn’t try to resist the temptation. He just ate, like Eve did. It was their choice, not Satan’s. The results were exactly what Satan was hoping for: they hid from God.
I think it’s important for us to remember Satan’s goal. He doesn’t care about causing us to suffer for the sake of suffering. He doesn’t make us step on a nail just so we’ll be in pain. His entire desire is to cause us to hide from God. If we look at the story of Job, we see that the reason Satan sent all the suffering on Job was to make Job curse God. Thankfully, Job refused to do that. In the midst of all the suffering, he continued to hold fast to God. Granted, he yelled out his pain and confusion to God. But He still remained faithful. That’s exactly what Satan didn’t want. In fact, he seemed pretty confident that Job would turn against God. That gives us just a glimpse of how little Satan thinks of us. He doesn’t begin to understand the strength we have to resist temptation when we have God’s Spirit in us.
That leaves us with the question of why bad things happen to good people. It’s easy to say that it’s because Satan has caused them to suffer. Then we don’t have to wrestle with the question anymore. Unfortunately, scripture doesn’t support that view. I don’t pretend to know the answer. But I do think that choosing to place all the blame on Satan sends us in the wrong direction. Instead, we should be going to God and asking Him the questions. Is there something He wants us to learn? Maybe something of which we need to repent? Or perhaps He wants to use our story to help others. Whatever the reason, we won’t know the answers until we run to His loving arms. Once there, we may or may not receive the answer to our questions. Interestingly, we won’t care about the answers anymore because we will have found the only answer that matters: true communion with our loving Father.