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Originally Posted by Evangelical
Christians believe that Satan entered the serpent to deceive Eve, a kind of demonic possession. But why couldn't Satan simply enter Eve directly and cause her to eat the fruit?
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The Bible isn’t entirely clear about demonic possession, or how it happens, but there seems to be indication that when it happens to humans, there is likely something done on the individual part to initiate it. With Judas Iscariot, it was greed, and once Jesus had called him out on his motives, Satan could enter Judas’ heart.
This wasn’t the case with animals, as the herd of swine could become possessed by Jesus’ permission alone. The swine had no choice that could have determined the outcome. So for this reason I would disagree that Satan could have possessed Eve as his choosing. He had enough power to possess a serpent at his choosing. At any rate, the serpent was somehow enticing enough to prompt Eve to question and disobey God. All this was done indirectly, and it seems that the goal was for this to be done indirectly. Satan basically gave Eve the “nuclear codes” and then waited for her to press the button, which she did.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Evangelical
God said:
Genesis 3:14 "So the LORD God said to the snake, "Because you have done this, You are cursed more than all the wild or domestic animals. You will crawl on your belly.".
So before the serpent deceived Eve, it was not cursed, it was part of God's good creation. The serpent fell by deceiving Eve, and God cursed it.
We could say that mankind's fall and the snake's fall occurred at the same time.
Logically then, if the snake was Satan, then Satan's fall occurred when he deceived Eve, not before that.
So the idea of Satan falling from heaven prior to the fall of man in Genesis is questionable, as is the idea of Satan entering the snake.
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From what I can gather, many Christians would generally understand the curse of the serpent to be a curse on serpents/snakes, not on the devil himself. Satan utilized a serpent in the garden, and for that reason the serpent was cursed was to remind us of what happened. I don’t think the curse of the serpent has anything to do with Satan specifically, not to mention when Satan fell.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Evangelical
Actually, the idea of talking animals is nonsense, because animals don't talk, and the snake has no intelligence of the sort displayed in Eden. The discourse between Eve and the snake in Eden I believe is Eve's conscience. She engaged in self-deception by imagining a discourse with one of the animals in the garden, the snake, by which she justified herself to eat of the tree of knowledge. I can imagine all of this taking place in her mind as she walked through the garden. The snake has rich symbolism in the Bible but to take it too literally leads to all sorts of impossible scenarios. A snake physically cannot utter the sorts of intelligible sounds and words required to have dialogue with a human, unless Eve figured out a "morse code" language between the animals, but still doesn't explain how the snake had enough intelligence to deceive Eve. The only animals God created with sufficient intelligence are the humans.
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Lastly, the idea of an animal speaking is not an isolated occurrence in the Bible, so why do you say it’s nonsense? In Num 22, Balaam’s donkey spoke and in Rev 13, there was the blasphemous beast that spoke.