Coercion, responding to people and how I relate to people when our wills are cross purposes or we have different visions of reality in some way. What happens when we’re in conflict, how am I going to treat you or you hurt me, how am I going to treat you or you and I hate each other, how I’m going to treat you, anything more than this, comes from the evil one. Jesus is drawing upon here, in a very subtle way, an important narrative motif throughout the Hebrew Bible that begins life with the snake in the garden of Eden and it’s a motif, it’s about people who take the words of God and use them to manipulate other people or deceive them to get them to do what they want.
Genesis 3:1-5, the snake quoted the words of God, the snake comes up to the woman and first requotes the command of God to Adam, but changes just a couple words, twists it, did God really say you cannot eat from all the trees of the garden. The snake added the word not, introducing that one word not, makes the woman focus then on the one tree that God did say not to eat from. The snake is sowing the seeds of distrust here, but then the woman says no, God said we’ll die when we eat of it and then the snake just straight up inverts God’s words, no, you will not die. The snake is using God’s words, but just tweaking, twisting in order to lead this person into a trap, that’s the motif, it’s the voice of the evil one and Jesus is alluding to that, how the words of God can be twisted and abused in order to create traps and to manipulate people.
The way that designed patterns work in the Hebrew Bible is that the garden of Eden story becomes like a template and each generation of characters that goes on will always be replaying usually through subtle vocabulary hyperlinks in some way the previous stories. There’s many narratives in the Hebrew Bible where people trick each other and somewhere in the story is depicted in language similar to the snake and then what they do, is use a vow and oath as the way to deceive somebody. This is a core motif, using what sounds true in order to deceive and that forces somebody to have to discern whether you represent the truth or not. These tricksters get the Israelites, Joshua 9:15 to swear an oath by Yahweh that they won’t ever do anything to harm them, here’s an example where people who are acting like snakes and they use an oath, they’re getting somebody else to promise in the name of Yahweh, but they’re manipulating.
Oaths become instruments that bring death, instead of life, whereas the whole purpose of them originally, they bolster truth, when Jesus says anything beyond this comes from the evil one, he’s sharing a little window into how he reads and understands his scriptures and he sees in them a motif and when people use the truth, especially Divine truth like oaths, something meant like God’s words and then use them as instruments to deceive or use them to set in motion something that will lead to death or to ruin, he sees the voice of the evil one at work. Humans can become instruments of the evil one, we can become snakes to each other, when we use something that’s meant to reinforce truth and we actually use it to manipulate or to deceive. Don’t play the snake and there are times when we may intentionally do that to each other and there’s other times when it’s subconscious and we don’t fully know that’s what we’re doing, but we are, because we’re motivated by some desire.
We’re snaking ourselves as well as others, swearing an oath was a really common practice, where you’re bring the name or the reputation of the God of Israel into our interactions with each other. But Jesus is claiming, there is something diabolical underneath it that we don’t even fully understand that we’re participating in. Jesus has a view of human character that habit formation, while it may be really personal and internal, it rarely stays private, it eventually goes public in some way, because your character is shaped by your habits and then eventually, even internal habits have an external set of consequences. It might seem an innocent little exaggeration, the little white lie, but over a thousand repetitions, all of a sudden it becomes a lot easier to maybe tell a bigger lie or to bring God into the deception and to use someone else’s belief in God as a way to manipulate them, that’s the way of the snake.
Genesis 3:1-5, the snake quoted the words of God, the snake comes up to the woman and first requotes the command of God to Adam, but changes just a couple words, twists it, did God really say you cannot eat from all the trees of the garden. The snake added the word not, introducing that one word not, makes the woman focus then on the one tree that God did say not to eat from. The snake is sowing the seeds of distrust here, but then the woman says no, God said we’ll die when we eat of it and then the snake just straight up inverts God’s words, no, you will not die. The snake is using God’s words, but just tweaking, twisting in order to lead this person into a trap, that’s the motif, it’s the voice of the evil one and Jesus is alluding to that, how the words of God can be twisted and abused in order to create traps and to manipulate people.
The way that designed patterns work in the Hebrew Bible is that the garden of Eden story becomes like a template and each generation of characters that goes on will always be replaying usually through subtle vocabulary hyperlinks in some way the previous stories. There’s many narratives in the Hebrew Bible where people trick each other and somewhere in the story is depicted in language similar to the snake and then what they do, is use a vow and oath as the way to deceive somebody. This is a core motif, using what sounds true in order to deceive and that forces somebody to have to discern whether you represent the truth or not. These tricksters get the Israelites, Joshua 9:15 to swear an oath by Yahweh that they won’t ever do anything to harm them, here’s an example where people who are acting like snakes and they use an oath, they’re getting somebody else to promise in the name of Yahweh, but they’re manipulating.
Oaths become instruments that bring death, instead of life, whereas the whole purpose of them originally, they bolster truth, when Jesus says anything beyond this comes from the evil one, he’s sharing a little window into how he reads and understands his scriptures and he sees in them a motif and when people use the truth, especially Divine truth like oaths, something meant like God’s words and then use them as instruments to deceive or use them to set in motion something that will lead to death or to ruin, he sees the voice of the evil one at work. Humans can become instruments of the evil one, we can become snakes to each other, when we use something that’s meant to reinforce truth and we actually use it to manipulate or to deceive. Don’t play the snake and there are times when we may intentionally do that to each other and there’s other times when it’s subconscious and we don’t fully know that’s what we’re doing, but we are, because we’re motivated by some desire.
We’re snaking ourselves as well as others, swearing an oath was a really common practice, where you’re bring the name or the reputation of the God of Israel into our interactions with each other. But Jesus is claiming, there is something diabolical underneath it that we don’t even fully understand that we’re participating in. Jesus has a view of human character that habit formation, while it may be really personal and internal, it rarely stays private, it eventually goes public in some way, because your character is shaped by your habits and then eventually, even internal habits have an external set of consequences. It might seem an innocent little exaggeration, the little white lie, but over a thousand repetitions, all of a sudden it becomes a lot easier to maybe tell a bigger lie or to bring God into the deception and to use someone else’s belief in God as a way to manipulate them, that’s the way of the snake.
