Sir Walter Scott wrote the famous words, "Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!" When Eve made her defense in Genesis 3 she says that the serpent deceived her. The rest of the book of Genesis tells how well we learned from the serpent. Cain wasn't very good at deception, he couldn't hide his reaction to God favoring Abel's sacrifice, and He certainly wasn't able to deceive the Lord about what had become of his brother. Beginning with the deception of Abraham concerning Sarai's true identity, we hit our stride, continuing on through Joseph's deception of his brothers in Egypt.
We had become so accustomed to deception that when the real thing, Jesus, appeared, we no longer perceived truth. Today, we try and find ways to get around His claim to be "The Way, The Truth and The Life" by saying He is "a" way by questioning as the serpent did, "Did he really say..." It is the same deception as the garden yet we keep falling for it so why should satan change his tactics?
In the beginning, he had to take on the form of a serpent to pull it off. It worked so well that we have taken it up ourselves. When the truth came, it was in the form of a man, truth incarnate, a real man, true to His call as image-bearer of God. The deception is still the same, that God is keeping something from us and there is another way to get it outside of Him. Jesus says we will lack nothing and that if we ask our Father, He will give it to us, why don't we believe Him?
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