Speaker Jackie Hill Perry says Satan told Eve two lies in the Garden of Eden that he continues to use on us today: 1) God won’t punish us for disobeying His commands and 2) God is a liar. If we believe these lies, we’ll lose the war with sin.
“If you dig deep enough into the particular sins that you struggle with now or struggled with before, you will discover that the core of these sins is unbelief in the Word and person of God,” Perry says. “Some of us are in illicit and immoral relationships not primarily because we’re lonely—that’s surface-level. The root is that we don’t believe that God really is the source of all comfort.
” … Sin doesn’t just happen. It happens because somewhere in our minds, we have concluded that God cannot be trusted.”
Perry says if we aren’t knowledgeable about God’s commands in His Word, we’re actually giving Satan more opportunities to tempt us and lead us into sin. This happened to Eve—she quotes back to Satan that God told her not to touch the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, even though God only instructed her not to eat it.
“We assist the devil in his desire to deceive us when we’re not clear what God has said in His Word,” Perry says.
For more on the strategies Satan uses against us and how to prepare ourselves to fight back with the Word of God, watch the entire sermon here.