Twin Attacks | Shannah Hogue

The serpent met the woman in the garden, near a tree. And he leveled twin attacks at her that still reverberate, even now.

Attack #1 – God isn’t trustworthy

Genesis 3:1 says, “He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”

It doesn’t really matter that a serpent spoke and she wasn’t concerned about it. It really doesn’t matter that she (most unwisely) responded when she should have walked away.

The serpent looked at the woman and asked her a direct question. But it wasn’t really about the tree, of course. It was about God. “Can you really trust him?” “Did he actually say…?” The words sound incredulous to me, not sinister. The attack isn’t frontal. It’s sympathetic. He sounds like a good friend asking a surprised question.

So she answers. And because she does, she opens herself up to the second attack.

Attack #2 – You are not enough.

The serpent questions God’s trustworthiness, but he still had another missile to fire. These were twin attacks.

After she answers his question, the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (3:4-5).

The first attack undermined her belief in God. The second undermined her identity in God.

“Woman,” the serpent said, “God doesn’t want you to eat this fruit because he’s purposely keeping you from being all that you can be.”

Your eyes will be opened — you’re missing out on so much that you could be seeing. Woman, you deserve more.

You will be like God, knowing good and evil — you don’t even know how much you don’t know. You need more.

The serpent’s words made her question her own status, security, and identity. Maybe she wasn’t enough. Maybe there was more. Or maybe God really was holding out on them.

And so, she takes things into her own hands. Verse 6: So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.

Twin Attacks … Today

Nothing has changed, especially for women. The serpent is still gunning for us, and he’s still using exactly these twin attacks to derail our spiritual growth and deflect us from living our lives for God’s glory.

There is a constant stream of doubt about God. Maybe he isn’t trustworthy. He could have protected me (or my kids or my husband or my job or my marriage or my health), but he didn’t. So maybe I need to just handle things. Our endless need to control the world, nag our husbands, worry ourselves out of sleep and into sickness — this is a direct result of buying in to the suspicion that God can’t be trusted.

And oh, how overwhelming is the flood of messages about how we’re not enough.

We aren’t healthy enough, good enough at managing our homes or balancing our lives. Our kids aren’t accomplished enough. Our husbands aren’t romantic enough (or they would be if we could be more ______ [fill in the blank]).

Even the girls-are-awesome mantras of feminism or the girls-can-do-STEM-careers push in education or new self-help messages that say “God loves you, so you are enough” aren’t really freeing. They don’t remove any expectations we have, they only add new ones. Now I have to please all of these people, too.

And so we fall, just like the woman, deceived by the twin attacks: God is not trustworthy and I am not enough. We live our lives, make decisions, run ourselves ragged trying to protect ourselves from the fear that these two attacks induce.

But like the woman in the garden, the attacks didn’t have to work. She had a choice. So do we. And sometimes, just recognizing the attacks is enough to break their hold over us. To send us running back to God instead of away from him. To enable us to step away from the fruit instead of picking it up. And above all, to keep from being deceived.