Playing God is the sin of our time

Why does the snake slither? It starts with a man, a woman, and a garden...

Genesis answers the most fundamental questions of life.

The kind we ask as children, like:

Why am I born a boy (or a girl)? God’s plan: Genesis 1:27: “And God created the human in his image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.”

Why does Dad go to work most days?

Because Adam, and Eve, and the serpent, and the apple. Because of the curse God gave Adam in Genesis 3:19: “By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread, tell you return to the soil, for from there you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you shall return.”

Why does Mom? Feminism.

Why do people speak different languages? Because the people in Genesis 11 sought to glorify themselves by building a tower “with its top in the heavens.” They got too close to succeeding. So God confused their language.

Genesis 11:6-7: And the Lord said, ‘As one people with one language for all, if this is what they have begun to do, nothing thy plot will elude them. Come, let us go down and baffle their language there so that they will not understand each other’s language.’

This was the Tower of Babel, in Babylon.

What was likely a ziggurat that wasn’t completed because financing fell through became the Biblical equivalent of Icarus, a warning against man flying too close to the sun.

As Robert Alter wrote in his translation and commentary on Genesis: “The polemic thrust of the story is against urbanism and the overweening confidence of humanity in the feats of technology.”

Man’s first sin was disobedience. But it was more than that. It was disobedience in furtherance of playing God. Or at least “becoming like” a god by eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, as the snake promised in Genesis 3:5, and as God feared in Genesis 3:22.

God’s fear is why after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, God immediately cut off their access to the Tree of Life, and eternal life. If man had knowledge and eternal life, God only knows. With what God did know, he wasn’t willing to risk it.

That fear resurfaces in Genesis 11: “Nothing they plot will elude them,” God said.

God had made man in his image. Man now had access to his knowledge. Man was clever. Add in man’s inclination to evil, and it was a dangerous combination.

Someday on a trip to the zoo, when a kid asks about the sad plight of the snake — “why don’t snakes have arms, legs or feet?” — Genesis has that answer, too.

It’s because the serpent talked Adam and Eve into disobeying God’s will, and was punished for it.

That the serpent slithers is a feature, not a bug, of its design.

Genesis 3:14: “On your belly shall you go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.”

The Bible doesn’t come out and say it, but if this was the snake’s punishment, it had to have lost something. What it lost were its limbs.

True story: Snakes used to have arms and legs, but don’t anymore. “Mutations.”

So you might have gotten a chuckle this weekend to see a snake walking, aided by a machine that took steps for it.

“You like having your legs back?” a man asked the walking snake.

But snakes were made that way, and left that way, for a reason.

To give a snake legs is to treat its God-given design as a disability.

That’s the real danger here, and across our culture. We can’t face the world without anxiety medication or get to sleep without melatonin, but find it appropriate to play God.

Think it’s too hot outside? Pass this bill in Congress. They’ll pull enough Levers of Government to bring down the thermostat. They’ll reverse the flow of the oceans. If it stays hot, maybe we’ll dim the sun.

In the time since the Garden of Eden, Satan has found abler messengers than the snake.

These days Satan acts through rulers of nations, academics, and the popular culture.

It’s unlikely walking snakes will be returned to their cunning ways, or trained to sell us reverse mortgages. It’s all just a laugh, probably.

But take note: These people are not acting without regard for God’s vision. Nor do they stumble in contradicting it. They’re setting out specifically to override it.

Playing God has gone badly, historically.

Let boys be boys. Let girls be girls. Let kids be kids.

And let snakes slither on their bellies and eat the dust, as God spoke it.