The serpent in Genesis 3 was the first appearance of Satan

Much like Tony Soprano's fate, the identity of the serpent in Genesis 3 has inspired much debate. Let's end both today.

Did Tony Soprano die at the end of The Sopranos? Some 15 years after its final episode aired, Tony’s fate is still a topic of debate. Sopranos creator David Chase has played both sides of the fence.

But if you review the final scene in its totality, it’s obvious Tony died. Was killed, actually. As his daughter walked in, as his family looked on.

In his last moments at Holsten’s, Tony notices the old people, the brothers walking in, and the Boy Scouts.

He does not notice the one other gangster in the place, the guy in the Members Only jacket, the one guy making a point to look at him.

By the time the Members Only assassin goes into the bathroom, Tony is ordering onion rings and looking down at the menus. He looks up to the door, expecting to see Meadow, and the screen goes black.

The end. With the death of actor James Gandolfini in 2013, it was easier to admit reality. Tony Soprano was gone. But some people deny it to this day.

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“Did God really say ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’”? — The serpent, to Eve, in Genesis 3:1

The first question in The Bible was not a search for truth. It was the serpent’s way of conveying a message. Sometimes, when we’re asking, we’re really telling.

Eve responds as best she knows how. God told Adam he’d die for eating from the tree. By the time Eve relays it, she believes she’s believes she’d die just from touching it.

And does it anyway.

She knows the costs. But the serpent is the first to explain the benefits.

“You will not surely die,” the serpent says in Genesis 3:4, addressing the cost.

Then he proceeds to the benefits in Genesis 3:5: “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

That wasn’t a lie. It was God’s greatest fear.

“The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil,” God says in Genesis 3:22.

In “Portraits of Christ in Genesis,” author Martin Ralph De Haan notes that Satan’s “first and initial attack upon Jesus Christ was disguised as an innocent request for information.”

DeHaan continued: “After six thousand years of human history, Satan’s strategy has not been altered or changed…Under the guise of a search for knowledge and better understanding of the Word of God, the enemies of the Gospel are repeating the question of the serpent, “Yea, hath God said?”

Note that Jesus’s favorite question to his questioners was “Have you not read?”

If Satan was going to challenge God’s word, it was important that God’s people study those words, and know them well. Jesus was not fooled by Fortune Cookie Moses. We are not to be fooled by Fortune Cookie Jesus.

If you’re not referring back to the word, you’re doing it wrong. So the word is the first thing Satan tests. Then and now.

We first meet Satan by name in Job 1, but it’s not until Isaiah that we learn Lucifer’s origin story.

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, ‘I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.’ Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.” — Isaiah 14:12-15

Lucifer bought the same sin the serpent sold to Adam and Eve: The idea that we can, through our wisdom or works, ‘ascend above the height of the clouds, and be like the most high God.’

Playing God is a dangerous game. For the serpent, Lucifer, Adam and Eve, it resulted in immediate demotions.

The proof of serpent-as-Lucifer doesn’t end at the beginning of Genesis 3. It’s solidified in God’s curse against the serpent, which sets the stage for the rest of the Bible.

“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” — God to the serpent, in Genesis 3:15

As De Haan wrote, the only Bible character referred to that way, as the seed of a woman, is Jesus. Everyone else is described in terms of their father.

Genesis 3:15 is an early depiction of the battle between Satan and Jesus, one that plays out through the final page of Revelation.

When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Tony Soprano “went dark” that last episode of The Sopranos, not just the screen.

And the serpent that approached Eve in Genesis 3 was Satan, before he was brought low to his belly, and then lower than that to Hell.