In his successful plot to deceive Eve in the Garden of Eden, and thus hopefully gain control over the entire human race, the devil, masquerading as a serpent, made the following statement to Eve: “God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Genesis 3:5.
This statement contained truth and falsehood, as the devil’s sophistries generally do. It was true that if they ate of the fruit that their eyes would be opened and they would know something that God did not desire them to know. “Their eyes were indeed opened; but how sad the opening! The knowledge of evil, the curse of sin, was all that the transgressors gained.” Education, 25.
The human race would not have known anything about pain, sickness, disappointment, misery, loneliness, bereavement, poverty, exhaustion, frustration, war, strife, quarreling, bitterness or death. By disobedience, our eyes were opened to know what God did not desire us to know. In the aspect of understanding what evil is and what its consequences would be, we learned something that only God knew before. (At the time of the Garden temptation, even the devil did not know all of the consequences of evil, and it would take a long time for the human race to become acquainted with all of them. So in this sense, the statement was a lie and it will remain a lie until the end of the Great Controversy.)
Part of the reason for the success of the temptation was the fact that it aroused in Eve an unholy curiosity to know something that she did not know, and that could not be known without disobeying God. This same curiosity causes the downfall of millions today. There is some knowledge that God has always forbidden us to tamper with and to cross that line starts one down a path to destruction. There are some pictures you cannot look at and some reading that you cannot engage in and still be a Christian. There is some music that you cannot listen to, or play, and still be a Christian. There are some kinds of work that you cannot engage in and still be a Christian. Any work, occupation, reading, pictures, music, food or clothing that involves a violation of the law of God, or any practice that tends toward breaking any part of that law, is forbidden ground. If you venture upon that forbidden ground, the devil knows that you have entered his territory and are lawful prey.
But the other part of the temptation was the arousal of an intense desire to become elevated to a higher sphere of existence—to become like God. In all ages this same temptation has been one of the most successful in the downfall of the human race.
There are a number of things that are right for God to do that are wrong for anybody else to do. This is implied right in the first commandment, which states, “you shall have no other gods before Me.”
In our first editorial on this subject we showed from scripture that there is only one lawgiver (referring to the moral law.) It obviously then, would be wrong for anybody else to attempt to be a lawgiver and define what is right and wrong. All righteous human laws derive from that moral standard given by God Himself.
But there is something else that belongs to God alone and that is the right to receive worship. This is stated in the most explicit and definite language in the second commandment. It is right for God to receive worship but it would be wrong for anybody else to receive it. Even an angel from heaven is not to be worshipped. (See Revelation 19:10; 22:8, 9.)
Contrary to this most explicit command, in the heathen religions, the leaders of those religions received worship. In II Thessalonians 2, when describing the antichrist power, Paul says “He sits as God in the temple of God showing himself that he is god.” We have seen already that the temple of God is His church (Ephesians 2:19-22.) This then is a prophecy that the antichrist will appear within the Church and that he will sit as God in the church. In other words, he will attempt not only to be another lawgiver but also be another demanding worship. The Bible predicts that in the last days all the world, except for the remnant, will worship this antichrist power (Revelation 13:8.) This applies primarily to the devil, but it would also apply to any human being who, under the inspiration of the original rebel against God’s government, attempted to rewrite God’s law and accepted worship from mankind.