Page 78 - Foundations

them. This brother had to take a religion course. He mentioned to me that his professor challenged
a statement that he had made in one of his papers. The professor criticized this man’s statement that
Satan had tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The profesor stated that the Genesis account
made no mention of Satan, speaking only of a serpent. My friend read the Genesis account and saw
that this was true, and asked me what I thought. I responded by telling him about the following
Scripture passages from the book of Revelation.

Revelation 12:9
And the great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who
deceives the whole world; he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with
him.

Revelation 20:2-3
And he laid hold of the dragon, the serpent of old, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a
thousand years, and threw him into the abyss, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he should not
deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were completed...

Both of these passages reveal that “the dragon,” “the serpent of old,” “the devil,” and “Satan” are
references to the same being. This satisfied my friend who was eager to return to his professor and
share this evidence with him. As we look at the behavior of this being described in Revelation, we
find that the same activity is ascribed to the serpent in the third chapter of Genesis. In Revelation we
read that this being “deceives the whole world,” and “deceives the nations.” In Genesis we read:

Genesis 3:13
And the woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."

Satan is a deceiver and a liar. There is a common idiom ascribed to Native Americans that lying white
men “spoke with a forked tongue.” In The History of the American Indians, published in 1775, the
leaders of the Chickasaw tribe spoke ruefully of the white man’s lawyers who they described as
“hired speakers, who use their squint eyes and forked tongues like the chieftains of the snakes,
(meaning rattle-snakes) which destroy harmless creatures for the sake of food.”