Burn Like A Snake On Fire
The serpent was presented to me as a bad thing
The serpent was presented to me as a bad thing. God told man not to eat from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The serpent tempted man to disobey God and eat the fruit anyway. Disobeying God is always sinful, sinfulness is always bad because it leads to death, and death is just the worst. Ultimately, the serpent is bad because it tempts man with sinfulness and death.
The existence of the serpent and its temptation used to bother me philosophically. Why would God create the serpent and indirectly tempt humankind with sinfulness and death? If God didn’t want man to sin, why would He create the serpent and put it in The Garden with man?
I could not make sense of the serpent’s existence in light of God’s purported omniscience and loving nature. If God is omniscient, then He can see the futures of things that do not exist yet. He can see the futures of potential creations before He actually decides to create them.
Why would an omniscient God set Himself up for immediate disappointment by creating a version of humanity that is susceptible to the serpent’s temptation? God could have created a version of humanity that is infallible and invulnerable to temptation. Why would God imbue man with the predisposition to sin if He is disappointed by sin? Why would God put the serpent in The Garden if the serpent’s whole shtick is tempting humanity to sinfulness and death? Can an all-knowing and all-loving God also be a masochist who enjoys disappointing Himself?
I have asked these questions repeatedly in many different ways throughout my life and been given many answers. Most of the answers that I have been given hinge on a particular, and in my view unwise, understanding of “free will.” They usually go something like this: God gave man free will so that man could actually choose to love and know God, for people with enslaved wills cannot willingly choose to enter into a relationship with God.
My biggest issue with this has always been that – well, just look around. Look around at people. When I look, I do not see people who “have” free will. I see addicts, I see slaves. I have struggled with addiction in my life and I can tell you with certainty that, when you are actually addicted to something, you do not “have” a free will. This is precisely why addiction is bad and how something even gets labeled as an “addiction” (instead of a “habit”) for a person in the first place.
Addicts need intervention, they need salvation, because they cannot see how their wills, their thoughts and feelings and intentions, have been enslaved to the object of their addiction – whether that be a drug, a sense of moral superiority, a toxic relationship, shameful self-talk, or literally anything else in the world (for everything can become an object of addiction, an illusory master – even water).
A recovered addict knows more about free will than someone who has never been addicted. That’s because everyone is addicted to something. Even if you are just addicted to doomscrolling social media, you are an addict, a sinner. Those who have faced their addiction, understood that they are addicts, and overcome their addiction know what “free will” means in their heart and soul better than those who have not. They know that freedom is not something that you “have,” but something that requires a significant amount of painful sacrifice to find and grow. The addict’s will must be transformed, his mind must be liberated and renewed, before he can possibly enter into his post-addiction life.
People have often defined “free will” to me as the capacity to do otherwise, or the ability to have done something other than what you did. I can’t help but suspect that people who define it this way do not actually understand what freedom means. At the very least, they have not aligned their theological perspective of freedom with their psychological one. They understand in the abstract that the addict’s addiction constrains his ability to make choices in life due to the psychological impact that addiction has on the addict’s mind, but they have not faced the obvious tension between this fact and their theological understanding of freedom – which presents freedom as a thing people just always “have.”
Free will isn’t a thing you just have, but an aspect of your being that can grow and decay like everything else that God created. You are not a robot with dichotomous programming built into it.
People say that God gave us free will, rather than a pathway toward freedom, and think that for some reason this makes humanity less robotic than the alternative. What they are essentially saying is that God was like a programmer who could encode humanity with a 1 (has free will) or a 0 (does not have free will). They are saying that God chose to program humanity with a 1. (Take a second to appreciate the symbol of this blog, the symbol for Fighting Anomie and my personal life, ∅, which is both a 1 and a 0.) According to these people, freedom isn’t an ongoing relationship with life, it’s just something we have by dint of our programming. They then criticize people like me who take issue with this interpretation as wanting humanity to be more robotic and lacking in “childlike faith.”
But people are not like robots, they are like trees. We are all trees. This is why humanity begins in The Garden in the Bible. Your being is a tree with roots that extend downward into the underworld and branches that reach upward toward the heavens. You change through the seasons, old parts of you die, and new parts of you grow. In what sense is a tree free in life?
A tree cannot choose to be a robot or anything other than a tree. It can’t choose to be something other than a being that grows and decays, lives and dies, as seasons change. Sometimes, the winter is especially cold and long, other times the summer takes all year (especially here in Texas). A tree can’t choose when the sun will appear or disappear, it can only try to grow in the summer and conserve its most essential parts in the winter. The tree is free, but only to grow and die. Biblically speaking, life is not physical living, but growth, and death is not physically dying, but decay. When does a tree experience new life? It experiences new life every summer, after the death of winter. It lives anew when it grows anew. To live is to grow, to experience the transformation of decay into growth, of death into life.
It’s not childlike whatsoever to think that people are robots encoded with free will. Only a jaded adult could invent such an atrocity, for children understand that people are like trees. Healthy children see the good in people, they see that people can grow. They see in people the potential for growth, no matter what terrible adult things that those people have said or done.
Childlike faith is the faith that trees can grow, not the “faith” that people are certainly robots programmed by God to always be one way or another, free or enslaved. Nothing is remotely childlike about this latter view, so I can’t help but look at the adults telling me to be “more childlike” and secretly think that, unfortunately, they have forgotten what it’s like to see as a child in this life.
This brings us back to the serpent. If we live and die like trees, which we do as part of God’s natural creation, then what was God trying to tell us about life when He inserted the serpent into the story of The Garden?
Strangely, many people think that the serpent is obviously the devil or Satan and only this one thing. This is true in a way, but not how they understand it. If the serpent is always the devil categorically, then important Bible verses about serpents don’t make any sense at all.
Take the story in Numbers about Moses saving people’s lives with a bronze snake pole. The group that Moses was leading was despairing at the lack of food and water. They wanted to give up their faith in God and in Moses because life sucked. God does a bizarre thing here. “Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died.” What? Why would God send fiery serpents, fiery devils, to attack and kill His people? Weird!
Even weirder is the instruction God gives to Moses to stop all the snake attacks. “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.’” Why on earth would this be the thing to do? What is God telling us about life here?
Take also Jesus’s reference to this snake attack story in John 3, immediately before He says what He does in John 3:16 – the most quoted and least understood verse in the Bible. “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life.” Jesus is telling us to “lift up the serpent” like Moses did in order to find eternal life.
If the serpent is the devil, why would Jesus tell us to associate with the serpent at all? What would it mean to lift up the devil? If the serpent is the devil, why would God send devil serpents to attack His people? Doesn’t God hate the devil and demons more broadly?
There’s something deeper here, something more going on other than just “the serpent is the devil and that’s the end of the story.” The serpent must symbolize more than just plain evil, otherwise this story doesn’t make much sense at all!
To see the serpent for what it really is, look at how similar a snake is to a tree. Look at how snakes and trees conform to things. Actually look at it because you have seen far fewer snakes in your life than people used to when the Bible was being written. Look at how similar the sight of a tree wrapping around a stake is to a snake wrapping around a pole. In both images, in both symbols, nature conforms to an artifice and is guided by that artifice. Snakes and trees wrap themselves around artificial things, whether those things are straight and pointed up toward the heavens, or bent and pointed away from the heavens. For better and worse, for good and for bad, snakes and trees conform to things by their nature, but only if they are allowed to actually live.
Another way to talk about conformity and its spiritual opposite, individuality, is in terms of the capacity to change. Which animal is well known for its capacity to change, to live life anew again and again and again – for the whole time it is alive? Which creature sheds its old self the most? Which creature transforms death into life the most vividly? Which animal is most like a tree in this way? A snake! The most unique thing about the snake is its capacity to change, its ability to shed its old self, its old way of life, and to become a new self and live in a new way, to become a new being.
Serpents in the Bible symbolize people’s capacities to change and grow. Adam and Eve would not have grown in wisdom if they stayed in The Garden and didn’t eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They wouldn’t have gone on to see the bad things in life, the maturing things that gave them a completely new appreciation for the good things in life. They wouldn’t have grown at all in wisdom if they stayed in The Garden, if the serpent hadn’t tempted them to test fate. Only fools can become wise, only through our individual foolishness can we individually grow in wisdom, only by making mistakes can we further develop and deepen our relationship with life and God.
God imbued man with a sinful nature, he made man fallible (fall-ible). He made humankind with the ability to fall and grow and die like Adam did. If we did not sin, if we were never foolish, then we could never act wisely or grow in wisdom. Fools, those who have not come to know good and evil, can only act wisely on accident. To grow in wisdom, we must sacrifice ourselves to the pain of trying and failing, the pain of progressing and regressing, the pain of living and dying, the pain of transformation. No animal knows this pain better than snakes, who God blessed and cursed with an extraordinary capacity to change.
God sent serpents to attack His people when they became ungrateful for life. He sent agents of change to inject His people with the venom of change, the venom of potential – of potential growth and decay, life and death. God accelerated His people’s capacity to change, but He also provided a direction for them to change toward in the midst of their accelerated state of existential chaos. God gave His people a way for them to change for the better, something new for them to conform to that would give them new hope and new life. God inspired Moses to put a fiery snake, a creature in the middle of a profound and deeply painful transformation, on a pole that pointed upward toward God. Those who “saw” the pole, who gained a new awareness and understanding of how growth requires sacrifice, were saved by God.
This is why Jesus references this story right before presenting Himself as the way to eternal life. Jesus dying on the cross is the same symbol as the fiery snake on the pole pointed toward Heaven. Both symbols capture the pain of change and growth and represent the transformation of death into new life. In both symbols, an organic body is conformed to an artificial structure that guides it somewhere new – to where exactly, we do not know, but, hopefully, upward toward Heaven.
Importantly, although these symbols have fundamental similarities, they would not convey the same meaning if the snake wasn’t fiery. The symbol of a fireless snake wrapped around a pole would mean the same thing as an image of nailless Jesus on the cross. If Jesus wanted to be on the cross, if He wasn’t in pain, if He didn’t intentionally choose to sacrifice Himself to the pain, to the fire, then His death wouldn’t be special. If Jesus found it easy to bear His cross, if bearing His cross came easily and painlessly to Him, if He didn’t see in advance how painful bearing His cross would be for Him and still choose to be transformed anyway, then Jesus would be like a fireless snake climbing on a random pole. The snake would not be on fire, in the process of shedding its skin and becoming something new.
Once you return to Genesis with this understanding of the snake, it becomes much clearer why God cursed the serpent after The Fall. “The Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.’” Why would God curse the snake to slither on its belly for tempting humankind to test fate? Did serpents have arms before God cursed them?
The snake wasn’t on its belly before man knew that he was sinful. The snake wasn’t on its belly before man realized that he was vulnerable to fate. The snake wasn’t on the earthly ground before man recognized that he was bound by his nature to inevitably make costly mistakes in life if he ever plans to grow in God’s wisdom. In The Garden, the serpent, like man, was not moving around in life. Life in The Garden was paradise in the same sense that ignorance is bliss. Real life is not paradise, but a journey that we can find peace within. It’s not that snakes had arms before they were cursed, it’s that snakes didn’t navigate real life at all until after The Fall. All snakes slither on their belly in the real world, all people are susceptible to conforming to bad things if they are truly living – if they are actually spiritually open to changing and being changed.
The serpent is the part of man that led him to sin, the inner part that grows in wisdom and foolishness. The serpent is the aspect of Adam and Eve, of you and me, that inspires us to change, to take risks, and to try new things. The serpent is our capacity to change. This is why God curses the serpent first before cursing mankind after The Fall. Really, it was the serpent, Adam and Eve’s serpent, the serpent that lives within all of us, that caused The Fall. It was humankind’s thirst for change, for life, for real life with ups and downs, growth and decay, good and bad, that led him to sin and fall.
God curses the serpent because the serpent is the thing that makes us act foolishly. We could not act foolishly if we already knew everything God knows, if we already possessed God’s wisdom. Life would be so boring if that were the case! There would be no growth, no adventure, nothing to challenge us and to learn from! We could never be renewed if we could not change! We could never set our snakes on fire if the fire didn’t burn us! We could never actually, painfully, sacrifice for anything or anyone in this life if it weren’t for our vulnerability to sin! Look at your snake within, set it on fire, point your burning body at what is most worth sacrificing for in this life, and die! Die so that you may truly live!