It is as if Satan had said, "Ye must be foolish indeed if ye suppose that God could possibly be unwilling that ye should eat of this tree when he had himself given you 'dominion' over all the trees of paradise; nay, when he had positively created all the trees for your sakes. How can he, who bestowed as a free favor all things upon you, possibly envy you these particular fruits, which are so sweet and so pleasant!" For Satan's whole aim is to devise a means of drawing them away from the Word and from the knowledge of God, and to bring them to conclude that what they had stated was not really the will of God, and that such was not really what God had commanded them. That this is the true sense of the whole divine passage, that which follows tends to prove; when Satan says, "Ye shall not surely die." For all the stratagems of Satan centre in this one:--to draw men away from the Word, and from faith unto a new and false god. And this same plan of Satan all fanatical spirits follow. Hence, Arius reasons and inquires, Do you really think that Christ is God, when he himself says, "My Father is greater than I?" In the same manner also the Sacramentarians ask, Do you really think that the bread is the body and the wine the blood of Christ? Christ most certainly had no thoughts so absurd. When men begin thus to indulge their own cogitations, they by degrees depart from the Word and fall into error. Since therefore, the whole force of the temptation was in leading Eve to doubt whether God really did say so; it is a more correct rendering to leave the emphasis resting on the name of God. The leaving it to rest on the interrogative particle, why? takes away from the peculiar force of the meaning. In my judgment therefore the passage will be best rendered by making the emphasis to rest on the _not_. Hath God said that ye shall _not_ eat of every tree of the garden? For Satan's real aim is, not to set up an inquiry why God said this. His object is to bring Eve to conclude that God had positively not so commanded, in order that by bringing her to this conclusion he might wrest from her the Word. Satan saw that the reasoning power of Eve might in this way be the most effectually deceived, if he drew away from her sight and judgment the Word of God, under the very name of God. And he thinks the same still.