It is profitable for us to learn these things and to know them. Hence it is that Peter admonishes us to stand fast under temptation, and to resist the Tempter, keeping fast hold of the Word by a firm faith, and keeping our ears shut, so as not to listen to anything contrary to the Word, 1 Pet. 5:9. For such "sufferings" and temptations of Eve are most truly "lessons" to us; that we suffer not the same things, by being drawn aside from the Word and faith, as she was. That which follows in our text, "For God doth know that your eyes shall be opened," may be taken in a twofold sense. We may either understand Satan to have thus spoken, for the purpose of exciting an ill-will against God, for having forbidden man to eat of a fruit so good and useful by which means Satan would create in Eve the beginning of a hatred towards God for not being sufficiently indulgent. Or again, I would rather understand the passage, Satan speaks this, as in praise of God; that he may thereby the more easily entrap Eve in his deception. As if he had said to her, "Be assured that God is not such an one as to wish you and Adam to live in darkness as it were without the knowledge of good and evil. He is good. He envies you nothing which can in any way conduce to your benefit or pleasure. He will be quite satisfied and content that you should be like himself, as to the knowledge of good and evil." When Satan thus praises God he has the razor fairly in his hands, so that he can cut the throat of a man in a moment. For the fall of a man is thus rendered by Satan the most easy, when the pretext of the Word and the will of God is brought in upon the back of that which the lust of the heart desires. This is why I would rather understand the words now in question to be spoken by Satan, as intended to persuade Eve, rather than to excite in her any hatred toward God. I leave it however quite free to you, my hearers, to adopt the sense of the passage which pleases you best. The sum of the whole or the one aim of Satan, is this: to draw Eve away by all possible means from the Word, and to persuade her to do that, which had been forbidden by the Word. For Satan is the most bitter enemy of the Word of God; because he knows that our whole salvation lies in our obedience to that Word. But here an inquiry by no means absurd is raised. How was it that Eve did not yet feel her sin? For, although she had not yet swallowed the fruit, yet she had sinned against the Word and against faith. She had turned away from the Word unto a lie and from faith to disbelief; from God to Satan and from the worship of God to idolatry. As this was the sum and substance of her sin, for plucking the apple was not the sum of her sin, how was it that death did not immediately follow? How was it that she did not feel so mighty a sin? Nay further how was it, that after she had eaten the fruit, she did not feel the death which was the decreed punishment of it, before she persuaded Adam to eat of it also?