The Whopper
It’s the whopper of all time! It all began in Paradise. In the heart of the one we know today as the devil—or Satan—there arose such jealousy that the prophet Isaiah in the Bible recorded it. “I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God. . . . I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High” (Isaiah 14:13, 14).
This created being of the order of angels coveted and planned to supplant the place of the mighty God of the universe, his creator. Expelled from heaven, he then spun his web of deceit in the newly created Garden of Eden.
Approaching Eve, who’d wandered to the forbidden tree, he told the first recorded lie: “You will not surely die!” (Genesis 3:4). Satan, thus labelled the father of lies, then tells the ultimate whopper: Eat of the forbidden fruit and “you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5).
Imagine such audacity! The great deceiver not only contradicts God who declared the sinner would die, but claims humankind could become as God Himself. The created is challenged to become god and creator! But today, as in every age, the devil continues to make that same claims—you won’t die and you can live as God, creating your own selfish world and future.
It’s a universal theme, one that’s built into the pyramids of Egypt and reflected in the philosophy of our own time. But curiously, Mexico contains more pyramids than Egypt, found in the ruins of its former occupants, the Aztecs, Mayas, Olmecs and Zapotecs, who share a common belief.
At the ruins of Teotihuacán, 50 km north-east of Mexico City, the Aztecs and their ancestors worshipped a feathered serpent. This is interesting to the Bible student as it reminiscent of the serpent described in the Genesis account of the Garden of Eden. The Bible describes a beautiful serpent, which flew about the trees, but for its part in the deception of Eve, was condemned to merely crawl on the ground. For the Aztecs, the serpent was Quetzalcóatl and, further south, in the great Mayan culture, Kulkulkhan.
It is interesting to see the connection between the whopper told to Eve, millennia before, and the story of Teotihuacán, where the great processional—The Avenue of the Dead—stretched four kilometres south from the Pyramid of the Moon. Only the northern two kilometres beyond the Pyramid of the Sun to the Temple of Quetzalcóatl have been explored. There, even in modern times, people climb the Pyramid of the Sun in order to worship.
The Temple of Quetzalcóatl at the southern end details the sharp fangs of this feathered deity and another called Tláloc, thought to be the water god or the fire serpent that bore the sun on its daily journeys. Here amid these massive reminders of the worship of the sun and of the snake—and through it the devil—the very name of the place has significance.
To the people who inhabited these parts, the name Teotihuacán means “the place where men become gods,” This site, with its 75 temples identified along the processional way, is intertwined with the events of the Garden of Eden.
In Mexico’s Mayan civilisation, the most impressive site is Chichen Itza. Here the great El Castillo rises up. It has a unique design that allows the sun’s rays to penetrate into the most holy room of Kulkulkhan just once a year. Even now, on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, the shadow of the sun seems to slide down the stairways to their god and end in the gaping jaws of the serpent. This has been interpreted as the coming of the “god of life.”
Beside the striking similarity of the worship of the feathered serpent god, there is another interesting feature here. Just north from El Castillo is the Platform of Venus. Here is found the Toltec symbol for Venus, a feathered serpent with a human head in its jaws. Again the similarity with that event in the Garden of Eden becomes obvious. The devil is addressed in the Scriptures as the Morning Star, or Venus (see Isaiah 14:12).
These remnants of former civilisations are reminders that the devil craved worship and the place of God Himself. Most heathen worship echoes this aspect of the great lie, offering human beings the opportunity of becoming a god!
Even Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons, when delivering the King Follett Discourse in his last year of life, claimed God was “once as we are now, and is an exalted man.”
Lorenzo Snow, the fifth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, wrote Man’s Destiny (1892), and was a little more explicit when he said, “As man now is, our God once was, as now is, so man shall be.”
The great father of lies uses this artifice, this innate human desire, when delivering his appeal today. We are civilised, educated and scientific in our outlook, yet the selfish desire manifest in the mind of the devil still weaves its magic among us. The desire to be supreme has strengthened the resolve of many a dictator and tyrant. Our age of freedom bows to no-one but self, our lives unfettered by moral restraints such as God’s commandments. We live as demigods.
The concept of becoming god doesn’t need pyramids and temples to be reality; it just needs a mind determined not to yield in any way to the One who is “the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). The devil wanted to usurp God, but Jesus Christ—God Himself—came from heaven to our world and demonstrated characteristics in direct opposition to those of the devil. Jesus voluntarily gave up His place in heaven to become a human being. Jesus also chose death on the cross on our behalf in order to win by love the allegiance of the people of this world.
So see the whopper for what it was—a self-seeking effort to usurp the Ruler of the universe told by the great liar—regarding life and death. It still has appeal. Like Eve, we’re forced to choose between willing following the Word of God or the words of the devil.
See A World Gone Wrong for a more comprehensive Bible-based insight into the rise of evil and sin in our world, its consequences and God’s solution to it.
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