Genesis 3 and 4 function as the deepest gateway for understanding human history. Through these two chapters, Pastor David Jang (Olivet University) exposes the structure of the Fall as a direct counterpoint to the creation world of Genesis 1–2, where God declared everything “very good.” For him, Adam’s sin and Cain’s sin are not isolated episodes but enduring spiritual patterns shared by the whole human race. In this light, the final petition of the Lord’s Prayer—“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”—is not a vague request for protection. It is a desperate plea: do not let us reenact the tragedy of Genesis 3. Satan exists as surely as God exists, yet he is never an equal rival deity. He is not another god competing with God, but a created being who abandoned his given place and became corrupted—nothing more than a fallen creature.
Scripture does not leave the serpent of Genesis 3 undefined. Revelation 12 identifies him unmistakably as “that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world,” joining the Edenic serpent to the great dragon who appears at the climax of history. The mirror that reflects the inner depth of this “ancient serpent” is found in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28. In prophetic satire against the kings of Babylon and Tyre, Pastor David Jang reads more than the fall of political tyrants; he discerns the spiritual reality working behind them—the pride and collapse of the one called “morning star,” Lucifer. The lament—“How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn!”—crystallizes the tragedy: an angel created to bear light abandoned his station, coveted the Creator’s place, and plunged into ruin. Jude 1:6, which speaks of angels who “did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling,” bound in gloomy darkness, clarifies that the essence of the Fall is not merely breaking a rule. It is abandoning one’s rightful place—refusing creaturely limits and rejecting the order of God.
Pastor David Jang sees in the fall of these angels an archetype of human sinfulness. When we trace our sins to their root, he argues, we find ourselves repeating the path Lucifer walked first. In John 8:44, Jesus tells the Pharisees—religiously zealous men—that “you are of your father the devil.” The statement is shocking, but it reveals a spiritual truth: humans are not neutral beings drifting between good and evil. We become like a father; we are shaped by a lineage. The early fathers, such as Tertullian and Augustine, spoke of original sin precisely because Scripture diagnoses humanity as being caught from birth in the devil’s structure of lies and disordered desire. Revelation 12’s image of the dragon’s tail sweeping down “a third of the stars of heaven” symbolizes the vast scope of fallen angels; Pastor David Jang stresses how densely they operate behind history—within cultures, powers, ideologies, and systems.
Jude 1:7 testifies that Sodom and Gomorrah indulged in sexual immorality and pursued “unnatural desire,” receiving punishment. Pastor David Jang reads this alongside angelic rebellion to highlight the extreme distortion of human desire when it aligns with fallen spiritual impulses. For him, money and sex are two of Satan’s most accessible axes of temptation. In the ancient Near East, Baal and Asherah worship, the offering of children through fire to Molech, and Israel’s first constructed idol in the wilderness—the golden calf—interweave sexualized religion, material obsession, and the corruption of life itself. Just as the bull—once a symbol of costly sacrifice offered to God—could be twisted into Molech’s monstrous demand for children’s blood, Satan constantly seizes what belongs to God—glory and worship—and contorts it into degraded, self-serving devotion. Today, Mammon and Baal no longer stand chiefly as carved statues of stone and wood; they operate as cultures and structures that commodify sexual pleasure and assign price tags to human dignity.
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Behind this massive distortion, Pastor David Jang understands angels as personal beings—entities possessing mind, emotion, and will. Angels are not impersonal energies; they think, feel, and choose. God desired that love and obedience be free responses rather than coerced compliance; therefore, he granted angels personality and freedom. For that reason, angelic rebellion is not a small incident but a heartbreakingly painful event from God’s vantage point. Beings meant to serve one another and sing God’s glory with joy chose instead the path of mutiny—captivated by pride’s mantra: “I will ascend… I will exalt… I will be like the Most High.” This is not mere myth, but a cosmic tragedy.
Isaiah 14 records the inner monologue of the fallen “morning star” with chilling detail: “I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high… I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north… I will make myself like the Most High.” In the repeated “I,” pride is distilled to its essence. The creature, refusing to remain a creature, seeks to place itself beside the Creator—pursuing autonomy at its most absolute, crossing boundaries to occupy God’s domain. Standing in total opposition to this is Christ in Philippians 2. “Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant… and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death.” Kenosis—the self-emptying path of Christ—reveals the reversal: Lucifer, though a creature, wanted to rise as if he were God; Christ, though truly God, descended as man. One exalted himself and fell to Sheol, the depths of the pit; the other humbled himself, and God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name above every name.
The event of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis 3 shows the human choice at this crossroads. Ultimately, only God has the rightful authority to define good and evil, to draw the boundaries of life and death, blessing and curse. The command not to eat from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” is not a trivial prohibition about fruit. It is a declaration that the subject who determines good and evil must be God—not man. Yet the serpent subtly twists God’s word: “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” He begins with exaggeration and distortion, planting suspicion toward God’s goodness. The woman replies, “We may eat… but… you shall not eat… neither shall you touch it,” and the atmosphere of distrust starts taking root within her. The progression—seeing, reaching, touching, taking, eating—symbolizes the growth-pattern of desire. The Decalogue ending with “You shall not covet” underscores that sin begins internally, prior to external action. Jesus’ teaching that whoever looks with lust has already committed adultery in the heart directly targets this inner architecture of sin.
The serpent’s climactic lie is blunt: “You will not surely die.” It overturns God’s warning—“you shall surely die”—and carries within it a total assault on God’s faithfulness, paired with the arrogance that humanity can become the standard-bearer of good and evil. “God knows that when you eat of it… you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Pastor David Jang argues that if we translate this temptation into modern language, it resembles the creed of postmodernism. The claim that there is no absolute truth, that all values are relative, and that right and wrong depend on circumstance and personal choice—situational ethics—is, at bottom, a philosophically refined version of the serpent’s proposition: “The subject of good and evil is not God; it is me.”
Therefore, when God declares, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil,” and blocks the way to the tree of life with a flaming sword, this is not mere retaliation. It is mercy—preventing a fallen condition from becoming eternal. If humanity, having seized the right to define good and evil, were also permitted to secure immortality in that state, the universe would become an everlasting space of rebellion and chaos. Here—at the point where judgment contains protection, where what sounds like curse conceals a rescue mechanism—Pastor David Jang locates a key that dissolves common theodicy misunderstandings. God is not a cold deity who passively observes the Fall; he is a Father who warns with trembling compassion: “lest you die.”
When we shift our gaze to Job, the fate and function of fallen spiritual beings appear with sharper contours. Traditionally regarded as among the earliest written books of the Old Testament, Job reveals a heavenly courtroom scene behind earthly suffering. Satan appears as the accuser who stands near God and challenges human integrity: “Does Job fear God for no reason?” In that question, he tries to reduce even piety into transaction and conditional exchange. God, though fully able to annihilate fallen spirits instantly, is also a God of justice, allowing history to unfold so that the faithfulness of humans and the falseness of Satan are exposed. In the meantime, Satan manipulates rulers, authorities, and the powers that shape the structures of society. As Ephesians 6:12 declares, our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against “rulers… authorities… cosmic powers over this present darkness… spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” At times, the thrones of the world seem as if they sit upon “the dragon’s seat,” because satanic power can operate through institutions and systems to oppress human beings.
Yet the gospel brings a decisive reversal. Jesus comes as the one who binds the strong man. In the wilderness temptation of Matthew 4, Jesus confronts the same core temptations Lucifer deploys: the test of bread that targets economic appetite; the temple pinnacle that tempts religious spectacle and presumption; the offer of all the kingdoms of the world that promises political dominance and glory. But Jesus never makes his own feelings or circumstances the standard of judgment. He answers with the blade of Scripture: “It is written.” He embodies the truth that the criterion of good and evil is not human desire but the word of God. When the trial ends and “the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him,” it signals both the authority granted to the one who resists temptation and the consolation that follows obedience. And Jesus’ statement in Luke 10:18—“I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”—shows that his victory is not merely personal; it reorders cosmic reality. He grants his disciples authority to tread on serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy, and in that authority the church is called—as the seed of the woman—to trample the serpent’s head.
Genesis 4 then becomes a mirror that shows how Eden’s rupture takes concrete form in human relationships and social life. Cain’s offering looked outwardly like a religious act of worship. Yet God accepted Abel’s offering and rejected Cain’s. The issue was not the external form alone but the inner posture—faith, trust, and the substance of the heart before God. In the experience of rejection, Cain is invited by God to examine his interior life, but he refuses that invitation and instead clings to anger and envy. God warns him: “Sin is crouching at the door… but you must rule over it.” Cain will not listen. The image of sin crouching at the threshold echoes the serpent approaching in Eden. Unable—or unwilling—to rule over sin, Cain lures his brother into the field and kills him, reenacting the likeness of the devil who was “a murderer from the beginning.” If Adam’s fall shattered the vertical relationship with God, Cain’s murder destroyed the horizontal relationship between human beings in the first act of fratricide. In these two chapters the tragic pattern of human history is condensed.
At the root of all this disorder lies the distortion of truth itself. John 8:44 defines the devil as one in whom “there is no truth,” who speaks lies from his own nature—“a liar and the father of lies.” The modern world’s loss of boundaries between truth and falsehood—where information, ideology, public opinion, and emotional noise blur the very possibility of discernment—is not merely a side effect of technology. It is the outcome of relocating the seat of moral judgment from God’s word to human preference and circumstance. When postmodernism says, “There is no absolute,” it often ends up enthroning another absolute: “My perception and my choice are the final standard.” In this way, contemporary intellectual currents have only changed their outward form; in essence, they repeat the serpent’s words in Eden.
Against this, Pastor David Jang cites Pascal to describe the God we believe in—not the “God of philosophers,” but “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” This God is not an abstract First Cause but a personal God who weeps over Jerusalem, who weeps at Lazarus’ tomb, who grieves over the city that kills the prophets. Jesus’ tears were not only grief at death’s pain but sorrow over human hardness—over those who could not believe even when resurrection and life stood before them. This God still speaks to those trapped in the cycle of the Fall: “I am the truth. Do not enthrone yourself as the standard of good and evil; look to my word and to my Son.”
This is why Pastor David Jang weaves Genesis 3–4 together with the Lord’s Prayer, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and Lucifer, Cain’s murder and the idols of modern civilization into a single line. We cannot remain spiritual infants. Hebrews 5:13–14 teaches that those who live on milk are infants, unskilled in the word of righteousness, but solid food belongs to the mature—those who by constant practice have their powers of discernment trained to distinguish good from evil. The core of spiritual maturity is to lay down the pride that wanted to become the subject of good and evil, and to train our senses to discern good and evil only within God’s word.
The Lord’s Prayer—“lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”—thus becomes the daily breath that sustains our existence. It is not a request that all tests vanish from our path, but a plea that in the midst of trial we will not be seized by evil, not be handed over to the accuser, not repeat Eden’s failure or Cain’s tragedy. When the Holy Spirit comes as light within us, darkness loses its place to remain. Lucifer imitated light and claimed the title of “morning star,” but the true Morning Star is Christ, who identifies himself in Revelation 22 as “the bright morning star.” Abiding in Christ, the seed of the woman, embracing his mind, and walking the path of humility and obedience he displayed, we move toward a life that tramples the serpent’s head—discerning and overcoming Satan’s lies and idols. And at the center of that path, as Pastor David Jang repeatedly exhorts, we are called to know Scripture deeply, to meditate on the word day and night, and to grow into mature believers whose discernment of good and evil has been trained. This is the most practical—and most glorious—calling given to believers living in a fallen age.