“Why is the serpent’s punishment to crawl on its belly when that’s what it does?”
This is the question posed by Dr. Jackson of Hillsdale College in the Youtube advertisement for his free, online course on Genesis. I highly recommend the course, and in fact, I highly recommend all the Hillsdale free courses! Despite being fully engaged with my Master’s thesis at Dallas, I’ve found time to relax and watch many of these courses, and they are all worth your time.
But the question Dr. Jackson asks is an old one, with many answers that have been posed. Some have argued that before the curse, snakes were like other lizards. Others have said there was no snake at all and everything is a metaphor…but what is a meta for? And like all knotty biblical and theological questions there are lots of answers…or at least attempts at answers.
But I’d like to propose that Dr. Jackson phrases the question in a very helpful way, because his wording reminds us that crawling on its belly is what a snake does; snakes behave snakishly because they’re snakes.
Granted, the snake here, or Serpent, if you prefer, isn’t simply A snake, but THE snake, the great and ancient serpent. This is Satan taking on the form of a snake. So, the curse of the snake is really a curse against Satan. And this is helpful to remember because it helps us to think through the problem. Whatever the curse of Satan is, it has to parallel the curse of the serpent. The form of the serpent’s curse is that the serpent would continue to do what it already does. Or to put it another way, the serpent will continue to be as it is.
Satan’s curse means that Satan will continue to be as he is: the enemy, the adversary, wicked, hateful, jealous, godless. Notice that God makes a prophetic statement in Genesis 3, that is partially fulfilled in the gospels, but doesn’t receive its fullest fulfillment until Revelation 20. But between Genesis 3 and Revelation 20 we see Satan continuing to be as he is. Even 1,000 years of imprisonment do not change his nature. He is not only unwilling, but incapable of changing. He will forever be – all the days of his life – as he was in the moment he brought death into the world.
Satan will always be what he was and is. He is unchanging, but unchanging in the worst possible way. Because being unchanging for God, who is infinite and perfect, is no detriment to His glory…it’s perfect and infinite. But for a finite and imperfect creature to be unchanging is a trap, a prison, a Hell.
And of course this is part of Christian anthropology that is most evident and obvious but not very often talked about: people are forever becoming more like themselves. When we say that “old people” get set in their ways, it’s not because you can’t teach old dogs new tricks (at least not entirely). Part of the reason old people become so inflexible is because they have always been resistant to change and recalcitrant and unbending and, over the years, they’ve grown more and more unwilling to change – because changing means admitting imperfection, or incurring discomfort.
This is why we look at teens and twentysomethings who go out carousing and making a ruckus and say that they’re just healthy kids sowing their wild oats. But when people in their 40s and 50s and 60s are acting like 19-year-olds we find it pathetic. Why? The behavior is the same, oughtn’t it to have the same moral value? No.
When a kid acts wild and crazy, there is the historically and anthropologically and statistically supported assumption that eventually they’ll get it out of their system and settle down and take on responsibilities.
In other words, we assume that they’ll grow!
But when you see Madonna splayed out on a bed trying to be a slutty grama we find it repulsive and repugnant. We culturally believe, or at least used’ta believe, that growing and maturing is a normal and natural part of life. When people fail to grow, we say that they are retarded in an area: physical, mental, social-emotional. Being retarded in any aspect of life is not good – but arrested development is even worse than retarded development.
And God’s curse for Satan is arrested development. Satan will never change. He’s psychologically (in the broadest sense of that term) turned to stone. He will never be anything more than he currently is. And that is a terrible curse. Even a good person, who is imperfect would find it a curse to never transcend himself as he is; imagine how dreadful it would be to be Satan forever; to be full of malice, and envy, and spite, and unfulfilled desires and ungratified hatred.
And that in itself would make Hell hellish. I’ve preached and written about this concept at length before, so I won’t belabor the point. But allow me to rephrase it.
God, who is transcendent and allows his children to transcend themselves curses Satan and his followers by withholding transcendence from them.
In other words, God’s curse, and perhaps Hell itself, is God withholding His nature.
I’m not saying that I’ve answered Dr. Jackson’s question completely, but I think whatever the answer truly is, what I’ve written above certainly is part of the answer.