Christopher Nolan specialises in directing bamboozling, mind-bending films. Perhaps his most well-known is the 2010 film Inception. And that film deals with a problem similar to the one Satan has in the garden of Eden: how do you persuade someone to do something they have no desire to do?
In Inception the problem is the threat a multibillionaire faces from the expanding empire of a rival business multibillionaire. He decides he needs to get his rival to break up his empire. But his rival has no intention of doing anything like this, and so via manipulation using dreams the idea of breaking up the business is created in his mind – what the film calls an inception.
Alan Thomas
The first such inception was in the garden of Eden where Satan used seduction to trick Eve into thinking of sin and then doing it. Last month we considered the first stage in Genesis 3:1 in which Satan generated in Eve’s mind the idea that God might not be altogether good and might in fact be a bit mean, denying good to her. With his second speech in Genesis 3:4-5, Satan builds on this by further using ambiguity to twist the meaning of God’s good command.
