One of the cleverest things Satan has ever done is to convince people to view him as a ridiculous figure in a red suit with horns, a barbed tail, and a pitchfork. It is hard to take him seriously if you view him like that. The apostle Peter tells us in 1 Peter 5:8 that we better take Satan seriously. “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” Satan cannot force us to do things against our will, so he works to convince us to choose to do wrong; and his greatest weapon is a lie. Satan is the biggest and best liar there has ever been. In John 8:44 Jesus said, “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it.” You can see how the devil operates in Genesis chapter three. Verse one says, “Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?” Satan begins with a question. He didn't immediately attack what God had said or accuse God of being wrong, he asked a question which started the woman thinking in the direction he wanted her to think. When she says, “but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ” (vs 3). Satan immediately casts doubt on God’s motives, “Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (vs 4-5). This is much like the conversation we have with ourselves when we are tempted to sin. We tell ourselves that the sin we are thinking of committing is not really that bad, that we will have the will-power to just do a little then stop. Satan will whisper in our ear and give us all kinds of reasons to do what we really know we shouldn’t; and once we have started down that path, Satan will do everything he can to keep us going farther into sin. Like Eve, who “... saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate…” (vs 6). Whenever Satan begins to whisper in our ear, we need to remember that it is a lot easier not to start down the path of sin then it is to make our way back once we have started.