Hello, and thank you for joining me today for Give Him 15.

The title of today's post is, God Always Outwits the Crafty One.

One of the important aspects of prophetic intercession is to serve as watchmen.

The praying church is maturing in this understanding.

Adam was actually assigned to be a watchman.

He was told in Genesis 215 to keep, Hebrew word shamar, keep, which means to guard, protect, preserve the garden of Eden.

Shamar is one of the primary words for watchmen in scripture.

Adam's assignment to protect the garden had to be related to the serpent.

Before the fall, the only possible thing Adam could have needed to protect it from was the serpent.

There were no other threats or enemies.

The first mention of Satan in Scripture, Genesis 3-1, describes him as being more crafty

than any other creature.

The word used comes from a Hebrew word meaning smooth or bare.

God was telling Adam that Satan was slick, smooth, cunning, wily,

watch him. Applying this to all of us, our biblical assignment as watchman is to protect our gardens from the crafty serpent.

Adam failed in this assignment. Israel also failed at times to guard against Satan's craftiness.

Yesterday I highlighted one of those occasions.

I chose this incident with the Gibbeanites, which we talked about yesterday, because the same word is used to describe Satan's craftiness, or excuse me, the same word used to describe Satan's craftiness was used to describe this people.

Israel was deceived by the crafty Ghibeonites into entering a covenant relationship with them.

Though they were a local people, they dressed in old, worn clothes, making it appear that they had come from a distant land, wanting to make a covenant with them, with Israel.

This incident clearly symbolizes or pictures all humankind being deceived by the craftiness of the serpent,

thereby aligning with him. Covenants were sacred in those days, an agreement Israel could not

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