And Yahweh God said to the serpent,

“Because you have done this,
Cursed are you more than any of the cattle,
And more than every beast of the field;
On your belly you will go,
And dust you will eat
All the days of your life. (Genesis 3:14)

Here, God speaks to the animal, the instrument of Satan.

The animal has no rational mind. The animal has no sense of sin. The animal was simply used by Satan. But God curses the animal anyway, even though the animal is not necessarily a willing and rational partner.

The snake knew nothing of the temptation. The snake knew nothing of the sin. And the snake actually knows nothing of the curse, because it cannot personally, rationally grasp it. But cursing the serpent serves a purpose, and I’ll show you what that is.

Cursed are you more than any of the cattle,
And more than every beast of the field.

This might, at first, seem to indicate that God cursed all the animals. But He didn’t. Otherwise there would be no culpability for the tool that Satan used. The Hebrew text is not saying that God cursed all of the animals and then cursed the serpent even more. In Hebrew it is not so much a comparative term as a selective term.

The idea of the Hebrew here is that out of all the animals, the serpent alone was selected to be cursed.

Now, it is true that all the animals feel the effects of the fall. They all feel the effect of the fact that God has cursed the ground, which we will find out about when we get down to verse 17 and following. They feel the impact of sin in the world.

All animals, as a result of the fall, will decay. They will age. They will get diseases and die. That’s why Romans 8 says in very straightforward language that the whole creation groans. All the created universe feels the effect of sin:

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. (Romans 8:20-22)

It isn’t the fault of the animals that they are subjected to futility. It isn’t the fault of the ground. It isn’t the fault of the plants. It isn’t the fault of the planet or the stars. It isn’t their fault. They were not responsible or guilty, but they have been subjected to futility. However, that’s not what it’s talking about in Genesis 3:14.

So, why was the snake in particular cursed, even though it was not responsible for its actions? What is the point of punishing the animal when the animal itself doesn’t have any awareness?

The answer is very simple. Cursing the serpent turned it into a symbol. It turned it into a constant reminder of the degradation of Satan. Satan was really synonymous with the serpent:

And the great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. (Revelation 12:9)

And he laid hold of the dragon, the serpent of old, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years. (Revelation 20:2)

We know the serpent in the garden is Satan because of these verses. God curses the animal itself, the snake, so that it becomes a constant picture of the devastation and the reproach that Satan bears. The snakes of the world are symbols of the divine judgment on Satan. The one who successfully tempted Adam and Eve, who challenged God’s authority, is thrown down by God in His symbolic curse on the snake:

On your belly you will go,
And dust you will eat
All the days of your life.

Every time you see a snake slithering and crawling around, it is a sign of the humiliation of Satan. It is a reminder of the divine judgment on him for tempting Adam and Eve into sin.

Rabbinic legend holds, and it’s perhaps an accurate thing, that the serpent before the temptation was an upright creature. Perhaps that is why Revelation also refers to him as a dragon. But now he is altered and cast down onto his belly. And further, God says, “Dust you will eat.”

That doesn’t mean that dust is the food of a snake. Most snakes eat insects, small rodents and things like that. They don’t eat dirt. They just live in it. That’s what it means. “Dust you will eat,” not as a food, but as a result of writhing on the ground.

If you go back into the Old Testament, “licking the dust” is a common phrase. And we use that still today. When we say a certain team “licked the dust,” we mean that they were defeated. And that’s exactly what it meant in the Old Testament; it was a symbol of being vanquished.

So the serpent crawls on the ground and eats the dust as a constant symbol of a degraded and defeated Satan.

In a way, snakes are like rainbows. Every time you see a rainbow, what are you to remember? That God promised He would never again destroy the world by water. Every time you see a snake, you can remember that Satan, who sought to lift himself up, was cast down to the ground. They are constant reminders that Satan is a defeated enemy.

And the curse will never be removed. God says that the curse will endure “all the days of your life.”

As long as there are snakes, they will crawl on the ground. They will be doomed to be visible symbols of a vanquished king of darkness. They are doomed to be perpetual symbols of the demolishing of Satan’s ambitions. They are a perpetual symbol of the defeat of the devil.

Look at Isaiah 65:25, which describes the millennial kingdom, after creation is released from bondage:

“The wolf and the lamb will graze together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox; and dust will be the serpent’s food. They will do no evil nor act corruptly in all My holy mountain,” says Yahweh.

There will be dramatic changes in the animal kingdom. Wolves and lambs, who are natural enemies, will get along fine. There will be no more carnivorous animals. The most familiar of the carnivores, the lion, will eat straw like an ox. But even still, “Dust shall be the serpent’s food.”

No matter what else changes in the millennium, snakes don’t change. They will no longer be dangerous (Isaiah 11:8), but they will all crawl in the same way they’ve always crawled. So God has permanently given us a symbol of a vanquished Satan.

This post is based on a sermon Dr. MacArthur preached in 2000, titled “The Curse on the Serpent, Part 1.”