After Adam sinned, God pronounced that man had become like Him, knowing good and evil (Genesis 3:22). How did that knowledge, especially that of evil, change mankind to a godlike status?

Recognizing God as superior and desiring that superiority, Adam and Eve bit into Satan’s deception that they could become like God by knowing good and evil. It was true that they could, but of course it wasn’t the whole truth.

Satan must have known that the two already knew the difference between right and wrong. After all, God had made it clear that it was okay to eat from every tree except for a specific one. So maybe Satan enticed them by making “evil” sound like something other than “wrong.”

Satan, of course, knew more than he was telling. He knew that the two, once they disobeyed God, would indeed become like God; but only in the sense of knowing the nature of evil. He obviously didn’t elaborate on how that knowledge would be different as it pertained to God and to them.

Having spent so much time in God’s company, Satan would have to have known that God, through His omniscience only, knew of evil’s every form and consequence, plus its outcome. And so he naturally must have figured that Adam and Eve’s knowledge of evil would be different than God’s.

He probably banked on that difference occurring—that their knowledge of evil would be the same as his knowledge of it. (At some point prior, God probably had declared him evil.) Satan hid from them that they and their descendants – like him – would know evil; not just intellectually, but by experiencing evil’s manifestations, consequences, and conclusion.

In this way – the sense of fully understanding evil, understanding what it’s like – did Adam and Eve become like God.