8:44 your father the devil. Just as those who receive Christ become children of God (John 1:12), those who do the will of the devil are called “children of the wicked one” (e.g., Matthew 13:38). The age-long conflict between the spiritual seed of the serpent and the spiritual seed of the woman was first prophesied in Eden right after the fall of Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:15).

8:44 murderer from the beginning. Evidently, the first child of Satan was Cain, who slew his brother Abel, no doubt at the instigation of Satan (I John 3:8-12). Since that first murder, the devil has been seeking to slay men and women before they can become children of God through faith in Christ, using his own children whenever he can to accomplish it.

8:44 father of it. As the father of lies, the devil deceived our first parents with the lie that they would become “as gods” through obeying his word rather than God’s Word (Genesis 3:1-5). This lie of “humanism”—that men and women, as the apex of the evolutionary process, are the true gods of the world—has been deceiving and drawing people away from the true God of creation ever since. It has assumed various forms in different times and places, but it is always essentially the same old lie of Satan, “which deceiveth the whole world” (Revelation 12:9). Thus, he is author of the great lie of evolution, seeking to understand and control the world without its Creator. He has thereby deceived himself first of all, convincing himself that both he and God had evolved out of the primeval chaos (as in all the ancient mythical cosmogonies which he must have taught his own earliest human children).