Speak of the Devil

Propers: The First Sunday in Lent, AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

If we wish to speak of the devil, we first have to talk about God.

A theme to which I often return is that the Bible is not a book, but a library. And this library was compiled over vast spans of time. Some biblical bits date back around 3000 years or so, others less than 2000. The debates over canonicity, which books ought to be included, never entirely died out. To this day, Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Bibles contain differing numbers of books in differing orders. The bare minimum is 66, penned by over 50 authors.

And that’s to say nothing of translations—some less than a decade old, others so influential as to be literary masterpieces in their own right. We do not consider the King James to be terribly accurate, academically speaking. But it is a work of art.

Taken together, the books of the Bible tell the tale of one people’s ever-evolving relationship with God, a love story chock-full of history, mythology, poetry, philosophy, legends, novels, letters, prophecies, and mystical encounters. And not surprisingly, the two main characters—Israel and God—change a lot over the course of such a sprawling narrative. The Israelites go from herdsmen and nomads through slaves and warriors to kings and exiles.

And God—well, God changes rather a lot throughout the pages of sacred writ. Of course, as good classical theists, modern Jews and Christians do not believe that God Himself actually changes. He is, after all, infinite, eternal, and transcendent. God is beyond time, beyond change. Yet our understanding of Him grows considerably. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? The only way for finite creatures to interact with the infinite Creator is for us to be forever learning, forever growing, from glory unto glory.

There are parts of the Bible, reflecting an ancient worldview, in which God seems little different from Zeus or Odin. He has a body, a wife, a family. He has a throne, a chariot, and weapons of war. He gets grumpy and jealous and frightening. In other words, He looks a lot like us, just writ large. His appetites are gigantic, His emotions gigantic, His responses gigantic. Back then every tribe had its god. Yahweh sometimes comes across simply as the tribal god of Abraham.

Such theology is deeply primitive, but also deeply human. God meets us where we’re at, in the Bible. When we wanted a pagan desert god, and had no category in our minds for anything higher than “big hero warrior,” then that’s how we saw Him. Even as that view evolved—as the Israelites came to understand that theirs wasn’t just one god amongst many, but the greatest god, perhaps the only god—they still viewed Him as moody, volatile, hungry, and kind of manic-depressive.

In such an understanding as that, there isn’t much room for the devil.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There were always demons, devils, darker spirits, haunting the tombs and the wastes. The ancient world was alive with spiritual powers beneficent, malignant, and indifferent. So is ours, if we take the time to notice. But the question of evil wasn’t much of a question. Where did evil come from? Who caused disasters and droughts and famines and wars? Why, God did, of course. Who else? He was the biggest boss, the divine King of the heavenly council.

It was God who caused weal and sent woe. Oh, they believed that He was just, mind you. They believed that He had reasons for His wrath, even if we couldn’t quite suss them out all of the time. But bad things happened for the same reason that good things did: God willed them. God caused them. God sent them.

It’s a lot like how the ancient Greek pantheon didn’t have an evil figure. Ares or Hades weren’t villains. Rather, the gods themselves were as good as they were evil. Zeus caused the Trojan War. Zeus stood behind it all. Who needs a devil when the gods are scary enough by themselves?

This understanding of God, meting out blessing and cursing, doubled down when the Israelites were sent into Exile by the Chaldeans of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The Exiles of Israel and Judah settled for generations next to the Persians of the Iranian plateau. And the Persians, who followed the prophet Zoroaster, believed in two gods: one good, and one bad, forever at war until the end of time.

The Israelite Prophets said in response to this, “No. There is One God, not two. One God causes all, both good and ill.” Theology often seems a contest between God’s sovereignty and God’s love. If He’s all-powerful, how can He be all-good? And if He’s all-good, how can He be all-powerful? Such is the conundrum of theodicy.

Now, sometime around the Exile, a remarkable little book was written to address just this pressing question, of God and good and evil: the Book of Job. And Job introduces us to a wicked tricksy fellow called the Satan.

The word “satan” simply means adversary or accuser. It had been applied at times to angels sent by God in the Torah. But it’s also a legal term. In ancient Israel, as throughout the ancient world, kings were the highest court in the land. There in the throne room stood the Accuser, the prosecuting attorney, as well as the Paraclete or Helper, the defense attorney. Both were members of the king’s court. One accused you, the other defended you, and the king then passed his judgment.

Israelites in Exile imagined God as a King, and so of course He had an Accuser, a Satan. And in Job, it’s the Satan that causes hardship and woe, to test all humankind, to prove his point against them. The devil had a job; he worked within God’s court. Now we hop ahead to the New Testament, and if references to the devil were thin upon the ground within the Hebrew Bible, then here in the Christian Scriptures he shows up chock-a-block.

The devil is everywhere in the Gospels, in the Epistles, in the Book of Revelation. And notice he no longer works for God; now we understand him to be not simply our adversary, but God’s adversary. And that’s because of Jesus. I said that our understanding of God grows throughout the Bible: His revelation to us is progressive, breaking us of our idols, showing to us His true goodness. And for Christians, the culmination of divine self-revelation is Jesus Christ.

Jesus is God in the flesh. He is Emmanuel, God-With-Us. Everything we know of God we know in Jesus Christ. The Bible exists to give us this Jesus, has no other purpose than Him. And here the devil is revealed as the enemy of God. If Satan accuses humankind, he now accuses God Himself, for God is one of us. This is why Jesus tells us that Satan has fallen like lightning from Heaven, and that He shall send to us another Paraclete, the Holy Spirit. It’s court imagery again.

You see? There is no Accuser in Heaven, He says. Jesus Christ is King and Judge of both the living and the dead; the Holy Spirit is our Paraclete, our defense attorney in the heavenly court, and both of them are God! All is God, all is love, all for us. Even our understanding of Satan’s origins evolves. He was not created evil; he couldn’t have been, for God can only make what’s good.

Satan began as an angel, as a good and holy spirit, who fell short of his intended glory and took us all down with him. Jesus, Paul, and John agree: the world isn’t bad because God makes it so; it’s bad because the serpent broke it. The fullness of God’s revelation is His love, His compassion, His mercy, His Jesus. There is no accusation in Heaven, no accuser, no enemy, no Satan. Christ has cast him down, and as God and Man are one in Christ, our judgment is Not Guilty.

So you see, one cannot really speak of the devil until we speak of God. This is not because they are opposites and equals. There is no evil god. We understand now that evil is brokenness, fallenness, injury, tragedy, and God has come to heal. Whether one understands Satan as a literal fallen angel, or simply the spirit of hubris, the personification of Creation’s rebellion against the love of God, it hardly matters. The devil shows what evil is: empty, false, ungodly, defeated, and doomed.

There is no trace of evil in God. Evil’s but a shadow, soon to fade before the light. I have seen devils in the night, somehow darker than the darkness. And the very Name of Christ puts them to flight. They cannot stand before His grace. Thus has love conquered anger, forgiveness smothered wrath, and life arisen in glory from the deepest pits of hell. Satan has fallen like lightning from Heaven. And Christ is King of all.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.