The Revelation of Evil

Devil Do, by Lenka Simeckova

    

Pastor’s Epistle—January 2024

Everyone who commits sin is a child of the devil; for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil.

—1 John 3:8

Please allow me to introduce myself. I’m a man of wealth and taste. I’ve been around for a long, long year. Stole many a man’s soul, and faith.

—Sympathy for the Devil

Our middle child has outgrown most of her old stuffed animals, yet two retain their prominence of place: her plush Krampus, and her plush Jersey Devil. Yes, the pastor’s daughter delights in adorable little demons, both of which I bought for her. In fairness, they’re really more fairy tale monsters than anything else: folkloric entities limited to St Nicholas’ Day and the greater Philadelphia area, respectively. And in these particular renditions, they’re honestly quite cute.

Creatures such as Krampus are often claimed to be heathen holdovers from pre-Christian times, but most of that is bunk. Pagans don’t have devils. They didn’t need them. Their gods were bad enough. Devils, by and large, are of Christian conception, and for good reason.

The Hebrew Scriptures, which make up the bulk of the Christian Old Testament, are best taken not as a single work but as a library. They contain histories, mythologies, poetry, letters, liturgies, all witnessing to the relationship between God and His people Israel. As centuries and circumstances change, the Israelite understanding of God likewise grows. Our image of God becomes richer, deeper. He is always better, always more, than we can imagine.

In early sections of the Scriptures, God comes across as more of a god, like Zeus or Odin, cranky and flawed and often quite wicked. Such elder tales, as befits their Ancient Near Eastern milieu, concern themselves not with the morality of deity so much as divine power. Who can tell a god that he is wrong, after all? They can do whatever they like. They are, as Nietzsche might have it, beyond good and evil. Gods such as these concern themselves only with their honor and their pleasure—often the latter at expense of the former.

This is not to say that God is evil, mind you, or that God can change. He can’t. If He could, He wouldn’t be God. A changing, evil-doing deity cannot be the God of classical theism, by definition. Rather, it's some pagan idol that we've cooked up in our heads. What I am saying is that our vision of God matures over time. He doesn’t change, but our view of Him does, becomes more expansive. As Aslan said to Lucy: “Every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”

We can see this awareness developing in the Torah. When God sends angels to judge Sodom and Gomorrah for their inhospitality, Abraham says of God, “Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” The editors compiling the Books of Moses after the Exile knew very well that it wasn’t enough for God to have might; He had to have right. He had to be good, else He couldn’t very well be God.

There are demons in the Hebrew Scriptures, though they aren’t quite as we might imagine them today. These were, for the most part, personifications of harmful forces: famine, pestilence, frost, and the like. Aspects of the natural world which opposed human flourishing were afforded a reality distinct from God, if not independent of Him. God didn’t harm people; demons did. Yet concern for the sovereignty of God nevertheless led the biblical authors to depict Him as letting them loose. “Oh, I’m not going to hurt you. That’s what I pay these guys for.”

Closer to the time of Christ, we find in the Scriptures a portrayal of God that most of us would recognize: a comprehension that God is infinite, eternal, transcendent, and immanent; that in Him we all live and move and have our being; that His Spirit is the breath of all life; and that God truly is, as Plato would have it, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. He cannot do evil, for He is the Good. He cannot be false, for He is the Truth. Indeed, God is the Father of us all.

Which brings us now to Jesus. For Christians, the Scriptures’ progressive revelation of God’s nature and character culminates in the person of Jesus Christ: the Word made flesh, true God and true Man, who is both God and from God. He is the literal incarnation of God’s self-expression. Whenever we want to know what God is like, we look to Jesus. When we want to know the nature of humanity, we look to Jesus. When we seek to love our neighbor, we look to Jesus. It is Christ, and not the Bible, who reveals the face of God. The Bible tells us so.

Yet if God is so loving, so good, so utterly self-sacrificing—whence cometh evil? It can’t be from God; we get that much now. So it must come from something or someone apart from God, indeed opposed to God. Yet who could that be? The Hebrew Scriptures contain scant references to a Satan, which translates as “Adversary” or more specifically “Prosecuting Attorney”—yes, folks, Satan’s a lawyer—yet he seems to work for God, testing humankind.

In the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament, Satan comes into his own. Here he is not an agent of God, but an agent against God; not just humanity’s Adversary, but Jesus’ Adversary, and so God’s enemy. As the light of dawn banishes shadow, so the revelation of God’s goodness eradicates any notion of evil within the Godhead. Conceptually, we have to have a Satan once we know that Christ is Lord.

Yet the Satan cannot be a second God, or an entity on God’s level, for again, if there were more than one god, then neither one of them could be God. That’s classical theism 101. And so Christians came to recognize Satan, as well as evil on the whole, as good gone bad; as a creature fallen from grace. Evil itself had no substance. Just as darkness is a lack of light and cold a lack of heat, so evil is only emptiness, a lack of love, a turning from intended good.

The Devil, then, was an angel, a spiritual child of God. He fell from grace, fell for pride, fell and took all the world with him. Thus demons became fallen angels in medieval reckoning. One can see the necessity of such mythology, to make sense of evil within a world that God had made all good. Jesus reveals the truth of God, and with it the truth of the Devil. Yet not even fallen angels can thwart the will of God, not forever. Hell is harrowed by Jesus Christ, and heaven thrown open for all. Death and sin are defeated, the damned ransomed up from their graves.

As for the end of all evil, well—I often suspect that Satan’s greatest fear is that he too shall be saved at the last. Thankfully, we leave his fate in far better hands than our own, hands which we and he together once nailed to the wood of a Cross.

In Jesus. Amen.