Robert
Lyon is a retired clergyman who divides his time between
Guelph, Ontario and Melaque, Mexico. He taught high
school English, Latin, Greek and science, and served
as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve,
retiring in the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. His latest
book, Don't Throw Out Your Bible, is now in
print.
“Why
do elephants paint their toenails?”
“So why,” Willie asks Joe, “do elephants
paint their toenails red?”
Joe replies, “I dunno.”
Willie explains, “So that they can hide in cherry trees.”
Joe says, “I’ve never seen any elephants hiding
in cherry trees.”
“See!” says Willie, “It works!”
The
Devil’s greatest trick, as Baudelaire and many after him
have said, is to convince people that he doesn’t exist.
See, it works!
If
you’ve lived through any of the wars of the Twentieth
Century; if you’ve followed any of the political machinations
of the Twenty-first Century; if you read newspapers or watch
TV; if you’re even remotely in touch with what goes on
in your own heart — you know that evil exists. That doesn’t
mean you know for sure what it is, or in what mode it exists.
But you know that it is, and that it does.
Perhaps
it’s a malevolent other-worldly personality; or perhaps,
as St Augustine says, evil is a deprivation, the absence of
good, just as darkness is the absence of light and cold is the
absence of heat. (Yet we still say: Shut the door and don’t
let the cold in.) But however we understand it, evil is insidious,
pervasive, anti-life, and to those of us who are believers,
it’s anti-God. We try — but not very successfully
— to understand how evil can exist in a good God’s
universe. Some of us believe that’s what Jesus came to
deal with by dying and rising from the dead.
But for a lot of people, the way that many Christians try to
explain the existence of evil — Satan, demons, rebel angels,
the Fall of Adam and Eve — seems to be on the same level
as elephants with painted toenails hiding in cherry trees. That
explanation “works” if you’re into circular
reasoning, but there’s no objective way to validate the
circle. The result, then, is that people with reasonable doubts
may tend, as we say, to throw out the baby with the bathwater
— to reject the Jesus story because of the improbable
imagery and legends that have become associated with it.
So
what I want to do in this essay is to examine those passages
where the Bible speaks of Satan, explore what they mean, and
see how we might best understand such passages today. To begin,
we need some rough ballpark dates, so that we can see where
the various books of Scripture, particularly those of the Old
Testament, fit into the history of the Jewish people.
The
historical narratives of the Bible begin with Abraham, who may
date from as early as 1800 BC (Genesis 12). The Exodus from
Egypt under Moses is traditionally dated at 1446 BC. We can
safely place King Saul around 1050 BC, David at 1035 BC, Solomon
at 970 BC, and the division of the kingdom under Rehoboam and
Jeroboam at 930 BC. The Northern kingdom, Israel, was conquered
by the Assyrians in 722 BC and the Southern kingdom, Judah,
by the Babylonians in 586 BC. The Exile in Babylon lasted until
538 BC, and after the Jews returned from Babylon the Temple
was rebuilt by 516 BC. The introductory chapters of Genesis
(1 to 11) seem to have been added later, as the narratives began
to be assembled, to set them in a unifying theological framework.
So
the sources from which most of the Pentateuch (the five books,
Genesis through Deuteronomy) was composed would have come from
the period between 1800 BC and 1400 BC. The sources for Joshua
and Judges would have come from the period between 1486 BC and
1050 BC. And the sources for the books of Samuel and Kings would
have come from between 1050 BC and 600 BC. Those books may all
have been compiled more or less in their present form by the
time of the Exile. Isaiah wrote in Jerusalem around 700 BC,
the time of the Assyrian assault on Israel. Jeremiah wrote around
600 BC, during the Babylonian assault on Judah. Zechariah wrote
around 500 BC, after the return from the Exile. The books of
Chronicles were written after the return from the Exile, and
if Ezra was their author, that would put them around 400 BC.
The story of Job is an ancient tradition, perhaps from as far
back as the Patriarchs, but scholars date the writing of the
book of Job, as we now have it, from anywhere between 700 and
300 BC.
There
are two peculiarities in Scripture that got me started on this
inquiry. The first peculiarity is that, of the 22 occurrences
of the Hebrew word “satan” in the Old Testament,
the earliest doesn’t appear until 1 Samuel 29:4 -- after
1000 BC — where the word means nothing more than a human
adversary; the word “satan” does not appear at all
in Genesis through Judges. The second peculiarity occurs in
the Chronicles, which are a post-Exilic revision of the Biblical
narrative from Genesis through Kings: At 2 Samuel 24:1, we read
that it was God who “moved David” to commit the
sin of conducting a census (David’s sin lay in trusting
the statistics rather than God). But at 1 Chronicles 21:1, the
writer attributes this temptation not to God but to an evil
personality named Satan. Now, one can understand the Chronicler’s
motive of not wanting to attribute temptation to God, and one
can also understand Samuel’s “calvinism” that
recognizes God’s sovereignty as the ultimate source of
everything. But one must wonder what shift had taken place in
the Jewish world-view over the several centuries between those
two, that Ezra felt a need to “correct” the sacred
tradition.
The
uses of “satan” in Samuel and Kings all correspond
to the use at 1 Samuel 29:4, where the Philistines are suspicious
of letting David join their side lest he be secretly an “adversary”.
At 2 Samuel 19:22, David persuades some ne’er-do-wells
not to become his adversaries. At 1 Kings 5:4, Solomon rejoices
that he has neither adversary nor misfortune. At 1 Kings 11:14
and again at 11:23 and 25, God raises up human adversaries to
Solomon. At Psalm 109:6, David prays about another ne’er-do-well
who is bad-mouthing him, and asks that there may be an adversary
to oppose him, someone like a plaintiff or a prosecutor. And
at Psalm 71:13, an old man wishes that his adversaries —
his accusers — might be put to shame. In all of these
instances, the “satan” is human, and not at all
other-worldly, even when sent by God. Moreover, the word “satan”
is used in those instances as a generic noun, identifying a
person who behaves in a particular role, not as a proper name.
Then
we come to the occurrences in the books from the Exile and afterwards.
Eleven of those occurrences are in the first two chapters of
Job. Here, “the satan” — still generic, not
a proper name — is certainly an other-worldly sort of
being, but he’s not the devil who legend says was previously
cast out from heaven. Not cast out, indeed, for though he’s
a shady character, he’s able to enter heaven, crash God’s
staff meeting, and induce God to a wager. (But in truth, as
Einstein said, “God does not play dice with the universe.”).
This “satan” is more like a self-appointed prosecutor
who becomes an amicus curiae. He is a literary device whom the
author uses to initiate the conflict, in much the same way as
he uses Mrs Job, who counsels her husband to “Curse God
and die.” And then when those two have performed their
function, they disappear from the story, never to be seen again.
(Job gets more children in chap 42, but there’s no Mrs
Job there.)
The
only two places in the Old Testament where we see “satan”
used as an actual name are at 1 Chronicles 21:1 (above) and
at Zechariah 3:1,2. The former, as mentioned, substitutes Satan
for God as David’s tempter, while in the latter we see
Satan trying to discourage a scruffy looking High Priest after
God has promised to build the New Jerusalem. Both instances
occur after the return from the Exile. The Hebrew root “s-t-n”
also occurs in other forms, as for example, in Zechariah 3:1
as the verb form “l’sitnao”, “to accuse
him”, and in Ezra 4:6 as the noun “sitnah”,
“an accusation”. “Satan” as a name is
clearly a later and derivative usage.
It
seems likely, then, that Satan as an evil other-worldly personality
did not originate in Judaism. The timing of its appearance suggests
that this God-Devil dualism appears in Judaism only after contact
with the Babylonians and Persians during the Exile. And even
then, the idea seems to have progressed by stages from “the
satan” as a tolerated agent of the heavenly court, to
“Satan” as a downright malevolent adversary. But
by the time we reach the New Testament, we find Peter saying,
“Be sober. Be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls
around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour”
(1 Peter 5:8). (“Diabolos”, from which we get the
English word “devil”, is the standard Greek translation
of the Hebrew “satan”. So “your adversary
the devil” is a clever Hebrerw-Greek redundancy.)
What
we have to recognize about the New Testament is that its writers
were people of their time, immersed in the world-view(s) of
their time, just as we are people of our time, immersed in the
world-view(s) of our time. We tend to be only vaguely aware
of our world-views, until they’re challenged, just as
fish are only vaguely aware that they’re immersed in water
— until they aren’t. A clear example of this outside
influence on New Testament thought can be seen in the epistle
of Jude, who remarks that “the angels who did not keep
their proper domain, but left their own abode, [God] has reserved
in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the
great day” (Jude 6). This doctrine of fallen angels, a
fanciful interpretation of Genesis 6:4, actually comes from
a Jewish apocalyptic work known as the Book of Enoch. Enoch
was written maybe around 300 BC, but today it is not recognized
as part of anyone’s Bible, except by a tiny Ethiopian
Jewish sect, and by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
Here’s what Enoch tells us about the fallen angels: “They
have gone to the daughters of men upon the earth, and have slept
with the women, and have defiled themselves, and revealed to
them all kinds of sins. And the women have borne giants, and
the whole earth has thereby been filled with blood and unrighteousness”
(Enoch 4:6).
So
if there really aren’t any elephants hiding in our cherry
trees, how shall we read those passages where the New Testament
writers speak of the devil and demons? And more importantly,
how should we understand Jesus’ apparent belief in the
devil and demons? The fact that the New Testament writers understood
the world as men of their own time, does not make them wrong
theologically. Paul also spoke about “bowels of mercy”
and about “believ[ing] in your heart”: both of which
are examples of faulty physiology and faulty psychology —
but we certainly understand and agree with what Paul meant.
So if you want to resist temptation, and if it helps you to
do so by identifying the temptation with a mythic face, maybe
that is not silliness but a useful self-help technique. As for
the New Testament healings of possessed persons, the witnesses
and the writers reported honestly what they saw, in the terms
in which they understood what they saw. That’s what witnesses
do, and it doesn’t mean that those healings didn’t
happen.
But
what about Jesus? If, as some manuscript versions of Matthew
24:36 tell us, even Jesus didn’t know the time of his
second coming, might there not have been other things that,
consistent with being truly human, he also didn’t know?
After all, he did have to “grow in wisdom and stature”
(Luke 2:52) like the rest of us. On the other hand, if Jesus
did know that there is no real devil (assuming for the sake
of the argument that there isn’t one), his important preaching
of salvation and the kingdom would have gotten impossibly bogged
down if he had wasted time trying to correct his audience’s
metaphysics. Jesus spoke to people where they were at in the
hills of Palestine, just as we need to speak to people where
they are at today in the hills of their own minds.
But
even if the devil really is only a mythic personification —
which this discussion certainly does not prove, indeed cannot
prove — that personification could never have appeared
if there were not some significant reality behind it. How then
might that affect our take on Jesus and the gospel? The short
answer is: We need them even more than ever! For if we can no
longer say with Eve, “The serpent tempted me” —
or with Flip Wilson, “The devil made me do it” —
then we’re reduced to Pogo’s truly awful realization
that “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”
But
even that awful realization comes with some encouragement. At
Genesis 4:7, where the writer personifies sin poetically but
doesn’t put a face on it, he says: “Sin is crouching
at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it”
. That “must” is good news, for it implies “can”.
James, the Lord’s brother, on the other hand, who believed
in the devil, was certainly not going to let us use the devil
as an excuse. “Resist the devil,” he says, “and
he will flee from you” (James 4:7). That’s another
“can”. So whether we think there’s a devil
hiding in our cherry trees or not, evil is real and it needs
to be identified and resisted. And we ought to have discovered
by now, first, that we have no ultimate compulsion to do so
unless there really is a righteous Creator, and second, that
we have no assurance of forgiveness for our failures to do so
apart from Jesus and his gospel.
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