So, I spent, or rather wasted, a minute of my time following a link to a blog post provocatively titled, “Why Did God Make the Devil?” thinking to myself, “Hell, who wouldn’t want to read that?”
So I hopped on over to A Heart of God Ministries website to learn, or rather re-visited, the story about how Satan and his followers supposedly rebelled from God to establish their own kingdom. It’s right there in Isaiah 14:
12 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! 13 For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: 14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.
The blogger says that God didn’t technically create Satan; he created the angel Lucifer, who then betrayed heaven and was subsequently cast down to perdition. Lucifer must have been an influential person — er, spirit — because, as the story goes, he took a third of God’s angels with him. Darn. God sure wasn’t winning the PR campaign, was he?
In any case, from the Christian perspective, this began an epic battle between light (God) and darkness (Satan), with each vying to win the hearts and minds of man. Huh. That’s a cause for pause in and of itself. The mighty forces of God and Satan vying to win man’s affection? That seems rather sophomoric and capricious from the perspective of divine, eternal, powerful beings.
Even on the details of the story Christians can’t agree. Here is a person named Jason A. who commented on the blog post:
Most OT scholars agree that Isaiah 14 is not about Satan. Many, though less than the last group dispute Ezekiel 28. Your interpretation of that in instrumental terms is pretty fanciful and refers better to the setting for jewels(it makes much more logical and exegetical sense). I believe in Satan because Jesus says explicit things about him. It’s dangerous to overhead these OT prophecies who were written about real people, Nebuchadnezzar(Isaiah 14) and the King of Tyre( Ezekiel28)
Whatever the interpretation, the problem with this tale is, as ever, God’s omniscience. Christians can claim that God did not and would not create an evil being like Satan in the beginning. For the story to make any sense whatsoever, Satan needed to rebel as an independent agent bent on wresting power away from the almighty. But here is the rub: if God is all-knowing, he would have known well before he created Lucifer or any of the minions which among them would eventually rebel. So, yes, Yahweh actually created Lucifer knowing in advance that he would try to usurp heaven, just as Yahweh created man with the full knowledge that he would succumb to temptation in the Garden, a temptation orchestrated by — who else? — Lucifer. And this unholy cycle is complete.