From Chaos to Satan: The Story of Evil in the Bible, Part 2
This is the second of two posts on evil in the Bible. The first post lays out a lesser-known Old Testament idea of evil. This post describes a more familiar New Testament view, where evil takes on personality.
The point of these essays is to urge Christians to re-embrace the earlier Old Testament view, which is rooted in the creation texts and underlies the Old Testament’s Deuteronomic history, the Wisdom Books, and the sophisticated theology of the prophets. This creational/prophetic outlook is more subtle than the simpler New Testament view that credits the Devil for much evil. And this is why I’ve devoted the first post to explaining this older and less familiar outlook.
Because the creational/prophetic view grows out of the creation texts it opens insights into social justice and different religions and cultures. And importantly, it gives us a new lens through which we understand and act against climate change.
This essay traces the rhetorical development of “the satan,” through both testaments. The satan as a character rarely appears in the Old Testament. He or it isn’t a proper name, nor possesses personality, nor even is all that bad at least not until the Second Temple period.
By Jesus’ time, Satan is a full-blown problem. He has acquired a menacing persona, commands an army of deplorables, and, according to John’s Gospel, runs the whole world. Satan is a minor, but colorful, actor in the New Testament. He is important as a metaphor for the intractable difficulties people face and serves as a contrast to the power of Jesus’ saving ministry and emerging kingdom.
Before we elaborate on Satan’s career through the Bible, we’ll recap the first essay’s conclusions about evil as human sin and chaos.
The Creational Prophetic View of Evil
Before the Babylonian Exile, Israel credited evil to human sin. God didn’t make, according to the Bible, an adversarial power. Neither was evil around when God started organizing chaos (Genesis 1.2). When we read the Old Testament, we can’t credit the bad things that counter God’s creative goodness to an evil character. This means that evil arises from some malfunction in what God has made that has a capacity to un-create the whole world. There is no other source of conflict with God other than, let’s face it, people.
It’s like buying an automobile “lemon” that looks beautiful but whose doors have fallen off before the new owner can drive it out of the dealer showroom. By Genesis’ sixth chapter, things have gone so badly for creation and creator alike that the whole enterprise nearly collapses into its pre-created state of chaos—dark, wild water, now with corpses.
Genesis confronts the reader with an exquisitely made world that functions beautifully, except for one element, humanity. People, not rocks or catfish or stars, turn out to be spectacularly destructive, a problem made more curious by the fact that the Creator made them on the pattern of the divine nature.
This post is a study of Satan and evil. It would have been useful if there was an independent bad guy to account for the glorious and fascinating mess that creation had become even before God enlists Abraham as a partner. A fully functioning evil presence, like the bad gods in neighboring cultures, would not only have let humanity off the hook, but the Creator as well.
So the creation story gives us the, to put it charitably, “complicated” nature of the world and its occupants that will serve as a backdrop for the rest of the Bible, but really the rest of history.
The reader of Genesis reaches the end of the first chapter expecting a bright future for the fresh made world and instead sees even the first humans evicted from paradise. The narrative moves on to the murder of Abel, a catastrophic Flood, the Plagues in Egypt, and the eventual destruction of Israel in the exiles.
The problems and suffering are appalling. And the Bible stubbornly insists that all these upheavals originate within the created order. People get the blame, at least up until Assyria and Babylon drive many of Israel’s occupants into new societies that have other theories about evil’s origin.
It’s startling to ponder that Israel’s nationhood collapsed less than 300 years after David and Solomon’s reigns got it started. Then, for 700 years, leading up Christianity’s start, Israel existed under the heavy hand of some empire’s domination. Israel’s existence is like that of a little business that is bought out by a huge corporation. Then it is sold and acquired again and again.
This is Israel’s fate. At length Israel is a client population within Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, Egypt, and Rome. After Alexander the Great’s disruptive conquest in the 4th century bce, the Jewish people find themselves mixed in with countless societies around the Mediterranean world and Mesopotamia.
I mention the exiles and deportations in this discussion of evil because the Old Testament prophets interpreted the catastrophe of exile in the light of the creation-sin-consequence theology we’ve just described. Just as the sinful first humans, Adam and Eve, were banished from Eden as a consequence of their mistrust of God, so was Israel banished from the Eden of Canaan as a consequence of its mistrust of God. And the prophets are eloquent in making this connection.
We can restate the above this way: the traditional ex nihilo idea of creation, namely the belief that God made everything from nothing, supports the idea that evil has no existence that doesn’t originate in God. Bad things happen because the creatures God has created mess up God’s plan. Evil has a historic rather than an ontic character. “Ontic character” means, “Evil is not actually a thing.” Evil is a reorganization or disorganization of created goodness back into chaos.
And to repeat, the first essay elaborates on these ideas at greater length.
How Satan Became a Thing
So, Israel assumed its now familiar identity as a minority population in the cities of the Mediterranean world after a succession of competing empires overran and exploited it. Israel became less a kingdom and more a religion, Judaism. This is why by the first century in the Common Era the Apostle Paul travels from one Jewish enclave to the next in large cities around the Mediterranean world.
As a subgroup living within powerful empires, Jews came to understand themselves, their God, and the world in new ways.
For example, in 732 bce the Assyrian deportations of people from Israel’s 10 northern tribes resulted in the loss of their identity and faith. The well-known expression, “lost tribes of Israel” is fitting. Babylon’s later deportation and resettlement of the people of Judah led to a flourishing of Jewish culture. Babylon settled Judahites together in one district in Babylon, a tactic that led to a surprising flourishing of Judaism outside Palestine.
A generation later, Babylon’s control collapsed in the face of the advancing Persian armies. The Persian Empire, a more peaceable and tolerant regime, replaced that of the Babylonians. It was during the Persian period that the rabbis and scholars assembled much of what we call the “Old Testament.”
Seven hundred years before the rise of Christianity, the Hebrew people needed to reinvent most aspects of their identity. They’d lost their king, land, and Temple. They needed to learn how to survive, worship in the absence of a Temple; interpret their recent demise, remember their heritage, evaluate the vibrant cultures that enveloped them, and listen again for how God was inviting them into a new vocation.
During this era of theological ferment, the Jewish people encountered dualistic and individualistic thinking. By this, I mean that good and bad qualities coalesced into personalities. For example, messianism, the idea that a liberating hero figure would deliver his people from oppression, was a prominent feature in several religions.
Additionally, during this time, the Jewish people began to think of evil, not so much as the natural consequence of its own sin, but as an entity, which went about creating trouble in the world.
During the long period that the Jews lived under Persian authority, the religion, Zoroastrianism, exerted influence on the rabbis and ordinary people. Zoroastrianism’ s main project was for goodness to prevail over evil. The spiritual being, Angra Mainyu, was Zoroastrianism’s embodiment of evil. Angra Mainyu did not issue from Ahura-Mazda, Zoroastrianism’s top god. Angra was an independent power.
Zoroastrianism saw reality as consisting of two aspects–a good entity and a bad. Evil was not a state of suffering or the seeming intelligence of bad fortune. Evil was a thing. And it was out to get people.
The Jewish populations dwelling in Persian places were watching all of this. They could scarcely avoid this dualistic thinking. Neither could they resist taking it into their religious outlook.
From Chaos to Satan
Just before Christianity’s arrival, Israel’s idea of human wickedness as God’s main opponent merged with the idea of evil as an independent power. Nailing down when and why this shift took place may never be possible. Israel may have simply borrowed this idea from its neighbors. The Jewish people may have felt that the evils around them were so sinister and unstoppable that they could never explain them as consequences of their own disobedience.
Not only did evil become a distinct entity with creature-like attributes, but these took up location in the old idea of the satan. The satan in much of the Old Testament was not an individual but a function. The function was what a district attorney does in bringing charges or prosecuting. Satan meant accuser. In fact, Bible translators have rendered many of the satan’s Old Testament occurrences not with the name, Satan, but with the function, “accuser.”
Somehow the rich idea of chaos as God’s main opponent gave way to Satan as the adversary. Even a cursory look at the Bible’s use of the word, “satan” over time leaves little doubt that Israel had come into a new consciousness about the workings of evil.
We may not understand why Second Temple Jews and early Christians felt that chaos could no longer capture evil’s depth and power. Nor could we understand why Satan proved to be so apt. But we certainly can observe in the language of Old Testament texts over time that a shift took place and the old idea of chaos transformed into the new metaphor of the Devil.
What follows are four indications of this shift.
First: One Old Testament author felt uncomfortable with the traditional idea that God performed un-god-like mischief and substituted Satan as the culprit.
There is one story in the Old Testament that bristles with significance into the evolution of evil through the books in the Old Testament. In 2 Samuel 24.1 God is angry with Israel and wants David to take up a census. Now, taking up a census is in the biblical value system a wrong thing to do because it gives human kings too much power. With a population count they can collect taxes and recruit for the military. So, when God goads David to do this wrongful act, it appears to place God on the side of evil.
The text reads:
Again, the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, ‘Go, count the people of Israel and Judah.’ (2 Samuel 24.1)
After the Exile, the Chronicler, who lived 500 years after the writing of 2 Samuel, wanted to retell this story. But the Chronicler was reluctant about attributing evil to God. So, he plugged “Satan” into that spot in the narrative:
Satan stood up against Israel, and incited David to count the people of Israel. (1 Chronicles 21.1)
One might say that the Chronicler had a new culprit to plug into that old story, a character who hadn’t gelled into an individual at the time when the earlier text was composed.
Second: The history of the Hebrew word, “satan” illustrates this move away from a creational/prophetic view of evil to a post exilic/embodied view.
Below is a listing of the occurrences of the world satan through the Old Testament
The Satan Through the Old Testament
| Text | Snippet of Verse | Translation | Notes | |
| 1 | Numbers 22.22 | the angel of the Lord took his stand in the road as his adversary. | adversary | lə-śā-ṭān, Used as a function |
| 2 | Numbers 22.32 | The angel of the Lord said to him, ‘Why have you struck your donkey these three times? I have come out as an adversary, because your way is perverse before me. | adversary | lə-śā-ṭān, Used as one who stands against |
| 3 | 1 Samuel 29.4 | the commanders of the Philistines said to him, ‘Send the man back, so that he may return to the place that you have assigned to him; he shall not go down with us to battle, or else he may become an adversary to us in the battle. | adversary | lə-śā-ṭān, Used as function |
| 4 | 2 Samuel 19.22 | But David said, ‘What have I to do with you, you sons of Zeruiah, that you should today become an adversary to me? | adversary | lə-śā-ṭān; used as function |
| 5 | 1 Kings 5.4 | But now the Lord my God has given me rest on every side; there is neither adversary nor misfortune. | adversary | śā-ṭān, no indefinite article, used as function, the adversary is a human |
| 6 | 1 Kings 11.14 | Then the Lord raised up an adversary against Solomon, Hadad the Edomite; he was of the royal house in Edom. | adversary | śā-ṭān, no indefinite article, used as function, the adversary is a human |
| 7 | 1 Kings 11.23 | God raised up another adversary against Solomon, Rezon son of Eliada, | adversary | śā-ṭān, the adversary is a hman |
| 8 | 1 kings 11.25 | He was an adversary of Israel all the days of Solomon, making trouble as Hadad did | adversary | śā-ṭān, the adversary is a hman |
| 9 | 1 Chronicles 21.1 | Satan stood up against Israel, and incited David to count the people of Israel. | Satan | The orinal Hebrew is no different than other OT uses but translators make this into a proper name. The same story is told in 2 Samuel 24.1 in which God incites David to conduct a census. |
| 10 | Job 1.6 | One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them. | Satan | haś-śā-ṭān. Recent scholarship has seen Job as a later addition to the Old Testament, which may account for its use of “satan” as a proper name. The “satan” in Job is an extension of God’s wishes and work. |
| 11 | Job 1.7 | The Lord said to Satan, ‘Where have you come from?’ Satan answered the Lord, ‘From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it. | Satan | haś-śā-ṭān. Recent scholarship has seen Job as a later addition to the Old Testament, which may account for its use of “satan” as a proper name. The “satan” in Job is an extension of God’s wishes and work. |
| 12 | Job 1.8 | The Lord said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job? | Satan | haś-śā-ṭān. Recent scholarship has seen Job as a later addition to the Old Testament, which may account for its use of “satan” as a proper name. The “satan” in Job is an extension of God’s wishes and work. |
| 13 | Job 1.9 | Then Satan answered the Lord, ‘Does Job fear God for nothing? | Satan | haś-śā-ṭān. Recent scholarship has seen Job as a later addition to the Old Testament, which may account for its use of “satan” as a proper name. The “satan” in Job is an extension of God’s wishes and work. |
| 14 | Job 1.12 | The Lord said to Satan, ‘Very well, all that he has is in your power; only do not stretch out your hand against him!’ So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord. | Satan | haś-śā-ṭān. Recent scholarship has seen Job as a later addition to the Old Testament, which may account for its use of “satan” as a proper name. The “satan” in Job is an extension of God’s wishes and work. |
| 15 | Job 2.1 | One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them to present himself before the Lord. | Satan | haś-śā-ṭān. Recent scholarship has seen Job as a later addition to the Old Testament, which may account for its use of “satan” as a proper name. The “satan” in Job is an extension of God’s wishes and work. |
| 16 | Job 2.2 | he Lord said to Satan, ‘Where have you come from?’ Satan answered the Lord, ‘From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.’ | Satan | haś-śā-ṭān. Recent scholarship has seen Job as a later addition to the Old Testament, which may account for its use of “satan” as a proper name. The “satan” in Job is an extension of God’s wishes and work. |
| 17 | Job 2.3 | The Lord said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil. | Satan | haś-śā-ṭān. Recent scholarship has seen Job as a later addition to the Old Testament, which may account for its use of “satan” as a proper name. The “satan” in Job is an extension of God’s wishes and work. |
| 18 | Job 2.4 | Then Satan answered the Lord, ‘Skin for skin! All that people have they will give to save their lives. | Satan | haś-śā-ṭān. Recent scholarship has seen Job as a later addition to the Old Testament, which may account for its use of “satan” as a proper name. The “satan” in Job is an extension of God’s wishes and work. |
| 19 | Job 2.6 | The Lord said to Satan, ‘Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life.’ | Satan | haś-śā-ṭān. Recent scholarship has seen Job as a later addition to the Old Testament, which may account for its use of “satan” as a proper name. The “satan” in Job is an extension of God’s wishes and work. |
| 20 | Job 2.7 | So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord, and inflicted loathsome sores on Job | Satan | haś-śā-ṭān. Recent scholarship has seen Job as a later addition to the Old Testament, which may account for its use of “satan” as a proper name. The “satan” in Job is an extension of God’s wishes and work. |
| 21 | Psalm 109.6 | They say, ‘Appoint a wicked man against him; let an accuser stand on his right. | accuser | wə-śā-ṭān, conjunction, masculine, singular |
| 22 | Zechariah 3.1 | Then he showed me the high priest Joshua standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him. let an accuser stand on his right. | wə-haś-śā-ṭān Used here as a proper name. |
We can draw some conclusions from this collection of haś-śā-ṭān’s occurrences:
- Most of the other occurrences of satan in the Old Testament refer not to a personality but a function. The function is to provide an accusation.
- Satan is an uncommon word in the Old Testament. Half of these are in Job. Scholars now date Job late in the Second Temple period, which makes it unsurprising that the Satan has taken on personal qualities.
- In some places the function of haś-śā-ṭān is not in opposition to YHWH, but in alliance with YHWH.
Third: Throughout the New Testament, Satan, and references to Satan’s empire eclipse chaos as God’s prime opponent.
By the first century CE when Christians wrote of the New Testament, they comfortably and perhaps universally used the idea of Satan, at least as a metaphor, for the origin of some but not all evil that appears completely independent of God.
The Devil and Personified Evil in the New Testament
| Text | Snippet of Verse | Name | Notes | |
| 1 | Matthew 4.1 | Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. | devil | Matthew. The devil appears at crucial points in Jesus ministry. |
| 2 | Matthew 4.10 | Jesus said to him, ‘Away with you, Satan! for it is written,“Worship the Lord your God, | Satan | Gospels. Jesus uses the name Satan here. |
| 3 | Matthew 6.13 | And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. | evil one | Matthew |
| 4 | Mark 3.23 | And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, ‘He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons. | Beelzebul | Mark. Beelzebul proper name has merged with devil. |
| 5 | Mark 3.27 | But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered. | Strong man | Sovereignty over world. |
| 6 | Mark 4.15 | when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. | Satan | Jesus. Jesus uses the name Satan here. |
| 7 | Luke 4.6 | And the devil said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. | devil | Devil claims sovereignty over world. |
| 8 | Luke 4.13 | When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time. | devil | Luke. Satan is versatile using Judas’ treachery and other instruments large and small. |
| 9 | Luke 10.18 | He said to them, ‘I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. | Satan | Luke |
| 10 | Luke 13.11 | And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. | spirit | Luke. Satan is versatile using Judas’ treachery and other instruments large and small. |
| 11 | Luke 13.16 | And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free | Satan | Luke |
| 12 | Luke 22.3 | Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was one of the twelve; | Satan | Luke. Satan is versatile using Judas’ treachery and other instruments large and small. |
| 13 | Luke 22.31 | ‘Simon, Simon, listen! Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, | Satan | The devil appears at crucial points in Jesus ministry. |
| 14 | Luke 22.53 | When I was with you day after day in the temple, you did not lay hands on me. But this is your hour, and the power of darkness!’ | power of darkness | Luke |
| 15 | John 6.70 | Jesus answered them, ‘Did I not choose you, the twelve? Yet one of you is a devil.’ | a devil | A devil. Devil here does not refer to a particular personality |
| 16 | John 8.44a | You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. | a devil | John. The depth of domination by the devil is portrayed as a parent-child relationship |
| 17 | John 12.31 | Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. | ruler of world | Gospels This gives a vivid picture of how powerful personified evil has become. No proper name here despite the importance of this statement. Satan’s days are numbered and his reign is limited in duration. |
| 18 | John 13.2 | The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas | devil | John. Satan bothers Christians. The devil attacks Gentiles. Satan is versatile using Judas’ treachery and other instruments large and small. |
| 19 | John 13.27 | After he received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him. | Satan | John. Satan bothers Christians. The devil attacks Gentiles |
| 20 | John 14.30 | I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no power over me | ruler of world | Gospels |
| 21 | John 16.11 | the ruler of this world has been condemned. | ruler of world | gospels |
| 22 | Acts 5.3 | Ananias,’ Peter asked, ‘why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit | Satan | Luke. Satan bothers Christians. The devil attacks Gentiles |
| 23 | Acts 10.38 | God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil | satan | Luke |
| 24 | Acts 26.18 | so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God | Satan | Luke. Christians are given some freedom from evil one’s control. |
| 25 | Romans 16.20 | The God of peace will shortly crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. | Satan | Demise of Satan assured. |
| 26 | 1 Corinthians 5.5 | you are to hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord. | Satan | Paul. Satan seen here as useful for kingdom purposes. |
| 27 | 1 Corinthians 7.5 | Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. | Satan | Paul. Cautions about evil in everyday life. |
| 28 | 2 Corinthians 2.11 | And we do this so that we may not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs | Satan | Paul. Cautions about evil in everyday life. |
| 29 | 2 Corinthians 4.4 | In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, | god of this world | Paul. Claims sovereignty over world. |
| 30 | 2 Corinthians 6.15 | What agreement does Christ have with Beliar? Or what does a believer share with an unbeliever? | Belair | From Hebrew word refering to “worthlessness or wickedness” |
| 31 | 2 Corinthians 11.14 | And no wonder! Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. | Satan | Paul. Cautions about evil in everyday life. |
| 32 | 2 Corinthians 12.7 | Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given to me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated | Satan | Paul. Satan doesn’t appear to be an ultimate adversary, but rather an opponent who can bother believers in the minor details of their lives. |
| 33 | Ephesians 2.2 | in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. | ruler of the power of the air | Pauline |
| 34 | Ephesians 4.27 | and do not make room for the devil. | devil | Pauline. Cautions about evil in everyday life. |
| 35 | Ephesians 6.11 | Put on the whole armour of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. | devil | Pauline. Cautions about evil in everyday life. |
| 36 | Ephesians 6.16 | With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. | evil one | Pauline. Cautions about evil in everyday life. |
| 37 | Colossians 1.13 | He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, | power of darkness | Paul. Christians are given some freedom from evil one’s control. People are powerless against evil one |
| 38 | 1 Thessalonians 2.18 | For we wanted to come to you—certainly I, Paul, wanted to again and again—but Satan blocked our way. | Satan | Paul. Cautions about evil in everyday life. Satan can prevent necessary travel. |
| 39 | 2 Thessalonians 2.9 | The coming of the lawless one is apparent in the working of Satan, who uses all power, signs, lying wonders, | Satan | Pauline. The entire community is delivered from Satan’s power |
| 40 | 2 Thessalonians 3.3 | But the Lord is faithful; he will strengthen you and guard you from the evil one. | evil one | Pauline. The entire community is delivered from Satan’s power |
| 42 | 1 Timothy 1.20 | among them are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have turned over to Satan, so that they may learn not to blaspheme. | Satan | Paul. Here Satan is no overwhelming power but a vigorous disciplinarian who can contribute to people’s redemption. |
| 43 | 1 Timothy 3.6 | He must not be a recent convert, or he may be puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. | devil | Pauline. Cautions about evil in everyday life. The devil whose accusing role sucks people back into his thrall. |
| 44 | 1 Timothy 5.15 | For some have already turned away to follow Satan. | Satan | Pauline. Cautions about evil in everyday life. Satan constantly places the community in danger. |
| 45 | 2 Timothy 2.26 | and that they may escape from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will. | devil | Paul. Pauline. Cautions about evil in everyday life. |
| 46 | Hebrews 2.14 | Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, | devil | Author of Hebrews |
| 47 | James 4.7 | Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. | devil | James. Pauline. Cautions about evil in everyday life. |
| 48 | 1 Peter 5.8 | Discipline yourselves; keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. | devil | Peter. Pauline. Cautions about evil in everyday life. |
| 49 | 1 John 2.13 | I am writing to you, young people, because you have conquered the evil one. | evil one | John. The entire community is delivered from Satan’s power |
| 50 | 1 John 3.8 | 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. | the devil | John. The depth of domination by the devil is portrayed as a parent-child relationship. There’s a fundamental opposition between God and devil. |
| 51 | 1 John 3.10 | The children of God and the children of the devil are revealed in this way: | the devil | John. Parent child analogy between devil and humans |
| 52 | 1 John 5.19 | We know that we are God’s children, and that the whole world lies under the power of the evil one. | evil one | John. Evil. The “one” is implied |
| 53 | Revelation 2.9 | I know your affliction and your poverty, even though you are rich. I know the slander on the part of those who say that they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan. | Satan | John. Satan bothers Christians. The devil attacks Gentiles |
| 54 | Revelation 12.10 | the accuser of our comrades has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God | accuser | John. Accusation, as in OT, central to devil’s activities. The cosmic defeat of Satan anticipated here. |
| 55 | Revelation 12.12 | But woe to the earth and the sea, for the devil has come down to you with great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!’ | devil | John. The devil is able to be and inevitably will be defeated. The cosmic defeat of Satan anticipated here. |
| 56 | Revelation 13.2 | And the beast that I saw was like a leopard, its feet were like a bear’s, and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth. And the dragon gave it his power and his throne and great authority. | dragon | John of Patmos. Mythological monsters may be images of the devil. In the last days Satan summons Antichrist to serve him. |
By the time of Jesus’ public ministry Satan or some personified expression of evil has assumed an active role in the drama.
When we list all the occurrences of Satan or Devil in the New Testament, several generalizations emerge.
- Other words for Satan like the Devil or Evil One appear commonplace. Despite the diversity of names, evil has a single center.
- The Devil is not a formidable adversary for Jesus. Evil’s only direct attack on Jesus occurs during the Temptations in the wilderness. The lures that Satan presents to Jesus are the seductions that any leader might face, namely the attraction of material goods (stones to loaves); celebrity (the Temple tower stunt); or dominating power (rule over the world). Jesus fends these off without struggle and Satan does not challenge Jesus directly again.
- Several New Testament texts state that the Devil’s influence is time-limited and on the brink of ending.
- Satan is dangerously seductive at a human, not cosmic, level. As Jesus moves through his ministry, he encounters people who the Devil has tormented, such as the bent over woman in Luke 13. Jesus, with apparent ease, releases demon-bothered people. Jesus is like the generous motorist with jumper cables in the car trunk. He stops repeatedly and gets people on the road again.
- Satan does not orchestrate Jesus’ crucifixion. Satan motivates Judas but we can hardly blame the Devil for the community-wide twists and turns that succeed in raising Jesus’ cross. Readers of the Passion see moral mediocrity of people animated by cowardice, rivalry, political expediency, buck passing, and mob psychology.
- The Bible’s strongest statement of the Devil’s cosmic importance comes with the Gospel According to John’s description of Satan as “ruler of the world.” It is doubtful that these isolated texts establish a ontic dualism which presents evil as an adversarial power with an origin outside of history. John does not elaborate on these statements, but does declare that Satan’s defeat is at hand.
Fourth: Chaos conflict and ongoing creation reappear triumphantly in The Book of Revelation
In the New Testament, evil takes on personality in the figure of Satan. The language of chaos has completely disappeared. I say “completely” because there are faint glimmers of the old chaos metaphor. For example, Jesus calms a violent storm in all three synoptic gospels, (Matthew 8:23–27, Mark 4:35–41, and Luke 8:22–25), an act reminiscent of several Old Testament passages where God brings order to chaos.
The faint glimmers of the old chaos and creation metaphor turn into a blinding in the Book of Revelation. Revelation brings together embodied evil and renewed creation.
Revelation 21.1 declares that the sea ceases to exist in the world to come. The absence of chaos, implied in the disappearance of the sea, signals the arrival of the kingdom of God.
More than this detail about the sea, Revelation’s big revelation is that a new creation comes and that the heavens and earth mentioned in Bible’s first verse will realize the glorious destiny implied in their creation in the first place.
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
‘See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them; (Revelation 21.1-3)
The Snake and the Fallen Angel
Before we summarize, there are two additional topics that readers may have been looking for as they worked through these two essays: the Devil as fallen angel; and Satan’s presence in the Garden of Eden’s snake.
- The primary biblical passage that people use to argue that Satan came from a fallen angel is Isaiah 14.12. This passage, however, refers to a king of Babylon who has lost power and fallen from a previous exalted status.
The Wikipedia articles on Lucifer and fallen angels make clear that after in the years after the closing of the Old and New Testament canon, a lot of speculation floated around, which sought to string together bits and pieces from various writings to justify an array of new beliefs. It is this environment that we locate the speculation that passages such as Isaiah 14.12 can be interpreted as declaring that Lucifer is Satan.
- The idea that the Devil was behind the snake’s conversation with Eve is also a first century speculation that has persisted in tradition despite the fact that Genesis gives no warrant for this interpretation. Seeing the Devil in the snake first appears in the first century CE apocryphal book, The Wisdom of Solomon 2.24. “…But through the Devil’s envy death entered the world…” We should not be surprised that early Christians and others who were enveloped by the idea of embodied evil and mythological creatures would read their own views back into ancient texts that were nearly a thousand years old.
Summary
We’ve established two things in this second half of our study of evil or Satan in the Bible.
First, Satan as a personality is not an Old Testament idea. Or, put more accurately, Satan’s “existence” only started to gel with the development of the Jewish diaspora, when Jews started learning about what neighboring societies believed.
Second, the Devil is a New Testament character. But nowhere does the New Testament suggest that Satan has being outside of what God has made. Satan is a useful metaphor. Jesus’ public ministry uses the Satan metaphor to make vivid sin’s grip on a person and to demonstrate God’s unfolding triumph.
Conclusions
The other day, I received an inexpensively printed bi-fold brochure from a sectarian church group. There was one Bible quote on the brochure: “…the whole world belongs to the devil.” (1 John 5.19; Worldwide English Version). This verse is the New Testament’s most extreme statement of the place of the devil. And this translation sharpens the place and power of evil to the point that when it stands alone one is likely to conclude that wickedness engulfs all of creation.
Our survey of both testaments leads to a very different conclusion. Evil is a perplexing reality that is part of the created world. The Bible uses powerful metaphors to give us mental tools with which to deal with the forces around us that attack God’s work and cause vast and intractable suffering. We’ve explored two of those, chaos and the devil. These do not account for everything that is wrong in creation and are sometimes ineffective or distracting. The fact that the Bible itself moves from a sin and chaos metaphor to a demonological conception of evil ought to encourage us to drop outmoded conceptualizations of evil and think freshly about the forces that counter all that is good.
That Satan is a metaphor is an insight that Church leaders need to keep in mind. Once the devil becomes as real as any other person problems follow. Arthur Miller’s play, “The Crucible,” retells the story of the Salem Witch Trials and gives a sobering view of what can happen when demon possession or occult activity becomes a sin. The effort to ferret out and banish demon possession is far more “demonic” than interacting with personified evil.
On the other hand, dropping all language that personifies evil, demythologizing the New Testament, as recommended by theologians like Rudolph Bultmann and Harvey Cox, robs Christians of important tools for interpreting their experience.
It’s true that spirits and demons do not swoop down on people like the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz. This does not mean that insidious influences, which bring terrible suffering, do not exist. Historians recognize that the widespread practice of enslaving workers through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in the United States continues to bring suffering to their descendants. One scholar coined the phrase the “afterlife of slavery” to describe a persistent evil force that is just as destructive as the people in the first century believed demon possession to be.
A second implication of these two posts on evil lies in the potential for the creative/prophetic view of evil for understanding the climate crisis. How naïve it would be to blame satanic powers for the advance of species extinctions or the record-breaking heat. But how promising it would be to view our current situation as did the great prophets. They saw injustice, human cruelty, environmental collapse, and the judgment of God as one interrelated problem. This comes close to the message that climate scientists are sending.
Psychologists and social commentators today speculate that the human mind, at least for most of the population, may not be able to react to anthropocentric climate change because it is too big a problem. We can’t fathom our own extinction or that of the non-human living world because we’ve never had to do so. Our evolution has not equipped us to interpret a mega problem like how the greenhouse effect can bring disaster in a hundred years. It’s difficult for many in the public to link heat waves and drought to petroleum based economic development.
But aren’t these too-big-to-take-in ideas the very drama that fills the pages of Genesis’ first chapters? —The intimate link between massive self-destructive human behavior, the health of the world, rising waters, the partnership between humans and animals, devolution to chaos? Are we talking about the Noah’s Ark story or the latest UN IPCC report?
The Christmas story teaches that Magi figured out by reading the stars that a king born in Palestine would usher in a new epoch. So they go to Jerusalem to learn more. What they discovered was that they knew more than the rabbis and religion officials, who were oblivious to the teaching of their own scriptures and tradition.
This is the condition of Christianity today. It has neglected its own clear and expansive teaching by overlooking real evil that challenges God’s reign and focusing on evil as personal sensuality, psychological problems, ethical mistakes, and wrong belief. Our churches encourage us to link these problems to our own immaturity or even some kind of evil order much like demons we see in Jesus’ ministry.
This must not continue.
I propose recovering creation theology’s view of sin and judgment where human waywardness registers as a beleaguered created world. There’s ample material to work with. Genesis’ first chapter is crucial. The prophets occupy about a third of the Old Testament and they represent the zenith of Israel’s theological sophistication. The Book of Revelation bristles with mythological monsters and beasts. And it provides a vivid vision of where the creator is taking the redemptive drama, which is toward New Creation.
To be clear-eyed about evil robs it of power. Evil is what people do to dismantle nature, the living world, and human community order and throw good and beautiful things back into chaos. The rich, thought-leaders, business and political leaders, religion celebrities, those who carry weapons and manage large amounts of money are most able to open the doors for chaos to come flooding in.
The children of Abraham and the followers of Jesus carry their own unique responsibility for creation. It is to side with what God is doing to bring all things to fullness in goodness, truth, and beauty. A big part of this calling is to not fall into nor tolerate the all-too-human tendency to oppose creation’s unfolding work. And knowing what evil is is an important part of this task.
