This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Hey – it’s Monday AGAIN! What better day of the week for Monday School – “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!” No shoes? No shirt? No problem! (It’s the Vatican that’ll refuse you admittance – not me!)

Today’s Lesson: What’s The Relationship Between God And Satan? Are They Some Goofy Variation On That Old Good Cop/Bad Cop Routine Or What??

The Christian conceptions of God and Satan seem to be confused outgrowths of older religions (especially ancient Persia’s Zoroastrianism). Unlike those older religions, however, Christianity is allegedly monotheistic. Instead of positing the existence of battling gods – one good, one evil – most Christians seem to assert that there is only one God who created everything, including His archenemy, Satan. Why their God did this is not at all clear and has created a basic, unresolved (and apparently unresolvable) problem for Christian theology.

It’s worth recalling that Satan is barely mentioned in the Old Testament. As Charles Panati points out in his Sacred Origins of Profound Things (Penguin Books: 1996), the Hebrew noun satan just means “enemy”; as a verb it means “to plot against.” The ancient Hebrews “recognized no single archenemy of God who dwelt in the netherworld, for as a people they had yet to articulate a clear concept of Hell” (p. 367). Peter Stanford makes much the same point in his excellent The Devil: A Biography (Henry Holt and Company: 1996). Both books (as well as others) emphasize a fact well known to scholars but rarely acknowledged by Christians – namely, the fact that the concept of Satan (like religion itself) has quite clearly evolved over time.

The stages in that evolution have frequently contradicted each other. The driving factor behind this evolution seems to have been the changing needs of people – not logical consistency (let alone objective truth).

The problem (as I see it) begins with the conception of God itself. If we grant for the sake of argument the common Christian definition of God as an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, perfect Being, it is difficult to understand why such a Being would want or need to create anything.

It is even more difficult to understand why such a Being would create an evil archenemy.

The Bible never seems to explicitly acknowledge this problem but it does subtly present it in its first few pages.

Consider:

Genesis 1:24-25 tells us that God created “every thing that creepeth on the earth” on the sixth day. When He was done, God pronounced his work “good.” Genesis 3:1-15 tells us, however, that one of these creatures – the serpent – corrupted Eve and is therefore cursed by God. Later Christian theologians would interpret this serpent to be Satan – an interpretation that seems not to have occurred to the ancient Hebrews who originally wrote this story down, but no matter. In either case, an essential contradiction (or tension between contrary needs) is apparent: If God created all creatures (including the serpent) good, how could the serpent possibly have corrupted anyone? (Similarly, if God really had created Adam and Eve “perfect” – as many Christians claim – it’s hard to see how they could have been corrupted.)

This problem/tension pops up repeatedly in the OT. It seems that the authors of the Bible couldn’t come up with a good answer to the origins and existence of evil, so they tried various answers in sequence – none of which make much sense.

The most common answer the OT seems to give us: God Himself is evil.

As Panati indicates, the ancient Hebrews didn’t need a Satan to dispatch plagues, pestilence, famine, and heartache – the wrathful God of Abraham sent them all by Himself.

Why did Pharaoh refuse to free his Hebrew slaves? The Bible doesn’t claim it was because he was listening to Satan – it says it was because God repeatedly hardened his heart (Exodus 7:13; 9:12; 10:1; 11:10; 14:8 – among other places).

Judges 9:23 and 1 Samuel 16:14 tell us that God – not Satan – sends evil spirits to people.

Isaiah 45:7 quotes God as saying “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”

Amos 3:6 asks rhetorically “Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?”

Lamentations 3:38 asks “Out of the mouth of the Most High proceedeth not evil and good?”

Ezekiel 20:25 tells us that God sometimes gives bad laws to people – hardly the act of an all-good Being.

Although one of the essential attributes usually ascribed to God by Christians is love (or benevolence), the Bible repeatedly presents us with a God who is violent, destructive, and positively devilish; a Being whose actions hurt the innocent and the guilty alike.

Exodus 15:3 explicitly tells us that “The Lord is a man of war” – the antithesis of peace and love. 1 Samuel 15:3 elaborates when it quotes God as giving these orders: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” Ezekiel 9:5-6 quotes God as commanding “Slay utterly the old and young, both maids, and little children, and women….” Jeremiah 50:21 repeats similarly demonic orders. It is absurd to call such a Being either good or moral.

Apparently this bothered even the Hebrews themselves and led them to eventually change their tune.

We see evidence of this change when we compare 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1. Both deal with David’s taking a census. In 2 Samuel, God tells David to take this census, then punishes him for it (much as He had hardened Pharaoh’s heart so He could punish him). In 2 Chronicles, however, we are told that it was Satan who rose up against Israel and provoked David to take this census.

“Hebrew scholars say that the term ‘Satan’ was a later substitution for the phrase ‘the Lord’,” Panati explains. “In other words, to theologically clean up the wrathful God’s image, Satan was made to take the rap” (p. 368).

An even more startling transformation occurs in the New Testament, of course, where Satan becomes THE villain of villains – God’s chief adversary and a personification of evil that Western art and literature spent centuries embroidering and elaborating upon.

Perhaps the sharpest contrast with the OT comes in John 8:44 where Jesus calls the Jews the spawn of Satan. Somehow God’s Chosen People – and the self-proclaimed descendants of the God-created Adam and Eve – have been transformed into the offspring of God’s archenemy….

Echoes of the old way of thinking about God still pop up, however. Colossians 1:16 tells us that all things – visible and invisible – were created by God and for God. Revelation 4:11 repeats the point when it says “for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.” That necessarily includes evil, pain, suffering, and sin. (What’s more, Ephesians 3:9 implicates Jesus in all this, for it claims that God created all things by Jesus.)

These echoes – like the earlier OT passages I cited – make explicit what is true by definition: God the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator is necessarily responsible for everything, including sin and evil. He could have created only good. He could have created a perfect world and perfect creatures. The fact that He obviously did not create such a world or such creatures would seem to leave us with just two possibilities: Either He is not all-good, and we must reject the typical Christian definition of God stating otherwise; or He simply does not exist, and we can dispense with theism entirely.

In any case, the Bible is yet again revealed to be a contradictory mess – incomprehensible at best, and a set of calculated lies at worst.

Such a work cannot and should not serve as our moral guide.