Sunday Message: Satan, defined

Sunday last I engaged during our morning walk in an imaginary philosophical exchange between myself and an atheist who was intellectually honest enough to allow the discussion point, "Say for a moment, there is a God...", the discussion starting with creation.  Now, science teaches us everything has a beginning.  That even the Big Bang had to come from something else.  Now, there are two ways to answer the question, "What is the Prime Beginning?" and if you are intellectually honest, the two answers are the same- either, "That is something we do not currently understand," and, "That is God."  Whichever one you believe in, you have to logically come to the concept of a Prime Beginning. 

Now, science will tell you that in the range of eternity, that eventually the multiverse will stumble onto a way to create everything- including the life we now live.  That some how, all the many "goldilocks zones" that are needed to explain intelligent life will be hit.  This requires one to believe, according to science, that a universe that could ONLY be created if the Big Bang hit a certain temperature in the first milliseconds- and if it were a ten-thousandth of a degree off in either direction the whole thing would collapse- and that said conditions could be hit by blind chance.  Then, it would ask that we believe that a certain planet, formed at a certain time in the development of said universe, placed at just the right distance from the raging radiations of the galactic core, around  a star of the proper combination of relatively benign radiations, at the right distance to allow the proper temperatures to allow liquid water (not to mention the right gases at its formation to even MAKE water), tilted on its axis just right to have seasons, with a proper sized and distanced counterweight to control its revolution around the star, protected from cosmic debris by a giant planet the proper distance away, with the right amount of mass so that its gravity separates out just the right mix of gases for a livable atmosphere, and a core to create a magnetic field of just the right strength, etc, etc.  All of that happening by chance, because if eternity's eternal, all of that can be stumbled upon.

Okay.

But now, let us reverse-engineer the topic.  IF we take God at His word, and He planned all that, why make it at all?  Here, we have to take the Bible at its word.  Christ is, for lack of a true way to explain this, the "physical", the "do-it" nature of God.  And the Church, the body of believers, is to be the "Bride Of Christ"- built painstakingly from US, cell by cell, molecule by molecule, to remove all disease, all cancer, all flaws.  Now, go back to a time BEFORE the creation of man, when God first made non-physical servants we call angels.  Just like with us, God wanted angels to serve Him of free will- but how do you produce free will when Your Nature is to be Holy, and holy only?  Say God perceives that the greater any being sees itself, the greater the chances to fall into glorifying itself.  Thus, you create Lucifer, a being as far above the other angels as we are above the ant.

And Lucifer is fine with his place- until he learns the plan God has for making His Bride.  This plan puts him on a MUCH lower rung, and he resents it.  He, and a minority of the other angels- perhaps the other "creme de la creme" angels, we don't know- turn against the plan, hoping to corrupt it, and keep their place.  But how to do it?


And this is where I realized that the plan he chose to corrupt is the same one he uses now.  Give man a little bit of knowledge- just enough to make him attempt to glorify himself.  "Eating the fruit won't kill you," he says to Eve. " No, it will give you KNOWLEDGE of good and evil, that you may BE LIKE UNTO GODS".  Not a lie at all, but certainly not told in a truthful manner.  Eve and her husband got that knowledge of evil and good, because for the first time, they had committed evil; now, they were like God, in that they knew what evil was; but it wasn't a good thing, because the bond with God was severed.  Lucifer left that detail out.


And this is what he has done to cause the most damage THROUGHOUT history.  He gave the "Church Fathers" just enough knowledge to lead them into a church that was corrupted by political power, by money, and by the "knowledge" they alone held- until Luther reminded us what Paul said- "I will know nothing but Christ, and Him crucified".  By sola scriptura, God through Luther gave us another chance.  Or look at Galileo.  Though the "church" forced him to recant what his eyes plainly saw, others proved with KNOWLEDGE that the church was in error- and the church was in error because they somehow misread the scriptures to say that Earth HAD to be central- "knowledge" leading to the glorification of man, and certainly NOT anything that God taught.

And Lucifer AKA Satan has continued to lead man away from God and towards self glorification by giving little tidbits of knowledge, somewhat true in themselves but turned in such a way to disprove God Himself- witness Darwin and the assertion that, because birds in a closed-off ecosystem will adapt to that ecosystem, that means that man himself is an adaptation from a glorified virus that developed into an amoeba, then a fish, then a monkey, etc.  Many are the examples of Satan's circular reasoning, my favorite being the concept of "index fossils"- ones that are found in a certain type of rock and thus we know how old they are because we know the age of the rock.  And we know the age of the rock because, well, it has that fossil in it.

Last week, I touched on Michio Kaku and his brilliant presentation of the theory of quantum mechanics- a theory that, unlike all others, was stumbled onto full-blown, and now scientists are trying to reverse engineer it (with no great success) to find out WHY it works.  And how some scientists, at risk of their careers, grudgingly admit that it  makes it impossible to believe in a creation without a Creator.  And the ones who refuse on the basis that, "We've come this far without relying on superstition, WE'LL figure it all out someday."  We don't need a GOD to figure it out.

A little knowledge, turned just slightly awry, with the motivation of self-glorification.  The sin that felled us then, and the sin that fells us now.  Because the height of Lucifer's "glory" is lies and destruction.  And if it ain't broke, he ain't gonna fix it.