The devil tempts Jesus at the beginning of his ministry to look after his own needs by turning stone into bread, by proving his trust in God’s word by leaping off the pinnacle of the Temple and relying on God’s angels to bear him up, and by serving Satan who can deliver over to Jesus all the kingdoms of the world (Matthew 4:1-11). In the meantime the Satan and his angels have been thrown down to the earth. This is God’s final mastery over creation, the elimination of chaos. However, the Book of Revelation envisions a new earth in which “the sea is no more” (Revelation 21:1). Levenson in Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Doctrine of Divine Omnipotence (Harper and Row, 1985). This theme is developed by the Jewish scholar Jon D. It was pushed back by God’s creative act, but not eliminated. God’s creative work is to bring order out of chaos. The first chapter of Genesis can be interpreted, as some Jewish commentators do, as God’s mastery of the pre-created world, the subjection of the sea, which represents chaos. It is the stuff of mythology, of primordial origins, of what took place in Mircea Eliade’s famous phrase, in illo tempore, “in that time” of beginnings before time.

This all takes place in heaven, in eternity, outside of historical time. Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.” Satan and the demons are therefore portrayed as fallen angels. “For to reign is worth ambition, though in hell. Satan has the best lines in this epic poem. John Milton’s Paradise Lost picks up the theme of Satan’s ambition. The Bible, of course, regards matter (the created world) as intrinsically good and created by a benevolent Creator.Īpocalyptic literature resolved the conundrum by portraying Satan as a fallen archangel who rebelled against God in heaven and was defeated in the heavenly battle by the archangel Michael and thrown down to earth with all his followers (see Revelation 12). The ancient religion of Manichaeism, with roots in Persia, divided the world between good and evil principles and regarded matter as intrinsically evil and the spiritual as intrinsically good. There’s a theological problem if a source of evil exists separate from God and also if evil exists in God. Is the devil who tempts Jesus in the gospels also functioning as a prosecutor to see if Jesus’ commitment to his mission is what it ought to be? Is Satan God’s devil after all?

(“Satan” is a Persian word for prosecutor.) God actually gives Satan permission to test Job. Satan in the Book of Job really functions as God’s prosecutor who travels to and fro on the earth checking to see that faith is what it should be. But if the snake is the personification of evil, of Satan, what was it doing in Paradise? Was the serpent that tempted Eve in Genesis 3 the Devil in disguise or just a talking snake? The identification of the serpent with evil is seen in the medieval image of the dragon who takes captive the young maiden (a figure of the church) who needs to be rescued by the knight (St. One of our modern problems with the Devil is the inconsistency of the images of the Devil or Satan in the Bible.

Creation and the persistence of evil