Part II: His Creation

Chapter 5: Chaos and Destruction

One of the most beautiful and powerful spiritual creatures God made was the cherub later called Lucifer. The book of Ezekiel describes who he was: “Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created. Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee. By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned: therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God: and I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire. Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I will cast thee to the ground, I will lay thee before kings, that they may behold thee” (Ezekiel 28:13–17).68

The passage highlights several details about this being:

Here lies a profound paradox. The Bible says Lucifer was perfect in his ways from the day he was created, till iniquity was found in him. How could iniquity arise in a perfect creature? God does not create imperfect or evil beings; as we saw in earlier chapters, beauty and perfection are among His own attributes, and everything He made was “very good.” So something went terribly wrong in a creature that began flawless. We must ask what.

Before we trace the answer, a word of honesty is in order. Scripture tells us that Lucifer fell, and it shows us the shape of his sin, but it never fully explains how the first evil impulse could arise in a holy heart in the unclouded presence of God. This is one of the deep mysteries of the faith. Reformed and evangelical teachers alike have confessed that we cannot finally explain the origin of sin—Herman Bavinck called it “the greatest enigma of life and the heaviest cross for the intellect to bear.” What Scripture makes unmistakable is that the creature, not the Creator, is responsible; God is not the author of sin.69

Let us take a step back to a point touched earlier: for Yahweh to be worshipped as God, there must be creatures who worship Him; and for that worship to be true worship, two things must be present—both of which are themselves reflections of God’s own nature.

The first is love. “God is love” (1 John 4:8); it is His very character. When He created, He loved what He made and made it beautiful and good, and into His creatures He placed the capacity to love—so that their love might be directed back to Him, in perfect harmony between Creator and creation.

The second is free will. God Himself is free; He creates and acts according to His own good pleasure. When He made spiritual and physical beings, He gave them, too, a measure of will—the freedom to love and obey, or not. Love that cannot choose is not love at all but mere mechanism; forced worship is no worship. So the very freedom that makes real love possible also makes real rebellion possible.

Lucifer, then, was created with the freedom to love, surpassingly beautiful and perfect in all his ways—until the day he turned that freedom not toward God but toward himself. He fixed his gaze on his own beauty and brilliance, centered his love on himself rather than his Maker, and came to think himself better than every other creature—and at last better even than the God who made him. So he set out to be God.

Notice carefully: love is good, beauty is good, perfection is good, and freedom is good. None of these is the problem. I appreciate the way Emmanuel Makandiwa once illustrated this paradox in a sermon, which I paraphrase: two chemicals may each be entirely beneficial on their own, but the moment a person uses his freedom to combine them wrongly, he can make a bomb. Or think of water used to generate electricity—good and useful—yet if one were to bring that electricity back into contact with the water, the result would be deadly, a danger that was never there at the start.70

In the same way, the moment Lucifer joined his freedom to self—choosing himself over God—he produced what Scripture calls iniquity. It was not a thing God created; it was the corruption of good gifts turned away from their right end.71

The prophet Isaiah gives the anatomy of this fall, recording the fivefold “I will” in which self is exalted in the place of God: “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! 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: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit” (Isaiah 14:12–15).72

He says he will ascend—for he was already in the garden of God, on a perfect earth, walking up and down the mountain of God in worship. But now he wishes to ascend not to worship but to be worshipped, not to honor God but to be like Him. He chose himself; and iniquity was found in him. The root of his fall, in a single word, was pride; Scripture warns that pride is “the condemnation of the devil” (1 Timothy 3:6).

There are lessons here for our own lives:

Lucifer persuaded many angels to join his rebellion—perhaps over a long span of time, and in great number. Yet throughout the whole plot, God Almighty knew and saw everything. In His all-knowing wisdom He permitted it to unfold. He could have crushed the rebellion at its first stirring, destroyed the rebel, and compelled total obedience—but to do so would have contradicted His own character of love and freedom. Forced allegiance is not love, and a creation coerced into obedience would have been a tyranny, not the free and loving worship He desired. Instead, God had a greater plan—the plan of the ages—by which He would answer the problem of evil; we will trace that plan in the chapters to come.73

It is worth saying clearly that God’s permission is not God’s authorship. He governs even evil, yet never by becoming its author; the moral guilt of the deed belongs wholly to the creature who commits it. God brings light; the darkness arises only when the light is freely refused.

Then war broke out in heaven. It was the angels who fought, not God—for God does not contend with His creatures as an equal; He is God. Angels loyal to God stood against the angels who had followed Lucifer. It was the greatest war ever waged. A war similar to it is portrayed in Revelation 12:7–10.74

This was a cosmic war, fought in heaven and reaching the whole created order. It was chaos. On the restoration reading we have followed in this book, the once-beautiful earth was caught up in the ruin: it became “without form, and void,” an empty waste, and darkness lay upon the face of the deep for a span of time we are not given to know. This is what the second verse of Genesis describes: “The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2).

But it was not so at the beginning. “For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there is none else” (Isaiah 45:18). The rebellion of Lucifer and his angels brought chaos and ruin; and Lucifer, having fallen and lost the glory and presence of God, is now called the great dragon, the old serpent, Satan, the devil, and the father of lies.75

After his rebellion, Satan and his angels were cast out of heaven. Yet being a cherub, he still has access to it—he was not, at the first, barred from ever entering again. This is why, in the book of Job, when the sons of God present themselves before the Lord, Satan also appears among them, and God speaks with him—and this happens more than once (Job 1:6–7; 2:1–2). Scripture calls him the accuser of believers: “The accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night” (Revelation 12:10).76

But a day is coming when the devil will at last be cast out finally and forever, his place found no more in heaven, never again to accuse the saints: “And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night” (Revelation 12:7–10). And the saints overcome him “by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony” (Revelation 12:11).77

Notes

  1. 68. The application of Ezekiel 28:12–17 to the fallen cherub behind the human king of Tyre is a long-standing reading in evangelical and Pentecostal interpretation, going back to Origen and Tertullian. The immediate reference is to the king of Tyre; some interpreters, including John Calvin, restrict the meaning to that ruler. See Daniel I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel: Chapters 25–48, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 116–125. ↩
  2. 69. On evil as a privation—not a substance God created, but the corruption of a good nature through the misuse of will—see Augustine, Confessions 7.12; Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 3, Sin and Salvation in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 33–40, 145–146. Bavinck: “Light cannot of itself produce darkness; the darkness only arises when the light is withdrawn.” ↩
  3. 70. Emmanuel Makandiwa, sermon illustration, paraphrased. The author recalls this analogy from a message preached some years earlier. ↩
  4. 71. Scripture is candid that even “free will” does not finally explain the first sin: why a perfectly good being in God’s presence should choose against Him remains, in Bavinck’s phrase, “the greatest enigma of life.” Reformed and evangelical voices alike (Bavinck; Berkhof; D. M. Lloyd-Jones; R. C. Sproul) affirm that the Bible describes Satan’s fall without exhaustively explaining its origin. What Scripture is clear about is that the creature, not the Creator, is responsible for it. See Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:28–40. ↩
  5. 72. Many interpreters read Isaiah 14:12–15 as describing, behind the taunt against the king of Babylon, the pride and fall of Satan. The fivefold “I will” is widely noted as the anatomy of pride—self set in the place of God. See, e.g., John N. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 1–39, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 320–323; cf. 1 Timothy 3:6, where pride is called “the condemnation of the devil.” ↩
  6. 73. On God’s sovereignty over evil without being its author—governing by “positive permitting” rather than “positive enabling”—see Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:60–64; Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1938; rev. 1996), 220–222. God remains morally perfect; the moral quality of the deed belongs to the creature who commits it. ↩
  7. 74. Revelation 12:7–10 is understood in more than one way: as a vision of the original, primeval fall of Satan; as the decisive defeat won at the cross and resurrection (cf. Luke 10:18; John 12:31); or as a still-future expulsion. The view followed here—that the original rebellion is the backdrop, and that Revelation 12 portrays a war similar to it—is one option among several held by those who affirm Scripture’s authority. See G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 650–664. ↩
  8. 75. Isaiah 45:18; the same passage that grounds the “restoration” reading discussed in chapter four: God did not create the earth tohu (“in vain,” “without form”), but formed it to be inhabited. ↩
  9. 76. In Job 1–2 “the satan” (the accuser) appears among the “sons of God,” consistent with his role as accuser of the saints (Revelation 12:10; Zechariah 3:1–2). See Francis I. Andersen, Job, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1976), 80–84. ↩
  10. 77. Revelation 12:10–11: the accuser is overcome “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.” See Beale, Revelation, 661–664. ↩
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