Separating Satan From God

In the midst of a busy period of ministry, when the disciples were the ones performing miracles and driving out demons, Jesus made a strange, celebratory statement. Luke 10:18,

“I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.”

For the longest time, I was unable to make sense of this. Why would Satan be in heaven in the first place? I’ve come to believe that there is an essential truth at the heart of this statement that informs how we read the Old Testament, or indeed any account of God doing something destructive. 

Confusing God and Satan

Old Testament believers didn’t differentiate between God and Satan, seeing Satan as God's left hand. Whenever there was temptation, destruction, wrath, and death –activities the New Testament would consistently ascribe to Satan – Old Testament writers wrongly assumed these acts were divine rather than Satanic. 

In the New Testament, we see Christ overcoming all these things, and labelling Satan as their originator. New Testament writers tell us to resist the Devil and he will flee; to stand against his wiles and destructive intent. Helpfully, Jesus differentiated between himself and the Devil in the clearest terms. John 10:10,

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

Old Testament believers had no concept of resisting the Devil, seeing everything that happened to them as God’s intent. Often, they would beg God to stay his own, wrathful hand. Satan was not identified as the cause of such destruction, but rather as God’s minister of wrath, while God himself was credited as the cause of both good and evil. 

The Old Testament often blends the natures of God and Satan, which confuses the real source of Old Testament wrath. The confusion is easy enough to detect in the writing. For example, in 2 Samuel 24:1, ‘the anger of the Lord’ is stated as the cause of the census David took of Israel and Judah.

Again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.”

In 1 Chronicles 21:1, describing the same incident, the writer identifies Satan as the one who incited David.

Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel.

This would leave Hebrew readers with a significant degree of confusion about the differing natures of God and Satan. Indeed, Satan was seen as a servant of God, his minister of wrath.  

In the Old Testament, Satan is most often mentioned in the book of Job. In that book, Satan and God team up to torture Job in order to test his righteousness. This is perhaps the clearest example of the Old Testament view of Satan, and therefore of God. God was both the giver of life and the stealer of it. The New Testament mentions Satan/demons nearly 200 times, and always as an enemy. 

Sadly, this confusion warps the view and therefore the spiritual experience of Christians to this day. How often do we sing that awful song based on a verse in Job that blasphemes the nature of God?

You give and take away
You give and take away
My heart will choose to say
Lord, blessed be Your name

The Lord does not give and take away; it is only in his nature to give. James 1:17,

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. 

Jesus came to make clear the true nature of God

A core element of Jesus’ ministry was to clear up this confusion and to make God known. In John 14:9, he taught his disciples about the consistently loving nature of God. 

Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?

The writer of Hebrews sums this up beautifully. Hebrews 1:3a,

The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.

Jesus radiates the light of God and is the exact representation of his being. Or to put it another way, if we can’t see it in Jesus, it is not part of the nature of God. 

Jesus’ relationship with wrath

We can see Jesus’ relation with wrath and vengeance in the gospels. For example, when he was heading to Jerusalem for the final time, a Samaritan village wouldn’t receive him. Jesus’ disciples were incensed and drew on their religious tradition for a response. They would have read about Elijah calling down fire to consume God’s enemies, and as far as they were concerned, that was something God would do. Luke 9:54,

And when His disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them, just as Elijah did?”

Jesus took the opportunity to show his disciples what God does and does not do (verses 55-56):

But he turned and rebuked them, and said, “You do not know what manner of spirit you are of. For the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives but to save them.” 

God doesn’t destroy our lives – he saves them. The spirit that wants to destroy is not of God. When we think it is, when we take vengeance, when we hate, we follow a demonic spirit. It really is that simple.

When Jesus celebrated seeing Satan fall from Heaven, I believe he spoke of the confusion about the nature of God finally being cleared up. If we read the scripture through the lens of Christ, we are finally able to perceive clearly. In particular, we can interpret passages that supposedly show the wrath of God at work with the understanding that Old Testament believers wrongly saw God as the author of good and evil, and so they wrote about destructive events with that in mind.  

The scriptures reveal the unfolding of humanity’s understanding of God, culminating in the life, teachings, deeds, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. He is the exact representation of God’s being, giving us the clarity we need to embrace love and abandon theological double-mindedness.  

Lord, help us embrace your true nature, as seen in Jesus. May the scales fall from our eyes, and our understanding of you become singular. 

 

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