Satan: Lifting the Veil - Part 7: God's State Prosecutor

Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?

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Satan: God’s State Prosecutor 

The final appearance in the Old Testament of this mysterious being - and once again I would like to point out, only one of three (!) appearances as a character - is in Zechariah 3:1-7.  The scene is laid out as a heavenly courtroom - it almost resembles a congressional hearing for an official whose actions are being questioned (think: the Benghazi hearings, and compare how Hillary Clinton was questioned to this scene).  Once again, Satan (ha satan - literally “the accuser”) seems to be a member of God’s governing body, playing the role of a prosecuting attorney, with Joshua as the defendant.  But in this scene, it seems that he’s taken this a bit too far, and God has had enough of it. 

Once again, it seems that this passage deserves a bit of context.  Zechariah’s ministry took place during the Persian reign of Darius the great - during Israel’s exile in captivity.  Many of Zechariah’s audience would have been questioning at this point: “where is God?  Why has He allowed us to go through so much trouble?  Haven’t we suffered enough at this point?  Our forefathers must have done something really, really bad to upset God so much that He’d punish us like this.”

So you can see how this vision is not meant to be taken as a literal story of something that happened, but is rather a very symbolic representation of Israel’s current situation.  Joshua is labeled as a high priest in this vision - high priests played a very symbolic role in Jewish liturgy as the mediators between the Jews and God, and so the character of Joshua in this vision is also playing a mediating, representative role as well.  Joshua represents the whole nation of Israel, and is dressed in filthy rags - representative of the past sins of the nation of Israel which other prophets had identified as the cause of Israel’s exile and captivity.

So the Accuser is still not a being of pure evil here.  The case he’s made against Joshua was the conventional wisdom of generations of prophets!  Israel had been tried and found guilty, and was bearing the consequences!  Here, “Satan” is merely echoing what everyone believed God’s attitude towards the Israelites was at that time.  So what we see here is that the Accuser in this passage is not actually demonic, but is a representation of the inner or collective voice(s) of condemnation within the community.  Many sensitive people hear this inner voice repeating accusations of guilt or inferiority tirelessly, and often there is a degree of truth in these accusations.

But this passage is a message of hope for the audience - God comes to the defense of the accused!  God is saying “enough is enough!”  God rebukes the accusing voices of the community and speaks in the accused’s defense - Israel is a “brand plucked from the fire”, and God removes their “filthy garments” and clothes them instead in “festal robes” and a clean turban, which represents freedom from guilt and the promise of future blessings. 

In this passage, the accuser demands strict justice based on inflexible, legalistic principles.  This sort of “‘justice” is spirit crushing.  But God tempers justice with mercy.  The takeaway of this passage is that when we hear a “voice” telling us to deal harshly with people who have “broken the rules”, we should ask if this voice is indeed from God, or if God would call us to use mercy.  This vision presents a message to anyone who feels persecuted by their inner voices of accusation - “that’s not God speaking - God is your defense attorney.”

This passage presents a tension with other views presented in the Old Testament, where the evil spirit is from God (see I Samuel 18:10 and 19:9).  It asks us to question this supposed origin - “God doesn’t attack - He defends”, it gently calls to us. 

 
Do Not Judge, Or You Become Satan

At this point, I’d like to take a quick detour to the New Testament, where we can find a parallel story that presents a very similar image.  In the book of Jude, verses 8 and 9 alludes to a lost legend from the “Assumption of Moses”.  According to this legend, when Moses died, the devil claimed his body on the grounds that he had murdered an Egyptian.  Once again, the pattern is the same as in Zech. 3 and Job: the devil is an overzealous servant of God with a strict and merciless view of the law.  There is some truth to the accusation, but God calls Michael to rebuke this accuser because of the legalism which does not make room for mercy.  But what’s interesting about this passage in Jude is that it says that when the angel Michael argued with the devil, he “did not dare pronounce against him a railing judgment” - and so the writer of Jude is making the argument that if Michael doesn’t dare to condemn this devil for slander, how can we presume to judge... anyone?  If we pronounce a reviling judgment, we end up taking on the role of the accuser ourselves!

Jesus echoes this same sentiment when he tells his audience in the sermon on the mount:

Matthew 7:1-2
Do not judge so that you will not be judged.  For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.”
(Parallels Luke 6:37)

And the writer of 2 Peter picks up this theme in 2 Peter 2:10-11 when he writes about corrupt beings who indulge in the desires of the flesh, despise authority and “revile angelic majesties”, but in return the angels “who are greater in might and power do not bring a reviling judgment against them before the Lord.” 

The book of Sirach (or, as it is sometimes called, Ecclesiasticus) - which is part of the canon for Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican Christians - has this to say in verse 21:27:

When the ungodly curseth Satan, he curseth his own soul.

Could it be that all along, the Bible has been trying to tell us that by calling anyone “Satan” we become the Accuser ourselves?  Do we become satanic merely by believing in a being of pure evil for which there is no hope of redemption?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in “The Gulag Archipelago”:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

The Devil’s Morality

I totally just wanted an excuse to use this...

Taken together, the picture presented by the passages I’ve outlined in this post is that an overzealous, legalistic view of the law often ends up producing the very evil that the law is supposed to protect us against.  Satan presents a strange paradox - the moment you believe you have found “him”, you find instead that he functions as a mirror pointing right back at your very own self.  So perhaps the one sin we should be most careful to avoid is slander.  Perhaps we should never pick a side and pit ourselves against those who are not “in our tribe”, whilst blindly accepting everything our side claims to be true.  For, as I pointed out before, the model of Galatians 3:28 shows us that to be “in Christ” is to live without labels - without status or tribe - but instead to be part of the universal collective.

Satan, in the Old Testament picture we’ve found, believes himself to be the threshold guardian of the law, and yet has no concern over his own state of righteousness, instead focusing the law outward to accuse.  But within the contrasting picture of God that these passages draw out, God’s chief characteristic is mercy.  And this is the one characteristic that the Accuser in these passages lacks.  In “New Seeds of Contemplation”, Thomas Merton wrote (this is from perhaps the most brilliant chapter in the book, which can be found in its entirety here):

This is the chief mark of the theology of hell, for in hell there is everything but mercy. That is why God himself is absent from hell. Mercy is the manifestation of his presence.

The theology of the devil is for those who, for one reason or another, whether because they are perfect, or because they have come to an agreement with the Law, no longer need any mercy. With them (O grim joy!) God is “satisfied.” So too is the devil. It is quite an achievement, to please everybody!

The people who listen to this sort of thing, and absorb it, and enjoy it, develop a notion of the spiritual life which is a kind of hypnosis of evil. The concepts of sin, suffering, damnation, punishment, the justice of God, retribution, the end of the world and so on, are things over which they smack their lips with unspeakable pleasure.

There is a sad irony to the fire and brimstone preachers who terrify their congregations with horror stories about this Satan character, using fear to keep their audience from questioning dogma, but all the while lending their passive support to the economic and political systems which enslave and suck the very life out of entire generations.  We can be so good at finding Satan behind every door and hiding in every bush whenever our selfish, ego-driven goals do not come to fruition.  And the media makes sensations of the individual cases of most-likely psychologically troubled individuals who are supposedly “possessed”, but all the while we ignore the dominating elements within the corporate systems that act like a cancer - spreading globally through greed whilst treating employees like robots and driving wages to near zero through the “race to the bottom”.  But, if Satan is indeed a shadowy supernatural being behind all evil in the world, why would he be so concerned with an individual when he can possess an entire civilization through our own greed and desire for power?  Is our modern society really so different from the ancient background of Job - we still live by the Deuteronomic code, worshiping the CEO’s, rich actors, and politically powerful while slandering the destitute beggars.  We talk of trickle down wealth while we offer up sacrifices to the gods of Wall Street as we scoff at those ignorant people of ancient religions - but are we really so different?  “The gods never died”, writes Carl Jung: “they merely became diseases.”  So, denying the existence of “demons” does not help if we do not apply the remedy.  But on the flip side, legitimizing them may actually contribute to the ailment.

In my earlier series on hell, I spent a bit of time in one post talking about the supposed heresy of Origen.  One of the reason Origen’s detractors found his theology to be so distasteful was that he believed that in the end, even Satan and his demons would be redeemed.  Origen came to this conclusion because he found no wiggle room within the Biblical passages which implied God’s universal salvific purposes.  But the question I am led to ask is: what if we discovered that, by extending mercy even to the devil himself, we find that he never truly existed in the first place - but in his place was only another son of God, who had merely become lost in his overzealous application of the law?

In my next post, we will begin to examine the New Testament passages where Satan is mentioned.

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Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?