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 Sifter
In my earlier posts within this series, some of my readers may have been surprised to discover a picture of Satan as a “son of God” in Job, and not only that, but serving as an official in God’s courtroom. Well, if this surprised you, you might also be surprised to find that in the New Testament, Satan is still being portrayed as God’s servant - playing a necessary function for God! There are a number of examples of this.
The second example of Satan serving a necessary function comes in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians - in chapter 5 of this letter, we discover that one of the members of this church has been engaging in “immorality of such a kind as does not exist even among the Gentiles, that someone has his father’s wife.” Interestingly enough, Paul immediately follows this up with a rebuke of the congregation - saying that they have become arrogant, rather than mourning. Paul then places the blame for the necessity of the consequences upon the congregation! And he states in verse 5:
I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.Once again, we see that Satan is serving a necessary function - sifting this member of the congregation in much the same way that Peter was sifted. And the hope is that through this process, this member will be saved!
But there is a follow-up to this story in the next letter to the Corinthians - in 2 Corinthians 2:5-11, it seems that Paul is gently alluding to this same member. He says that the punishment was sufficient, and they should forgive, comfort, and reaffirm their love for this man! It seems that “the Accuser” has become the church’s inner spirit of self-righteous judgment and accusation here - they became overzealous in their application of the law, and when the excommunication worked and the member tried to come back, the congregation would not let him! This is a striking parallel to the overzealous prosecuting attorney of Job and Zechariah 3! And Paul notices this - he urges the congregation to forgive, so that “the Accuser” will not take advantage of them! So once again, we see that “Satan” is not a being of pure evil - but often grows from a correct application of the law that gets out of control and becomes overly-enthusiastic because it is lacking in mercy!
There is a very similar case briefly mentioned in I Timothy 1:20, where Paul mentions two members who were similarly “handed over to the Accuser, so that they will be taught not to blaspheme.” Here Paul is advocating a sort of passive justice - releasing these men out of his community in order that they may face the true consequences of their ways. From within the community, the consequences of these mens’ sin might not have been clear. The waters would have been muddied - they would have tried to blame any consequences of their actions on other factors, and the church itself would have suffered the accusation of these men and might have fallen into self-doubt. But by releasing these men out of the community, Paul is putting them out where they cannot blame any consequences of their actions on other factors - they only have themselves to blame if things go wrong. But as in 2 Cor. 2:5-11, Paul surely must be hoping that the men will return to the community after repenting.
Satan’s Desire for World Domination
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| What are we going to do tonight, Brain? |
Nevertheless, we have another appearance of “Satan” in connection to Peter in Matthew 16:21-28. The passage starts with Jesus informing his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer at the hands of the authorities there, and even be killed. Peter’s ego shines through once again, and he takes Jesus aside to rebuke him. The reasons behind this might be missed for the reader who already knows the end of the story - why wouldn’t Peter understand Jesus’ purposes if Jesus was going to be resurrected? But Peter didn’t think this way - Peter was living within the thought world of a conventional Jewish messiah.
You see, Jesus was not the only - nor the first - Jewish messiah figure. There were dozens of Jewish Messiah claimants within the history surrounding Jesus. And almost all of them tried to establish the “kingdom of God” through violent means. They thought that the kingdom of God was going to come about as all kingdoms did: by overthrowing the current power structure through military might. And in every case, when these messiah claimants died, their following dispersed - a dead messiah was a failed messiah. So when Jesus says he’s going to die, Peter hears this as Jesus giving up on his mission to establish the kingdom of God. So Peter thinks he’s doing Jesus a favor by rebuking him here - “this will never happen to you!”, he says.
But Jesus whips right around and says (verse 23):
“Get behind me, Satan*! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s.”Now, I think that this verse is a huge clue to identifying Satan - because we have to ask: if Satan is a literal being who is pure evil, why is Jesus calling his beloved disciple Peter by that name? Are we to believe that Peter is Satan? Or is Satan thrusting his hand into Peter, puppet-style, and controlling him through supernatural ventriloquism?
* [A more accurate translation might use the word “adversary” here, as you’ll find in the YLT version.]
In one of my earlier posts in this series, I alluded to the possibility that Satan is a literary device - much like “Sophia” in the Proverbs. “Sophia” is not only a female name, but is also Greek for “wisdom”, and so, since Proverbs speaks of God’s wisdom as a woman calling in the streets (see Proverbs 1:20 and 8:1) many scholars have taken up the practice of substituting “Sophia” when talking about the wisdom of God. And if we began to profess belief that “Sophia” was an entity with her own free will and her own personality, we might be doing the same thing that has happened to “Satan” (the accuser). But this passage practically demands to be taken poetically! Jesus is not saying that Peter is a dark demon from the nether realms with supernatural powers - he is using poetic personification to illustrate a spiritual reality! In this passage, Peter shows that he believes Jesus should be acting as the other Jewish Messiah claimants have always done, and is trying to instill the worldly ambition of the Domination System into Jesus, and Jesus is rejecting it! Because violent rivalry only produces further violent rivalry - as any historian will tell you! Rene Girard wrote:
A seductive tempter who suggests to us the desires most likely to generate rivalries, Satan prevents us from reaching whatever he simultaneously incites us to desire. He turns into a diabolos (another word that designates the obstacle/model of mimetic rivalry). Satan is skandalon personified, as Jesus makes explicit in his rebuke of Peter.So in this passage, we might say that “Satan” actually represents the Domination System itself - and this should come as no surprise, as the accusing nature of humanity often produces a desire for domination, and despises the loss of ego. But here we can find a curious reversal - Jesus uses the word “skandalon” (translated “stumbling block”) in verse 23. And this word is also used in I Corinthians 1:23 to describe how Jesus’ death functions for the Jews, paralleled with the way it is seen as foolish by the Gentiles ("stumbling block" in this verse is "skandalon"). And if we continue reading the Matthew passage, verses 24-25 show that death by crucifixion is not only a strategy for Jesus, but he actually wishes for his disciples to follow him in this strategy! Death by crucifixion is Jesus’ strategy for conquering Rome - a complete reversal! Caesar conquers by hoisting people up on crosses - but king Jesus conquers by offering himself up to be crucified! And this remarkable loss of attachment to one’s very own life seems to be the only way to defeat the accusing nature - for the Accuser feeds on ego, and so in order to defeat "him", one must experience a loss of ego.
This passage - and many others - are meant to expose to us the complete worthlessness of the myth of redemptive violence. But so often, theologians come up with ways to twist the Bible in order to affirm this myth and render violence itself as sacred - as the so-called “Penal Substitutionary Atonement” theology of Anselm does (and, by the way, the church got along fine without this theory for the first thousand years of its existence and I don’t think its invention has helped it much since, either). This theory renders the skandalon of Jesus’ death empty - rather than scandalizing us, it affirms our violence. God himself could find no way to solve evil without using violence, and so He killed His own son! But the theory of Penal Substitution falls apart when you realize its self-contradicting nature - God, in this theory, plays both the role of the victimizer and the victimized. How can a perfect being - devoid of neurotic tendencies - scapegoat Himself?
But Penal Substitution relies on a selective reading of the scriptures, and fails to account for verses like John 15:25, which places the blame solely on those who crucified Jesus, and states that they hated Jesus without a cause. How can they hate Jesus without a cause if God needed them to kill Jesus? Wouldn’t God be the cause?
And if this was really how it went down, then how is it that the author of 1st John can declare that God is love? (I John 4:8, 16) How can a being who personifies love be a worse father than most earthly fathers? I mean, if you heard a story about a Dad who had one son that did something that made him angry, and so he turned around and killed the other so he wouldn't be angry any more, would you say "wow, what a loving father!", or "that guy is abusive and needs anger management classes"?
In Matthew 5:48, Jesus says to "be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" - this comes immediately after a teaching to love enemies (see Mt. 5:43-48). So if we believe that the way God loves enemies is to displace all his righteous anger towards them onto his son, does that mean whenever someone hurts us we have to kill our own children in response? Actually, if you think about that one, this is often what happens - we often take the frustrations we have from dealing with our jobs out on our families. And I don't think Jesus was endorsing this.
But if God really wanted sins to be "paid for", why did Jesus quote Hosea 6:6 in Matthew 9:13 when he said: "But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’"? And in case you missed the importance of this statement, Jesus quotes the same verse again in Matthew 12:7! And why would the author of Hebrews say (in 10:8): "Sacrifices and offerings, burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not desire, nor were you pleased with them"? Why would the writer of Psalm 40:6 declare that God does not desire sacrifice nor require burnt offering? This is affirmed again and again in passages like Ps. 50:8-15, 51:16-18, 69:30, Isaiah 1:11, and Jeremiah 6:20. And perhaps the biggest challenge to the idea that God could not be satisfied without a blood sacrifice is Micah 6:7-8:
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
While substitutionary atonement theories declare that violence was necessary in order to satisfy God, a non-violent atonement theory such as Christus Victor allows us to see violence for what it is - completely pointless! By presenting a completely innocent victim, and declaring that we still hated him - without reason - the scapegoat mechanism is revealed, and we can cast it aside. And then our innocent victim - Jesus - points outward at our enemies and reveals that there is never a good reason to hate, and there is never a good reason for violence of any kind. Rather than legitimizing violence and making the scapegoat mechanism sacred, the Gospels are supposed to reveal the true nature of violence and show us how it destroys us just as we destroy the victims that we choose.
And it is only through this revealing of violence as empty and meaningless that we are also able to unveil and dethrone the Accuser. It is only through this unveiling that we can see how - through the mechanisms of the Accuser - we actually hurt ourselves as much as we hurt our enemies.
Rene Girard demonstrates this idea later on in the same article I cited earlier:
On the one hand, Satan is the instigator of scandal, the force that disintegrates communities; on the other hand, he is the resolution of scandal in unanimous victimization. This trick of last resort enables the prince of this world to rescue his possessions in extremis, when they are too badly threatened by his own disorder. Being both a principle of disorder and a principle of order, Satan is truly divided against himself.In the last line of this quote, Girard references a saying of Jesus - Mark 3:26:
If Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but he is finished!When we accuse our neighbors and treat them as enemies, we rise up against ourselves, and in so doing we become self-defeating. And as long as we make our violence sacred - as long as we believe that some problems can only be solved through violence - we will fail to unveil this truth. We will continue to try to dominate and conquer others, and this will continue to contribute to cycles of violence which are ultimately self-defeating chaos.
The message of Jesus, which he carried out even to the point of death, was that loving our enemies is the way to defeat them. Thich Nhat Hanh writes about this:
When Gandhi said that love is the force that can liberate, he meant we have to love our enemy. Even if our enemy is cruel, even if he is crushing us, sowing terror and injustice, we have to love him. This is the message of Jesus. But how can we love our enemy? There is only one way – to understand him. We have to understand why he is that way, how he has come to be like that, why he does not see things the way we do. Understanding a person brings us the power to love and accept him. And the moment we love and accept him, he ceases to be our enemy. To “love our enemy” is impossible, because the moment we love him, he is no longer our enemy.
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| MLK and Thich Nhat Hanh |
Could it be that we're even called to love our...Accusers?
At this point, we need to take a closer look at the act of Jesus' atonement, and its meaning, before we go back to examining the appearances of the Accuser and his demons. In my next post, we will examine the scapegoat mechanism and its connection to Satan.
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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?
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