"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can
understand it?” That is the Bible’s uncompromising and
unflattering assessment of human nature, according to the Old
Testament prophet Jeremiah (ch17 v9). An initial reaction might be
to dismiss it as a wild generalisation, not at all accurate in
relation to ourselves. But a more considered and honest assessment
might enable us to understand why the Bible makes this sweeping
statement. The 87,000 (approx) residents of the UK’s prisons are there
for a whole variety of crimes – ranging from serial murderers
through rapists, paedophiles, drug dealers, fraudsters, down to
petty thieves. And if we are honest with ourselves we would have to
acknowledge that, whilst most of us would never actually commit
these crimes, we are nevertheless all physically capable of them.
Where does this capacity for nastiness come from? Evolution can’t provide the
answer, because some of what human beings are capable of is far
worse than anything in the animal kingdom from which we have
supposedly (but wrongly!) developed. The Bible’s explanation is both
rational and provable by our own experiences. In the early chapters
of Genesis we read that God, having created the physical environment
of our world, then placed on it 2 adult people. The sovereign
creator could have created 2 robots, pre-programmed to obey
implicitly and automatically His wishes. But He didn’t! Instead He
created 2 human beings with free-will – the capacity to choose for
themselves whether or not they would follow the Creator’s
instructions. And in order to ‘engineer’ a situation in which they
would be obliged to make a choice, God set them in a garden full of
desirable things to eat, and gave them just one prohibition:
"You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that
you eat of it you shall surely die." (Gen 2:16/17)
Once in front of this one particular tree they were obliged to make a moral
choice – to eat its fruit = disobey God, or to avoid its fruit =
obey God. The consequence of disobedience was described simply and
unambiguously -
you shall surely die. This dramatic
consequence is opened out in more detail in the following chapter –
after Adam and Eve had both committed the act of disobedience:
And to Adam he said,
"Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten
of the tree of which I commanded you, 'You shall not eat of it,'
cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all
the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for
you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your
face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of
it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return."
But just glance back to the moment earlier in the chapter when the act of
disobedience was committed. The account tells us that Eve
saw
that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the
eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took
of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was
with her, and he ate. Notice the order – she
saw, and
then she
took. The act of disobedience was not in
seeing,
but in allowing what she saw to influence her
doing. And the
doing precipitated the pre-stated
consequence – you
shall surely die - you are dust, and to dust you shall
return.
This process is confirmed as being the universal pattern for human nature by the New Testament
writer James:
Let no one say when he is
tempted, "I am being tempted by God," for God cannot be tempted with
evil, and He himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when
he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has
conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings
forth death.
(1:13-15)
This process can be presented in a sequence as
follows:
-
Desire > Sin > Death; or alternatively
- The Thought >
The Deed > The Consquence.
And it all starts with what is within us – the capacity to do
bad things. The Lord Jesus himself confirms this to be the case,
when he said the following words:
"What comes out of a person is
what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come
evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting,
wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.
All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."
(Mark 7:20-23)
Another New Testament writer – the Apostle Paul – reinforces the link between universal human
nature inclined to do bad things and the events in the garden of
Eden, in these words:
Therefore, just as sin
came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so
death spread to all men because all sinned
(Romans 5:12)
Notice that he doesn’t say that we die because Adam sinned, but that we die because we sin like
Adam sinned – like Adam and Eve we allow bad thoughts within us to
lead us to sin - to disobey God, and therefore to suffer the
consequence – death. Our human nature, inherited from our first
parents Adam and Eve, inclines us towards evil, but also gives us
the opportunity to resist these natural inclinations and do what is
right.
So, where does the orthodox concept of the devil/Satan as a fallen angel who mischievously
incites us do bad things, fit into this scenario? The simple answer
is – it doesn’t. This “orthodox concept” owes its origins to pagan
ideas and NOT to the Bible. Here are some Bible facts:
1. The word ‘devil’ does not appear in the Old Testament at all!
2. The words ‘devils’ ie in a plural form, DOES appear in the Old Testament, and its primary
meaning is a hairy goat, or satyr (for example it is the word
used of the 2 goats in the ritual of the Day of Atonement in
Leviticus ch 16)
3. In the New Testament the
word ‘devil’ simply means “a (false) accuser” (see Titus 2:3
where it clearly relates to human beings);
4. The word ‘satan’ is a
Hebrew word meaning “an adversary”, and that adversary can be an
angel of God (Numbers 22:22), God Himself (compare 2 Samuel 24:1
with 1 Chronicles 21:1), or a human being (1 Kings 11:14 & 23,
Matthew 16:23).
The sense in which the New
Testament in particular uses the concept of the ‘devil’ is best
illustrated in this passage from the letter to the Hebrews:
Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, (Jesus) himself likewise partook
of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who
has the power of death, that is, the devil,
(2:14).
So, Jesus
has destroyed “the devil” by his own death. But notice that “the
devil” is here described as the one who has the power of death.
But we have already established from the words quoted earlier
from James, that what has “the power of death” is SIN. So, by
putting those 2 Bible passages together we are presented with the
proposition that the devil = sin. And that same passage from James
has already told us that the source of sin is not an external one,
but our own human nature – the nature which inclines us towards
thinking and doing bad things whilst at the same time allowing us to
resist them by thinking and doing good things. So, the inescapable
conclusion is that “the devil” is the Bible’s way of describing our
own innate capacity and propensity for sin – the ‘devil’ is within
us, not outside us.
Let’s just test that proposition against a prominent occasion when it would APPEAR from
the Bible account that an external “devil” is part of the story. We
read in Matthew 4 and Luke 4 that Jesus was “tempted by the devil”.
We need to allow the account to be set in its recognised context. He
has just been baptized by his cousin John, and has received, in a
dramatically visual way, the Holy Spirit from God. He can now do
everything and anything. He is now being tempted to use this
supernatural power for his own personal ends – to feed himself, to
give a dramatic demonstration of his powers, to take a route through
life that would avoid the horrors of the cross. In the interests of
space let’s just focus on this latter temptation:
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world
and their glory. And he said to him, "All these I will give you, if
you will fall down and worship me."
There is certainly no mountain in the land of Israel, or indeed anywhere in
the world, where all the kingdoms of the world would be
visible to the naked eye – our planet being a globe would inevitably
make that impossible. And nor would even the most hardened advocate
of the orthodox view of the devil/Satan go so far as to believe that
this ‘supernatural being’ could offer access to all the kingdoms
of the world and their glory. That could only be in the gift of
God Himself. The only rational way to understand this, and all the
Lord’s temptations throughout his life, is to see them as an
internal struggle between his human nature which would naturally
look to ways of avoiding the extreme hardships of the pathway
leading to the cross, and his absolute dedication to carrying out
the will of his Heavenly Father.
Which just leaves one final
question to be addressed. IF the devil is within us, in the form of
our human nature inherited from our first parents, then why does it
APPEAR on occasions as though this devil/Satan is described in terms
of being something external to us? Please consider this answer in 2
parts:
1. The Bible does make use
of the literary device of personification for impact purposes –
see Proverbs ch 31 where “wisdom” is personified;
2. Perhaps the IMPRESSION is given that sin is embodied in an
external agent, because that is precisely what we should be
doing to sin – trying to make it external to our lives. In the
words of the Apostle Paul -
Let not sin therefore reign in
your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Control and
de-throne our sin-inclined human nature – that is what the Bible
challenges us to do.
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