The Womb of Iniquity & Angelic Rebellion

Evil did not begin with man, and the matter of where it did begin is neither idle nor merely academic. It is the foundation upon which a man's entire understanding of God, of creation, and of his own condition finally rests. If evil is eternal, then God is not sovereign. If evil is native to matter, then creation is a mistake and the Creator is implicated in it. If evil originated in man, then the human race is the author of its own ruin and there is nothing beneath our fall to explain it. None of these answers is the answer scripture gives. Evil is not eternal, not coeternal with God, not intrinsic to the material order, and not first of all a human phenomenon. Evil entered creation through the interior of a created celestial being, an anointed cherub set as guardian over the garden of God, in whom iniquity was found; and the rebellion that issued from that iniquity left a wreckage whose physical residue we read in the second verse of the Bible.

That is the claim I intend to establish, and I want to establish it in order. I will begin with the question of where knowledge of creation may legitimately be sought, because the doctrine of origins is worthless if it is received from the wrong authority. I will then show from Genesis and Isaiah that the earth passed through three distinct states in the opening verses of scripture, pristine, corrupted, and restored, and that the same threefold movement governs the history of man and the movements of the incarnate Word. I will take the testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ in Luke 10 as an eyewitness deposition concerning the fall of Satan. From there I will go into Ezekiel 28 to identify who this being was and what office he held, and I will advance a thesis concerning that office which I believe the scriptures themselves compel. I will trace from that same chapter the interior sequence by which evil was conceived, gestated, and born. I will follow Isaiah 14 into the mind of Lucifer and down the whole arc of his descent, from heaven to the earth and from the earth to the pit. And I will end at the altar, because the knowledge of the origin of evil is not finally information to be held but a condition to be healed.

The stakes are these. A man who does not know where evil came from cannot know what he is contending with, cannot recognise the shape of the deception when it is presented to him, and will mistake the chaos of his life and of the nations for the thing itself rather than for the distraction it is. It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter (Proverbs 25:2). We are invited into the search. What is concealed is concealed in order to be sought.

The Glory of God to Conceal: Where Knowledge of Creation Must Be Sought

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth (Genesis 1:1). Everything that the doctrine of origins requires is already present in that sentence, provided we read it with attention. The heavens and the earth are contingent creations. They exist because they were caused to exist, and they are contingent upon God. God himself is contingent upon nothing. He is the causal principle of all things, the uncaused ground from which everything that is derives its being. This is not a philosophical embellishment laid over the text; it is the plain logic of the text. Creation cannot be self existent. If nothing creates, then nothing is. The pen in my hand exists because someone made it. The microphone before me exists because someone designed it. Extend that principle to the whole of the visible order and you arrive at the necessity of a Creator who is not himself part of the series.

From this a consequence follows that our age has almost entirely lost. If creation is contingent, then knowledge of creation belongs properly to its Creator. You do not learn how an Apple device works by going to Samsung. You do not learn the workings of a Ford by studying the schematics of a Mercedes Benz. It is the manufacturer of a product who is responsible for its specification, its manual, and the articulation of its purpose. Only he can tell you how, and why, and to what end. And yet what has happened in our world is that we have been taught about creation by contingent beings who are not the cause of creation, men who have constituted themselves authorities over a thing they did not make, with the result that their knowledge of creation stands in opposition to the knowledge of the Creator.

This is why I say that our school systems, to a very great extent, are engaged in something more serious than error. When an institution offers man a knowledge of creation that opposes God, who is the causal principle of that creation, what is taking place is not neutral inquiry but rebellion. It is the offering of alternative knowledge, and its purpose is to set the creature against the Creator. I am not claiming that every fact taught in a laboratory is a lie. I am claiming that an account of origins constructed by creatures, in independence of the Creator's own testimony, is structurally a rival authority, and that it functions as one.

Consider how God himself handles this. When God finally answers Job, he does not speak to him about cartwheels or about the houses men build. He goes directly to what he is responsible for: the seas, the animals, the elements, the constellations. He asks who shut up the sea with doors, and who said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed (Job 38:11). He speaks of leviathan set in the deep, of the movements of the lion and its prey. He does this because he is responsible for these things and can therefore speak of their interior reason. His science concerning creation is the only science that reaches the level of cause. This is also why every modality of healing that treats the human being without reference to God will finally fail. Man may develop remarkable apparatus and genuine technologies, and I do not despise them; but the human being and his condition can only be ultimately defined by the one who constituted him, and a definition that is wrong at the level of cause cannot be right at the level of cure.

What, then, are the scriptures? They are the accurate historical record of God concerning his own creation and his own movements within it. It follows that the only account of origins which finally bears consideration is the account God has given. This is what faith means at the level of epistemology: the acceptance of God's information irrespective of any competing information. We know that God set a firmament in the midst of the waters to divide the waters from the waters (Genesis 1:6). We know, therefore, what is above and what is beneath. We know that the earth exists within the compass of that firmament and not outside it. It does not matter what Charles Darwin says, or what Richard Dawkins says, or what the frontier scientists of our age claim to have measured. It does not matter that they say they have been to space, or that they show us images of their going. We know that above the firmament there is water, and above the waters the heaven of heavens. We know that the sun is not the hundred and forty four million kilometres away that we have been told. We know it because God said it, and because a record given by the Maker outranks a reconstruction offered by the made.

I am aware how that sounds to a modern ear, and I state it deliberately. The alternative is not neutrality; the alternative is a second authority. This is precisely Satan's method. He creates a duplicity of knowledge, a second account standing alongside the first, in order to persuade us that we have options in the matter of how creation works. That is how doubt is manufactured. Doubt is not ignorance; doubt is the entertaining of two accounts at equal weight. A double minded man is unstable in all his ways (James 1:8). The man who holds two opinions and gives them equal regard is told plainly, let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord (James 1:7). The duplicity is the weapon. It is not necessary for the lie to win the argument; it is sufficient for the lie to be seated at the table.

There is a further reason we should care about records, and it bears directly on the work of contemplation. The Lord said to John, Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter (Revelation 1:19). God cares about records. He cares about the imprinting in time of that which he accomplishes. Everything I do ministerially, I do for posterity, because the God we serve is a God who commits his acts to memory and to text. I would urge the same discipline upon every believer within his own career and his own life: find a way to imprint what God has done for you in a given season, in whatever format is available to you, so that there remains a reference to it. We do it in an ecclesial and ministerial context, but the principle is not ecclesial only. And this is why the history I am about to set out matters: not because antiquity is interesting, but because this particular history foreshadows the future. The origin of evil is the template of its end.

Three States of the Earth: The Ruin Between the Verses

And 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). The Hebrew describes the earth as tohu va-bohu, formless and empty, and the verb permits, and I would say requires, the sense that the earth came to be in that state. The earth of verse two is not the earth of verse one in a different light. It is the earth of verse one in a different condition.

The proof is not speculative; it is given us by the prophet. 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 words rendered not in vain are lo tohu: not formless, not waste. God declares that he did not create the earth in the very condition in which Genesis 1:2 finds it. If he did not create it so, and it is so, then something occurred between the creating and the finding. Isaiah fills the gap that Genesis leaves open. Read verses one and two together without Isaiah and you may conclude that verse two is simply describing the earth of verse one. Read them with Isaiah and you cannot. These are two states, and something stands between them.

What was the nature of that corrupted state? The text tells us: the earth was submerged. The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the deep, not upon the face of the land. There was no dry land to move upon. It is only later, when God says Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear (Genesis 1:9), that the earth is summoned out from beneath the waters. The earth of verse two is a drowned earth, and a drowned earth is uninhabitable, and God has just told us through Isaiah that he formed it to be inhabited.

I want to press this further, because the sea is not incidental. We are given a description of the perfected earth at the end of the canon: And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea (Revelation 21:1). In the restored earth there is no sea. There is a river, and on either side of the river the tree of life (Revelation 22:1–2), but no sea. Now the new heaven and the new earth are restitutions; they restore what ought to have been from the beginning. If the restored earth has no sea, then the earth in its pristine state had no sea, and the sea is therefore a characteristic of the imperfection into which the earth fell. The waters that cover the deep in Genesis 1:2 are not neutral scenery. They are the icon of a ruin.

The subsequent witness of scripture reinforces this reading with remarkable consistency. When God destroyed the earth in the days of Noah, every creature of the dry land perished, all in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land (Genesis 7:22), while the creatures of the waters were untouched, because the judgement was a judgement upon the land and the sea was the instrument of it. When John sees the beast, he sees it rise up out of the sea (Revelation 13:1). When he sees the great harlot, she sits upon many waters, and he is told that the waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues (Revelation 17:15). The sea is repeatedly the terrain out of which the hostile powers emerge, the domain congenial to the entities that entered this earth after they were cast down. I do not press the imagery into an allegory it cannot bear, but the pattern is too insistent to ignore.

So the opening of Genesis discloses not two conditions but three. There is the pristine creation of the heavens and the earth in verse one. There is the corrupted state in verse two. And from verse three onward there is the work of God recovering, reordering, and refashioning what had been ruined. Creation moves from perfection, through imperfection, into redemption.

The pattern that governs everything

Once that movement is seen, it is seen everywhere. Man himself moves through the identical sequence: a perfect state in Eden, a fallen state under the curse, and a redeemed state in Christ. The movements of the incarnate LogosLogosThe eternal Word of God, through whom all things were made, who became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:1–14). follow the same fashion, with the decisive exception that no imperfection attaches to him: he moves from his divine state, into his human state, into his glorified state. The pattern is not coincidence. It is the signature of how God deals with a creation that has been damaged: he does not abandon the damaged thing, he passes it through humiliation into a glory greater than its first estate.

And if this pattern is truly the signature of God's movements, then it has an implication for the angelic order as well. There was a pristine age among the angels, a fallen and corrupted age, and there is a consummation in which the rebellion is finally judged and the loyal orders are confirmed. The saints are told, Know ye not that we shall judge angels? (1 Corinthians 6:3), and the angels in view can only be the fallen ones. The angelic order has a history, and it has a history precisely because something happened in it. That something is what we must now examine, because the state of the earth in Genesis 1:2 is a consequence, and a consequence requires a cause.

I Beheld: The Deposition of the Eternal Son

For the cause, I want to take a short passage in Luke before going to the prophets, because it gives us something no prophet can give us: the testimony of an eyewitness who is himself God. And the seventy returned again with joy, saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name (Luke 10:17). Notice what the incarnation brought into the open. At the manifestation of the Son of God there came also a broad public knowledge of devils, and of what devils had been doing. The seventy went out, and in the name of Jesus they commanded, and the devils came out; and it became evident that devils had been concealing themselves within men. This discloses something structural about the condition of fallen spirits in the earth: they require hosts in order to express themselves. They are not at home here. They have no proper body, no proper terrain, no native mode of operation in this domain, and so they seize upon what is native to it. And if that is true of them under men, it raises an obvious question about the period before men, when there were no human hosts at all. The earth itself was then the host, and what was done to the earth in that period is written in Genesis 1:2.

Then comes the deposition. And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven (Luke 10:18). Weigh every word. I beheld. He was present. He is not relaying a tradition; he is reporting what he saw. And since Satan did not fall in the lifetime of the man speaking, the one who speaks is disclosing his own divine nature in the very act of giving evidence. This is God saying, I was there.

Note also the origin: from heaven. The first habitation of this being was heaven. In the whole compass of creation there are three strata, heaven, the earth, and the abyss, the third encased within the second. A fall from heaven therefore terminates in the earth, and a further fall terminates in the pit. The devils cast out by the seventy are alien to this terrestrial domain; they belong to the order that came down. And the Lord tells us the manner of the descent: as lightning. That is not a comment on brightness but on speed and on totality. Whatever Satan attempted, it failed instantly and absolutely. There was no protracted contest in heaven, no siege, no negotiated withdrawal. He was gone at the speed of lightning.

And he was watching. He did not lift his hand. I want to sit with that, because it establishes the proportion of the whole conflict. This is the same pattern that governs the end. At Megiddo, in the last war of the age, the armies of the earth are gathered, and the Wicked one is revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming (2 Thessalonians 2:8). Have you ever seen a war in which the victor does not need to lift a finger? And yet the war is real and vast: when the thousand years are expired, Satan is loosed out of his prison and goes out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth (Revelation 20:8), gathering them to battle. The deception is effective. The gathering is immense. And the breath of his mouth ends it.

This tells us something sobering about the human situation between the two falls. Until the restitution of all things there will always be in this earth those who are with Jesus and those who are gathered against him, and there are those who will never repent. No matter how much God does, no matter how much of his power he displays, they will not change. They are set for judgement because they received not the love of the truth (2 Thessalonians 2:10). Look at Israel in the desert, who saw the sea divide and still hardened.

Which is why I want to say something pastoral here before returning to the argument, because this is not an abstraction. If your heart still leaps at the scriptures, however poor you are and however low your status, give God the glory, because that responsiveness is itself the evidence of grace at work in you. The capacity to be moved by the things of God is the indicator of the presence and the operation of grace. Where grace is withdrawn, the affections for spiritual reality go dim, and a man can sit under the word unmoved. This is why a Christian ought to be alarmed, not comforted, when his movements toward God are diminishing; and why, conversely, a believer who has sinned and fallen and yet finds his heart returning has been given a sign. To day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts (Hebrews 3:15). The very form of that summons implies that hearts can be hardened irrespective of what is heard. Remember that of the seven churches in Asia, five are called to repentance; the Lord names precisely what each has done wrong, and still holds the door open. But where the heart is no longer able to repent, grace has gone far off.

The Anointed Cherub: The Guardian of the Garden

Now to the identity of this being, and here we must go to Ezekiel 28. The chapter carries a lamentation delivered in two movements. From verse one to verse ten the prophet addresses the prince of Tyrus, and the prince is plainly a man: he has set his heart as the heart of God, yet thou art a man, and not God (Ezekiel 28:2). But from verse eleven the address shifts to the king of Tyrus, and the king is manifestly not a man. He is an ancient entity who operated behind the shadow of the prince, and God now turns and speaks to him directly.

Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyrus, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty (Ezekiel 28:12). To seal up the sum is to be the consummation, the finished total of a thing. He was the completion of a certain order of creaturely excellence, wisdom and beauty brought to their term.

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 (Ezekiel 28:13). Now the subject is unmistakably celestial. His covering was of precious stone; his vesture was jewelled. And something stranger still is said: tabrets and pipes were prepared in him, built into his constitution, so that he was himself an instrument. But the decisive phrase in the whole verse is the last one: in the day that thou wast created. Whoever this king of Tyrus is, however full of wisdom, however perfect in beauty, he is a creature. He had a day. He is not causal; he only appears to be. The greater is still God, and everything that follows must be read in the light of that single concession wrung from the text.

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 (Ezekiel 28:14). Here is the office. He is a cherub. The word behind anointed that covereth is mimshach, the outspread one, the one whose wings are stretched over a thing to guard it. And I want now to advance a thesis which I believe the scriptures themselves establish, and which I hold until someone brings a better proposition from the same scriptures.

The thesis

Take Genesis 3. Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life (Genesis 3:23–24).

Read those two verses slowly, because three things are given us that are usually passed over. First, Adam was taken from ground outside Eden. He was formed outside the garden and then placed within it. Eden is a pristine location, distinct from the ground of Adam's origin, and when he is expelled he is sent back to till the ground from whence he was taken. Inside Eden he did not till; God had caused every tree and every plant to grow there. The garden was God's, and man was its custodian.

Second, the charge given to Adam was a charge of guardianship. God put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it (Genesis 2:15), and the word rendered keep carries the sense of guarding, of watching over against intrusion. Adam was the garden's keeper. Third, and this is the hinge, when Adam is removed from that charge, God places cherubims at the east of the garden to perform the very function Adam had been performing: to keep the way. A cherub is installed where a man had stood. The office is continuous; only the officer changes.

Now return to Ezekiel. Here is a cherub, and he was in Eden, the garden of God. What was a cherub doing in Eden? We may answer that question by the first mention of cherubim in scripture, and the first mention has them guarding Eden. Therefore Satan, in the primordial earth, was in Eden as its guardian cherub. He held the office before Adam held it, and when Adam forfeited it, God did not invent a new arrangement; he restored the original one, with loyal cherubim in the place of the one who had defiled it.

This is why the ministry of cherubim is what it is. Cherubim guard what is precious to God; the seraphim are the guardians of the throne, and the cherubim are stationed over the sanctuary and the garden. We should also notice that the tree of life did not first come into existence in the terrestrial Eden. It stands in the restored Jerusalem, in the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river (Revelation 22:2). The tree is an eternal reality, and the garden that housed it was the holiest ground in the created order, which is exactly why it required a guardian of the first rank.

And this gives us the motive for what followed. Man was placed in the office that this cherub had held and then vacated. More than that, man had been granted something no cherub ever received, the image and likeness of God, which is a higher esteem than was given to any other creature. The guardian who had been removed watched the creature of dust installed above him. That is the soil in which envy grew, and envy explains why Satan's assault fell upon Adam specifically and not upon some other part of creation.

Set side by side, Satan and Adam run in parallel: each was placed as guardian of the garden of God, each fell from that charge, and each was driven out of it. The one was an angelic being and the other a man, and it was the first who beguiled the second, but their fates bear the same shape. Yet envy of man cannot be the origin of evil, because the being who envied man was already fallen before man existed. Something preceded the envy. That something is the question we have been working toward.

The Iniquity of Thy Traffick: How Evil Was Conceived

Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee (Ezekiel 28:15). Everything hangs on the word till. There was a duration of perfection, and then a terminus. This creature was not made defective; he became so. And the verb is found: when God examined him, iniquity was located, present, resident within him. How ironic that the being who sealed up the sum of creaturely perfection should become the womb through which iniquity entered creation.

The next verse gives the sequence, and the sequence is exact. By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned (Ezekiel 28:16). The word rendered merchandise is the language of trade. He was peddling something. And notice the order of events: iniquity is found in him first; he then begins to traffick; the trafficking fills him with violence; and only then is it said, thou hast sinned. Evil is not born at the moment of the overt act. Iniquity is conceived in the interior first, in the secret disposition of the creature, before there is anything to see. Then the disposition seeks outlet, and the outlet is commerce with others. Then the commerce hardens into violence. Then the violence issues in the act. And the sentence follows at once: 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 (Ezekiel 28:16). Sin does not begin in human territory. It begins in angelic territory, and it begins in the heart before it ever reaches the hand.

What was the commodity? The text tells us the sequel rather than the substance, and from the sequel we may reason back. We know that this trafficking issued in a rebellion that took a third part of the angelic host with it: his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth (Revelation 12:4). Something was offered to those hosts that was persuasive enough to make them stake their estate upon it. My own judgement, and I offer it as a judgement drawn from the scriptures rather than as a bare assertion, is that what he peddled was a kingdom. He promised them authority, rank, and power held independently of God.

I ground that reading in the second Psalm, because the rhetoric of the kings of the earth is not their own invention. Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us (Psalm 2:1–3). That is the language of a creature persuaded that the Creator's governance is a bondage and that autonomy is available. Where did such a proposition originate? It originated with the one who first offered it to angels and has been reselling it to kings ever since. The rhetoric of the rulers is the echo of the merchandise of the cherub.

Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness (Ezekiel 28:17). Here at last is the root beneath the root. The iniquity was self regard. He contemplated his own excellence, which was real and God given, until the excellence displaced the giver in his estimation. And notice what that did to his wisdom: he did not lose it, he corrupted it. He remained full of wisdom; his wisdom simply no longer served truth. This is a distinction of enormous pastoral importance, because it means that intelligence is not a safeguard against ruin and that brilliance can be the very instrument of a creature's undoing.

There is a further and startling implication. For Satan to imagine that he could usurp God is not merely arrogance; it is ignorance. How can a creature contend with his own cause and expect to prevail? The very supposition exposes that he did not know God, that God in his totality was hidden from his creatures. He possessed wisdom, but not the wisdom of God, for the wisdom of God begets the fear of God in those who hold it, and the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom. Had he possessed that wisdom he could not have thought as he thought.

And that ignorance persists. Paul says that we speak the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory (1 Corinthians 2:7–8). At the cross the same being made the same miscalculation on the same grounds, believing that he was destroying the Son and not perceiving that he was accomplishing the counsel of God. He was full of wisdom and blind at the decisive point, twice.

Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities, by the iniquity of thy traffick; therefore will I bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee, and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee. All they that know thee among the people shall be astonished at thee: thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more (Ezekiel 28:18–19). He is sentenced to be a terror, and he is sentenced to cease. The fire that consumes him is brought forth from his own midst, which is to say that his destruction is the maturation of what he himself conceived. And the place of his banishment is named: I will cast thee to the ground (Ezekiel 28:17), where the word is erets, the earth. This is why the assignment given to man was not the simple stewardship it appears to be. There was something in this terrestrial domain greater and more dangerous than the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air and every creeping thing. There was a foreign entity here, already judged and already resident.

I Will Ascend: The Mind of Lucifer and the Whole Arc of His Descent

Ezekiel shows us what led to the fall. Isaiah shows us what followed it, and gives us the name. 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! (Isaiah 14:12). His fall did not remain a private catastrophe. It weakened the nations. It destabilised the human order. Whatever else Satan is, he is the destabilisation of humanity, and the disorder of the peoples traces back to a wound in the celestial order that preceded them.

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 (Isaiah 14:13). We are being admitted into the interior of this creature, into his psychology, and the first thing to observe is the tense and the posture. He speaks of ascending, which means he is below. He speaks of exalting his throne, which means he already has one. This is therefore a word spoken after the first defeat. He has been cast down, he has established a seat in the place of his banishment, and from that seat he is planning the next campaign. That he possesses a throne here is not difficult to accept, for the Lord himself says to Pergamos, I know thy works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan's seat is (Revelation 2:13).

And what does he intend to seize? The mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north. The Psalmist tells us where that is. Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, in the mountain of his holiness. Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is mount Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of the great King (Psalm 48:1–2). The phrase is identical. He is coming for Zion. And Zion is not a hill in the Judean highlands only; the epistle to the Hebrews tells us what it finally is: ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn (Hebrews 12:22–23), and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel (Hebrews 12:24). That is what he proposes to profane and to occupy.

I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High (Isaiah 14:14). Five declarations, each beginning with the same two words. This is a totalitarian will. He does not want a share; he wants the whole. And the ambition has a lower register as well as a higher one, for the claim to exalt his throne above the stars of God is also a claim of kingship over the celestial orders themselves, which is precisely the dominion described when Paul says that we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places (Ephesians 6:12), and names him the prince of the power of the air (Ephesians 2:2).

Understand the character of the creature you are dealing with, because it bears on how a believer must conduct himself. Neither give place to the devil (Ephesians 4:27). He will not be a tenant. He does not come to occupy a room; he comes to be master of the house, and the Lord's own image for him is the strong man armed who keeps his palace until a stronger comes (Mark 3:27). This is why his movements in scripture are always at the level of kingdoms. He is the king of Tyre, the power behind Egypt, the spirit of Babylon; he is the great red dragon having seven heads and ten horns (Revelation 12:3); the harlot sits upon many waters and the waters are peoples and nations. He does not want a part of your family; he wants the bloodline. He does not want a city; he wants the continent. A being who believes he can overthrow God is not going to be satisfied with a household. And this is why his hatred fixes upon the Son who was born to rule all nations with a rod of iron (Revelation 12:5), and upon every man who successfully resists him and gives him no foothold.

It is also why I can say plainly, and without apology, that Allah is a demon and Buddha is a demon. If the ambition of this being is the universal worship that belongs to God, then every system of worship that directs man to a deity unconnected with the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is an instrument of that ambition. For all the gods of the nations are idols (Psalm 96:5), and what the nations sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God (1 Corinthians 10:20). They have mouths and speak not, eyes and see not, ears and hear not (Psalm 115:5–6). The prophets of Baal cried from morning until evening, and cut themselves with knives and lancets till the blood gushed out (1 Kings 18:28), and no fire fell, because there was nothing there to answer. And I would ask any man to consider, with his reason and not only with his religion, how one arrives at the conclusion that the dead are to be worshipped. You weep for a man when he dies, and then you petition him for power. You conclude that the skin of an animal can confer power on the one who wears it. How is such a conclusion reached by a mind that has not first been blinded? These are not neutral cultural inheritances. They are the residue of a trafficking that began before the earth was refashioned, and their single objective is the suppression of the knowledge of God.

From earth to the pit

Then the script changes. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit (Isaiah 14:15). The first descent was from heaven to the earth. This is a second descent, from the earth to the abyss, and he is the only being in the created order who falls through every stratum of creation to its extremity. Having been cast down himself, his project is to drag man down after him. The whole vocation of man is ascent toward God; the whole project of this being is descent, and he wants company in it.

And then the language shifts in a way that ought to arrest every reader. They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms; that made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners? (Isaiah 14:16–17). Is this the man. He is no longer addressed as Lucifer, son of the morning. He is looked upon as a man. This tells us his final form: the son of perdition, the one who as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God (2 Thessalonians 2:4). Before his annihilation he will appear as a man, and men will stare at him and find him smaller than his reputation.

The sentence concludes with a detail I do not want passed over. All the kings of the nations, even all of them, lie in glory, every one in his own house. But thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch (Isaiah 14:18–19), and thou shalt not be joined with them in burial, because thou hast destroyed thy land, and slain thy people: the seed of evildoers shall never be renowned (Isaiah 14:20). He is denied burial. Every king of the earth lies in his own sepulchre, and this one is refused even that. He passes through no intermediate custody, because his judgement was settled from the beginning; he goes directly to the lake of fire. And the LORD declares that he will rise up against the seed of evildoers and cut off from Babylon the name, and remnant (Isaiah 14:22). Babylon is his last seat on the earth, the mother of harlots (Revelation 17:5), and it is cut off.

So we have the whole arc set before us in two prophets: the description of this being, his office, his perfection, the conception of iniquity within him, his trafficking, his rebellion, his fall, his throne in the place of his banishment, his second ambition, his final form, his judgement, and his end. And in the middle of that arc stands the earth of Genesis 1:2, a drowned and ruined world, bearing the impact of a fall that came down like lightning.

VII. The Theanthropos: The Answer That God Himself Is

I have set out an account of where evil came from. I now have to say plainly that an account is not a remedy, and that this is why I cannot end with Isaiah. The chaos of life and the chaos of the nations, considered rightly, is a distraction. It is designed to be. It draws the eye from the one true God, the theanthropos, the God who became man, the one who was present and beheld Satan fall like lightning and who has borne the name the Word of God from before the foundation of the world. He is the only begotten Son of the Father. We are sons by grace and by adoption; he is Son in essence, Son indeed, and the distinction is not a technicality but the whole ground of our hope. For the love of mankind he became man, took on the likeness of sinful flesh (Romans 8:3), and received in himself the judgement that was to fall upon the whole race. The Prince of life subjected himself to death. And Peter says of that death that God raised him because it was not possible that he should be holden of it (Acts 2:24), and cites David: neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption (Acts 2:27). On the third day the Author of life rose from the dead, having satisfied the demands of eternal justice, and he did for us what no creature in heaven or earth could have done. There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5). We love him, we worship him, we serve him, and we renounce Satan and all his works.

I want to press this directly against the ordinary business of a life, because that is where the conflict is actually joined. While you are pursuing a career, building a business, raising a family, walking the path toward whatever you understand as arriving, remember that the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever (1 John 2:17). Build, by all means. But build with your eyes on him, and continue to seek a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God (Hebrews 11:10). Set up your insurance policies if you must; only remember which policy is the principal one. Faith has to be built until it is impervious, until a man's convictions concerning the Lord Jesus Christ are so settled that his whole life is staked upon them: his business, his career, his household, all of it committed to a single wager. That is what it is to become the true material of Christ. Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life (Revelation 2:10).

Conclusion: The Medicine of Immortality

Evil has a genealogy. It did not always exist; it is not the shadow side of God; it did not begin with Adam and it did not begin with matter. It was conceived in the interior of a created cherub who sealed up the sum of creaturely perfection, whose heart was lifted up because of his beauty and whose wisdom was corrupted by reason of his brightness, who trafficked a stolen kingdom among the celestial orders until he was filled with violence and sinned. It issued in a rebellion that took a third of the host, and it was answered by a fall so swift that the Son of God, watching, did not lift his hand. The wreckage of that fall is written in the second verse of the Bible, in a drowned and formless earth that God had not created formless. And the being who caused it was cast down into the very domain into which man would afterwards be placed, and his envy of the creature who bore the image of God and inherited his vacated office has driven every assault upon the human race from Eden to this hour.

That is the history. But the reason I have rehearsed it is not that we might be well informed about our adversary. It is that we might understand what has been done to us and what is now being done for us. Man moves in the same threefold pattern as the earth and receives the same treatment: perfection, corruption, and then a redemption that carries him beyond his first estate. We pray for metamorphosis. We pray for the therapia, the holy therapy effected by the Holy Ghost, by which the Spirit of God heals us in spirit and soul and body and reconstitutes our beings to the function for which we were purposed and created. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God (Romans 8:19).

And that healing is not chiefly an idea. It is administered. As we come to the holy Eucharist, the sacrament of the Lord's body and blood, we are to remember that it is his body and his blood that have become our life, and that from him we draw our strength, our hope, our future, our wisdom. This is my body which is given for you (Luke 22:19). This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins (Matthew 26:28). Saint Ignatius called the Eucharist the medicine of immortality, the food by which we may attain unto the life that does not die. God intends that we should eat and drink so much of Christ that we become icons of the Logos, until our minds and our characters and our conduct are so full of God that there is no room left for sin. We continue to fall, and the falling is simply the indicator that imperfection is still present in us. But as we consume perfection we will become perfect; as we contemplate the Lord Jesus Christ we will attain unto him.

The being who tried to ascend is going down to the sides of the pit. The creature he envied is being raised, fed on the flesh of God, and made to sit in the city whose builder and maker is God. That is the whole answer to the origin of evil: not an explanation only, but a reversal, and the reversal is a Person.