The Beginning of Sin

     Ezekiel 28:1-19  Isaiah 14:12-17

Lucifer was God's wisest and most beautiful creation. God created Lucifer with love. God wanted Lucifer to know that he was wise and beautiful. In order to do this, God had to give him self-awareness and free will. God wanted Lucifer to be like Him in many ways.

But God appeared to be naive and innocent when He created Lucifer. God cannot be charged with making a mistake for creating Lucifer because God knew absolutely nothing about evil. God expected Lucifer to create only good systems. Habakkuk 1:13 relates that God can see the effects of sin, but God cannot look on sin directly. This condition accounts for why the Father turned His face away from Jesus on the cross. Matthew 27:46; Psalm 22:1,6.

Evil is a mystery even to God. II Thessalonians 2:7. This does not mean that God is not omniscient. God possesses an infinite knowledge of all that is good, but He cannot directly know sin.

God cannot directly observe sin because God has a positive consciousness, a consciousness of goodness only. God created Lucifer and mankind to have only a positive consciousness. A positive consciousness seeks only to create good systems. A negative consciousness seeks only to destroy good systems.

The source of all evil lies in the abyss. Luke 8:31 calls it "the deep." Revelation 20:3 calls it "the bottomless pit." It is a place of nonexistence and absolute nothingness. Yet, in some mysterious way, negative consciousnesses can emerge from absolute nothingness in an attempt to possess living beings.

In the story of the maniac of Gadara in Luke 8:26-37, the demons that possessed the man cried out that they knew Jesus was the Son of God. They did this only because they were deathly afraid of Jesus and hoped only to placate His wrath. These demons begged Jesus not to exile them back to the abyss. Negative consciousness hates the abyss. It is nowhere and at no time, and there is nothing there of which to be conscious. There, demons can only wail in the agony of emptiness. Jesus displayed His mercy even to the demons by sending them into a herd of swine instead of the deep. But the herd of swine killed themselves to get rid of the demons, and so the demons went back to the abyss anyway. I John 3:8 teaches us that Jesus came to destroy the works of the Devil. In other words, Jesus came to purge all evil from His world.

God knew nothing about the abyss or evil until after Lucifer had rebelled. This happened because there was nothing to know. God only knows an infinite goodness. That is all that is worth knowing. Sin equals vanity or emptiness. Romans 8:20.

Lucifer began to love his own beauty and wisdom. Ezekiel 28:15 relates that suddenly evil was found in him. This evil came from nowhere. It came from the abyss. Lucifer invented a false system called "excessive pride." Negative consciousness has no ideas of its own. Lucifer had to steal God's ideas in order to invent false systems such as "excessive pride" and "excessive pleasures" which prove only to be destructive. All of God's ideas stolen by Lucifer were good in themselves. "Excessive" and "pride" and "pleasure" are all good ideas as God knows how to use them in creative systems. Lucifer could not create anything. He could only invent false systems that are always destructive.

Ezekiel 28:17-18 relates that God destroyed Lucifer with fire and exiled his ashes to the earth. Hebrews 12:29 teaches us that "...God is a consuming fire." God burned up Lucifer in order to recover His good elements that God had put into him, and He exiled his "ashes," symbolic of his negative consciousness, to the earth. This relates how Lucifer became the Devil. God used His good ideas to create Lucifer as a good system. God had to have recovered all of Lucifer's good elements because the Devil became totally evil.

But on the earth, the Devil or Satan did not lose his negative consciousness. He could still invent false systems called "lies" by which he could attack God's next creation, the finite, but innocent, consciousness of mankind. Satan could no longer use God's ideas directly, but he remembered some of them, and by using these shadow ideas, he formed his lies.

Positive consciousness can get no idea of how a negative consciousness can do anything or even how it can exist in a nonexistent state. We do know that a negative consciousness can possess no ideas of its own. A negative consciousness, which is a demon, can only invade a positive consciousness  in order to get out of the abyss and have a means to invent destructive systems from the good ideas that it finds there.