The World and the Word

                                          The Fall

The fall of God's creations into the influence of evil began with the greatest angel that God ever created named Lucifer. In Ezekiel 28:1-10, the prophet relates a story of one of the kings of Tyrus who apparently became so filled with excessive pride that he claimed to be equal to God. This king acquired much power and wealth, but his enemies overthrew him and killed him. Ezekiel implied that God caused this prideful king's downfall because of his excessive pride.

In Ezekiel 28:11-19, God inspired Ezekiel to use this fallen king as a symbol of how His angel Lucifer also fell into evil because of his excessive pride. God gave Lucifer tremendous beauty and power, and He also gave him a gift which only God possessed which is free will. At that time, God knew nothing about evil.

God is Omniscient. But He possesses only an Infinite Set of Good Ideas from which He draws upon to create only positive systems; that is, systems that are good and useful and beautiful. God expected that Lucifer would also use his gift of free will to choose to create only good and useful systems. In His innocence, God could not imagine that free will could be used in any other way.

But Ezekiel 28:15 implies that God became shocked to find that something very strange had happened to Lucifer. Lucifer had become filled with a false system called excessive pride and had begun to claim that he was equal to God Himself. Isaiah 14:12-17. God also discovered that Lucifer had begun to misuse God's good ideas to invent his own little evil world and had mislead one third of God's angels to join him in practicing false systems of excessive pride and pleasure. Lucifer then rebelled against God and tried to overthrow Him, murder Him, and take His place. John 8:44.

God suspected that somehow an evil influence had emerged from the cover of darkness, which He had previously created, to infect Lucifer with excessive pride and rebellion. Genesis 1:2; John 3:19-20. God created darkness for useful purposes, and He had no idea such an event could happen. God also discovered that a weakness existed in His gift of free will to Lucifer that allowed him to choose to be influenced by evil. The word "profane" in Ezekiel 28:16 indicates that Lucifer refused to repent of his rebellious acts towards God. Because he refused to repent, Lucifer's system became totally evil, and God had to use His consuming fire to dissolve Lucifer's system, recover all of His good ideas that He had put into his system, and exile his nothingness to earth where he became a totally evil and destructive entity called Satan.

Yet somehow, even though he had become equal to nothing, Satan still retained some form of consciousness. Satan could think and act, but only in destructive ways. Job 1:7. God realized that Satan had acquired some form of negative consciousness even though his being had become absolutely empty. For this reason, the Bible (KJV) almost always refers to sin and evil as vanity which means both emptiness and excessive pride. Ezekiel 28:19. God further realized that Satan's negative consciousness emerged into Lucifer by its use of the cover of darkness from some nonexistent place of total emptiness that God called the bottomless pit. Revelation 20:3. God further realized that because some negative consciousness had to have influenced Lucifer, then this bottomless pit must be filled with negative consciousnesses which He called devils. Luke 8:30-31. How a nonexistent, totally empty place could be filled with totally evil, negative consciousnesses that were nevertheless able to think and act became a complete mystery to even God. II Thessalonians 2:7.