The World and the Word

                        The Devil's Dilemma

Satan's plan has always been that if he could cause the eternal death and separation from God of the living soul and spirit of just one human whom God had created in His image, then the Devil could prove that God's Love is not Almighty in that God could not protect that which He loves. Job 1:11; Job 2:5; Job 2:9. For this reason, the Devil injected spiritual death into Adam and Eve and the rest of humanity with the hope that that evil would eventually overpower the spiritual life that God has put into every human and thereby annul something God creates and loves. When God allowed the Devil to do his worst to Job but save his life, that command became symbolic of God's protection of the good lives of the entire human race. Job 1:12; Job 2:6; Job 2:10. Job's good life symbolized the perfect image of God that He has put into every human. Job 1:8. God's allowance of the Devil to do his worst to Job symbolizes the fact that God must allow the Devil to do his worst to humanity in order to prove that total evil can never cause the Love of God to fail. I Corinthians 13:8; Ecclesiastes 3:14; Genesis 3:20; Luke 20:38. But the Devil's real goal is to find a way to weaken God's Almighty Love to the extent that he can find a way to murder God and take His place. Isaiah 14:12-17.

After listening to Jesus' sermons for a while, The Devil learned that Jesus' special sacrifice would probably be by crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. But this knowledge put the Devil into a terrible dilemma. Should he influence humans to let Jesus go and thereby thwart God's prophecy, or should he influence humans to nail Jesus to a cross and possibly kill Him forever? The Devil's dilemma accounts for why the Sanhedrin waited so long to order the arrest of Jesus. In God's plan before He created the world, He had already determined that the Devil would choose to have Christ crucified, but the Devil did not know this as he passed through time. The Devil only knew that he had a choice to make.

The Devil knew that God had prophesied that Christ would suffer and die and be resurrected in some special way, but the Devil did not know that God had planned it all before He ever created humanity. The Devil knew that Lucifer's rebellion had caused doubt about the Almighty Power of God's Love to enter into His creations. The Devil wagered that this doubt had entered into the Being of God Himself. If this were so, then this doubt would cause God to be uncertain as to whether or not the sacrifice of Christ would be successful. The Devil wagered that if God had this doubt, then that doubt would give the Devil the chance to permanently murder God. But if the Devil had known that God had planned Christ's sacrifice and resurrection before He created the world, then the Devil could have guessed that God had complete confidence that Christ would prevail. I Corinthians 2:7-8.

The Devil reasoned that if he influenced humans to let Jesus go, then he would thwart God's prophecy, and at the same time, he would buy more time in mankind's history to completely and forever ruin some living soul and spirit that God loves. But the Devil remembered that his main goal was to murder God forever. If the Devil let Jesus go, then he might lose his only chance of ever being able to murder God. Both Simon Peter's and Pontius Pilate's attitudes toward Jesus reflected the Devil's dilemma.