THE FALL GUY
On your belly you shall go,
and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.
—Genesis 3:14
“The assumption that Satan was a good angel gone rogue would mean God didn’t see it coming,” said the boy, “that His creation had a flaw. Or what, He foresaw the serpent bending Eve’s ear in the garden but got caught up in traffic so He couldn’t get there in time to stop it? Nonsense. But a Satan designed to test humanity puts our all-knowing God back in control.”
The man appeared to be playing with the notion in his mind, so the boy went on.
“First, think about this. The trouble didn’t start until God planted a tree that couldn’t be eaten from. Imagine if God never put temptation smack dab in the middle of the garden to begin with. The snake comes slithering up to Eve and says, ‘Did God really say you can’t eat from every tree?’ And Eve says, ‘No, no. We can eat from every tree.’ And then all the snake has left to say is, ‘Oh. Well, this is awkward.’ There’s no test of temptation without something to be tempted by, so God knew exactly what He was doing.
“But God knew that in order to test humanity’s genuine worship once they had free will, He couldn’t just say, ‘Hey, I’m testing free will now, so don’t eat from the tree over there.’ It had to be a blind study, where the subjects didn’t know they were being tested. So God created an outside influence that would give them a little nudge toward defiance. Except this other being couldn’t know that it was testing humanity either, because it might feel some kind of moral conflict in doing so. So God created a creature without morals, whose nature is to oppose God, but is still obedient enough to listen to God. Then He used reverse psychology to steer Satan into doing what He actually wanted. Just like when He called Job righteous and upright, and Satan would inevitably want to prove God wrong because that’s in his nature.”
The man remained silent and still.
“Let me ask you something,” said the boy. “How do you think Satan knew the tree of knowledge wouldn’t kill Adam and Eve in the sense that it was poisonous?”
The man thought about it for a moment before he said, “We don’t know. It’s possible he didn’t.”
“Right, but there are only a few possibilities. Either God told Adam the tree would kill him when He knew the serpent was close by, or He told them each the same thing separately. In either case, Satan was trying to kill the humans because that was his nature, which God knew because He made him that way.
“Or, God told Satan ‘in confidence’ that it actually wouldn’t poison them, in which case Satan pounced on the opportunity to undermine God and spill the beans about His untrustworthiness, because that was his nature, which God knew because He made him that way.
“Or, based on this story here, there was a cabinet meeting after Adam and Eve were created where God said, ‘Satan, what have you been up to?’ And Satan said, ‘Slithering around the garden and such.’ And God said, ‘What do you think about the humans? Free will is my crowning achievement, but I’m sure they’ll follow My every command.’ And Satan said, ‘Do they listen to God for nothing? You’ve put them in a paradise without temptation. But plant a tree and tell them not to eat from it and surely they’ll defy You.’ So God said, ‘Very well. I’ll tell them not to eat from the tree of knowledge, and you may test their obedience.’ So Satan went out from the Lord and slithered up to Eve because he knew she knew she was just created as an afterthought and figured she was probably still holding onto that grudge. But God knew all this would happen because He made him that way.”
The man drew in a deep breath and let it out again. “While this is all very clever, why on Earth would God curse His own creation in any of these situations if He made him that way?”
“The point I’m trying to make,” said the boy, “is that Satan was ‘the fall’ guy. God needed to test free will and obedience without the humans knowing, so He threw Satan under the bus as a scapegoat, just like Satan was the scapegoat in Job.”
The man raised an eyebrow. “And how do you figure that?”
The boy raised an eyebrow of his own. “Are you even paying attention? Look how everything happened. God came down and blamed Satan for Job’s suffering. He didn’t admit to the fact that He pointed Satan at Job to begin with. All He said was, ‘There’s a chaos monster out there, Job, on the loose, causing suffering. But at least it taught you a lesson about genuine worship. And because I’m so gracious and merciful, here’s a new family.’
“It’s like I was saying before. Imagine how Job would have seen things if he knew what actually happened. Do you think if Job had heard God tell Satan, ‘Have your way with Job,’ he would have taken back all the things he said? Like you said yourself, even ten new children couldn’t replace the loss of one. But with this ending, at least Job could be satisfied by ignorant bliss. But no matter how you slice it, this story is still unsatisfying for the reader.”
“I don’t know about that,” said the man. “I feel quite satisfied knowing the Lord is in control.”
“Of course, you do,” said the boy, “because what’s the alternative? That God isn’t all-knowing? That He can be bamboozled by His own creation? That the only thing the ‘leash’ is good for is tripping up God? No, God is the creator of cunningness, so we can assume one of His creatures isn’t more cunning than He is. But that’s only the silver lining if Job actually had a lesson to learn, if there was a point to this story other than ‘sometimes there’s unexplainable suffering.’ I think that’s in line with the crocodile theory you mentioned earlier. It’s the lazy man’s way out for those who don’t dig deep enough into the puzzle. But anyone with a sense of morals still has to question why God allowed Satan to kill Job’s family and then blamed it on Satan acting on his own accord.”
“But Satan was acting on his own,” said the man. “That’s the reason why sometimes there’s unexplained suffering.”
The boy slapped his palm on his forehead. “You keep trying to separate God and Satan when they’re equally responsible. You can’t say what Satan did was bad while God remains good.”
“But God is good,” said the man, “always.”
“And that’s why I’m arguing that Satan is ‘good’ as well. In a sense, anyway. Satan gets a bad rap because he’s the fall guy, but really he’s just a hired gun. Or rather, a gun God manipulates to do His bidding, which, in your view, is always good. But God created this gun and said, ‘Aim over there,’ knowing it’s in the gun’s nature to shoot at whatever God points toward. This is the whole ‘Guns aren’t bad, the people behind the guns are bad’ argument. A gun is just a hunk of metal, but whoever aims the gun is responsible for what happens next.
“That’s why a mother ostrich leaving her eggs isn’t ‘bad,’ that’s just what God designed her to do. The lion killing prey to feed her cub isn’t ‘bad,’ that’s just the instinct God gave her. The serpent testing humanity isn’t ‘bad,’ that was just God’s aim when He created him.
“Don’t you think if God wanted to, He could have stomped the serpent’s head in the garden and nipped the whole problem of suffering in the bud? Of course He could’ve. But Satan is a necessary part of God’s plan, however mysterious that plan is. Then, after judgment day, in the new earth or whatever, God won’t need to be testing the people He’s already tested. So, poof, into the lake Satan goes, along with everyone who fell for his charm.
“But unless you’re saying God’s plan is ‘bad,’ then Satan can’t be ‘bad.’ Satan is a neutral force of chaos doing the job God created him to do. He didn’t have a personal grudge against Job or hate children. God said, ‘What do you think about this guy?’ And Satan said, ‘I see someone that needs to be tested because it’s in my nature to test whoever God points me toward.’ Satan is a dragon on a leash that God uses whenever He needs to throw a little chaos in the mix, because God needed a force to influence His world in a way that could teach lessons, build character, and push people in different directions, even if it’s for reasons we don’t understand.”
“But this makes God sound like a master manipulator of sorts,” said the man. “That God allows evil is a given, but that God created evil in order to bring about good is something I can’t accept. Why would an all-loving God do such a thing?”
“Well,” said the boy, “assuming the whole purpose of this human experiment was to test free will, how can you know anyone’s true character until they’ve been tested? It’d be difficult to test free will in a vacuum of paradise without a chaos dragon. God probably recognized that temptation and suffering and challenge are necessary for the complete human experience.”
“Yeah, but tell that to Holocaust survivors,” said the man, “or anyone inflicted by any kind of evil and torture throughout history. Are you saying gas chambers were part of God’s plan?”
The boy looked down and pinched his lip in thought. “Hmm. Well, maybe God knew that you can only bring out the best in humanity by forcing them to overcome the worst. And if you limit the force of chaos to a level you know your people can overcome, then putting ‘the adversary’ against mankind was actually a means to bring out the greatest good.
“This kind of relates to the story you mentioned in Exodus, where God cuts off the heads of Rahab, ‘the dragon’ that was Pharaoh. Doesn’t God continually harden Pharaoh’s heart, even through plague after plague? Then even after Pharaoh lets them go, he still chases them into the Red Sea. But eventually, God conjures up a force that defeats him. Maybe you could say the same thing about the Christians and Rome. They were persecuted and persecuted, even after Christ was nailed to the cross. But eventually, the forces of God were able to overcome those of Satan. And even in the Holocaust examples, the allies eventually came to the rescue and defeated the Nazis.
“Which brings us back to those points you made about being concerned over God’s justice regarding Satan. There probably wasn’t a whole lot of Israelite pity for Pharaoh, or Christian pity for Paganism, or Jewish pity for Hitler. Maybe Satan was created so we’d have forces to overcome. Maybe we were never supposed to have sympathy for the Devil.”
The man quietly stroked his beard as the boy watched him think it over.
“Just tell me what growth would come from a garden story where God says, ‘Go ahead and eat from every tree of the garden,’ full stop, with no room for temptation. Adam never has to toil over the land, Eve never has pain in childbearing, they just have lots of sex and lots of pain-free babies, and there’s no threat or danger, and everyone lives happily ever after eating fruit off the trees because there’s nothing else to do. You’re just a happy little robot with no room to choose sin even if you wanted to.
“The Bible would be two pages long that way, with no lessons to learn. There has to be a chaos dragon. Without Satan, there is no Bible, there’s no Jesus, there’s no redemption arc for humanity, or anything to strive for because we’re born into perfection without the temptation to sin. There’s just rainbows and butterflies and unicorns and gumdrops in fairyland. There are no obstacles to overcome, no range of emotion, no improvement in character as you fight through life’s challenges. The chaos dragon makes the human experience whole. Seems to me like you can’t spell the ‘Holy’ in Bible with wholly including a dragon!”
The man looked up and to the left for a moment. “Actually, ‘wholly’ is spelled with two L’s and ‘Holy’ is spelled with one, but I see what you’re getting at.”
The boy’s expression slumped into a frown. “Come on, man. You couldn’t let that go?”
“You make a fair point overall,” said the man. “And because Satan enters our story with the proclivity toward sin, without knowing where it came from, I suppose we can’t disprove your theory per se. It just goes against the entire Christian understanding of the narrative. The moral issue I’m dealing with is that I can’t seem to justify evil by the good it transforms into. I can’t resonate with the notion that Israel was built thanks to the Holocaust. I’m horrified by the notion.
“When you face adversarial circumstances, you can grow from them, I agree there. But adversarial is not the same as a gas chamber. There’s a finality to that. You can’t grow from dropping dead. I supposed if you take the afterlife into account as the full picture, you can find some relief overall. But I would forever wrestle with this view of God you’re painting.”
“But you admit God allows evil to exist when He could just snap His fingers at any time and get rid of it,” said the boy. “I think it’s hard to view things from God’s perspective when we’re caught up in pain and suffering ourselves. But God can see all of time and existence in one snapshot, and He can evaluate human history as a whole. We’re limited to our own tiny glimpse of time and reality. We’re living in a book that’s still being written while God already knows the ending. Maybe what unfolds by the end is a beautiful story that had to include evil and suffering to some extent. Who is to say that’s not as meaningful as a story that had no good to choose, no evil to overcome, no moral decisions at all?”
“But then we’re back to the justification of evil,” said the man, “and whether or not that paints the image of a cruel God, and that’s tough for me to sit with.”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” said the boy. “Maybe God recognized there’s nothing to define meaning without suffering to compare it to. And even though He knew we’d be faced with difficulty, it’s either give in to sorrow or act in a way that moves us above Hell.
“My point is there’s no evidence that God calls Satan ‘evil’ or ‘bad.’ These are human labels on God’s creation. Instead, God goes into a long and adoring description of His creation and says, ‘Look at the ostrich. I care for her even though she’s chaotic. Look at the lion. I care for her even though she’s chaotic. Look at Leviathan. I care for him even though he’s chaotic. Each of these creations plays an important role in My world, a world far too complex for any human to understand.’”
The man nodded quietly for a moment before he said, “I think you’ll see when we get to the gospels that Jesus thinks quite lowly of Satan. He resists his temptations in the desert, He calls him evil, the enemy, and the like. Satan is a force to be opposed. Likewise, Peter tells us to stay alert.573 He says our adversary, the Devil, is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for anyone he can devour.”
“Yeah,” said the boy, “no one is arguing you shouldn’t stay alert. But look, Jesus is compared to a shepherd, right? Well, sheep who wander far from the shepherd are more likely to get picked off by a hungry lion. So, people are more likely to stick with God when there are consequences from straying off. I mean, you still have free will, of course. Heck, go out there and be a sheep in lion’s clothing if you want. But the most peaceful life for you is when you follow the shepherd closely and avoid the lion. Without the lion, the sheep might start to think there’s no need for a shepherd. All I’m saying is that if God can foresee everything, and if He designed everything perfectly, then how would it fall outside of His plan to put a force in place that keeps humanity in check with what He desires for our lives?
“It’s like the raging river we discussed before. Maybe the message through Jesus is something like, ‘You remember what I told Job about Behemoth standing up to the river? Well, here’s a living example of how it’s done. You witnessed how when Job had only heard of Me, his resistance to Satan was weak, but after he saw Me, his whole perspective on life had changed. So here I am, in the flesh, standing up to Satan like you heard Me tell you before, but now you can see Me do it for yourselves. I’m not just gonna talk the talk anymore, I’m gonna come down and walk the walk as well.’ Jesus was setting the example of how to resist the force of chaos and put your trust in God, but that doesn’t disprove the idea that Satan was an intentional part of God’s creation all along.”