I Am and the Light V: Lucifer

Don: At the Creation, God moved in the darkness to illuminate it—to separate the light from the darkness. But since…

God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5)

…the only way darkness could continue to exist would be if God were to remove his presence. Why did he choose to do this?

We’ve noted two contrasts between the Garden of Eden—the original new earth of the original Creation—and the new earth coming at the End Time as prophesied in Revelation: The Garden has both light and darkness, but the new heaven and earth has only light; and the new earth does not have a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Before the Creation and before the Fall of Man, there were angels and there was a fall of certain angels, led by Lucifer. Isaiah described his fall allegorically, using the King of Babylon to represent Lucifer (or perhaps Lucifer’s agent):

“How you have fallen from heaven,
O star of the morning, son of the dawn!
You have been cut down to the earth,
You who have weakened the nations!

“But you said in your heart,
‘I will ascend to heaven;
I will raise my throne above the stars of God,
And I will sit on the mount of assembly
In the recesses of the north.

‘I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.’ (Isaiah 14:12-14)

This is all about will—and about whose will should be done, God’s or Lucifer’s. Ezekiel shows the extent of his fall, with his importance shown by his fine vestments and adornments:

“You were in Eden, the garden of God;
Every precious stone was your covering:
The ruby, the topaz and the diamond;
The beryl, the onyx and the jasper;
The lapis lazuli, the turquoise and the emerald;
And the gold, the workmanship of your settings and sockets,
Was in you.
On the day that you were created
They were prepared.

“You were the anointed cherub who covers,
And I placed you there.
You were on the holy mountain of God;
You walked in the midst of the stones of fire.

“You were blameless in your ways
From the day you were created
Until unrighteousness was found in you.

“By the abundance of your trade
You were internally filled with violence,
And you sinned;
Therefore I have cast you as profane
From the mountain of God.
And I have destroyed you, O covering cherub,
From the midst of the stones of fire.

“Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty;
You corrupted your wisdom by reason of your splendor.
I cast you to the ground;
I put you before kings,
That they may see you.

“By the multitude of your iniquities,
In the unrighteousness of your trade
You profaned your sanctuaries.
Therefore I have brought fire from the midst of you;
It has consumed you,
And I have turned you to ashes on the earth
In the eyes of all who see you. (Ezekiel 28:13-18)

So great was Lucifer’s fall that it “swept away a third of the stars of heaven [Lucifer’s angelic supporters] and threw them to the earth”. (Revelation 12:4)

The issue in pre-Creation heaven was the same as that in the post-Creation Garden: Whose will shall be done? Who shall be in charge? Lucifer wanted to “make [him]self like the Most High” and the serpent seduced Eve by telling her she would be “like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:5) (Why did God let the serpent into the Garden?!) In both cases, the creature seeks to become like the Creator. It is unrighteous to worship the creature rather than the Creator:

Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. (Romans 1:22-23)

Is free will the fundamental problem? Is expressing a will that is not God’s tantamount to saying “I am as good/right/powerful as God”? What drives the creature to want to be like the Creator? And since, as God said, we are made in his image, are we not like him anyway?

Fallen Man and fallen angels were perfectly created beings. Both were given a choice of darkness or light, and both chose darkness. Why?

If God had eliminated darkness at the Creation, where would Lucifer have gone? Where would he and the rest of the fallen angels be found, in spiritual terms?

And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day,… (Jude 1:6)

Robin: Creation took seven days, but Lucifer was banished to the earth before it was created. It doesn’t make sense.

Alice: Darkness was there until God said “Let there be light,” so there was a place for Lucifer.

Kiran: Perhaps this is the answer:

For this reason, rejoice, O heavens and you who dwell in them. Woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, knowing that he has only a short time.”

And when the dragon saw that he was thrown down to the earth, he persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male child. (Revelation 12:12-13)

Robin: There is still a contradiction, as I see it.

Jay: The lesson seems to be that given a choice—given free will—created beings are bound to make the wrong one. God is not a created being—he always was, is, and will be timeless. But a created being has a finite existence—a finite starting point and a finite end in time. Therefore there was and is for them a darkness of non-existence prior to their creation. Darkness is then just a fundamental property of a created universe or being—it cannot be otherwise. The Creator must inevitably create darkness in the process of creation. In God’s own timeless heavenly realm outside of his Creation, there is no free will and no darkness.

Kiran: If God had created creatures within his own dimension—essentially, carbon copies of himself—would they not then have been essentially slaves or robots, with no choice?

Jay: Isn’t that the heaven we all aspire to?

Kiran: I’m not sure. If we were programmed to do God’s will, what would be the point? The fact that we can and perhaps sometimes do choose to do his will of our own free will is surely the point.

Robin: So in heaven, love is still volitional, still a choice. But it is a genuine choice, neither programmed nor coerced.

Alice: All it takes to enter the world of darkness is to separate from God. Lucifer was in the dark the moment he separated from God. It’s not that God cast him into darkness—he cast himself there through the act of separation. The same choice faced Adam and Eve: Stay with God or leave him.

Robin: That well describes spiritual darkness. When God created night, it was for rest.

David: If it is true (as Eastern philosophies have no trouble accepting) that in a created world there must be dualities of light/dark, good/evil and so on, then the potential for duality had to be present in the Creator. We have to assume that God is not a program, not a robot; that he too has free will and therefore is at war with his own free will as we are. Perhaps Lucifer is just the side of God that wants to choose evil over good, dark over light. The key may be the Golden Mean (or something like it): A disproportion in the balance of good versus evil, with the preponderance being good. We can observe this in our world, I think, if we only care to look; and in my theory this is what existed as potential in the Creator before the Creation. Given the preponderance of good, light, etc., then it is statistically inevitable that over time they must prevail. In the meantime, the Luciferian, dark, evil aspect of the Creator and his creation will be present. God cannot eliminate them because they are a part of the Oneness, the Unity of God.

Don: He certainly claimed that he created both the light and the darkness.

David: The passages you quoted from Isaiah and Ezekiel sound to me like God talking angrily to himself. Perhaps that’s a heretical thing to say; but for me, it has explanatory power.

Kiran: Perhaps darkness is a place the Creator allowed for us to escape to. Rather than eliminating us after we sin, he allows us to retreat into darkness where there is always the potential for coming back into the light. He even shines his light in the darkness to guide us back to it. So darkness itself is perhaps not as evil as we tend to think—it has some good in it. It is the choice to separate from God that is the real evil. Even as we make that choice, we know in the back of our mind, or the inner recesses of our heart, our soul that it does not have to be our final choice, that we can change it back.

For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.” (John 3:17-21)

Alice: Everyone has the good/evil duality within them. Everyone has the spirit of God and the evil spirit of Lucifer within them. They constitute the ego. We have to have free will to be able to choose between them, and a loving God gave it to us. In the end, we will all choose God, we will all go back to him, become one with him, because we will all truly recognize and accept his love.

Kiran: Both exist in our egos, so we know what we are missing when we choose one over the other. Adam and Eve had no such knowledge until the serpent told them.

David: The Golden Mean says that in nature there is no equal balance; that the fundaments of nature comprise roughly 2/3 stuff and 1/3 anti-stuff. This ratio is not a median, it is a true (if illogical) mean. The actual ratio is like Pi in the sense that it is an irrational number which cannot be represented as a fraction but only (apparently—we could never prove it!) as an eternally recurring decimal. A whole object that conforms to the Golden Mean is a fractal phenomenon—it contains never-ending, ever-smaller copies of itself. To me, the universe could not exist without it. If stuff and anti-stuff had been created in equal measure they would have simply canceled each other out, effectively annihilating one another, and there would be nothing. Nothing. For God to exist, there has to be more good in him than evil. Again, I think this is what we see.

Don: This theory would fit with the story that 1/3 of the angels fell while 2/3 did not.

David: So it would seem!

Kiran: Why did Lucifer and Adam and Eve want to be God? And did God kick them because he felt his position was threatened?

David: Perhaps Lucifer wanted to take over the 2/3 of God that he did not already possess. Covetousness and greed are two of the seven deadly sins, so would be in his nature! The Golden Mean suggests that he could never achieve this goal.

Chris: As I read Genesis, God created the earth, then a nice Garden with nice plants in it, but he also plants this awful Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in it. If he really wanted the tree, he could have planted it somewhere else on earth, outside the Garden, but he didn’t. He put it right alongside everything that was good to eat and that had been given over to Adam and Eve to tend. This has to be a test!

It’s like war. It’s almost like almost children fighting over some childish principle. But this war is on God’s character. Lucifer wanted to define goodness—he did not want to accept God’s definition of it.

David: Perhaps it was the naughty, Luciferian side of God’s nature that prevailed momentarily (albeit momentously) to plant the Tree, knowing it would cause trouble and delighting at the prospect. But the essentially good Being of God would have known that over time (as the Bible says—! 🙂 ) his stronger good side would prevail over his weaker bad side (this is the process of God Becoming in my version of Process Theology) and eventually the Garden would be recreated minus the Tree, minus any desire by the inhabitants for its fruit, and with the unification of God the Becoming with God the Being. God himself is perfected. His dark side, Lucifer, has been vanquished. Yet there is one thing that remains constant from the original Creation to the new earth: Free Will. Potentially any inhabitant of the new earth could choose to exercise it again against the will of God but the very Perfection of God and the new earth is the assurance that the inhabitants of God’s kingdom will of their own free wills always, for eternity, choose to align their will with God’s. So in a sense they and God are indistinguishable and inseparable. They are a Unity. They are One. This is Perfection.

The Garden of Eden was clearly not a place of Perfection. The only explanation I can think of is that God himself—the Becoming God created by the Being God as part of the Creation—was not perfect. He was not perfectly good.

Robin: It does seem odd that God would put that Tree in the Garden. He probably planted a hundred other harmless trees, but in creating this one and telling his children not to touch it… Well, all parents know what that leads to!

Jay: Right! Would a parent put a sharp knife in the toy box and tell the child: You can play with any of the other toys but don’t touch the knife! It would not seem to be an action any truly loving parent would take. I agree that we gloss over the fact that the Garden of Eden was an imperfect place. Why should it be perfect? After all, it was only Day 1 of  the Creation.

Even if darkness itself is not evil, we see over and over again in the Bible that it cannot exist in God’s presence. So evil had to be set up by God for it to exist at all. We struggle with this. As Chris said, we wage war on God’s character for being God, yet how could he be otherwise and who are we to presume on what his nature should be? God has nothing to prove. Ultimately, we will come to that realization in the new earth without the formal presentation of proof. We will not be robots—we will choose perfection then.

Robin: Lucifer was not only proud of his position in heaven, he was covetous of more.

Jay: Genesis tends to have us believing that evil was introduced into the Creation after the Fall of Adam and Eve. But we are glossing over the presence of evil in the Garden in the form of the Tree. We gloss over God’s absence during the Fall—he had to come looking for them after the Fall and ask why they were hiding. Sin and evil existed in the Garden. The Fall of Man was the proof of that.

Kiran: The game Prisoners’ Dilemma shows that a strategy of cooperation wins, over time, against deceit. So nice guys do win. Goodness does overcome evil. It is as though we are learning to play this game on a grand, eternal board, and that the realization of the right and good strategy will eventually influence everyone. Perhaps the Garden was the first square on the board!

Alice: It seems God the Creator wants the universe to know about Good and Evil—hence the Tree. He wanted to warn us of the results of knowing. He wanted to introduce Jesus and Lucifer as representing the whole—the Truth—of the unfathomable God who created us. He wanted to be fair. He wanted us to appreciate him. So we had the choice: To know him in all his awesomeness, and suffer accordingly—until final understanding? Or to continue in the Garden blissfully ignorant of the Truth?

Don: I never saw the Garden of Eden as imperfect, but I am starting to wonder.

Jay: We assume that there was no sin until the Fall. We think of heaven as the Garden restored. But the new earth is not the Garden restored, with all its imperfections. The New Jerusalem is not the Garden of Eden. We don’t usually think of it like that.

Robin: Restoration and re-creation are not the same. The earth and even the heavens may be recreated, but that is not the equivalent of restored. In re-creation, the original can be improved upon. In restoration, the original is simply brought back, warts (the potential for a Fall) and all.

Jason: That’s the question. Is another Fall possible? The continued existence of free will would suggest that it is.

David: Perfection is when by free-willed choice the ever-present potential for evil is never invoked and never realized. Perfection is when you turn the other cheek. Perfection is when you are the most downtrodden being in the universe. Perfection is when of all the tempting choices available, you make the apparently bleak and unappetizing choice of the will of God.

Alice: The basis of the universe is good and evil. We could not have known this without eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil then assimilating the knowledge over the ages. We had no other way of knowing and appreciating God. Adam and Eve cannot have really known God. They saw only one side of him—until they ate the fruit of the Tree.

Don: So in order to know good, we must also know evil?

Alice: You don’t know God without knowledge on the basis of which to exercise an informed, intelligent choice of good over evil.

David: To me, that is why for God to be perfect he must have the potential to be evil, he must have the free will to exercise that potential, and he must reject the exercise of that potential. The perfect God could commit perfect evil but chooses instead to commit perfect good. That is the heart of the struggle with Lucifer.

As Robin said, in the new earth love is not coerced. It is given freely, of our own free will. We will still have the potential for evil, for hate; but in the perfect new earth no-one will ever choose that option. Perfection is always choosing good over evil.

Alice: Our ego stops us from doing that, but even though we try, the parable says that all evil will be burned up.

Kiran: Jesus told us to be perfect “even as my father in heaven is perfect”. He was telling us to choose good over evil.

Don: We’ll continue this discussion, hopefully with Charles’ contribution—we know he has a particular interest in this topic.

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