Who Is the Devil (Part Two: Did God create the Devil? Why would God do that?)

Published Oct 20, 2023, 4:19 PM

Welcome back to season five of Enter the Bible, a podcast in which we share "Everything You Wanted to Know about the Bible...but were afraid to ask."

In episode 16 of season 5, our hosts are joined by Jeremy L. Williams. Dr. Williams is an Assistant Professor of the New Testament at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas.

Today our theologians will be answering the listener-submitted question, "Who Is the Devil? (Part Two: Did God create the Devil? Why would God do that?)"

Do you have Bible questions you would like answered? Go to our website at https://enterthebible.org/about to get started.

This episode of the Enter the Bible podcast was recorded on August 1, 2023 on Riverside.

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xvAEsG_EJ-s

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Hello and welcome to the Enter the Bible podcast, where you can get answers, or at least reflections on everything you wanted to know about the Bible. But we're afraid to ask. I'm Kathryn Schifferdecker .

I'm Katie Langston.

And our guest today again for part two of this episode is or the series is Dr. Jeremy L Williams. He's the Assistant Professor of New Testament at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University, and the author of a forthcoming book in the fall here called Criminalization in Acts of the Apostles: Race, Rhetoric, and the Prosecution of an Early Christian Movement. So welcome back, Jeremy. Glad to have you with us.

Glad to be back.

All right.

Thank you for having me.

So. Yeah. Thank you. So this is part two of a single subject. So for those listeners who happen to have come across this on its own, you might want to go back and listen to part one first. But we're still addressing a question that came into our website at Enter the Bible. Org. And the question goes like this: My confirmation students want to know where does the devil come from? Did God create the devil and why would God do that if God did create the devil? And so in part one, in answer to this question, we spent a fair amount of time, as you might imagine, in the Bible. I'm an Old Testament scholar. Jeremy is a New Testament scholar, and this is Enter the Bible. So we talked about the figure of Satan, both in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament and the New Testament, and talked about the kind of development of the idea of this figure in various books of the Bible and including in some works that came between the Old Testament and the New Testament, like some of the Dead Sea Scrolls or a book called Jubilees, which is a Jewish book that recounts some of the same stories in the Old Testament. So we see this development of from the Satan as a kind of accusing figure or prosecuting attorney in Job, to the Satan or Satan or Beezelbub or whatever name you want to call him, as really a demonic force or a oppositional force to God in the New Testament. So we want to, I don't know that we, and we talked about the the story of Satan being a fallen angel. So in that sense, I suppose we answer the the listeners question is, yes, God did create Satan, but not as an evil being, but as as a good being. And that Satan rebels. But what else? What else do we want to say? I know we talked in part one, Jeremy, about the usefulness of Satan. I think you , the usefulness of thinking about Satan. Do you want to start with that and we'll get back into the topic?

Yes. I believe it's important, especially when we think about biblical texts. And for those who are believers and are faithful Christians who believe that God inspired these texts to recognize that God speaks but sound doesn't travel in a vacuum. Sound has to vibrate off of material. And and for when it comes to biblical texts, God's Word vibrated off of the experience of the writer's lives. And one feature of their lives that I think is important when we think about the Satan, is that these are people who were chronically and frequently oppressed, colonized, and subjugated. And so part of the way that they heard God speaking to them was through experiences of oppression and experiences of a foreign rule and domination and the Satan or the devil, or some type of spiritual force that there seemed to be outside of their own powers, even as a collective group. Became a useful trope for thinking about how in the world could a God who loves them has all power and is able to defend them? How? How can they reconcile being in relationship with a God like that, when such terrible oppression and tragedies and calamities have befallen them? And a useful, um, I would say, literary trope, and then or we could talk about a spiritual idea, however we want to parse it out, became the idea of the Satan. And and see this idea in particularly in like Daniel and then particularly have the early Jesus followers of the New Testament started to think about the way that in these end times, these imperial ruling forces were really portrayed as beasts, creatures and demonic imps, or ultimately the minions of the devil. Because these people who are writing and penning and discussing God's word are living in these scenarios of oppression, domination. And so, so Satan becomes a way for them to rationalize a world that otherwise wouldn't make sense with a God who was supposed to be with them and who they're in covenant with. And so from that perspective, thinking about how the Satan is a tool of oppressed people to concile and to make sense of a world that is otherwise nonsensical, I think is something worth interrogating.

Now that's really helpful. I really I like that metaphor a lot, or analogy of God speaking, but not in a vacuum, right? That God speaks in people's experiences and history, and that's a really beautiful way of putting it. Thanks for that. So yeah, so the so the Jews and then the early Christians with them who are first of all Jews and then more Gentiles, right. They're experiencing this oppression. They're experiencing kind of event after event that seems to at least call into question the idea of an all powerful, loving God. And so then, so the re seems to be this dawning realization or idea of spiritual forces that then are opposed to God that, you now, instead of assigning all the bad stuff to God, it really makes more sense to think, well, maybe there's something besides God that's working against God, right?

So let me ask the...

And...Oh, go ahead, Katie.

Well, I was going to say I'm going to channel my inner skeptic, which she's never far from the surface anyway. But, you know, I could imagine someone saying, well, that is a likely story, right? Like bad things happen. And instead of just concluding that therefore there is no God, you're going to just invent this like bad guy and say, well, it's his fault that all the that all this has happened, right? And so yeah, I would, I would want to kind of wrestle with that a little bit like I would um, posit that perhaps as they are, as they're asking those questions and as they're, you know, considering what's going on, I don't know that they're inventing this as much as they are finding words and symbols and ways to express a reality that they're experiencing.

Well, I feel like I feel like you resolved your skepticism by the end of your statement. I think you resolved it. It sounds like...

Throwing out one possible way. One possible way to think through that. Yeah.

Because I think that part of what you raise is, is that certainly this is a way to to give God a way out. Yeah. To say, well, well, God didn't really do it. It was the devil

It was the devil.

But by the, but what you got to at the end was that people really had to make sense of, of their world. And, and it works. Um, and one of the, one of the things that's worth noting is that, the reason why I wanted to highlight the oppressed status of the people, because it makes a lot more sense when people do not have their hands on levers of power to recognize that there are intermediaries in between them and real power. That's not an experience that would seem necessarily untenable, that when we think about marginalized people, whether the enslaved or whether immigrants or people with disabilities, it's not difficult for them to see that people who have privilege and power can function one way, and that there are things in between that that are that are keeping them from from having access to those, those other rights and privileges. And so in that way, rather than to castigate the entire framework, especially if one presumes that that that wholeness is attainable in this world, then there has to be some forceful, powerful thing in between. And I think that, so now you have me theologizing. And I've warned, I've warned before.

You did warn us. But this is good. This is good.

But I think that. Um, creating satanic opponents is a way to make sense of situations that are difficult to comprehend. And I say that in antiquity I talked about the empires. But I think in contemporary times we easily can point out when this happens negatively. Right. Or we can talk about certain groups that point to other groups and want to demonize them or exclude them or, or to like, put them in hell, et cetera. But what's interesting too, is on, on, on the other side, if the more conservative side is who we would want to pinpoint that on, the more conservative, the more progressive side often similarly has its own devils that it likes to name and call out, like neoliberalism and and sexism and homophobia are demons that need to be destroyed. Right? But isn't this some utility? Right.

Yeah.

Utility to calling out patriarchy and kyriarchy as like if we use the Ephesians idea, you know, that spiritual wickedness in high places, right?

Yeah.

And so so the language is it's plastic enough to be dangerous, but also a useful way to think about systems that are not working perfectly that, that, that there's there's a way to say, I still think this can work, but this is not ideal the way it is now.

These forces, right, that the systems, these sorts of things, they kind of take on a life of their own, right? Like what you think about people that get caught up in, you know, in mob mentality, or you think about the ways in which we participate in these systems and perpetuate them, you know, even without wanting to, there is a sense in which, like, they really do like have their own energy and propelling, you know, movement forward like a force of power, right? So I yeah, think, you know, in a, in a skeptical kind of worldview, kind of sciencey kind of, you know, and post-enlightenment kind of world. These are hard concepts to, to wrap our minds around. But I think you kind of see it happening.

Yeah, I was going to go along the same lines. Katie, I think there are certain things that happen, at least for me. I'll just speak personally that I do believe there are evil forces, that there are evil spiritual forces. I don't think it's just an invention. You know, to explain things, I think, and maybe because I can't figure out otherwise, like how things like the Holocaust happens or slavery or, you know, genocide. Or maybe we can just attribute all that to human sin. But sometimes, as you say, it does seem like things, movements or mobs kind of take on a life of their own. And it's I find it useful anyway. And again, I'm just speaking personally. I find it useful to talk about that in terms of spiritual forces. I do want to say, and I think it's important to say that time after time, and you referenced this, I think, in our first the first episode. Jeremy. Uh, that that time after time, the New Testament affirms that these, these forces, whatever they are, not equal to God, right? That that God is, is always more powerful. And we see that especially in Revelation, ut in other texts as well, right, that, that there may be there may be forces that work oppositional to God and to God's people, but they're not as powerful as God. So like in 1 Peter 5, you know, the devil prowls around like a roaring lion. Resist him firm in your faith. Right. There's a there's it's not an inevitable kind of downfall, right? That that the devil can be resisted or these forces, however you want to characterize it, can be resisted.

Yeah. Like when Jesus tells Peter in the garden of Gethsemane that that Satan desires to sift through you like wheat. It seems that there's a point of decision, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that, you know, ultimately, I think the hope of the Christian faith and the and and and the hope of the resurrection is that those forces have been defeated, you know, and will be defeated in Jesus Christ.

And I think that there are there are and one and going back to one of my earlier points and where I want to kind of reiterate it again, is that when people are on the underside of power, it is very easy to see the entire world as being controlled by Satan. And that and that what's actually more difficult to believe, and I think there was a little bit of conversation about this before, is that God is good. It may be much more difficult to believe that then, that Satan is real, but that evil forces are in control of the day, right?

Yeah.

Um, like with those atrocities that you mentioned, Kathryn. Holocaust, enslavement, we think about the climate crisis as they we're experiencing, like when, when a handful of corporate plutocrats can determine the fate of the world, it would seem it would seem that is harder to believe that God is in control, to have this type of regime and the faith and the perseverance component is, is in actually observing the world as it is. And to say that that a lot of the way that the world currently operates is under the influence of the evil one. And I offer that because an article I wrote on on revelation argued that often we think about that text as just about the end of the world. But there are three ways that I think it's important to look at it. That one is that it's about power and mapping power in the Roman Empire. The second, outside of power, it's about perseverance. The goal is to remind those who are committed, those who are faithful to continue to persevere through, through this system, even when it seems that that your opportunity for vindication is far away. But to know that ultimately you'll have victory is very meaningful. But the challenge with that is that, just like any message, this kind of message in the wrong hands becomes support for labeling people who are oppressed as demonic and needing to be eradicated. And so the difficulty with the nimble language is that it can be used against its original purpose too.

Now, that's a really important point, Jeremy. Like this language, like the imagery of Revelation s really helpful and has been historically helpful to those who are oppressed. But if used by the oppressor, it can, you know, that kind of war imagery can be really dangerous. So yeah, very, very important caveat about that kind of imagery.

I do wonder if there is, you know, going back to the usefulness of these kinds of concepts, like one, one useful aspect of it could be that, um. That in a sense, thinking of it as a power or a force or an entity or something like that can depersonalize it. In other words, the person. Right? You don't say this, this person or this group of people themselves are evil and must be eradicated. It would be instead understanding that that the fight is not against flesh and blood, but is against the forces of evil, and that there's a way in which that actually calls us back to remembering the humanity and the, you know, of our fellow image bearers, of other human beings, that that it's not okay to actually demonize a person, because that's not who our fight or argument is with.

When I as you, as you heard in my bio , I'm C. M. E . And so but I didn't get baptized as an infant. I still had to come down and accept, joined the church and got baptized, although three modes, you know, pour and sprinkling were available, got immersed. But on the day that I decided to join the church, as we called it, my grandmother called Meemaw, she rang out with this song and said, Satan, we're going to tear your kingdom down because you've been building your kingdom all over this land, Satan. We're going to tear your kingdom down. And it has several verses. We're going to pray your kingdom down, Satan. We're going to moan. You can say the preachers are going to preach your kingdom down right. And then in that verse about the preachers are going to preach you down. You've been building your kingdom all in the house of God, right?

Oh, wow.

And so that song evoked some really powerful images that, that now kind of having done my training, I can go back to kind of the, there's a folksiness to it, but there's something I think that has actually animated a lot of my work and my activism and my, in my engagement is that there is there's a real job to do going around tearing Satan's kingdom down. Sometimes we imagine that we're preventing it from growing. But in a lot of places it's settled and established. When we when we look at the laws that are coming out of Florida and where I live now in Texas, it looks like Satan's kingdom is thoroughly established and is expanding. And so the work is to tear it down. And I think that for the early Jesus followers, like those in Revelation, for those who had just lost their temple in Jerusalem when it seemed like God's presence was lost, that Rome looked like it was getting stronger, and their their comrades and their experience and their traditions were getting weaker. And so part of the hope is that not only will Satan's kingdom ultimately fall, but we have some power to to take a brick or two out of it while we're here.

Amen.

Even I try to avoid, like, war like images, but I do think that some sometimes this idea of tearing down a kingdom, I think tearing down a kingdom is peaceful, right? Like, not not necessarily like waging war with another kingdom, but maybe tearing down one that can that can be active peace.

That works. Yeah. That preaches. That's good. Yeah. So in, in, in our Lutheran tradition that Katie and I are in, at baptism, either you know, whether it's a baby or adult, the parents or sponsors or the one being baptized are asked the parents and sponsors answer for if the if the baptized is an infant, do you renounce Satan and all his works and all his ways? It's the it's similar kind of thing, right? I renounce them and then you say, do you believe in God the Father? Do you believe in? And you recite the Apostles Creed. So Satan and all his works and all his ways to renounce that, I think that goes along the same lines of what you're talking about tearing Satan's kingdom down.

It presumes that they're standing right.

That's right

Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think it's it's just realistic about that. And yeah, that's a really powerful call. Thanks for sharing that. I don't know that song, but that's, that's really a powerful way of thinking about the Christian vocation. Right. To tear Satan's kingdom down.

So just one more question though. Like we're talking about, you know, all of this in context of, you know, forces and powers. And we kind of tracked in part one, we track the history of how, you know, how these ideas evolved and how people began to describe what they had experienced in these terms. But like, where did we get the , like, dude with the pitchfork or like the you know what I mean? Like some of these ideas that seem so pervasive in our culture now, if they're not rooted in Scripture, like where, where did they come from?

Thank you. Thank you for this question. And in the first part, we got through Hebrew Bible, got through most of the New Testament. And what we didn't get to some of the, the things the text like the apocalypse of Paul that comes after the New Testament, probably third or fourth century, where you start to see these, these different gradations of the afterlife and, and torment in, in hell and layers of hell et cetera. But, but even there, you don't get the types of images that many of us are familiar with, like the pitchfork and the horns kind of thing. Those really evolve out of texts like Dante's Inferno and and Milton's Paradise Lost, like, like although hell and the devil, they make appearances in biblical texts, these texts, these later texts make hell hotter, make the devil more personal and fierce. They take it to another level.

Sorry, but yeah.

And part of it is a I think, not to go too far down this road, is to just imagine the experiences that people engage to, to to need this as, as either a way to warn people to avoid. John Chrysostom always talked about how hell was a useful concept for teenagers to get them to behave correctly.

I need to I need to maybe roll that out more in my parenting. I got too much of this gray stuff going on. Like, God loves you, you're forgiven.

You know? You know, I think the fear of eternal torture is, is probably a little over handed to get teenagers to behave. I think it could be. It could work.

It can. It can be effective. Yeah, indeed I do, yeah, I do mention that sometimes on staff with my colleagues coming from, let's just say a more punitive tradition than I am now in, I'll say, you know, if we want them to donate more, we could just tell them that if they don't, they're going to be punished for eternity and my experience is that works pretty well. Oh my gosh.

And I think one thing, just to loop it all the way back around to our conversation around Satan and kind of what I mentioned at the beginning of this segment is, is and this might be a little, a little too, too meta, but I think your listeners can go here is is what work is Satan doing? For whom and to what effect? One of my teachers, Karen King, always ask this question: for whom does the text work? For whom and with what effect? And I think asking that question around Satan is also important, because it helps us to see the ancient author, the more contemporary author, and our own work, and it helps us to show the work we are thinking of the concept of the devil. For whom does it work and with what effects? And then we can see are there moments, as we talked about in this time, where using an image of Satan can be useful to help a group be resilient against insurmountable odds, but it can also be very, very problematic and harmful when used to demonize entire groups of people and use that as logic for their extermination. And so it's a dangerous concept to use, and people have used it in multiple ways. And so in some ways, I know some communities choose to not use it at all because of all of its negative implications. But what I think can be worthwhile is to recognize when it's important to see that Satan's kingdom is erupting in some places and really need some direct action and confrontation. But the tricky part, and this goes back to something we said in the first segment, is we have to be careful in identifying the work of evil, the work of the enemy, and make sure that we're not misidentifying it with the work of God's Spirit. And that's that's the real work, and that's an internal work. And it should make us very, very cautious in making these assessments on who is being moved by the devil and who is not.

And I'd suggest that kind of that kind of discernment needs to happen best in community. And with prayer, that it's not so much an individual discernment as it is a community discernment. But you're right, that's hugely important work, right? To discern what, what kind of spirit is at work in various events?

Wow. Well, we could probably do many, many more parts of what has been a two part, two parter already, which which we don't do that often. So this has been really, really interesting and helpful. And dear listener, I hope that this isn't too much for your confirmation students, but at least maybe it could be food for thought for you, and you can figure out how to present it to 14 year olds. But in any case, thank you so much Jeremy. This has been a wonderful conversation, super fruitful, super interesting, and just glad that you could be with us today. And for those of you who have joined us, yes, for those of you who have joined us either on YouTube or in your favorite pod catcher, thank you for being with us as well. You can get more resources, commentaries, conversations, articles, all kinds of stuff at Enter the Bible. Org and of course, please rate us. You know, five star ratings and reviews, especially on your favorite podcast app are super, super welcome. It helps other people find the show. And although the best way to do that is to share it with a friend. So if you do that, we would appreciate it. Thanks for being with us today.