And he said unto them, I beheld
Satan as lightning fall from heaven.
Adult
Sunday School Part 26 - September 2020.
I am busy writing an article named:
'Why do God reject us?' in which I use concepts which are mixed between the
physical and the super natural.
This Sunday School lesson is just a
basis for my treatise on rejection and is written as a Sunday school lesson.
The devil was cast down from heaven
and we find him later in Eden as a serpent tempting Adam and Eve.
I have heard some
people say the story is a myth or a fairy tale, but I have found it true and
insightful, and I have applied the idea of the poisonous Tree of Knowledge of
Good and Evil right through the pages of this blog, where I have espoused it as
the single most devastating influence on human happiness.
This tree of knowledge is what we
call philosophy, or the thoughts of mankind, and you may read my twenty four part series on the subject starting
here:
Like most of us, I have also been
brought up with the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and everybody I know loves
this story, but few understand the lesson it teaches. For me there is no
difference between the practical, the dogmatic, the fairy tale, the myth, the dream, the
conjecture and reality. I treat all these with respect and consideration. So,
please bear with me while I bring Little Red Riding Hood into this narrative, which
I want to use to explain the scene playing itself out in Eden – after all, this is a Sunday school lesson.
It is the age old story of jealousy,
deceit and getting something for nothing by evil intent. I introduce you to the
biggest swindler of all time named Satan.
He starts out by getting dominion
over earth for nothing, which dominion belonged to Adam and Eve and by swindling Adam and Eve
to believe his lies and by whetting their appetite for knowledge and power.
After this, when he meets up with Jesus
Christ some four centuries later in the desert, he takes a fat chance to sell his ill
begotten dominion of the earth to Jesus Christ in return for becoming King of the Universe, the inheritance of God's Son, and trying to get Jesus, as God incarnated, to worship him. This is as vile and sly as any conman can get.
I am going to use these two
narratives which talks to the interface between the physical and the
spiritual - the one of Red Riding Hood and the other about the serpent in the
Garden of Eden. They may seem to be two quite different stories and both
may even seem like fairy tales, but on closer inspection and introspection, we
will find that they are basically the same type of story. Both culminate in a scene
of a conversation between an innocent party and an evil party, and about
how the evil party convinces the innocent party to do something which will kill
them, physically or spiritually in a very sly manner.
I will start off with the story of Red
Riding Hood. She is young and innocent and takes a basket of cookies and tea to
her sickly grandmother - what a noble and loving act! On arrival she finds Big
Bad Wolf impersonating her grandmother in the bed where she expected her grandmother to be. She listens to him with his big mouth,
and in her innocence she cannot nearly imagine in her wildest dreams that this
friendly wolf wants to devour her. She does notice that his mouth is much bigger than her grandmother's, but the most important thing
namely the loud mouthed tone of his voice and his deceitful words is missed by
her. Had she but considered all the nuances of deception, she would have run,
but he catches her in a moment of weakness, brought on by her love, sympathy,
respect and compassion for her grandmother, and he devours an innocent and naive
girl without blinking an eyelid.
The lesson of the tale is of course:
'Do not listen to a big or loud mouthed person, even if it is your grandmother.
Our attention now turns to the
Garden of Eden
What happened so far:
The beautiful angel Lucifer was
beloved by God and was one of three archangels. Being so venerated, he came to
think he was just as good or better than God and he ventured to sit on the Mountain
of God as God.
God rejected him - partly for this arrogance, partly for his illegal trade in which he became super rich, and partly for his
jealousy of God's Son. This rejection was so quick, decisive and fast, that an
eye witness said it looked like a lightning bolt which struck from heaven while
he was cast down onto earth (Luke 10:18).
There are a few things we need to
know before we meet up with this serpent in paradise.
The first is that he could not appear
on earth in his heavenly body. Plain physics requires of him to take on the
form of a physical being.
He could have incarnated himself into
the body of a human being, but there were only two human beings available for
such an excursion or invention, and they were holy, because they have never
sinned. An evil spirit cannot incarnate into a holy body as innocent as Red Riding
Hood or Adam and Eve were. So he had to incarnate into the body of an
animal which he could impersonated best, and that was the serpent. The bible story says
that a serpent is more shrewd than all the animals.
The next thing we should know is
that God uses the personality of animals when He wants to expose the traits of
humans. For God a serpent is venomous and jealous, one of the first things we
should know if we want to interpret dreams and visions.
So for this story, it does not
matter what form the Devil took on, the fact is that God regarded him as a
serpent, and so should Adam and Eve have. For them he should have been the Big Bad Wolf who
wanted to devour them.
Due to their respect for the Garden
of God and in their innocence and naivety, in a moment of weakness, they
believed this Big Bad Wolf, whilst they should have listened to the tone of
this big mouthed liar, now an enemy of God and thus of Adam and Eve, and
remembering his recent humiliating encounter with God he said:
‘If you listen to me you
will become like God. God did not tell you this because He is jealous and do
not want you to become like Him.'
He discreetly omitted to say that God would
then throw them out of the Garden of the God – Eden, the way he was cast off the Mountain of God.
These are all lies. God does not
mind us becoming like Him, because He made us in His image and He wants us to be
like Him, or at least conforming to Jesus Christ.
This is also the story con people tell us still today when they wish to strip us of what we have or are.
This is in essence the story as it
is written for us to understand on a very basic level, just like Red Riding
Hood is to be understood on a very basic level.
We are now ready to understand why
God may and sometimes reject us like He rejected Satan and Saul.
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