Tag: Ezekiel 28

What Is Satan?

The post explores the biblical figure of Satan, discussing his nature, identities, and presence in both Heaven and Earth, including his manifestation as the King of Tyre. It argues that Satan is not merely a myth but a complex being with significant influence over human history and actions, rooted in scriptural evidence.

Satan is a name found in several places in the Bible and many places in popular culture. He had some pseudonyms: the Devil, Lucifer, the Deceiver, the Accuser, Beelzebub, among others. I would like to deal with the question of what is this being. We will only touch on such tangential questions as what is he like, what can he do, and where is he.

Let’s start with a prominent assumption: Satan is just a myth and a way to personify evil. Not many people want Satan to be a real, thinking, active being. Without direct, obvious interaction it is pretty easy to dismiss a real Satan. Even the majority of Christians do that. The intel that we have has to come ultimately out of revelation from God. Otherwise, we are unlikely to know. While Satan isn’t a primary theme of Scripture, he shows up more than you might think. The context is always personal. It does not seem to be talking about evil showing up as a concept. Is it mythical? Suspend that thought for moment.

To get at what Satan actually is, first we must see where he can be present. Frequently, Satan is depicted as being in Heaven, like in the challenge to God to test Job (Job 1:7). He is also shows up on Earth, like in the Garden of Eden and others. He does seem to be able to either disguise himself or to occupy a human being (2 Corinthians 11:14, Luke 22:3). With that information I would like us to consider a passage that doesn’t use “Satan” by name.

11 Moreover, the word of the Lord came to me: 12 “Son of man, raise a lamentation over the king of Tyre, and say to him, Thus says the Lord God:

“You were the signet of perfection,
    full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.
13 You were in Eden, the garden of God;
    every precious stone was your covering,
sardius, topaz, and diamond,
    beryl, onyx, and jasper,
sapphire, emerald, and carbuncle;
    and crafted in gold were your settings
    and your engravings.
On the day that you were created
    they were prepared.
14 You were an anointed guardian cherub.
    I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God;
    in the midst of the stones of fire you walked.
15 You were blameless in your ways
    from the day you were created,
    till unrighteousness was found in you.
16 In the abundance of your trade
    you were filled with violence in your midst, and you sinned;
so I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God,
    and I destroyed you, O guardian cherub,
    from the midst of the stones of fire.
17 Your heart was proud because of your beauty;
    you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.
I cast you to the ground;
    I exposed you before kings,
    to feast their eyes on you.
18 By the multitude of your iniquities,
    in the unrighteousness of your trade
    you profaned your sanctuaries;
so I brought fire out from your midst;
    it consumed you,
and I turned you to ashes on the earth
    in the sight of all who saw you.
19 All who know you among the peoples
    are appalled at you;
you have come to a dreadful end
    and shall be no more forever.”

Ezekiel 28:11-19 (ESV)

So is this lament about Satan or the King of Tyre at Ezekiel’s time? I think the answer is “yes”. Satan either disguised himself or possessed a person and was the King of Tyre. I say this because much of this story could not apply to a normal person and it then gives part of Satan’s backstory. The end (v.18b-19) could apply to Satan as manifested as the King. It could also be prophetic of Satan’s ultimate fate.

What does it tell us? That Satan is a cherub. Cherub’s are not fat, little, baby angels that dispense toilet paper. The word means “living one”. Ezekiel uses that term in Ezekiel 1 as he describes the creatures that accompany God. It is also picked up in Revelation 4. In Isaiah’s vision of heaven in Isaiah 6, he uses the term “seraphim” or “burning ones”. This is just how they look to Isaiah. They are clearly the same creatures: four faces, four to six wings, what looks like eyes on their wings. In fact cherubim have wings, angels are never said to have wings; but it seems impossible to get people or AI to get that popular depiction out of their heads. Cherubim and Seraphim are synonyms. They are not angels. This is very restricted club. A limited creation by God. There seems to be just four in Isaiah, Ezekiel and Revelation. Satan would make a fifth.

Was or is Satan nasty looking? No, very beautiful, at least at first. Satan wasn’t evil from the start either. He was a creature of freewill and invented rebellion against God. It is important to note that Satan isn’t an equivalent of God in power, but just evil, even if he momentarily thought he was. Isaiah 14 has a similar passage. This one nominally against the King of Babylon.

Sheol beneath is stirred up
    to meet you when you come;
it rouses the shades to greet you,
    all who were leaders of the earth;
it raises from their thrones
    all who were kings of the nations.
10 All of them will answer
    and say to you:
‘You too have become as weak as we!
    You have become like us!’
11 Your pomp is brought down to Sheol,
    the sound of your harps;
maggots are laid as a bed beneath you,
    and worms are your covers.

12 “How you are fallen from heaven,
    O Day Star, son of Dawn!
How you are cut down to the ground,
    you who laid the nations low!
13 You said in your heart,
    ‘I will ascend to heaven;
above the stars of God
    I will set my throne on high;
I will sit on the mount of assembly
    in the far reaches of the north;
14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
    I will make myself like the Most High.’
15 But you are brought down to Sheol,
    to the far reaches of the pit.

Isaiah 14:9-15 (ESV)

While this passage could easily be understood as describing the delusional fantasies of the King of Babylon, it also could be describing a Satan possessed man. The human King of Babylon ends up in Sheol (you can search above for “Sheol” in this blog), but a bit a Satan’s backstory is revealed. He thought he could be God. Is that naïveté, stupidity, or pride? Cherubim seem to have extraordinary powers, but they are no where near God in that category. Satan is not the evil equivalent of Jesus either as the Mormons proclaim.

In Revelation 12, Satan is cast to Earth and banished from Heaven in connection with the victory of Jesus. We do not have a comprehensive report on what he can or cannot do. What pushes him out the realm of myth for me is not only the consistent talk all through Scripture of Satan being an actual, created being; but it is also the horrid history of mankind.

Humans are capable of great evil all by ourselves, but I doubt that we would reach the depths that we have gone without significant outside help. Satan can possess, manifest and influence with great effectiveness. It would not surprise me if the nastiest characters in human history were either Satan in disguise, possessed by Satan, or under extreme influence. I don’t think evil could hold together as a system, movement, or institution the way that it has without such help.

Am I being superstitious or just ignorant of our capacity for evil? Again, I defer to Scripture. Society has swung from finding Satan under every rock to the opposite extreme of dismissing his existence. The truth is likely in between.

Heavenly Free Will

It is exciting to think about what our bodies may be like in Heaven and the New Earth. Can we move between Heaven and the New Earth? I think we will. Will we be stronger, faster, bigger, more coordinated? Will we look significantly different? Will we still be recognizable? All these things are mysterious and exciting, but I find one question disconcerting. Will we have freewill and if so, could not the whole cycle of sin start again?

There are a few things that we either know or can infer about the initial creation. Adam and Eve had completely free wills and had no knowledge of sin. They had one command and therefore only one way to mess up. The temptation to sin came externally from Satan. Satan was also created with a completely free will. Only vague information is given about His fall into sin:

You were blameless in your ways
    from the day you were created,
    till unrighteousness was found in you.
16 In the abundance of your trade
    you were filled with violence in your midst, and you sinned;
so I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God,
    and I destroyed you, O guardian cherub,
    from the midst of the stones of fire.

Ezekiel 28:15-16 (ESV)

Angels were also impacted. Nothing is known about the mechanism of their fall, but an approximate proportion is given:

3 And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems. 4 His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. 

Revelation 12:3-4 (ESV)

If this is about the angels, then, somehow, two-thirds remained without sin despite the availability of a way to fall.

In Heaven and the New Earth, Satan is out of the equation. Also gone is the genetic distortion that we refer to as our sinful nature. Is that enough to preclude sin? Will we not also still have “knowledge of good and evil”?

In Heaven and the New Earth, there will also not be a way to be linked to somebody else’s sin. Adam and Eve made the choice. We inherited their genetic distortion.

God has always sought love from His creation. Love requires freewill. To love you I must have the opportunity to hate you. So I expect that there will be an opportunity to fall away. A forbidden tree in the garden. I also expect that knowledge of evil will be an advantage this time. No one will be seriously tempted to rebel against God because we will have genuine love, a great existence and a knowledge of what rebellion means. An individual’s rebellion would not bring down the house. Perhaps that is why this passage is there:

No more shall there be in it
    an infant who lives but a few days,
    or an old man who does not fill out his days,
for the young man shall die a hundred years old,
    and the sinner a hundred years old shall be accursed.

Isaiah 65:20 (ESV)

https://afterdeathsite.com/?s=Isaiah+65

If you feel a dread that you would choose to sin and be cast out of God’s Kingdom, just like a child who insists on putting their hand on a hot stove, don’t worry. Your attraction to do wrong is a part of your sinful nature. There won’t be a temptation to the forbidden. Your knowledge will keep you away, as well as, the presence of Jesus himself.

Our experience of Heaven and the New Earth is something to look forward to rather than something to dread. Stick with Jesus and I’ll see you there.

Will We Be Eternally Secure?

As we look at the Biblical narrative about the course of creation from its inception until now, we see a creation with several kinds of high reasoning beings who can either obey God or rebel. The rebellion of such beings has precipitated the less-than-ideal world we live in. The Bible points our hopes to the future when God will make all things new. But if it happened before, could rebellion happen again?

Ezekiel 28:12 and following is a section that may or may not describe Satan. It states that it is about the king of Tyre, but the description seems to not be about a mortal man but rather a “guardian cherub”. Cherubim, literally “living ones”, is the name given to a strange sort of being that lives in the closest proximity to God. There are descriptions in Isaiah 6 (called seraphim or “burning ones” there), Ezekiel 1, and Revelation 4. The Ezekiel 28 passage describes one that is cast out.

You were an anointed guardian cherub.
    I placed you;  you were on the holy mountain of God;
    in the midst of the stones of fire you walked.
15 You were blameless in your ways
    from the day you were created,
    till unrighteousness was found in you.
16 In the abundance of your trade
    you were filled with violence in your midst, and you sinned;
so I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God,
    and I destroyed you, O guardian cherub,
    from the midst of the stones of fire.

Ezekiel 28:14-16 ESV

From where did the “unrighteousness” come? Further reading indicates that this being (presumably Satan) became proud and corrupted in his wisdom. It seems to be an act of free will.

Satan tactics with Adam and Eve give insight as well. Adam and Eve don’t know what evil is. They only know that they are not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and they are capable of following that command or not. Satan feeds them a lie that may be similar to the lie he told himself,

For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

Genesis 3:5 NIV (1984)

Though naive, humans made an act of the will to rebel against God. Consequently, their will was never truly free again. It is always influenced by a sinful nature and possibly also by evil outside forces.

We have no information about what happened with the angels, only that some of them (possibly as much as a third) also rebelled. Was it also an act of willful disobedience?

With the arrival of a New Heaven and New Earth, we are promised a resurrected body without a sinful nature and the removal of Satan and his angels. Will we have a truly free will? If so, can such a mess restart or can someone be expelled. There is no long biblical discourse to answer this. There is the promise of “eternal” life, and on this we must put our hope given the lack of information.

I would not postulate that we will have a constrained will of some sort. God created His greatest beings to be free for a reason. Love is free. Love is not the output of a pre-programmed mind that cannot deviate. What will prevent deviation? We barely understand what the soul or our will is. It is hard to speculate. Perhaps it will be because of new, more bonded relationship to Jesus. Even now we are somehow part of the body of Christ. This isn’t just a metaphor. It is a mystical relationship.

In the scant information that we are given, there seems to be no anticipation of further falling away or divisions in either cherubim, angels or humans. The question of whether we could fall away is a natural one. But we are thinking of our future situation through the lens of our current situation. Sin exists here. Evil is personified now. And we are corrupted in our wisdom.

Satan and the Afterlife

He is often shown in comedic form: a being with horns and a pitchfork and possibly a sense of humor ruling over Hell. But Satan is no joke. He can also be understood as a serious character ruling over the underworld. But there is nothing Biblical to connect Satan, or any demon for that matter, with Sheol; and Hell is described as a future placed prepared for the “Devil and his angels” not so that they can rule, but so they can experience being forsaken by God like all the damned.

I expect that most people dismiss Satan as pure fiction–a personification of evil. The Bible doesn’t waste too much space speaking of Satan, but he is definitely in there from the oldest book (Job) to the latest (Revelation). People tend to not believe in what they don’t want to be true. Anyway, Satan is a factor in any discussion of the afterlife, because without him there would be no such thing. There would only be life. The evil found in Satan becomes the source of all evil and the reason for death and segregation of those who belong to God from those who don’t.

So what is he? He is not the evil equivalent of God. Take a look at Ezekiel 28. It starts as a rebuke of the ruler of Tyre who thinks he is a god. Such megalomania was not unusual amongst ancient rulers, but around verse 12 it gets weird. Ezekiel is to “take up a lament” concerning the King of Tyre, and this lament no longer makes sense for a human:

You were the model of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone adorned you…on the day you were created they were prepared. You were anointed as a guardian cherub, for so I ordained you. You were on the holy mount of God; you walked among the fiery stones. You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created till wickedness was found in you.


Ezekiel 28:12-15

This reads like a backstory for Satan. It may be associated with the ruler of Tyre because of either the influence or because of a direct possession of the ruler Tyre. If this is Satan it tells us several things. He was created, beautiful, blameless at one time. He is a “living one” or cherubim, which are described earlier in Ezekiel, Isaiah 6 and Revelation 4. Their descriptions may not be about what they look like, as all of these accounts are visions and not observations. Their descriptions may be of their capabilities. In this case the ability to shift in form and to see into multiple situations at once. We can also infer a truly free will, uncontrolled by God. This free will becomes the source of pride, rebellion and wickedness.

Satan’s rebellion becomes the cause for his expulsion from the “mount of God” but not immediately. Ezekiel speaks prophetically and not historically at this point. Satan is seen in the presence of the God and vigorously accusing humans if not angels all the way to the time of Christ.

Revelation 12 takes up the next part of Satan’s story.

7 Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon and his angels fought back, 8 but he was defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in Heaven. 9 And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. 10 And I heard a loud voice in Heaven, saying, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. 11 And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death. 12 Therefore, rejoice, O heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!”

Revelation 12:7-12

Do we have any proof of this, outside of it being in the Bible? This could easily be just an ancient, irrelevant myth. I would offer a couple things. First, Satan appears to have had access to Earth before Christ and negative influence. So I wouldn’t expect human life to be necessarily worse at this point. But I do notice that as Christianity moved across the planet, initially it seemed to improve conditions; but within a generation or so there would be a negative snap back and corruption within the church itself. You can explain this from a sociological point of view, but I wonder if this has deeper roots. Also, while there was always anti-Semitism, it did not stand out as any worse than the fate of any other people group. Since then the Jews seem to lead to the way in the most hated department. The rest of Revelation 12 says this:

13 And when the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. 14 But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle so that she might fly from the serpent into the wilderness, to the place where she is to be nourished for a time, and times, and half a time. 15 The serpent poured water like a river out of his mouth after the woman, to sweep her away with a flood. 16 But the earth came to the help of the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed the river that the dragon had poured from his mouth. 17 Then the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus.

Revelation 12:13-17

The woman mentioned here is clearly the Jewish nation. Verses 15-16 sound eerily like WWII.

There is more to be said about Satan and the afterlife. I will take that up in my next blog entry.