Where Did Satan’s First Desire for Evil Come from?
Chapters
0:01:25 How Did the First Sin Come About
2:10 How Satan Became Evil
3:22 How Did Satan Become Evil
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | - We start the week with a question from a listener,
00:00:07.380 | Rob, who writes in to ask this.
00:00:09.440 | Pastor John, as a Reformed Calvinist,
00:00:12.020 | I highly appreciate Jonathan Edwards,
00:00:13.780 | who claims that number one,
00:00:15.720 | free will is doing what we desire,
00:00:18.220 | but that two, God gives us the desire to do good.
00:00:22.600 | And with that being said, and keeping James 1:13 in mind,
00:00:26.360 | I'm having trouble understanding where Lucifer
00:00:28.600 | received his first desire for sin.
00:00:32.600 | Norman Geisler says, quote,
00:00:34.480 | "The unmistakable logical conclusion
00:00:37.280 | for the extreme Calvinist is that both Lucifer and Adam
00:00:41.240 | sinned because God gave them the desire to sin first."
00:00:46.240 | End quote.
00:00:47.560 | I would imagine that Adam received his desire to sin
00:00:51.360 | from Eve, who received it from the serpent, from Satan.
00:00:55.400 | But if God is sovereign over all things,
00:00:57.020 | including all of our desires,
00:00:58.840 | would that make him the initial author
00:01:01.700 | of the first desire for sin in Satan?
00:01:05.680 | How do you answer this mystery?
00:01:07.240 | - For as many years as I can remember,
00:01:10.440 | I have said that among the mysteries in my theology,
00:01:16.300 | for which I do not have an adequate answer,
00:01:19.540 | one of them is the question, how?
00:01:24.720 | How is a key word here.
00:01:26.600 | How did the first sin come about?
00:01:29.960 | And by first sin, I don't mean Adam's first sin.
00:01:34.000 | I mean Satan's first sin,
00:01:36.960 | the very first sin in the universe.
00:01:39.920 | The Bible opens not with the beginning of evil,
00:01:43.540 | but with the presence of unexplained evil.
00:01:46.080 | Man is created innocent,
00:01:50.580 | and the serpent is already there, deceitful.
00:01:56.540 | Manifestly opposed to the God of creation.
00:02:00.080 | That's where the Bible begins.
00:02:03.660 | And as far as I can see,
00:02:06.780 | no explanation is offered in the Bible
00:02:10.880 | for how Satan became evil.
00:02:15.500 | I know there are hints that he was a perfect angel
00:02:19.640 | created by God.
00:02:21.060 | Jude says that he refers to angels
00:02:24.620 | who did not stay within their own position of authority,
00:02:28.960 | but left their proper dwelling,
00:02:32.500 | whom God has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness
00:02:36.280 | until the judgment of the great day.
00:02:39.120 | And I don't doubt that Satan was created good
00:02:43.980 | and fell from his proper place, like Jude says,
00:02:50.280 | because I don't think that evil and God
00:02:55.280 | are both eternal and ultimate realities.
00:02:58.460 | I'm not a dualist.
00:03:00.160 | God and his goodness and wisdom and power
00:03:05.160 | are the only ultimate eternal realities.
00:03:09.100 | And thus evil is somehow derivative, secondary,
00:03:14.100 | without God being a sinner.
00:03:19.180 | And all of that, virtually all Christians agree on.
00:03:23.120 | But how did Satan become evil?
00:03:27.500 | I do not know.
00:03:30.300 | And it is plain to me that those who believe
00:03:36.100 | in ultimate self-determination of God's creatures,
00:03:41.100 | like angels and humans, don't know either.
00:03:45.860 | To say that Satan had free will,
00:03:48.540 | that is ultimate self-determination,
00:03:50.780 | to say that Satan had free will
00:03:53.500 | is not an explanation for why he committed his first sin.
00:04:00.100 | It's a label.
00:04:02.220 | It's a label.
00:04:03.700 | It's not an explanation.
00:04:05.140 | It's a label of a mystery.
00:04:08.180 | How could a perfectly good being
00:04:13.180 | with a perfectly good will
00:04:17.140 | and a perfectly good heart
00:04:21.340 | ever experience any imperfect impulse
00:04:26.340 | that would cause the will to move in the direction of sin?
00:04:30.980 | And the answer is nobody knows,
00:04:34.900 | including those who say, "Oh, it's free will."
00:04:37.500 | That's not an explanation.
00:04:39.180 | It's a name for a mystery.
00:04:41.680 | So we don't know.
00:04:44.220 | The Bible doesn't explain the how of it.
00:04:48.340 | So Rob quotes Norman Geisler, who says,
00:04:51.340 | "The unmistakable logical conclusion
00:04:54.140 | for the extreme Calvinist,
00:04:56.380 | for both Lucifer and Adam, that they sinned
00:04:59.300 | is because God gave them the desire to sin."
00:05:02.460 | Now, I'm not sure whether I qualify
00:05:04.740 | for Geisler's extreme Calvinist,
00:05:06.500 | but I strongly suspect that I do.
00:05:08.520 | But just at this point,
00:05:13.060 | I am disagreeing with that description of me,
00:05:16.900 | and I am saying, no, I am not driven
00:05:20.580 | to say God gave, gave,
00:05:27.220 | Lucifer his first desire to sin.
00:05:30.940 | That is an oversimplification
00:05:33.700 | of virtually everybody's viewpoint.
00:05:36.900 | I do not know how Lucifer came
00:05:42.120 | to feel his first inclination to rebel against God.
00:05:47.120 | But here is what I do know.
00:05:52.400 | God is indeed sovereign,
00:05:55.260 | and nothing comes to pass apart from his plan,
00:06:00.260 | which includes things he more or less causes directly
00:06:05.760 | and things he more or less permits indirectly.
00:06:09.640 | And there is no doubt in my mind that Satan's fall
00:06:14.440 | and all of the redemptive plan of God
00:06:17.640 | for the glory of his grace afterwards
00:06:20.720 | was according to God's eternal plan.
00:06:24.580 | But it is precisely at this point
00:06:27.320 | that the how of the causality of Satan's first sin worked.
00:06:32.320 | We do not know.
00:06:35.640 | I have a category in my thinking, in other words,
00:06:38.680 | for the fact that God can see to it
00:06:42.240 | that something come to pass, which he hates.
00:06:47.820 | This is what he did, for example,
00:06:50.940 | when he planned the crucifixion of Jesus,
00:06:55.940 | according to Acts 4.27 and 4.28.
00:06:59.840 | The murder of Jesus was sinful,
00:07:02.600 | and it was planned down to the detail by God.
00:07:08.320 | You can read it in the Psalms,
00:07:10.100 | and you can read it in the New Testament.
00:07:12.480 | Precisely how God does that,
00:07:16.920 | maintaining his sinlessness
00:07:20.680 | and the sin of the things that comes about
00:07:24.200 | and the moral accountability of those who do those sins,
00:07:27.800 | the how of that, I do not know.
00:07:31.900 | But I think the Bible leads us to believe
00:07:34.960 | that he is sovereign over all sin
00:07:37.960 | and that he never sins.
00:07:40.880 | That is what I believe the Bible teaches.
00:07:45.320 | Now, how he does it, there might be hints in the Bible.
00:07:50.320 | And I am gonna give you one pointer.
00:07:53.880 | And I do not claim this as an explanation,
00:07:56.540 | but it's worth thinking about as a pointer
00:07:58.880 | toward a possible explanation
00:08:00.560 | that maybe we'll understand someday.
00:08:02.560 | In Isaiah 63.17, the prophet cries out to the people,
00:08:06.560 | "Oh Lord, why do you make us wander from your ways?"
00:08:11.160 | Did you hear that?
00:08:11.980 | "Oh Lord, why do you make us wander from your ways
00:08:15.600 | "and harden our heart so that we fear you not?
00:08:19.640 | "Return for the sake of your servants,
00:08:22.420 | "the tribes of your heritage."
00:08:24.320 | And so he ascribes to God the ultimate causality,
00:08:29.320 | somehow, of our wandering, Israel's wandering, into sin.
00:08:35.680 | How did God do that?
00:08:37.680 | The second half of the verse says,
00:08:39.280 | "Return for the sake of your servants,"
00:08:43.280 | suggesting, pointing, that somehow God's absence did it.
00:08:48.280 | And then he says in Isaiah 64.7,
00:08:52.040 | this is what, seven or eight verses later,
00:08:54.800 | "There is no one here who calls upon your name,
00:08:58.620 | "who rouses himself to take hold of you,
00:09:01.540 | "for you have hidden your face from us,
00:09:06.540 | "and have made us melt in the hand of our iniquities."
00:09:10.760 | And so again, it's the hiding of his face
00:09:15.140 | that explains the sin.
00:09:17.780 | And I'm not saying,
00:09:19.060 | this is a foolproof explanation of sin.
00:09:23.380 | Like somehow God cloaked his glory from Lucifer,
00:09:29.420 | and in the cloaking of his glory,
00:09:31.620 | somehow, still inexplicable to me,
00:09:35.060 | there rises a preference in Lucifer's heart for himself
00:09:38.900 | over God who has cloaked his glory.
00:09:41.100 | I don't know how that happens,
00:09:42.040 | but this is a pointer that something like that
00:09:45.100 | might have been going on.
00:09:46.900 | I'm simply saying this is worth pondering,
00:09:49.680 | that God may be able to govern the presence
00:09:52.660 | and absence of sin, not by direct active agency,
00:09:56.540 | but by concealing himself.
00:09:59.620 | I think it was Edwards who said,
00:10:02.180 | "There's a difference between the way light is caused
00:10:07.180 | "at three o'clock in the afternoon
00:10:10.120 | "by the shining of the sun,
00:10:12.280 | "and the way the shadows are caused
00:10:15.780 | "by the blocking of that sun by the tree,
00:10:18.880 | "though it is the light of the sun
00:10:21.240 | "that is responsible for both the brightness of the day
00:10:24.180 | "and the shadows under the tree."
00:10:26.260 | But I end where I began.
00:10:28.260 | How the very first sin in the universe came about
00:10:32.580 | is a mystery to me.
00:10:33.960 | I do not know how.
00:10:37.220 | What I am taught in the Bible
00:10:40.100 | is that God is sovereign over all things, including sin,
00:10:43.740 | and he himself is never a sinner.
00:10:46.520 | - That's very perceptive.
00:10:48.580 | And again, those passages are Isaiah 63, verse 17,
00:10:52.900 | and Isaiah 64, verse seven.
00:10:55.220 | I'm certainly gonna look at those passages
00:10:57.100 | more carefully myself.
00:10:58.380 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:11:00.140 | So should we hate Satan?
00:11:03.140 | John Piper will address that follow-up question tomorrow
00:11:06.220 | right here on the Ask Pastor John podcast.
00:11:08.580 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:11:09.820 | Thanks for listening.
00:11:10.860 | (upbeat music)
00:11:13.440 | (upbeat music)
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