known unknowns, part 2: satan in the old testament

In the Old Testament, Satan does not appear very often. But he and his pals are there nonetheless. “Satan” does not become a proper name for a while, either (just, “the satan”, the adversary).  Genesis 3 makes no mention of Satan as a character, just a talking snake. The New Testament (Rev. 12.9) explicitly links this snake who tricked Eve in the Garden of Eden with Satan.

There’s quite a bunch of wacky stuff in the Old Testament.  Genesis 6 has “sons of God” having relations with “daughters of men” and producing superhuman offspring.  I can tell you that anyone who claims to know exactly what’s going on there doesn’t.  But it has parallels with mythological stories in other cultures, where gods have these types of dealings with human beings.  It says a lot, both about those gods, and about the heavenly beings that God created.  It seems like they interfere in places where they ought not interfere.  So before there is any mention of one figure in charge of this rebellion, there clearly is a rebellion.  It goes against the created order of things; it sets these beings in superior relation to humans and aids in leading humanity astray to the wickedness and great violence that precipitated the Flood.

We also know that there are no monotheists in the Bible, not in the modern sense.  No one would claim that there is only one god (but for us there is only one).  There are other gods – Baal, Ashtoreth, Milcom, Chemosh, and Artemis, to name a few.  The Old Testament shows a God who is quite angry with these other gods and does battle against them.  The poetic literature is certainly full of reference to God putting other “gods” in their place and subduing them to bring about order in God’s creation (Pss. 74.14; 82).

There are other beings as well, called “evil spirits,” who do bad things.  They make King Saul go crazy (1 Sam. 18.10-11), so that he tries to kill David.  They lie to false prophets so that they will give false words and deceive people (1 Kings 22.19-23).  They are associated with idolatry and sorcery (Lev. 17.7), distorting the relationship between God and human beings.

Then there is Satan. In the Old Testament, he is really just “the satan” or “the adversary.”  He is one of the heavenly beings, and for some reason, he has the right to act as the adversary of humanity, within a limited scope set by God.  He pretends to be primarily interested in God’s righteous reputation, and so he tries to cut human beings off from God’s protection and plan by bringing up their sins or trying to get them to sin.  This is in direct contrast to intercessors like Abraham (Gen 18) and Moses (Ex. 32.11-14), who were indeed so concerned with God’s righteous reputation that they strongly urged him to show mercy.

In Job 1-2, Satan tries to prove that the only thing keeping Job righteous is his personal prosperity, and, in order to test Satan's accusation, God gives Satan permission to mess with Job's life.  Satan is wrong!  In Zechariah 3, Satan is trying to get the high priest Joshua kicked out of the priesthood, because apparently Joshua has done something wrong, something which makes him stained.  God’s response is to take Joshua’s dirty clothes off and put clean clothes on him.

So we see here that demons are interested in ruling over humans instead of serving them, in distorting the created order (overwhelming human beings with the ominous threat of chaos and being out of control of nature), in distorting human relationships by driving people against each other or away from society through disease, and by putting human beings and God at odds, either by setting up false gods in place of the true God or by getting human beings to turn away from God.

We’ll see how these powers are ultimately defeated by Jesus Christ when we talk about the New Testament next time.

- Pastor Bo Bannister