There is a widespread idea about the origin of evil. It is an assignment of guilt that says: Satan screwed up! He is the evil one in this world. At the same time, God is often seen as “exclusively good”. Then how come there can be a Satan? Didn’t God create everything?

The tension between the evil in the world and the supposedly always-only-good God is removed by an artifice. The so-called “Fall of Satan” is to explain how sin entered the world. The fall of Satan is now a standard Christian explanation of where evil in the world comes from. God is no longer in charge – Satan has screwed up! There are other ideas about how this happened.

This doctrine of the “Fall of Satan” claims that Satan was created as a flawless angel by a God-who-is-only-good and then rebelled against God and thus sinned. This development is to designate a moral fall, which produced a devilish Lucifer from a heavenly being. That was the first sin in the universe. Satan then crept into the garden and seduced Eve there and, via her, Adam. Ever since man sinned there in the Garden of Eden, sin and therefore evil has been part of our experience.

Such ideas help us to classify evil. The imaginations tell stories about how it is supposed to have happened and they give us an origin. Perhaps such ideas also help us to cope with difficult experiences. Often the performances are perfect projection surfaces for one’s own experiences. The only catch is that the Bible nowhere speaks of these things.

This teaching is foreign to the Bible. It is nowhere mentioned or even hinted at.

The doctrine of a “fall of Satan” has a specific purpose: it is to wash God clean of the origin of sin, even though, for example, Isaiah 45:7 says that God is the creator of evil. The fall of Satan and some other ideas serve to create a worldview in which God is only good and Satan stands for the bad. It is a dualistic image of God, a human explanation for the origin of these painful experiences. While we find duality in the world, is God not above it? Does He not have everything in His hands? It is very instructive to take a closer look at the key passages in the Bible about the “origin of evil.”

What does this have to do with me?

If we believe in this Fall of Satan, it changes our image of God. In this teaching, God is no longer all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing. He was “taken by surprise”, so to speak, by a rebellious angel who then mutated into a “devil”. The doctrine states that evil has its origin in Satan, contrary to clear biblical statements.

God is no longer responsible for evil, as Isaiah still formulated it, but Satan is. Satan got us into this. So what remains is an incomplete image of God and a God who has unfortunately let something slip out of his hand – the world and all the people in it. This immediately has something to do with me, because: Which God do I trust? This is what talking about the fall of Satan is about in consequence:

What kind of God do we have?

Deepening

• If you have never looked at the doctrine of the fall of Satan, it is worth looking at the various accounts. There are many contributions that see the “fall of Satan” as the origin of evil. I found the most detailed accounts on English websites, such as this one: The Story of Lucifer (Christianity.com)

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Image:
Gustave Doré
(1832-1883)