Question:

I would like to share some speculation with you. I think that nothing here goes against the Bible, but I am not sure; that is part of why I am sharing it with you; for your opinion on whether anything here goes against the Bible. There is nothing here that will change my faith or how I will live my life. It is just speculation. Would you take a look at it and tell me what you think? Here is my hypothesis. I think that most Christians believe that we each have a spirit; an immaterial part that survives eternally beyond the body. I don’t think the Bible explicitly says this, but it certainly implies it. The Bible clearly says that God created all physical/material things; He created us and He breathed life into us, but I don’t believe that it explicitly says that He created our spirits. I think that we generally assume that He created our spirits too; but what if He didn’t? What if, in the beginning, before creation, there were many many spirits? Perhaps, in some way, some spirits are stronger than others. Perhaps, back before creation, the strongest spirit, the Big Dog in existence, was the spirit we now call Satan. We do know that Satan was proud of who he was. What if three other strong spirits were those we now call the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit? What if these three spirits decided they liked each other, they loved each other. What if they decided to fulfill their love, to make their love complete, by merging together, somehow or another, as one. The first act of creation in the Bible is ‘let there be light.’ What if that command was not the creation of photons, but the event of the coming together in love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit to be God? What if Satan saw God as a threat? What if Satan pulled together other spirits and Satan and God fought? The Bible says that Michael and his angles fought against Satan and his angles and that Satan swept a third of the stars out of the sky.

The second act of God in creation was to separate the light from the darkness. What if this was Satan and his third of the spirits being defeated by Michael and his two thirds of the spirits? Yes, the Bible speaks of this as the creation of day and night, but there was no earth or sun or moon yet. What do we know about spiritual existence? What if God saw that some of the spirits that followed Satan had potential to be redeemed? What if all of creation, all of physical existence, all of time and space, is just a great sieve that God put together to separate the redeemable spirits from among all the spirits that followed Satan? What if each of us, in our bodies, in our physical existence, were just created to host a fallen spirit, to give it the opportunity to see and know God, to give it the opportunity to choose to change sides and to be with God instead of Satan? Now I believe that God is omnificent, that He knows which spirits will return to Him and which won’t; but in this scenario, He didn’t create the spirits; He doesn’t control their decisions. He just provides a situation, an opportunity, for them to choose. Again, I am not saying that this happened. I am just saying that something like this could have happened. To the best of my knowledge there is nothing here that goes against the Bible. What do you think?

Answer:

I am afraid that this scenario is definitely unbiblical.  John said of Jesus (John 1:1-2), “In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things were created through him. Without him, nothing was created that has been created.  Colossians 1:15f says something similar. Jesus is God. Jesus is uncreated. Jesus was the instrument through whom the entire universe was created.   Colossians 1:16 says he is the creator of all things visible and invisible.  Satan is a created being.  Jesus is not. What you are describing sounds a lot like Mormon theology. I just published a book on Mormonism (www.ipibooks.com). Joseph Smith created a blasphemous unorthodox theology which sounds a little bit similar to yours. He taught that Jesus and Satan were brothers and the the Father is a god (small g) just like Jesus is a separate god (small g). This is what you are describing in your scenario.

No, I disagree with this scenario in the strongest possible terms. You and I and Satan are created beings. God is the uncaused cause. He is the I AM. Jesus said, “Before Abraham was born, I AM.” He did not say “Before Abraham was born I was.” That would be a different thing. Jehovah’s Witness have Jesus a great angel–on par with Satan. But this is not a biblical teaching. Jesus is the Creator of the Universe. Spirits are created things. Colossians has Jesus as the creater of ALL things, spiritual and physical. There is not two ways to interpret this.

I will agree that the exact nature of Satan is not described in detail in the Bible. The traditional view is that he was a very powerful angel who decided to rebel against God. I cannot tell you with 100% certaintly that this is correct, but one thing I can say is that Satan is created and that he is not equal to God. The part of your scenario which has Satan being jealous of God and causing a rebellion in the spiritual realms IS consistent with biblical teaching as far as I am concerned. Whether or not the spiritual beings who rebelled against God can be redeemed is an open question in the Bible, as far as I can see.

I do not know what you mean that our bodies were created to host a fallen spirit.  I am not sure where you see that in the Bible. This would be the doctrine of pre-existence of souls/spirits. Orthodox Christianity has rejected this teaching because it is not taught in the Bible and, on the face of it, it does not seem consistent with the biblical view that we were created “in our mother’s womb.” I am not sure that this teaching is heretical, but it certainly is way outside the mainstream of Christianity and it is not supported by any scripture that I have ever seen used to support pre-existence. Again, this is a Mormon teaching, but not a biblical one as far as I can tell.

John Oakes