Tuesday, April 06, 2004

Many, many bible quotes in this one. Just so's you're warned.
Alright, so confusion:
This passage is generally given as the one cementing Satan's fate in hell, which is all well and good (and is the one that refers to the "morning star") until you realize that it's not about Satan at all. It's about Jacob, and specifically about driving home the fact that no matter how powerful a human you are, you aren't God. That's a very common meme in the Bible. Maybe You're cool, but you're still human and you're still going to die and be eaten by worms (I'm really impressed with the turn of phrase about the worms).
The other passage I've often seen cited as Satan being cast down to hell is this one. That, however, isn't at all the whole passage, which goes more like this and casts a whole different light on the thing. It's odd that it refers specifically to burning the one cast down with a fire from inside himself rather than casting him down into hell, but you can overlook that, at least until you see that it too is about somebody else. It's a reminder that all the money in the world doesn't make you God, thus the remarks about possessing quantities of precious stones in settings of gold and still being cast down by God.
Both of these are good lessons, and they're both absolutely true: Earthly power is all well and good, but it doesn't change the quality of the man under it. We're still an aggregate of guts and blood destined for the dirt. The only place I've found that actually has the devil being cast out of heaven in a huge war is in revelations, and that's stuff that hasn't happened yet, right?
So, what I'm getting out of this is that the Devil was cast out of Heaven and walks around (Just look at the book of Job and any of the accounts of the Temptation of the Christ), but that he's going to be cast into Hell during the Apocalypse, during which time (this makes more sense from a Jewish perspective) all of the unfaithful and the non-Kosher will be cast into hell, this being a new thing which will be created especially to house the unfaithful and the non-Kosher after the end times. Does that seem like the logical conclusion? I'm afraid that most of the Devil stuff that's made it into the shared wisdom is from sources outside the bible and therefore suspect. It's hard to tell, what with upwards of 2500 years of outside sources, liberal translations and removal of context, what's gospel (if you will) and what's not.
Puzzlement.

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