As we noted last time, we all want justice, but in spite of our best efforts, it continues to elude us. We’re surrounded by accounts of injustices, and while some of those accounts are probably exaggerated, not all of them are, not by a long shot.
Broken people, broken world.
The world has not always been broken, however, and it will not always be.
Scripture tells the story of how the brokenness arrived. It tells of a snake who deceived the first woman and of a man, her husband, who cooperated, even though he knew perfectly well what he was doing (Ge 3.1-6; cf 1Ti 2.14).
Yeah, a talking snake. A lot of people think that’s just ridiculous, and it’s easy to see why they do.
But I don’t. I view the Scripture as divinely inspired, inerrant, and authoritative, and I’ve explained why here.
So I’m biased toward the biblical accounts. All evil, including the world’s injustice, came from a talking snake.
So who was he?
The account says simply that he was a snake, and that he was “more crafty” than any other creature. In Job, possibly written even before Moses wrote Genesis, we meet someone named “The Satan” (Job 1.6), or “The Adversary,” who clearly opposes God; but beyond a handful of later references (1Ch 21.1; Ps 109.6; Zec 3.1-2), the Hebrew Scriptures have nothing else to say about him.
With the incarnation, though, he seems to get busy, throwing all his forces at the Christ when he is apparently most vulnerable. Satan appears in all four Gospels (Mt 3x; Mk 5x; Lk 6x; Jn 1x) and in Acts (2x).
He shows up often in Paul’s epistles (10x), and he explodes onto the scene at the end of history (8x in Rev). It’s at the very end of the story (Re 20.2, 7) that we find the answer to the question we have had from the beginning: who is the snake?
John tells us:
2 And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.
Now, is it possible that Eve’s tempter was a different snake? I suppose so, theoretically, but I note that John has already called this creature a “dragon,” which would nicely continue the flow of the story, but he pauses to add that he’s a “serpent,” which looks an awful lot like an inclusio, a bookend reference back to the beginning of the Canon; and he calls him “that” serpent, a relative pronoun that indicates a previous reference—something that linguists call an “anaphoric” use. And then, John calls Satan “that old serpent,” a strong indication that our “inclusio” theory is correct.
So this creature—and he is merely a creature—started all this trouble, this pain and suffering and exploitation and injustice, and now the Scripture is going to tell us what happens to him.
Some people object that God seems to be taking his sweet time addressing the problem, and they assume that this indicates some sort of moral failing in God—if he even exists.
I don’t have the time or space here to address the large question of the problem of evil, but I intend to as occasion presents itself down the road. In the meantime, given my own observational and intellectual limitations, and given God’s demonstrated faithfulness to me over a lengthening life, I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt. Suffice it to say that justice is coming, and that God’s view of time infinitely exceeds ours.
In the next post we’ll turn to an examination of this climactic passage revealing God’s dealing with his persistent but infinitely inferior enemy.
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