WHY WOMEN REALLY, REALLY, MATTER! AND SATAN REALLY, REALLY, HATES THEM!
One of the perennial questions asked by theologians is when did Lucifer rebel? Some scholars have suggested that Isaiah described Lucifer’s moment of rebellion in Isaiah 14 when it sounds like he thought he could take over heaven-
¶ “How you are fallen from heaven,
O Day Star, son of Dawn!
How you are cut down to the ground,
you who laid the nations low!
You said in your heart,‘
I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God
I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly
in the far reaches of the north;
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.’
Isaiah 14:12-14
But upon a closer examination of the text, it becomes apparent that Isaiah is speaking of the arrogance of the king of Babylon, not Satan. The prophesied rise of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon is described in language that depicts his arrogance as breath-taking. It may be that the condition of Lucifer’s heart at the time of his fall was similarly arrogant to that of Nebuchadnezzar (who Yahweh had greatly humble, as described in Daniel 2), but we cannot force the text of Isaiah 14 to mean something that it was not intended to mean. If Isaiah 14 does not describe the cause and timing of Lucifer’s, then perhaps Ezekiel 28 does? After all, it describes what we might reasonably consider to be the cause of Lucifer’s rebellion –
“Because your heart is proud,
and you have said, ‘I am a god,
I sit in the seat of the gods,
in the heart of the seas,’
yet you are but a man, and no god,
though you make your heart like the heart of a god—
Ezekiel 28:2b
But again, a closer examination of the text reveals that Isaiah was dealing with the king of Tyre, not Lucifer.
¶ The word of the LORD came to me:
“Son of man, say to the prince of Tyre,
Thus says the Lord GOD:“Because your heart is proud,
and you have said, ‘I am a god,
I sit in the seat of the gods,
in the heart of the seas,’yet you are but a man, and no god,
though you make your heart like the heart of a god—
Ezekiel 28:1-2
You may have heard teaching based on these two ‘classic’ passages supposedly about the origins of Lucifer’s transition to Satan (“the Adversary”) boldly asserted and then linked with the idea that he was an archangel who rebelled and took a third of heaven’s angels with him. These ordinary angels who sided with Satan then became demons. Revelation 12 is generally cited to make this case. But there is yet another problem that we encounter in trying to make this narrative fit. Notice the chronological sequence stated in Revelation 12 – particularly addressing the perennial theological problem we are trying to solve:
¶ And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth. And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it. She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne, and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which she is to be nourished for 1,260 days.
¶ Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon and his angels fought back, but he was defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.
Revelation 12:1-9
Here is the sequence of this passage:
(i) “The woman” (which is Mary representing Israel who is depicted with the metaphorical “sun, moon, and stars” first established from Joseph’s dream in Genesis 37 as being Israel. Whenever Israel turned its back on God the prophets declared that the sun no longer gives forth its light, the moon has been darkened, and the stars have fallen from the sky [Isa. 13:10; Ezek. 32:7]);
(ii) She is about to give birth (to the Messiah, Jesus);
(iii) The Dragon (Satan) musters the geo-political forces at the time — Israel (Herod) and Rome (Augustus);
(iv) The Dragon then sweeps down “a third of the stars of heaven” to the earth (presumed to be the involuntary subjection of a third of heavens angels who are then coerced to follow Satan). But this interpretation of this phrase creates two great problems: it suggests that Satan’s agenda did not commence until after the Christ was born, and secondly, it suggests that there were no demons until after Christ had been born. Both suggestions cannot be substantiated from Scripture;
(v) The Dragon then looms before the woman to devour her child when He is born. Indeed, Satan used King Herod in an attempt to kill the baby Messiah around the time of His birth, but failed;
(vi) The woman’s child grows to be the man who would accomplish redemption and the atonement of humankind’s sin and demonstrate that He is the true King of kings who will rule the nations ‘with a rod of iron’. After this phase of His redemptive plan is accomplished He ascends back to heaven;
(vii) Despite the Dragon’s 1,260 day program to wipe out the bearers of the news of the Saviour’s offer of redemption, the woman (the true Israel) is protected by God from being destroyed. [In AD64 Caesar Nero commenced a killing rampage against Christians but was unable to destroy Christianity. This rampage of martyrdom against the Church ended with Nero’s suicide in AD68, 1260 or so days later.]
(viii) War broke out in heaven with the archangel Michael fighting the Dragon. In AD70 the last vestiges of the Old Covenant were done away with, thus fulfilling the prophecy of Hebrews 8:13, and with the doing away with the Old Covenant (Temple, Priesthood, sacrifices) Satan’s role as the Accuser of believers was extinguished and his doom made certain (the expression “thrown down” is metaphorical language of this, and Revelation further describes his doom as being “thrown into a bottomless pit” in Rev. 20).
Do you see how this sequence does not fit the suggested narrative of the origins of Satan since we know he was already the Evil One in the Garden of Eden described in Genesis 3?
WHAT THE BIBLICAL DATA ACTUALLY REVEALS ABOUT THE TIMING OF THE FALL OF LUCIFER
It might be that the story of Job is the most ancient story in the Bible. That is, the oral tradition of this account was being told well before Moses and his editor/s penned the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, Deuteronomy). But the Book of Job, which describes a character referred to as the Satan in its opening two chapters was probably not formally written down in its present form until the time of the Exile in the fifth and the fourth centuries BC – whereas we know that the Genesis account was a part of the Book of the Law written and handed down from around 1400 BC. Therefore, the account of the Devil in Genesis 3 has ancient origins. If this text was all the data we had to determine when Lucifer rebelled against Yahweh, then we might be more inclined to accept an ancient tradition that says that it was the creation of the woman that triggered Lucifer to defy God. We certainly could not argue with the data as it is presented in the opening three chapters of Genesis since it is immediately after the woman (Heb. “Ishah”) is created that the devilish serpent appears. An ancient tradition states that it was this which triggered Lucifer, one of the Watchers originally assigned to earth to assist mankind, to be incensed with what Yahweh had done when he created a special being capable of doing what no no heavenly creature could do. While the man (Heb. “Adam”) had been created in the image of God, it was only after God divested Adam of those divine traits and embodied them in the Ishah with an ability that no other creature in the universe possessed: the ability to create ‘spirit’ (when a woman conceives her offspring he or she becomes an entirely new person in her womb with a spirit or soul comprised of a substance not previously in existence, unlike each of our physical bodies which are comprised of pre-existing material) — that Lucifer’s great pride became offended with envy and he was filled with rage against the woman (Ishah).
This would certainly explain the LORD’s denouncement of the serpent and His warning to the Ishah –
¶ The LORD God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this,
cursed are you above all livestock
and above all beasts of the field;
on your belly you shall go,
and dust you shall eat
all the days of your life.
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”
Genesis 3:14-15
If this ancient tradition is correct about the timing and cause of Satan’s origins, then it explains why his devilish strategies are almost entirely focused on the destruction of women. The evidence for this today is horrifically obvious. Satan hates women. He hates that they can do something literally divine – a woman can create a spiritual being – and he cannot. Therefore, he tricks, manipulates, deceives, and cons people into encouraging women to either abuse this divine power or to destroy its fruit (the conceived child) through abortion — and of course, sex-selective abortion. It is conservatively estimated that due to this devilish strategy there are now “one hundred million missing females” from the world’s current population! One researcher has estimated that in India alone, there have been 70,000,000 baby girls aborted due to the practice of sex-selective abortions. Added to this assault on women is Satan’s despicable scheme to have men commit sexual violence against women including the sin of rape and pornography. All the while, the father of lies manipulates even women to be spoke-persons for the euphemistically labelled “Sex Industry” to betray their own sex by advocating for “the rights of sex workers” when they of all people should be defending the dignity of women against the abuses by men! Yet, somehow, Satan’s devilish deceptions are packaged with a veneer of acceptability that results of pitiful confusion by politicians, the judiciary, the media, and the arts. This confusion reached dizzying heights when Hugh Hefner died and he was bizarrely championed as a liberator of women by complying with Satan’s schemes to have stripped of dignity and treated as objects rather than as people endowed by their Creator to be honoured, cherished, and protected from such scandalous abuses. While the media were lauding Hefner as a liberator of women despite his despicable objectifying of women, they were simultaneously promoting the “Me Too Movement” when hundreds of women began speaking up against their mistreatment by other powerful men!
It is my hope that every Christian man repents of their consumption of pornography and is delivered from the lie that the women portrayed in this devilish attack against women actually enjoy being treated as object rather than as persons!
WHY WOMEN ARE REALLY, REALLY, IMPORTANT
When Satan entered the Garden of Eden, he did not try to directly corrupt the man. He went straight to the one upon whom the entire divine plan for mankind depended – the woman. But God immediately instigated His plan of redemption and put women right in the centre of it! As you read through Scripture you will see this pattern – Satan attacks key women, God redeems these women and uses the attack against them as an opportunity to further His plan of redemption despite Satan’s attack against them! When Satan attacked Eve with his insidious deception, God redeemed this attack by announcing that He would send the Redeemer as “seed of the woman” (Gen. 3:15; Rom. 16:20). God ordained that a young woman named Tamar would be one of the women through whom the family line of the coming Redeemer would come. When Satan had orchestrated Tamar’s husband, Er, to be sexually deviant so that this would not happen (Gen. 38:7), God orchestrated for His plan of redemption to be furthered through Tamar and her link to the tribe of Judah anyway (Matt. 1:3). When a young chosen girl, Rahab, was chosen by God to be in the family-line of the Messiah-Redeemer, she too was attacked by Satan at a very young age. She was robbed of her of dignity and purity and against all hope doomed to be childless. But God chose to rescue her out of these wicked schemes of Satan and the men Satan had manipulated to abuse her. God orchestrated a dramatic military rescue plan and brought her into the family of God as the wife of a godly Hebrew man, Boaz, and she was able to become the Great-Grandmother of King David and thereby continue the family-line of the coming Redeemer (Matt. 1:5a). Her only child, Boaz, her son, reached his senior years and had not yet married. Satan had made life difficult for Boaz and his countrymen by orchestrating a drought and a famine. Satan’s scheme looked like it would bring God’s plan of redemption to a halt. But God once again used Satan’s attack and sovereignly orchestrated it as a means to redeem both Boaz and a young Moabite girl, Ruth (Matt. 1:5b) through whom He ensured that the family-line of the Redeemer remained unbroken. And when David corrupted the heart of the LORD’s favourite servants with lust for an already married woman, God eventually orchestrated for her who had been the wife of Uriah to be the chosen woman in the line of the coming Redeemer (Matt. 1:7).
Women are really really important to God and our endowed with a divine quality that men do not possess. We have already noted the fifth woman mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus, Mary (when we looked at Revelation 12) and noted how God indeed ensured that this young woman was an important means by which the Redeemer would redeem. Therefore, men, treat all women with respect, tenderness, and honour. And do this by heeding the Apostle Paul’s injunction to men-
¶ Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity. ¶ Honor widows…
First Timothy 5:1-3
Your pastor,
Andrew
Let me know what you think below in the comment section and feel free to share this someone who might benefit from this Pastor’s Desk.
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