The LORD said to Satan, "Where have you come from?" Satan answered the LORD, "From roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it." Then the LORD said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil." "Does Job fear God for nothing?" Satan replied. "Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land. But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face." The LORD said to Satan, "Very well, then, everything he has is in your hands, but on the man himself do not lay a finger." Then Satan went out from the presence of the LORD. (Job 1:7-12)
As a child, my worldview was formed in ignorance of Scripture and informed primarily by popular culture. My understanding of the relationship between God and Satan would have been best described by the scene in Animal House where Larry Kroger is tempted to rape a high school girl who had passed out in a drunken stupor in his room during a fraternity party. As he gazes lustfully down on the defenseless young girl, a tiny devil and counterbalancing angel appear on each of Larry’s shoulders to urge him respectively towards a choice between evil and good. In my ignorance, that is how I saw the state of man—as a morally neutral pawn caught in a battle of good and evil where God and the Devil were equally matched. The events of life, the skirmishes in this battle, were random. Sometimes you were Larry, sometimes you were the drunk girl, and the consequences of our actions were ultimately beyond not only our control, but beyond God’s control as well. If the Devil made me do it, well it wasn’t my fault, but it wasn’t God’s fault either. The Devil had just won that round. Good luck next time God! After all, you are little.
My notion of the random battle of good and evil persisted into adulthood, even during those times that I considered myself an atheist governed solely by civic virtue and my own idiosyncratic code of conduct. Sin, and its consequences, were not a form of disobedience to God, but the result of my own transitory moral weakness at a time when I had the bad “luck” to find myself tempted beyond my will to resist. No longer seeing evil incarnate in a pitchfork wielding Devil, I yet believed in a faceless force of evil that triumphed in those times that I had insufficient karma to resist. In this state of mind, it was not that the Devil made me do wrong, but that my resistance to evil was overcome by events that were both beyond my control and more powerful than the vague forces of virtue that sometimes were able to help me out—but not this time.
When I became a believer, I gradually abandoned both my childish notion of God as a tiny angel beseeching virtue from his tenuous perch on my shoulder AND my “sophisticated” notion of God as vague karmic force that occasionally and inconsistently assisted me in my battle against the random temptations of the dark side. Post salvation, neither of those formulations of God could be reconciled with the effect of the Spirit I felt within me or the plain meaning of the text of the Scripture I read. I came to believe that God is neither tiny nor impotent, and nothing that happens or fails to happen is outside of His control. The “battle” of good and evil is fake—it is not a test between equally weighted forces of good and evil fighting it out in divine equivalence. As we see in Job, in order to assail us with his fiery darts of temptation, the Devil must first come to God for permission to pierce the protective “hedge” that He has placed around his children. Got that. Got that. The question is, why does God grant that permission and let it happen? Why not simply Not Lead Us into temptation—and Just Deliver Us from evil?
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