Brooke Quist, a new friend of mine through Open Table Conference, blew my mind. He was asking for my thoughts on who or what Satan (the satan) or the devil is. After sharing a few of the thoughts I’ve gleaned from René Girard, Michael Hardin, Brian Zahnd, and especially my son Dominic Jersak, Brooke was eventually able to get a word in edgewise with his own discoveries.
He told me how he had been praying for illumination on two texts from the Johannine corpus (John's Gospel and first epistle):
John 8:44 You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
1 John 3:8 The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time on these texts, pondering how the New Testament regularly describes all people as God’s children—most overtly in Ephesians 3:15 and Acts 17:28, but also assumed in the parable of the prodigal sons (Luke 15). How, then, do John and Jesus himself, think of Christ's opponents as children of the devil? Elsewhere, I’ve concluded that they’re referring simply to children-by-imitation, rather than by nature.
But what jumped out at Brooke was in a different register. In the Gospel passage, Jesus describes the devil as “a murderer from the beginning.” And in 1 John, the devil has been sinning from the beginning.
As Brian Zahnd has pointed out, John 8 is reflecting on the first murder at the foundation of human civilization—Cain’s fratricide in Genesis 4. And he was there in humanity’s foundational sin: “through one man (Adam), sin entered the world” (Romans 5:12).
But wait. The devil has been this way for how long? A murderer and sinner since when? From the beginning—ap’ archē (ἀπ’ἀρχῆς). That word, arché, is the same “beginning” as in Genesis 1:1 (Greek Septuagint — In the beginning, God created…) and John 1:1 (John 1:1 — In the beginning was the Word). It’s a far fuller expression than from the start (protos). It’s more like from the very foundations or from the ground up.
And suddenly, I saw the implications for Christianity’s dominant “Satan origin story.” By way of review:
We believed that the Devil or Satan began as Lucifer, God’s principal archangel and worship leader, but through jealousy and rebellion, fell from heaven with a third of the angels, who became demons. But the truth is that the biblical basis for that storyline is extremely thin and often requires dubious leaps. The tradition is funded more by intertestamental Jewish literature (especially Enoch) and Babylonian mythology, amplified in medieval Christianity, perfected in William Blake's Paradise Lost, to where we inherited and assumed their demonology as dogmatic truth.
But contra that narrative, Jesus tells us the devil has always been a murderer from the beginning, the arché. Further, Jesus says, the devil’s native language (literally, “he speaks out of his own” — ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων λαλεῖ), and his first tongue is lying.
In other words, these texts suggest the devil did not pre-exist in the beginning as God’s highest archangel. Lucifer was not a holy angelic leader who rebelled and fell into the archdemon existence as Satan. The devil, satan, has always been a murderer and liar from the beginning. So says Jesus.
This discovery creates new questions that require fresh wrestling on the following points:
1. This beginning cannot be the same beginning as the foundational arche of the cosmos, because Genesis 1 and John 1 agree that God-through-Christ-by-the Spirit created ALL things and that God declared the whole of creation “Good.”
That’s partly why the Lucifer mythology seemed necessary. God created all things and did not create anything evil, so if the devil is an evil creature, then it must have first been good and then become evil. So we developed a war in heaven / angelic fall narrative to squeeze between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. And it works until you read John 8 carefully.
2. But we’ve already seen where Jesus, John, and Paul identity the devil’s arché. The foundational act or moment ascribed to the devil is in the first lie (“you shall not surely die”), the first sin (turning from the Light of God), and the first murder (Cain killing Abel).
From this perspective, Satan has been evil from the beginning, and that beginning is founded on human sin. In that sense, the devil or satan or evil is not so much a sentient creature of whom God once said, “Let there be…and it was good,” but rather, the monstrous personification of human sin.
As the early church said, evil has no being as such, but is a privation of or turning away from the Good. As Dominic Jersak once said, “...created by people out of the ashes of war, tears of those who are afraid, and the stuff that people want that doesn’t belong to them—and takes on a ‘life’ of its own, turns on us, and torments us.” Or, as Brian Zahnd has so helpfully said,
The satan is more than a metaphor but less than a person; by that, I mean the satan, though a very real and dangerous phenomenon, does not actually possess ontological being. The satan, like evil itself, is parasitic in nature. It cannot exist independently because it is not created by God. The satan can only exist by colonizing a host. If there is no host for the satan, the satan ceases to exist at all. Indeed, the devil is presented in Revelation as having “great wrath, because he knows that his time is short.” Though the satanic is properly a phenomenon and not a person, the satanic phenomenon is so real, so powerful, so deadly, so destructive, that we cannot help but personify the satanic as Satan.
Brian thinks that personifying Satan is probably necessary and helpful. Certainly, the Bible talks about it that way, especially in the fall narrative, the prologue of Job, and the temptations of Jesus, Peter, and Judas.
Allow me an illustration of why this is so. I interviewed a counselor who works with children who molest other children and asked her, “Does anything work?” She described one approach that can help, which experts call “externalization.” She helps molesters identify their experience of an overwhelming impulse to assault other children—an impulse from within that arises from factors such as genetic dispositions, previous traumas, and/or broken propensities. And while the children are held accountable for their own acts, they are also seemingly powerless to resist those impulses.
So the effective counselor will begin by externalizing and personifying the impulse by asking,
“Can you feel it coming toward you before it happens?”
Yes.
“If you could imagine it coming toward you, what would it look like?”
e.g., A dark angel. An ugly monster.
“And if you gave that monster a name, what would you call it?”
e.g., The devil. Freddy.
“And if we could see it coming, what ‘weapons’ would you need to resist it?”
e.g., a shield, a sword, angelic warriors, an unbeatable Champion.
My counselor friend was describing the basics of “spiritual warfare” that we’ve learned in Ephesians 6—but now discovered through therapeutic practice outside the Christian worldview!
The balance here is that, on one hand, the child doesn’t get to say, “The devil made me do it,” and absolve themselves. But it also distinguishes the heart of the child from the evil impulses themselves. This creates a breakthrough because it both empowers the child’s agency (you can resist the devil and it will flee from you). But it also begins to wash away the shame that comes by identifying themselves with (and empowers) the impulse.
To me, that’s a powerful reason to personify the satanic forces at work in this world, while also owning humanity's role in generating them. And while I’ve thought through much of this for years, Quist’s prayerful exegesis of Jesus’ view of “the devil from the beginning” feels like a clincher to be taken seriously.
Some humble caveats: (1) these are speculations about mysteries, insufficient to be regarded as doctrine; (2) these are not the only relevant texts in Scripture or interpretations in the tradition; (3) this is one perspective on the demonic, which does not exclude other phenomena, including the diverse realities or experiences of angels, righteous or fallen, actual or symbolic.