Why did Satan rebel against God?

[Sexton Blake]

God made Satan, and God is all knowing, so why did God make Satan?

[florduh]

Because there can't be "good" unless there is also "evil?"

[TABA]

The whole matter of Satan is a difficult one for Christians to explain.  God supposedly created everything that exists and the existence of Satan is a dilemma: did God create Satan without knowing he would turn bad?  If so then God is not omniscient (all knowing).  On the other hand if God did know, it raises serious questions about God’s benevolence.

 

Christians disagree as to whether Satan was an angel who went bad or whether he was evil from the outset.  The former view - probably a majority one - is based in some passages in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, which for the record do not mention Satan by name at all.  The problem with this idea is that in John 8:44 Jesus days that Satan “was a murderer from the beginning”.

 

In either case, the continued existence of Satan as a powerful supernatural, evil figure who continues to wreak havoc while God bides his time before destroying him, is a serious problem for believers.  What most of them don’t know, however, is that Satan only became such a powerful and evil character in the few centuries before the arrival of Jesus.  Before this a “satan” was an agent sent by God to challenge and test humans.  At that time both good and evil came from God, and there was no rival, evil supernatural power.  
 

It was only in late Old Testament times that some schools of Jewish thought reinvented Satan as a powerful adversary of God, working against humanity and the faithful.  This was an attempt to explain why righteous people and even righteous nations (Israel) suffered so much.  But the idea was that God would only allow Satan to do his evil work for a short time. He would soon send a Messiah to defeat Satan - and evil - once and for all and a virtual Utopia would be established.  Jesus seems to have thought of himself as either this Messiah or his forebear. 
 

Two thousand years later, Christians believe that Satan is as powerful as ever, since evil and suffering clearly still flourish.  Jesus’s supposed defeat of Satan has been reframed as something that will only happen in the future: mañana.  Of course since the Messiah was supposed to defeat evil once and for all, they maintain that this actually happened when Jesus died and/or rose.  Evil persists but also somehow was vanquished twenty centuries ago. Cognitive Dissonance much?

 

The real story of course is that both God and Satan were developed as ideas to explain why the world exists and why things work the way they do. 

[Sexton Blake]

As you point out, the first two chapters of Job has God and Satan as virtually friends, with Satan popping in to visit him.

 

There is a fair number of christians online who believe that Satan has taken over the world as they daily see all the bad stuff in it.

 

Of course, the bad stuff has been going on like forever, but now we have the media to point it out to us.

[alreadyGone]

Martin and Lewis?

Amos n' Andy?

The Skipper and Gilligan?

 

It seems clear that God likes drama and theater. And comedy.

Else why did he create a species so totally flawed that he goes on and on about how weak and evil we are?

And then tell Adam and Eve to go forth, be fruitful, and multiply?

 

All to create a backdrop against which he can tell us how holy he is.

 

 

[Moonobserver]

"Why did Satan rebel against God?"

 

I've touched on this before, but I'm prone to pointing out that an angelic rebellion against an omnipotent deity couldn't stem from mere pride; it could be driven only by *insanity*. Such a being would have to be delusional to expect to overpower the creator of everything including that being himself, so the only fair judgement on such a being would be "not guilty by reason of insanity". That in itself makes the "rebel angel" scenario unrealistic.

[Moonobserver]

Another story tells that God created man and commanded the angels to bow down to him. Lucifer [or the equivalent] refused, not out of resentment but because he adored God so much that he couldn't bring himself to bow before anything other than God, even if God commanded him to do so. So he was sent to hell because of his love for God.