This being is punished: he’s expelled from Eden to a new domain: earth and the underworld. Later in the oracle, Ezekiel tells us that this being had a pride problem similar to the prince of Tyre’s: “Your heart became proud on account of your beauty, and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor” (28:17). You were on the holy mount of God you walked among the fiery stones” (28:12–14). You were in Eden, the garden of God you were anointed as a guardian cherub, for so I ordained you. “You were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. In fact, the prophet says a few things that point all the way back to the Garden of Eden: God plans to bring this prince down a notch.īut while Ezekiel preaches against this ruler, he seems to make several allusions to a similar story on a cosmic scale. In the Old Testament, the prophet Ezekiel takes up an oracle against the human ruler of Tyre, an arrogant person smug enough to claim to be a god himself (28:2). Clue: Ezekiel’s oracle against the prince of Tyre But in the passages that do seem to touch on the devil’s fall from grace, pride is a predominant theme. The Bible doesn’t give us a great deal of specifics when it comes to Satan’s rebellion against God. The apostle warns Timothy that any elder “must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil” (1 Timothy 3:6). And yet, as the apostle Paul lays out the qualities he expects of church leaders, he makes specific mention of the devil. Perhaps the last place you’d look to find information about Satan is in a list of pastoral qualities. Heiser says, “The dark figure of Genesis 3 was eventually thought of as the ‘mother of all adversaries,’ and so the label satan got stuck to him. Over the centuries between Malachi and Jesus, Jewish writers began to use this label as a name for the biggest adversary of them all: a divine being who rebelled against God in the Garden of Eden by tempting Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. So how did the devil get the name “Satan”? In each of these episodes, the Hebrew Bible calls these figures satan, because they are acting as adversaries.
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