Our Crazy Ancient New Religion 4

Satan cannot create anything; all he can do is pervert what God has said and done.

You don’t have to buy into what follows in terms of the details. It’s just my opinion, my way of addressing something that comes up often enough to make it worth a little writing. The main thing I want to do is shake you loose from a ton of lies about what Satan does on this earth.

I’m going to pick on Moses again. You might want to recall that he grew up as Pharaoh’s adopted son, with all the perquisites of such an upbringing — education, military training, etc. Apparently he was also permitted to know something about his Hebrew heritage, but not enough. For the second part of his education, he spent forty years with Jethro, whose background is murky, but obviously a part of the nomadic Ancient Near Eastern feudal culture. Jethro was some brand of Semite and knew God by another name.

But you should suppose that young Moses spent plenty of time watching Pharaoh’s court magicians do their thing. It was part of the education process. So when God told Moses to throw his staff on the ground and turned it into a snake, that was familiar to him. Except that Moses carried a ceremonial staff of the wandering Semite type, indicating something of his tribal identity and relative importance. It had Levite markings, etc. But it was just a stick. God made it into a very real snake and Moses knew enough to get back.

We have some interesting tidbits about Pharaoh’s magicians. It’s quite possible they carried snakes around as staves — catatonic snakes. Seems they had played with all kinds of interesting potions and had plenty of snakes around, and snakes were a particular symbol of power in that part of the world. And it was part of their schtick. They had this snake-looking staff and could lay it down and do something that would weaken the effects of the potion that made the snakes catatonic and they would start acting more like a snake.

Most Westerners have a culturally induced phobia about snakes. But you can bet God had a reason for them, and I don’t recall instances of Him employing humans as consultants on whether snakes were a good idea. So they belong as part of God’s Creation and we owe them respect as fellow creatures. And using potions to make snakes catatonic isn’t too good for them, I’m sure. In other words, the magicians were profaning God’s Creation for very ignoble reasons. I’m suggesting that through their messing about with demonic influences, they learned something that looked impressive and would deceive a lot of folks. It surely wasn’t something God taught them to do.

So when Moses comes and does his miracle, it looks about the same to Pharaoh and he could pretend it was no big deal. The magicians would know the difference and simply not comment in a way that would weaken their position. And so it went through the year or so Moses came and went in Pharaoh’s court. But at some point during the Ten Plagues, the magicians warned Pharaoh that they couldn’t fake it any more. Whatever Moses was doing was the real thing, not some demonic perversion.

I’m not going to tell you that all “black magic” is like that, because I don’t know. Nor would I deny that some folks do odd things with Creation that are hard to explain. I will tell you that I generally have no fear of such things because I know that my God alone can change reality, and no lesser authority can do more than fake it. There might be a real danger to my flesh, but no threat to my soul.

If my heart tells me I have to walk through that fire, I can’t be worried about the consequences, real or imagined.