We still need more lore. Some of what I’ve written before seems to warrant a review. Maybe if I say it again differently, it’ll catch on.
If you read any kind of epic fiction or watch movies, or maybe play certain kinds of video games, you’ll be presented with all kinds of scenarios where evil comes very near to gaining the upper hand. Maybe it wins for a time, even a long time, but somehow some hero or heroine arises to beat back the evil.
That scenario is one of the biggest lies Satan ever told.
It assumes the Persian Zoroastrian mythology of balance between good and evil. It’s as if the Devil is Jesus’ twin brother and the two are rather equal. It’s sheer nonsense. Nor should you imagine that good always conquers, because that image assumes that you and I are competent to judge what is good. We have to struggle to shed the false mythology of a world outside of God’s revelation.
God always rules.
Chew on that until you feel it burning in your soul. Then try to keep in mind that your image of God should be the one He has used for Himself since the beginning — an eastern potentate. He’s a tribal Lord, and He could be your Father if you accept His terms of adoption. It’s a covenant based on His divine will, a will that He has revealed so clearly. It’s revealed both in writing and in Creation itself. He’s jovial and compassionate, but you have to embrace His divine character to see that.
We live in a fallen state and there is no way we can do anything that matters here except mirror His glory. There is no world to save; it will be destroyed as we know it. There is no mankind to save; all will die and face eternity in a wholly different form. When we die here, it’s not over. It has just begun. In the meantime, this is our Father’s world and He has all the authority we need to face the future with joy and peace.
There is nothing out there in Creation that defies God. There can be no creatures He did not make, so whatever is out there in space makes no difference. The Devil is not in control; he is constrained by divine moral law. Whatever lives and moves on this earth cannot harm our eternal souls. The powers of Darkness are limited to deceiving us. The Creator’s hand restrains everything that we could imagine threatening us because The End will come at His behest. Until then, we have a job to do.
Please do yourself and your kingdom service a favor and ditch that crazy mythology. Nothing mankind can dream up will have much effect on the climate. No massive laboratory disease can wipe us out. Best of all, no human force on this planet could ever organize things to rule humanity all at once. They are evil cabals, but they are deceived about their own power. There can be no global government because humans aren’t competent to make it happen. God will always intervene directly to insure these things never come.
Satan serves God as a faithful servant. Lucifer is the divine punisher, the left hand of God’s wrath. He cannot defy Jesus; Satan was never anything but a mere angel. Satan is our enemy, but not God’s. And there has never been a Lilith sneaking around to seduce Adam away from Eve. There was nothing noble about either Adam or Eve in how they responded to the Temptation in the Garden. Don’t read that wild nonsense back into the Bible.
The only real battlefield is your own soul. You are at war with your fleshly nature; it is an ally of the Devil. It can be subjected and even trained; that’s the true nature of what we are. But it won’t surrender easily, and it will not surrender permanently until we die. Death is your friend; it is the final act of God’s love and mercy upon our fallen state. It is always in His hand alone, and when He’s ready, He calls us home to rest.
“It assumes the Persian Zoroastrian mythology of balance between good and evil.”
Wasn’t this Socratic, as well? Expressed different, of course. I’m too lazy to Google it now.
I don’t think we’d ever be able to get away from this, because from what I can see, the only alternative is a acquiescence to the supernatural, even if it’s not God. That’s too explicit for some folks because we’re mired in materialism. Balance is a big physical domain concept, since engineering systems out of balance don’t work. We misapply it to the metaphysical realm because we assume it works the same way, but there’s no need for balance because there’s no opposing force possible.
To toot my own horn, I try to not follow the typical route with my fiction writing, i.e., the “hero’s journey,” but leave things like the major plot arc kind of unresolved. Some other good writers, who aren’t believers at all, do this as well but they they don’t come along very often.
I’m sure Socrates was just as wrong as the Zoroastrians. 🙂
Relatedly, I had someone on a forum way long ago try to convince me Christianity was a mutt religion because it took the good vs evil thing from Zoroastrianism. Even then I knew evil wasn’t like an equal force to good (there were some Western theologian types who say this), but I couldn’t find the right words to explain well that “God owns all”.
Well, Zoroastrianism was late to the game. It was a mutt religion itself; the notion of evil and darkness goes back too far in ANE literature to even know where it could originate.