There are certain things about God’s revelation to man that seem incomplete, like a full explanation of the ultimate destiny of Lucifer and why so many animals live cruel and predatory lives. An animal is an animal, of course, and animals are incapable of living according to a moral code. But Lucifer is capable of a moral life. Why is there no possible way for Lucifer to throw himself on God’s mercy and seek forgiveness? I think the Church gives partial answers to these questions, but does not go into depth on either one.
Catholic theology teaches that Lucifer is so adamant in his rebellion against God that he will never repent. If he refuses to repent, of course, there is no possibility of forgiveness for him. The same is true for every angel and man who has chosen against God. Claiming that each of them will never repent seems like a good answer, but it leaves God in the position of refusing to forgive. Can it be true that God will never forgive a demon his sin? For some people like me, we need further depth from the Church explaining God’s revelation.
Natural Evil
Through the years I have worked out in my mind a logical explanation as to why there is so much natural evil in animal conduct and in the mechanics of the universe with random collisions of heavenly bodies and explosions of stars. Just viewing photos of planets studded with craters show that collisions are very frequent.
Let’s start at the very beginning before God created anything and visualize what God has done in creating the universe. First of all, God has always existed, and there was no conflict within Him. He revealed that He is love itself and that He is three Persons in one God. Those three Persons love themselves and love each other. The Word and the Holy Spirit always do the Father’s will. It was like that for all eternity. There was nothing but love and harmony before God created anything.
The Creation of Angels
At some point, God decided to create the entire world as we know it. Creation includes everything in the universe, living plants and animals, human beings and the purely spiritual beings we know as angels. God blessed angels and humans with sovereign free natures. They have free will. Nobody should compel them against their will to do anything. God certainly won’t, but they are also blessed with intelligence. With their intelligence, they should understand that since God created them, He has a right to expect their love and obedience in return.
The angels were tested first to see if they were willing to love and serve the God who created them, which was exactly what common sense would require them to do. I don’t know if God gave them any privileged information about Himself at the very beginning, but He did test their sovereign natures to see if they would be freely willing to love and serve the God who created them, or if they would misuse their sovereign natures to presume they are equal to God and refuse obedience.
The Rebellion of Angels
Sadly, Lucifer chose to refuse. This was the first occurrence of anything contrary to God’s will. Since God is good, anything contrary to God is evil. Lucifer’s rebellion was the first occurrence of evil in God’s creation. It cost God quite a deal to create sovereign persons with free will and realize some of them will choose against Him, but God has a plan for all He did. If a sovereign person, of his own free will, decides to comply with God’s will, he has a dignity unavailable to someone not blessed with free will. Because Lucifer, of his own free will, chose to defy God, he offended his Creator very much, and his defiance of God’s will ultimately bring chaos to God’s creation.
Refusal to comply with God’s will is evil. Lucifer is the source of all evil. His bad example lead others, such as one-third of the angels (Revelation 12:4), into defiance also. As a consequence of their rebellion, Lucifer and the angels who defied God were transformed into devils. Lucifer, the kingpin of those who defy, became the Devil, Satan. Instead of being the “light bearer” as his name implies, he became the Prince of Darkness.
The angels’ rebellion is apparent to anyone who perceives them, whereas angels who remained loyal to God are perceived as righteous and beautiful. There were no human beings around at this time, but when Lucifer brought his rebellion to them in time, their descendants would eventually recognize his repulsiveness, as Satan slowly plays out his rebellion through human beings.
Satan’s boast was “I will be like God!” A lesser gifted archangel, Michael, gave a response. His was the question, “Who is like unto God?” Michael is named for this thought and rebuke of Satan: “Mikha’el?”—”Who is like unto God?” The angels rallied around these two opposing thoughts, and their test was complete. A third of the angels chose to side with Satan. They wanted to be like God also. Those who insisted that no one is like God retained God’s grace because they freely accepted His will.
The disobedience of Satan is the first appearance of evil in the entire world. Anything compatible with God’s will is good because God is good. Anything incompatible with God’s will is evil because it frustrates God’s will in governing his creation. Scripture alludes to these events (Exodus 29:12–19, Isaiah 14:9–29, Matthew 25:11, Hebrews 1:1–6) but does not fully clarify them.
Michael and the good angels then forced Satan and the rebellious angels out of heaven. No longer permitted access to the angelic heaven, these fallen angels were exiled to earth (or maybe, more correctly stated, to the physical universe).
The Creation of Man
The world was compromised because of the rebellion of Satan and the angels who joined his rebellion. The predatory nature of animals, the presence of debilitating disease, the violent nature of the physical universe were results of the rebellion. The physical force of entropy alone (the progressive unavailability of thermal energy for conversion into work) means that heavenly bodies will slowly lose energy until they become inert or blow up in the process. Entropy would make an everlasting universe impossible.
I surmise that these shortcomings were installed into the universe by God to show what happens when angels and men choose what they want in spite of what God wants. If anyone wants something God did not give him, the only way he can obtain it is to take from others what God has given to others. This leads to chaos in the universe. When God later created the first man, Adam, God put him in the Garden of Eden to work the garden and take care of it.
The Garden of Eden had been created special by God. It was like the whole earth would have been if Satan and his brood had not rebelled against God. God was very good to the first humans. The Garden of Eden was a special place where nothing compromised the elegance God wanted the whole world to display. Satan straight away tempted Eve, and she offered the fruit to her husband. Both of them, and all their progeny, entered into Satan’s rebellion, and that elegance was lost.
If Adam and Eve Had Refused to Sin
I speculate that had Adam and Eve defeated Satan in his attempt to seduce them, the whole world would have been restored to the pristine paradise God wanted in the first place. Adam and Eve and their progeny would have dwelt in that earthly paradise for all eternity, and Satan would have been consigned to everlasting hell. But now, since Satan misled them and they succumbed, God has punished Adam and Eve and all their offspring with eventual death, a tough life trying to maintain their health, and a difficult struggle with temptation by Satan and his brood of devils.
But God promised them a redeemer, someone who would remedy all human offenses against God and win for all humans redemption. They will be forgiven and restored to the original pristine human nature God meant all humans to possess.
The Theory of Evolution is Destroying the Credibility of Genesis
According to some, Genesis has been thoroughly refuted by Darwinian Evolution, which has convinced the unbelieving world that God did not create the world or human beings. Actually, in its worse aspect, it claims that God does not even exist. Humans merely evolved from apes with no God, not even any kind of intelligent agent guiding that evolution. If anyone refuses to place his faith in Genesis as being inspired by God, that person will never understand any Scripture and will spend his whole life in darkness until he dies. Then God will let him perceive that God really does exist.
Contrary to what the world presumes, God does not want His faithful servants to reject His word simply because they cannot easily perceive their truth. The main reason Satan offended God is that Satan did not believe God’s word was reliable. Satan relied on his own intellect to grasp only what seemed logical to him. He put his own person ahead of God.
That was his primary sin: pride. God wants all humans to accept the veracity of His word, His revelation. After all, God is God, and His word is good. Through His Church He makes accepting the veracity of His word easy for us who are not smart enough to recognize the veracity of His word on our own. We can be easily confused by Satan without divine revelation.
What God wants is for us humans to rely on the proclamation of the Gospel by His Church, which is inspired by the Holy Spirit to correctly explain His Gospel to every generation in their own language. It is the Church’s responsibility to make sure they proclaim what Christ preached. If the world does not accept that, the world will be swamped by error and darkness. That’s where the world is today, thanks to the evil one.
The End Game: Salvation
Lucifer, being so highly gifted by God, knew full well what his rebellion would mean to God, He aspired to be equal to God and led astray one-third of the angels, who were also highly gifted by God. This was a catastrophic mistake on their part. There is no room in God’s creation for a rival God. They must live out the consequences of their rebellion in an everlasting hell so that they do not diminish the perfection of God’s heavenly kingdom.
Humans are far less gifted than angels, and as a consequence of Adam and Eve’s sin, were created already afflicted by original sin. Humans are given an opportunity to aspire for perfection and to be blessed with help from Jesus and His Church. Each human being can and must strive for inclusion into God’s heavenly kingdom – and that includes each of us.
14 thoughts on “Before God Created Anything”
The NT tells us the whole of creation came under a curse due to Adam’s sin but in the millenium animals will not eat animals or humans.
Noah was a vegetarian until after the flood where he was told to eat meat.
The immediate creation of angels destroys the theistic evolutionism Teilhard de Chardin promulgated.
The long time scale is upended by the radio metric dating
which found the Matterhorn (if I remember correctly) from
Henry Morris’s book to be millions of years older than
the rocks it lies on. The evolutionists suggest strong winds
blew it along from miles away ??
The orthodox rabbis maintain the earth is 5700 yrs old or thereabouts if I remember correctly.
Usher used the Bible record of descendents to date the flood
about 4000 + years ago so this would tie in with the rabbis.
C14 dating has been widely out in lots of instances but it can only go up to 5000 years accurately.
Radio active decay is like trying to find how long a candle has been burning without knowing the original length.
But all these things are explained very well in Henry’s Genesis Flood – cheers charles
1. The angels beheld God face to face and were not constrained by the limits of space and time as we material beings are. They’re in the eternal “now”. Thus their decision for or against God is a one off decision.
2. Satan’s ultimate destiny, and his abode ever since his rejection of God, is hell. He and the other demons infest this material world from hell.
3. Animals killing other animals is not evil. A lion killing a zebra is bad news for the zebra, but good news for the lion and his cubs.
4. Even more puzzling is your idea that rocks colliding with uninhabited planets and moons is evil. Why? And by the way it’s not that “frequent”, those impact craters on the moon are the result of collisions over billions of years.
5. “The theory of evolution” is not at all incompatible with Genesis. Certainly it had no effect at all on Darwin’s own Christian faith. And evolution was first proposed by Catholic scientists centuries earlier. All Darwin did was propose a mechanism which is the most accepted one. And indeed it was Niels Stensen who had first proposed that the hitherto mysterious fossils found in rocks are the result of animals which died millions of years ago, and that layers of rock strata are the result of successive deposits after the layer below has solidified. After that, the father of modern geology and paleontology became a Catholic. He is now Blessed Nicholas Steno.
Hello Peter K.
Thank You for reading my article, and I thank you for the helpful comments.
You brought up a few points worthy of consideration.
Point three: Animals killing one another is not evil. I think it is a different kind of evil, but it is still evil. People who argue against the existence of God cite this as an example of the cruel nature of God. An animal that kills and eats other animals, sometimes eating them alive, is displaying incredible cruelty in doing that. I remember a movie that had a young actor react to seeing a flock of seagulls eating baby turtles on their way to the safety of the ocean. I remember another documentary of animals showing storks perched in trees above the nests of baby birds and simply picking baby birds out of their nests at random and eating them alive.
In my youth I wondered why the good God would create animals so brutal. I think I found out in my mature years. God is disciplining the devils. If they cannot create out of nothing like God does, then the only way they can acquire what they want is to take from others what God had given them.
God created lions and tigers, wolves and other predatory animals whose instincts let them recognize other animals as food. There is scripture in the Bible that suggests that this is not the way things will be in eternity. Is 11: 7 “The cub and calf will lie down together. The lion will eat grass like a cow: Is 65: 25 “The wolf and the lamb will feed together. The lion will eat hay like a cow.” In our wicked world already compromised by evil, there are many large and powerful animals doing well as vegetarians. Why will God not do that in eternity?
Point four: A universe composed of heavenly bodies that collide with each other and that sometimes explodes into supernova does not seem stable enough to last for eternity. How frequent are collisions on observable planets and moons? The entire surface of moons are covered with craters that overlap each other. Only on planets that have atmospheres are craters not visible because they get eroded away by the atmosphere.
Point six: I have always held that Darwin’s theory is not compatible with Genesis. Many of my articles on Catholic Stand are critical of evolution. My basic problem with evolution is that scientists think there are only two kingdoms of living creatures on Earth: plants and animals. I contend there are four. Spiritual beings: angels and devils and God and a half physical-half spiritual being: man. Scientists, even though they got a concession from the Pope favorable to evolution, never speak of man other than as an evolved ape. The popes have defined man as being created special by God. The soul was breathed into the nostril of Adam specifically by God and Eve was not some other ape that God chose to be Adam’s wife, Eve was created special by God out of the same flesh Adam had.
I will look up Niels Stensen on The Internet. He sounds like an interesting person. I can learn from him if he is now Blessed Nichols Sterno. I will look him up now since I see he now has a different name.
Thanks for your interesting comments. They will help me home in my own speculation to cover items I had not previously thought about.
Sincerely,
Maurice A. Williams
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Maurice – the tops of the mountains have thousands of fossils even mt Everest and they are mostly fish fossils . After the flood the mountains went up and the valleys went down.
Also after the flood Noah waited until the waters were lowered.
Where did they go ? – under the plates . Much of the water came from the ‘floodgates of the deep’ not only from rain.
‘The earth was altogether in one place – Pangea ‘ – but
the earth – Pangea – was divided in the days of Peleg’.
That is Pangea split apart – into the parts of a jigsaw
as even the evolutionists agree albeit on their long time scale.
Henry Morris’s son took over his ministry and Whitcomb was
the theologian.
A fossil can really only form by drowning in sediment – then
it rots and is replaced by hardened sediment.
But many fossils are still flesh – not stone. This is zealously hidden by the atheist biologists ‘ withholding the truth in unrighteousness’
No flesh bone or blood could last 70 million years.
Possibly the various flood legends arose from ancestral memories of the melting of the ice at the close of the last ice age (11,000 years ago).
Hello Charles Allan
You made a good point that the tops of mountains have thousands of fish fossils on them. Scientist have placed some events so far back in the distant past that sometimes we overlook them as clues in interpreting events in biblical history. I’m curious about what really happened during the flood, but I did not spend my whole life researching it like I did my interpretation of the Book of Revelations.
But I did come across a very interesting book that had a lot to say about the flood. It is “The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Fire, Flood and Flames in the History of Civilization.” by Richard Firestone. ISBN: 978-1592430612. The author lists about 20 accounts of a large floods affecting tribes and cities all over the world including tribes of American Indians.
You might find that book interesting. I was fascinated by it.
Sincerely,
Maurice A. Williams
Trying to apply magical religious reasons to the reality which we inhabit in the 21st century is the symptom of a delusional and indoctrinated mind.The church depends upon the ability to brainwash children from one generation to the next,without this brainwashing Christianity would be dead within 100 years.Not a single word of the Bible is true,non of the stories ever happened. The Bronze Age world was as unmagical as the world is today.All religions depend upon the belief that magical thinking effects reality,it does not and never did.All Christians are liars who worship a lie.
It was the Morris and Whitcomb book ” The Genesis Flood ”
that gave me rock solid belief in the Word – Henry was a civil engineer who proved that there was a worldwide flood and his expertise destroys the ridiculous theory of evolution and its required fantasy timescale.
That a God could drown all air breathing creatures except Noah and family for wickedness gave me a wake up call.
Just at the time when there is more evidence of the creator God than ever more and more people are duped by the Darwinian fantasy of one species changing into another
like sheep deer bear evolving into eg whales without a shred
of evidence,
The catholic Maximilian Kolbe society website is excellent
on upholding Genesis truth. Darwinism is a form of Arianism
and Teilhard de Chardin duped so many catholics .
Hello Charles Allan,
Thank you for reading my article and thank you for your comment. The flood is a difficult subject. I believe the flood really happened. Cultures all over the world have reported a flood, but the dept of water higher than mountains calls for way too much water. I can get “The Genesis Flood” from Amazon. Thanks for mentioning the source book.
Sincerely,
Maurice A. Williams
An animal is an animal, … and animals are incapable of living according to a moral code.
Genesis 9: 5 Surely I will require an account of your life’s blood; from every beast I will require it … A possible explanation is that if an animal eats something it is forbidden or
unnatural ie: a lion killing and eating a person, they will be held accountable.
Hello Ordinary papist.
Thank you for reading my article and thanks for the comment. Good insight! I think it is more likely that an animal must obey its instincts. They don’t have a choice because they do not have free will.
Sincerely,
Maurice A. Williams
Interesting post, but I would encourage you to look into the angels being born or created into the full beatific vision of God, because that research is what helped me put this issue to rest many years ago. I honestly don’t remember the exact sources, but I do remember that they were a speculation from one or more of the early church fathers and/or saints.
To put it simply, since all of the angels originally existed amongst the full beatific vision of God, could plainly see His face and continually experience Him in all His glory and goodness, that was more than sufficient for the testing of their allegiance with their free will. They had full knowledge and understanding, with no requirement or need to procreate (since they were all created together, so the allegiance or fall of one or two, unlike Adam and Eve, would not effect the entire species (for lack of a better word). That is why we as humans were given the opportunity for repentance and reconciliation when the fallen angels are not. I hope that helps.
In Christ,
Andrew
Hello Andrew,
Thank you for reading my article and thanks for the comment. Of course, they were created into the full beatific vision f God. I agree with you that is one of the reasons why the fallen angels are not forgiven. Another reason is that an angel, unlike humans, has an intellect so sharp that once they make a decision they have already considered all possibilities and they are not likely to change their minds.
Sincerely,
Maurice A. Williams