Sin, the breaking of God’s law, is a horrid, hateful thing. It results in grief, pain, misery, and finally in everlasting death. The question is, why then would anybody choose it? There is more than one true answer to this question. The answer as to why millions of angels chose it, and why Eve chose it, helps to explain many, otherwise unanswerable, questions, such as “Why did God allow this to happen?”
For thousands of years, philosophers have been asking this question: “If God is all powerful, and if He is the author and essence of love, and if, as the Bible says, He takes no pleasure in the death or pain of His creatures, then how can the degradation and suffering and pain around us be taking place?
It is of the utmost importance that an adequate answer to this question be given. It was the lack of an adequate answer to this question that resulted in a multitude of Jews becoming atheist after World War II. They could not correlate the holocaust, the genocide of six million Jews, with their ideas of God. It was, in part, because of an inadequate answer to the problem of suffering that the theories of evolution and atheistic communism were developed. These theories resulted in the deaths of over 100 million people in the last century. The lack of an adequate answer to this question has resulted in millions of people losing all confidence in the Bible and in the Christian religion.
It is significant that the theme of the first chapter in the Conflict of the Ages series of books is about this question. Again, this question is addressed in the first chapter of the Desire of Ages, as well as in the chapter called, “It is Finished,” and in the Great Controversy, the chapter on “The Origin of Evil,” and also in the final chapter of that book.
In fact, an underlying theme of the Conflict of the Ages series is to answer this basic question in a way that finite, fallen beings can understand. Of course, a complete answer to this question will not be understood, even by the saved at the end of the millennium. But enough can be understood now so that each descendant of Adam and Eve may understand enough of the basic issues involved so that intelligent decisions may be made.
Three of the most basic issues are:
- The character of God
- How do you know what truth is?
- Freedom
In this editorial we will begin to deal with number 2.
At the beginning of the great controversy between Christ and Satan, how did Lucifer persuade millions of angels to join him in rebellion against the government of God? We know now what the fallen angels did not know then—that Lucifer gained their allegiance by telling them lies! Although God had called a meeting of all the angels before this development, and had told them the truth in advance so that they would be prepared for Lucifer’s sophistry, the lies seemed more attractive to them than the truth. Although loyal angels attempted to persuade them to cease their independent, disobedient, unsubmissive course, Lucifer’s lies were more attractive to these angels than the truth. They seemed more true than the truth that God had told them. Ellen White makes the startling admission in Patriarchs and Prophets that during that epoch of time, before this world was created, Lucifer had a temporary advantage over God Himself, because Lucifer could, and did, use flattery and deceit, whereas God could not use any weapons like this.
From the standpoint of power, Ellen White makes it clear that God could have destroyed these rebel angels as easily as one casts a pebble to the ground, but this would not have solved the problem. The lies that Lucifer used were so persuasive and appeared so rational and reasonable, and so intrinsically logical and true to the angels, that the only way for finite, created intelligences to absolutely know for sure who was telling the truth was to allow those who believed the lies of Lucifer to live according to those lies and see what the consequences would be.
From our vantage point we can see that the angels who believed the devil’s lies and joined him in rebelling against their Creator became his first victims. By believing a created being instead of the Creator, they not only became Satan’s first victims, but they will suffer his same final fate, although their punishment in hell fire will be far less than his. (See Matthew 25:41; Luke 12:47, 48; 2 Peter 2:4.)
The point is, the very same technique that caused millions of angels to deliberately choose to live in sin, is the identical technique that is causing the vast majority of earth’s inhabitants to deliberately live in sin and will result in their eternal destruction along with Satan and his angels. What is that technique? It is the palming off of lies as the truth. The devil has millions of lies which he palms off as truth. They sound true; they are logical to the human mind; they often sound, to the human mind, to be superior to the truth God has revealed, but if you give your allegience to them, you too will become another of Satan’s victims whose number is as the sand of the seas.