This blog is written in response to a conversation about Satan and the angels
To begin with, you cannot use the New Testament in answering anything in the Hebrew Scriptures no more than you can use the Koran to answer anything in the New Testament. The NT was designed and put together by the Catholic Church; they chose the books and guided the translations. They openly twisted and changed the Hebrew Scriptures and made it their Old Testament – it was the Catholic Church that coined the terms Old & New Testament. All of this is proven fact.
Now that being said:
When God created the angels and Satan is an angel which in Hebrew is the word, malach, which means, messenger; they are messengers. The sages of Israel in their 1000s of years of study of the Torah and interaction with the messengers of God has passed down to us information about them.
The angels do not have a free will choice as given to man; angels are no more than tools in the hand of God. They are like a 9/16 wrench which is made to do a specific job, to be used on 9/16 nuts and bolts. The same is with angels, they can only move around within the realm of their duties and that is all. As pointed out by the sages that when certain angels complete their task they cease to be.
Over and over in the Tanach [the Hebrew Scriptures] when we see God sending angels to do a job it is done as per His instruction. The same is with Satan, when he was used in Job’s case we see God giving specific orders and Satan obeyed to a tee, no more and no less – if he was the devil as in Christian myth, he would have told God to stick it and he would have done his own agenda but this is not what happened.
Satan is a malach, he was created to be an advisory to man, to test man’s free will. Without Satan man would have no free will to make a choice from.
In 2 places God tells us that He created Good & Evil. Yes, dear Christian God created evil, again without it we would have no free will
Deut. 30:15 See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil,
Is. 45:7 I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I am HaShem, that doeth all these things.
The passages used about Satan in Is. 14 by Christians are taken out of context. As shown earlier that if you begin at the beginning of the discourse you will see that it is part of the parable of the king of Babylon. Eze. 28 answers itself as well that it is about the king of Tyre. Bringing Satan into these two passages are purely a Christian invention and have never been about Satan.
Now to the formation of man; this info you will not find in your English Christian bible.
When God made man, He formed him. This is important because the word in Hebrew, ‘form’ is the word, yetzer. It is spelled, yod tzadi resh – When God formed man the word, yetzer was spelled with 2 yod instead of one. It has been passed down since Moshe through the sages that 2 yod used in the forming of man are the 2 inclinations; the good & evil inclinations or in Hebrew they are known as, yetzer tov (good) & yetzer hara (evil). So in man God created the ability to do good or evil, it is our free will choice.
In Judaism Satan also known as the Yetzer hara is sent to test us. He is a teacher of sorts. The best way to understand it is to put it into an analogy – he is your weight lifting instructor, when the time comes he adds more weight to the bar bell, not to cause you to buckle under its weight but to build strength. He comes along with temptations testing your free will to see where it will take you, if you choose, evil then you reap evil, if you choose, good, you reap good. But without him testing you all the time you would not grow nor would your pure motives be discovered.
It is taught by the sages that once the final testing of man is finished and Satan’s job is complete, he will cease to be.
If you will step back and examine Christianity’s teachings on the devil you will see that it come because of the mixture of Greek/Roman mythologies that were mixed in with the Catholic Church which is a grab bag of pagan religious beliefs. They took the Hebrew Scriptures and with Greek/Roman minds added their thoughts and beliefs, perverting the Hebrew Scriptures.
To know what is really taught in the Hebrew Scriptures you have to go to the ones who have been the ones in which it was given and that is to the Jew. Today the Orthodox Jews are the decedents of those who are the caretakers of God’s original word. They have studied and lived it since the time of Moshe.
You cannot take just the written Torah and keep it nor understand it without the Oral Torah also given by God. This is proven clearly throughout the Torah. God had Moshe write down His words like headlines in a paper but Orally He explained it in detail and it has been passed down to this day. Without the Oral you will make wrong interpretations and assumptions. One example, “You shall observe the Sabbath and keep it holy.” How does one observe or keep holy the Sabbath? Does everyone make up their own ideas on what it means to observe and keep holy? No, the details were given in the Oral Torah.
God from the beginning created counterparts, things in twos – this is understood by the first letter of Torah the, Bet. It has the numerical value of 2, “In the beginning of God’s creating…” the creation is full of 2s
Day-night
Man-woman
Good-evil
Light-darkness
Land-seas
Peace-chaos
Written-oral
Israel – the nations (2 groups of people)
Pick any one and the other cannot be understood without its counterpart.
Satan did not rebel against God; this is again Greek/Roman mythologies mixed in.
The major problem of Christianity’s view of Satan is that it, deitizes him. It makes him into god, they blame everything that is bad on the devil, and they give him more power than God did.
For Christians that really want to know the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, you are going to have to separate yourselves from your Greek/Roman influences that was bred into your religion by the Catholic Church. You will have to do what Abram did and that is to leave the land of your father and go to another.
The opening words of the Torah parshah about Abram is, Lech Lecha – which means, “go for yourself” – God told Abram to go for himself from his relatives and from his father’s house and land.
It can only be you to decide if you will keep believing the lies handed down to you by the fathers of your religion or you can get up and go for yourself before it is too late.
Jerm. 16:19
O HaShem, my strength, and my stronghold, and my refuge, in the day of affliction, unto You shall the nations come from the ends of the earth, and shall say: ‘Our fathers have inherited nothing but lies, vanity and things wherein there is no profit.’
This is not about Israel or the Jews – this is to us the non-Jewish people, the nations of the world.
Terry W. Hayes
Emuna Trek 