The origin of evil lies with Satan, his demons, Adam and Eve

Before matter came into being and before the creation of the earth and the creation of man, there must have been millions of years in which the universe consisted of God, God’s Son and the angels.

It is also well possible that for millions of years these heavenly creatures lived together in perfect harmony during a long period of time when things like evil and suffering did not exist yet.

The Bible places the origin of evil with an angel who rebelled against God and thus interrupted the peace and the harmony of the world of those days. This angel is called Satan in the Bible. The Bible says that this fallen angel, Satan, allowed wrong desires to develop in his mind. Desires which conflicted with God’s thoughts, God’s will and God’s position as the absolute sovereign of the universe. Instead of crushing this kind of desires right away Satan must have permitted them to occupy a lasting position in his mind and to let their influence on his thinking and feeling get stronger.

In the end there came a time when Satan turned his thoughts and desires, directed against God, into actions and really rebelled against JHWH. This happened in paradise when Satan persuaded Eve to disobey God’s commandment with regard to the eating of the apple of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

After this act of rebellion Satan has continuously tried to make both angels and people join him in his course of action directed against his creator.

It is important to pay close attention to the words which Satan used when he persuaded Eve to rebel against God. He seduced Eve by suggesting that by transgressing God’s command she could become independent of God. No longer subjected to Him. He also told Eve that he found it unacceptable that God wanted to reserve a certain amount of knowledge, insight, power and abilities for Himself. That JHWH refused to share these with anyone.

The fact is that the words with which Satan seduced Eve give us an insight into the nature of the wrong desires which Satan allowed himself to cherish. The essence of these wrong desires must have been the inability or unwillingness to accept a situation of being inferior to God. The inability or unwillingness to accept a situation in which God is superior to you in many things, knows more than you, can do things that you cannot do. And of course a situation in which God has power over you, can give you orders, can command you to do certain things and forbid you to do other things.

Satan was a successful in his attempt to get Eve to join him in his rebellion against his creator: Eve became the first human sinner. She yielded to the possibility that Satan said he could offer her to gain for herself more freedom and more knowledge. Within this context it is good for people to realize that when Satan asserted that Eve would get a better life if she would disobey God’s command he launched a direct attack on God’s goodness and God’s integrity. He said that God withheld something from Eve that would improve the quality of her life. He told her that God was a liar: God had indeed told her that the result of the eating of the apple would be death. But according to Satan this was a lie: if Eve would eat of the apple, she would not die but get a better sort of life. Satan told Eve that God had purposefully given a wrong representation of the matter.

These words, which Satan used towards Eve, prove the reality of the image that the Bible continuously presents us of Satan, as completely alienated from God, a liar and a murderer (Satan knew that after her eating of the apple, God would sentence her to death).

As we have seen before: Satan was successful: he managed to fill Eve’s mind with the desire to be no longer inferior to God and to stop accepting a situation in which He knew things that she did not know and could do things that she could not do.

The Bible says that Eve was thoroughly deceived by Satan. This means that Eve believed what Satan said and was persuaded by his lies.

According to the Bible Adam was not deceived. When he ate of the forbidden apple he knew that what God had said about this matter was true and that the words of Satan were lies. Completely aware of the results of his actions he decided to be loyal to his wife and not to his God.

After their act of rebellion Adam and Eve first tried to hide from God. When later on they could no longer avoid being confronted by their creator they did not ask forgiveness for their action. They were driven out of their paradise and had to keep themselves and their children alive on land filled with thorns and thistles, by literally working themselves into a sweat. When they had been expelled from paradise they also realized right away that they would ultimately have to die.

They were alienated from God and had lost their perfection. They began to make mistakes and were confronted with hardships, strokes of bad luck and suffering. From the very beginning these negative matters impaired all aspects of their bodies and their minds, including the body cells with which they passed on life to their children. In addition: imperfect Adam and Eve could not give their children a perfect upbringing.

As a result of this state of affairs, starting from Adam and Eve all people have passed on imperfection and sinfulness to every following generation. The Bible says that all people sin. And the Bible says, equally clearly, that the wages that sin pays is death.

Thus, since the days of Adam and Eve, sin and death have affected all humans. It is fair to say that human history had a tragic start. Up to the present day no more than two persons have been so fortunate as to be allowed to live in perfect happiness in a wonderful paradise. And that only for a very short period of time. These two persons have not left their offspring perfection and paradise-like happiness, but only things like sin, suffering and death.

It is true what the Bible says: through one human sin came into the world and together with sin came death and in this way death has spread over all humans because they have all sinned.

In general the sinfulness of humanity has greatly damaged the relationship between God and mankind. The sinfulness of people has also had a strong negative influence on their physical and mental capacities. The peace and harmony which were so characteristic of the human condition in paradise have been hard to find on our earth, since the time when our paradise got lost.

Within this context: look at the attitude which Adam and Eve adopted towards God when shortly after their rebellion JHWH called them to account for their action: see in this attitude their sense of guilt, their shame, their uncertainty and their fear. All of them negative and painful emotions witch are only too familiar for all of us, humans.

Adam bequeathed some really nasty things to his offspring: a tendency to sin, a being subjected to suffering, illness, old age and a being subjected to death.