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What we know about angelic beings
With the evidence available to us, this book assumes Satan has all the powers and limitations of other angelic beings we encounter throughout the biblical narrative. One significant benefit is that we can better see what he can accomplish. But, just as importantly, we can also assess many assumptions we’ve already discussed to see if Satan can carry out the godlike role we’ve cast him in. So what do we know about the nature, powers, and limitations of Satan and creatures like him?
Volitional will and independent thought
We tend to hold a mixed view of angelic beings and their free will. On one hand, we see Satan clearly choose to rebel against God. Likewise, Revelation 12:9 tells us that Satan isn’t the only angelic being capable of rebellion:
And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. (Revelation 12:9)
On the other hand, we may also think that every other angelic being is robotically programmed to always obey, being utterly incapable of free will or independent thought. This may even make us question how a mindless drone like Satan could rebel. After all, if angels can only follow their programming, does that mean God intentionally created Satan with a flaw to make him disobey?
Before we accuse God, let’s first correct our base assumptions about obedient angelic beings by seeing how the Bible portrays them in 1 Kings 22.
To set the stage, 1 Kings 22 begins with an exchange where the wicked Ahab (king of northern Israel) wants Jehoshaphat (king of Judah) to join him in conquering a city. Jehoshaphat agrees on the condition that he hears God’s prophets confirm that God will grant them victory. Ahab gathers 400 prophets who all claim that God will deliver the city to them. Jehoshaphat, apparently doubting the trustworthiness of these false prophets, asks if there are any other prophets. Ahab confirms that there’s this guy named Micaiah, but the king hates him because the prophet never gives him prophecies he likes.
Micaiah comes, and after some discussion, this true prophet reveals what God showed him about why the 400 prophets falsely proclaimed victory:
And Micaiah said, “Therefore hear the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left; and the LORD said, ‘Who will entice Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?’ (1 Kings 22:19-20a)
Here, we see God holding council in Heaven. Though God doesn’t need angelic beings to accomplish His will, He still invites them into His work in the same way He invites humans to serve on the earth. But note that the Lord doesn’t issue commands for these angelic beings to obey – He states His plan (Ahab’s death at Ramoth-gilead) and asks for a volunteer. Thus, we see that angelic beings have the free will to accept God’s offer to fulfill a task. But as the scene continues, we see that they’re also capable of independent thought:
And one said one thing, and another said another. Then a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD, saying, ‘I will entice him.’ And the LORD said to him, ‘By what means?’ And he said, ‘I will go out, and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ And he said, ‘You are to entice him, and you shall succeed; go out and do so.’ Now therefore behold, the LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the LORD has declared disaster for you.” (1 Kings 22:20b-23)
While God had an end goal, He invited a group of angelic beings to offer ways to make it succeed; He asked them to exercise independent thought. Note that this doesn’t remove God’s sovereignty, because it’s only after one suggests working through Ahab’s false prophets that God declares that this will be how they accomplish His end goal. God sends this angelic being out with His approval and confirmation that the plan will ultimately fulfill God’s purpose.
This scene holds implications that we may not have considered until now. But for the sake of this discussion, let it serve to reveal that creatures like Satan aren’t just automatons who simply carry out their programming. Instead, they are rational, thinking, intelligent, imperfect creatures who make choices and create ideas that may or may not succeed.
Finally, having a will means that actions have a purpose. Satan is neither a mindless beast nor a malfunctioning robot, but an intelligent being who has made millions of decisions since the moment of his creation. Like all intelligent beings with a will of their own, his actions are always in service toward a short or long-term goal. Even today, he’s still making decisions that reflect his will. The question, which we’ll explore in future chapters, is this: What goal motivates Satan’s actions?
Spatial beings
One of the greatest powers we attribute to Satan is his ability to tempt all people, or at least all Christians, at the same time. Whether he’s whispering lies, implanting thoughts, or making our car not start on Sunday morning, the things we say he does would require him to simultaneously be in hundreds of thousands of places.
However, the Bible consistently portrays angelic beings, and even Satan himself, as spatial – only able to occupy a single space at a time. Note the beginning and ending of his interactions with Jesus:
And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” (Matthew 4:3, emphasis mine)
Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him. (Matthew 4:11, emphasis mine)
Here, we see that Satan (and the angels who later attended Jesus) went from a point of being not there to being there. In other words, they occupied a measurable space as they interacted with the physical world. By being in the physical presence of Jesus, they couldn’t be present anywhere else.
However, we also see that Satan and beings like him are “spatial” in the spiritual realm as well:
Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon and his angels fought back, but he was defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. (Revelation 12:7-9, emphasis mine)
Though the spiritual realm is largely a mystery to us, every glimpse we see in the Bible shows it operating somewhat similar to the physical universe. There are specific locations (Hell, the throne room of God, etc.) with beings in it who occupy a certain volume of space (refer to the passages we looked at in “What is Satan?” for examples of angelic beings occupying a certain amount of space in relation to their surroundings). In the Revelation passage above, Satan and his followers go from a point of occupying a place (Heaven) to being displaced into a new location (the earth). When in Heaven, they aren’t on the earth, and vice versa.
Like us, angelic beings are only shown occupying a single space at a time and affecting things in their immediate vicinity.
This realization was critical for aligning my own view of Satan with what God reveals about him or beings like him. If he can only be in one place at a time, this ancient foe must be very strategic with where he puts his efforts. If Satan is tempting me, that means he’s not tempting millions of others. Practically speaking, we must question whether we’re so important that he’d give up his presence anywhere else in the physical or spiritual realm just to harass us.
Must travel and cannot teleport
If we grant that Satan can only be in a single place at any given moment, we may rationalize our view of him by thinking he can instantly appear anywhere he wants. His nature doesn’t allow him to tempt hundreds of thousands of people at the exact same moment, but what if he teleports quickly between people, dropping sinful thoughts as he goes? Fortunately, Daniel 10 shows an interaction between Daniel and an angel that hints at how angelic beings get from point A to point B.
For context, God had just given Daniel a troubling vision of Israel involved in a great conflict. He responded by spending three weeks fasting, and it’s implied that he used this fast to seek God or understand His purpose in the vision. We don’t get insight into Daniel’s mental or emotional state during this, but it’s clear that God’s apparent silence is abnormal. Then, an angelic being appears to Daniel to not only explain the vision but also share why he took so long to arrive:
Then he said to me, “Fear not, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart to understand and humbled yourself before your God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words. The prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days, but Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, for I was left there with the kings of Persia, and came to make you understand what is to happen to your people in the latter days. For the vision is for days yet to come.” (Daniel 10:12-14, emphasis mine)
While the purpose of this passage isn’t to explain angelic travel, we nevertheless gain insight through this messenger’s comments. We can conclude that this angelic being started in one location (likely God’s throne room) and had to travel a measurable distance that put him in Persian territory. The spiritual ruler of Persia stopped his movements for three weeks until the archangel Michael arrived to help. He then says that he will travel back to the fight because the spiritual ruler of Greece is on his way.
This rare glimpse into how these beings travel clarifies that they can’t simply arrive somewhere. Instead, as spatial beings, they must move their form from one place to the next. Combined with what we now understand about Satan’s limitation to a single location at a time, we must continue to question if the traditional view of him is biblically consistent with what angelic beings can actually do.
Knowledge is limited to what they know in the present
The scene in 1 Kings 22 also shows us the limits of their knowledge. Note how, when exercising their free will to devise ideas for making Ahab fall, the angelic beings seemed to come up with several ideas that wouldn’t have worked. We don’t know the other ideas or why God rejected them. However, it’s clear that they weren’t working with perfect knowledge of the future or whether their proposed plans would succeed. Like humans trying to solve a problem, God’s council brainstormed good and bad ideas until one angelic being struck gold.
Other biblical authors likewise reveal that angelic beings have limited knowledge:
It was revealed to them [the Old Testament prophets] that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look. (1 Peter 1:12)
Though Peter only mentions angels in passing, it’s evident that they are so limited in their knowledge and understanding that even certain aspects of God’s plan of salvation were a mystery to them.
None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. (1 Corinthians 2:8)
Here, Paul discusses God’s plan of salvation through Jesus Christ. It’s tempting to think Paul’s reference to “rulers” is Pontius Pilate, the human ruler who sentenced Jesus to crucifixion. However, as we’ll discuss in chapter XX, it’s biblically consistent to understand these as the anglic rulers over the nations, and likely even Satan himself. If so, this even more clearly demonstrates that angelic beings make plans and try to carry them out, but they have no confidence that things will work out as they intend.
This limited knowledge debunks the commonly held belief that Satan knows exactly what will happen if he tempts us in a certain way. No human or angelic being is either all-knowing or capable of seeing the future. We don’t want to dismiss the fact that angelic beings have had thousands of years to learn and thus can plan far better than most of us. Yet, at the end of the day, they aren’t so different from humans in their ability to think, choose, and make decisions with consequences they may have never imagined.
