17 Things Your Pastor Will Never Tell You

Chapter 5 Satan, a Good Boy Turned Bad Can you imagine an entire book from the Hebrew Scriptures—for example, the 50 chapters of Genesis—written without vowels, capital letters, spaces between words, or punctuation—to be read from right to left? How about the entire Old Testament? Deciphering ancient Hebrew is a job and a half. An English transliteration of the first line of the Old Testament would look like this: htrhtdnsnvhhtdtrcdggnnngbhtn It was up to priests, scribes, and translators to make sense of the string of letters by adding spaces, vowels, capitals, and punctuation, so it became: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”* *See Chapter 2 to remember the mistake translators made in this sentence. Unfortunately, the lack of capitalization in Hebrew words left English translators wide open to errors, and a costly one was made in capitalizing Satan. When Hebrew and Greek texts were translated into English, Satan should not have been capitalized. It wasn’t someone’s name. It was a job title, a role, like a lawyer or an attorney. Correctly translated, the Hebrew Scriptures should say a satan, lowercase—never Satan with a capital S. It makes a difference. A satan doesn’t have the appearance, wardrobe, and stigma attached to Satan with a capital S, who is evil in Western culture. In contrast, a satan with a lowercase s is not evil but a functionary in God’s court. Come, look at the Hebrew scriptures. It is a common mistake to think that the first appearance of Satan in the Bible is when a serpent tempted Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. However, according to the Hebrew text, there was only a serpent in the garden, not a satan: “Now the serpent was more subtil* than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made . . .”—Genesis 3:1a *KJV spelling We can tell it became a snake because God cursed it and said, “From now on, you're going to move on your belly.” And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life . . .”—Genesis 3:14 The author of the Revelation, thought to be John of Patmos, writing 70 years after Jesus’ death, said the snake in Genesis was Satan in disguise. “And the great dragon was cast out [of heaven], that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.”—Revelation 12:9 He’s welcome to his interpretation, but the Hebrew word in Genesis is serpent. The first occurrence of a satan in the Hebrew text is in Numbers 22:22. However, if we search Cruden’s concordance, satan will not show up. The reason is that the King James scholars translated שָׂטָן (satan) as the angel of the LORD. The 3-chapter story (in Numbers 22-24) goes like this: Moses had led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and formed an army in the Sinai desert, gearing up to enter Palestine, “The Promised Land.” He had defeated the Amorites, and his next obstacle was Moab by the Dead Sea. Balaak, the king of Moab, in fear of the approaching army, cast about for help. He knew of Balaam, a powerful prophet who lived on the Euphrates River, whose blessings and curses were always successful either way. So Balak sent a delegation to hire Balaam to come to Moab and put a curse on the Israelites. When Balaam refused their offer, the king pushed those delegates aside and sent a second group with more money. To the new delegates, Balaam the prophet said, “Let me sleep on it.” The next day, he told them the LORD had permitted him to go with them, but he hid the fact that the LORD had instructed him, “When you get there, do what I tell you to do, not what Balak tells you.” Balaam mounted his donkey and headed west. As they journeyed, in the road ahead, the donkey saw a figure holding a sword, drawn and ready for use. When the frightened donkey turned aside, Balaam beat him, forcing it back on the path. But the donkey could still see the figure and turned into a vineyard with a passage so narrow it scraped against a wall and crushed Balaam’s leg. Balaam beat his donkey a second time and ordered, “Get up, and do as I command.” But the path was still blocked, so the donkey plopped down on the ground. Balaam dismounted and beat him yet again. Then, as if in a fairy tale, despite having no vocal cords, the donkey spoke. “Can’t you see the figure blocking our path?” Suddenly, the figure with his sword drawn appeared to Balaam, who said, “Oops! Sorry. If I'd known you were there, I wouldn't have come this way.” The figure told Balaam to go to Moab and say exactly what he was told to say—nothing more—and Balaam agreed. The interesting thing about this story is not only that a donkey spoke but also what he saw. The King James Version says the figure was an angel of the LORD, while in in the Hebrew (see Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance), it was a satan, an adversary on God’s staff, a member of God’s court—one of the good guys. . . . (continued) . .