The UNCOMFORTABLE Truth About Lucifer

A radiant angel, the most beautiful of them all stands in heaven at the height of his glory, but pride creeps in. He refuses to serve, and so he raises an army, wages war on God himself, and loses. He's cast down hurled out of heaven like a burning star, and in the darkness below, he becomes the ruler of hell, the enemy of all mankind, literally, the devil. And his name, before the fall, was Lucifer. I'm sure you've seen the story, you've seen in paintings or movies on heavy metal album covers, maybe even in Sunday sermons, it might be the single most recognizable villain origin story in all of civilization, but there's just one problem. It's not really in the Bible. And that name itself, Lucifer. In a lot of Bibles, it's not even there. And where it is, it shows up exactly once, buried in a poem that flat out tells you it's not even talking about the devil. In fact, the thing that we all picture when we imagine the devil might not even be the devil at all. So how did four words in three different languages get stitched together in the Bible to create the most terrifying figure we can imagine? Well, today we're going to find out. We're going to track the devil from the beginning of the Hebrew Bible all the way through the New Testament and dive into the hidden centuries in between to discover who the tempter of humanity, the prince of darkness actually is. So sit back, relax, and welcome to Religion Camp. What's up, dude? Welcome back to Religion Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single Sunday weeks, more the most interesting fascinating and controversial stories from every religion from around the world from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do here. I try to figure out what every religion believes. And more importantly, what the people of those religions orient their lives around. That's why I do the show really is I'm fascinated by what people around the world are actively doing when they're connecting with the divine, right? Like there's all these people around the world. And for many of them, their relationship with God or the gods is the single most important thing in their life. And for me to not know anything about it feels like a real missed opportunity to try to expand my knowledge of the world. Secondly, I like to find all the things that the religions do that are the same. I try to find all the common threads that they're all doing and take all the good stuff and try to apply it to my life again. I'm not taking every single little thing. I'm not one of these like universalists like, oh, everyone's going to heaven. I mean, some of the people in this room probably aren't going to heaven. But I'm doing this because I want to find what are the actual practices that people are doing that I can try to apply. Oh, you pray a lot. I should be praying more, you know? Oh, you believe in this sort of mystical practice. Well, maybe that occurs in my relationship with God, things like that. And today we have a fascinating one. We're talking about Diablo. Yeah, the devil himself. But before we jump in, I want to say a few more things. One, I want to thank you. Yeah, I did. You or girl, whoever you are, I don't really care how you identify. I just want to say thanks for being here, all right? Because every time you click on an episode or comment like anything like that, you help my dreams come true. You help religion camp grow. You help keep the lights on the tent and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. I've been in the show. I mean, a little over a year, maybe even two years at this point. And I haven't had a wonderful time so far. And I'm so grateful for all the people that tune in to make the show possible every single Sunday. It's one of the lights of my life. Also, it's not possible to do the show without the Greek freak sitting next to me. The Orthodox legend Christos Pashtimbaim Belos. How are you? You said some of the people in this room? What? What? There's only two of us. What? I mean, statistically. Some. I might be talking about me. 50%. Also, I might be talking about room in the broadsense. We're in a building with 30 other people. We're in the room with all the listeners. Yeah. The guy watching at home. Maybe this is the episode that he listens to. And it's like, you know what? I should pray to God. Or girl listening. Or girl. I mean, they're already probably praying. I feel like girls are a bit more connected with the divine. They're tapped in. But who knows? All I'm saying is someone's got to go to hell. And it's not going to be me. All right. But what's in hell? Who's actually commanding it? Who's the devil? Right. And now when you think of the devil, there's probably a few specific images that come to mind. You might be thinking of like red skin, horns. Maybe like a fork tail. He's always naked, which I find funny. He has a little butt hanging out. Pitch fork. Probably next to like a bunch of fire. That's the medieval version. And then there's like the beautiful version, which is crazy. This is like the gorgeous fallen angel with like black wings that's like proud, but also like tragic. And then there's the modern one, which is like a guy in a suit, which is always it's always a guy in a suit. It's always like, I'm the devil. And he's got like, he's more he went to like suit supply. And you know, he's got like a nice like tailored suit. That's like a nice little taper on the legs. And he's very charming. He's like kind of witty. And he's like a like an anti hero. You know, there's that version. And these are three completely different characters. And pop culture kind of treats them as one. And we use the names in the same way. I mean, there's so many names. There's again, this is coming from like specifically like a Christian framework, but I mean, we're kind of talking about the same figure regardless of, you know, which Abrahamic religion we're really diving into. But you got Lucifer, Satan, the devil, the serpent, the dragon, beails above, Chris does pocket operas, the Prince of darkness. There's all these different names that people use for the devil. And you can use any of them in a sentence and everyone knows basically who you're talking about. And they all basically point to the same person in our heads. But the question is, are they all the same? If you go through the source material, are we actually talking about the same entity when we're using all these words? So where does this even come from? And like, when you look at the chapter in the verse in the Bible, it starts to feel like, wait, that's that's it. Like, there's all this mention of Jesus Christ. You know what I mean? You read the New Testament. So like, Jesus is all up in there. And then when you're like, well, who's the opposite of Jesus? Okay, the opposite of God is the devil. So he should be in there a lot. And he kind of is, but it's not in the way that you think someone took a serpent from one story and an accuser from another story and a falling star from another story and then a dragon from another story and then a Babylonian king from another story. And the early church kind of like glued this together into one entity. And then you have centuries of artists and preachers and poets that basically sanded down these stories until the differences were basically moot. And now we're all kind of thinking about the same thing. But today, we're going to pull apart all those threads and not to like destroy it or be like, oh, the devil's actually not real. Actually, your Bible's fake. That's not the point. Okay. The point here is to figure out how we come to learn these things and how we get these images in our mind and who really paints them and like really gets to the bottom of who the devil really is like in the text and then who he is kind of in our minds. And to do that, we're going to go through all the names because almost every misunderstanding in this entire subject comes from different words, specifically four different words in three different languages and kind of what gets lost in the translation. So the very first word we're going to go through is coming from Hebrew. And that is Satan or in the kind of original pronunciation that is sauton. And actually in its original language, it's not a name, it's a job. It's a it's a now that literally just means like adversary. It means like an opponent and accuser someone standing in your way. And you could use it for like an enemy army. Like, oh, those bad guys over there, though, that's Satan or you can use it for like a rival in a court. And when it shows up with the little Hebrew word the in front of it. So like ha sauton, it literally means the adversary or the accuser. It's like calling someone like, this is the prosecutor in almost like a court sense. And then the second word is coming from our good pal over here, Christus. It's a Greek word that means literally this slanderer and the word is deoblos. And it's basically someone that accuses you. It's kind of similar to the first one, right? This is someone who throws words at you to basically bring you down. And this is the one that you probably already know literally is like, you know, deoblos. And it's basically where we get the English word, the devil. And the same idea as Hebrew, right? This is an accuser. This is an opponent. And then the third word is actually coming from Latin. And this word is the one that we're going to focus on a lot. And this is Lucifer. And Latin, it's two different pieces. So locks being like the root there, meaning like light and then fed it, meaning to carry. So this is literally like the carrier of light. This is the lightbringer. And to a Roman, this word is not really scary, right? Like because it was just their ordinary poetic name for a specific thing in the sky, which is the morning star. So this is the bright point of light that rises just before dawn, which is technically actually like the planet Venus. And Romans would look at it and they would see like Venus kind of glittering in the sunrise. And they would be like, oh, that's the morning star. That is the bringer of the light. Literally all the light is about to come up at dawn. That is a star that brings the light. That is Lucifer. It literally carries us into the morning. And then the fourth word is another Hebrew phrase that really the whole story here kind of hinges on. And that phrase is Halele Ben-Shakhar. This is the shining one, son of the dawn. This is also like a morning star image and also originally not specifically a name for the devil. So the entire story of Lucifer is the story of how these four ordinary words get mixed together and then turned into a single terrifying villain. And it happens literally over like a thousand years with one translation and one interpretation at a time that gets sort of like passed over generation by generation. So let's go all the way back to their beginning to the oldest layer where the word Satan doesn't necessarily mean devil at all. And it comes from the Hebrew Bible. If you read the Hebrew Bible, what Christians basically call the Old Testament, and you go through kind of looking for the devil, the grand cosmic enemy of God. the rebel, the angel, the ruler of hell, he's not really there in the way that you would expect. So in the oldest text, the word Satan is still doing its day job. It just means the adversary. So take the book of numbers, for example, there's a prophet named Balam who's riding a donkey down the road and God is displeased with him. So an angel, a messenger of God himself, is sent to block the road and stop him. And the Hebrew text says that the angel stood in the road as a Satan, which is interesting, right? This is an angel of God that is going to, you know, basically accuse or kind of chastise in a way. Balam, because he's displeasing to God. And basically working as an adversary, as an opponent standing in the way. So one being called a Satan in that scene is an angel of God doing the will of God, not the devil, just God's own engine functioning as an obstacle. And that's how neutral the word is, right? Like accusing someone that did something bad, that they did something bad isn't an evil act. And that sense, you would be an accuser, you would be a Satan. So you see the same thing over and over in the Hebrew Bible, and once you're kind of looking for it, it's almost like funny, so like political enemies of the wise King Solomon, they are called his sadans, which makes sense. And then when David's men worry that he might turn on their side in a battle, they warn that he himself could become a Satan against them in the fight. So it's just a word for a human rival or a threat or like just like a thorn in your side, something blocking your way. So kings have sadans in the way that modern politicians have opponents. So already, Satan is not one guy, it is that title like we said. But as we've just seen, that's not the only word that the story uses because in a few places, the adversary steps out of the human world and into the throne room of heaven. So this takes us to the book of Job, which is fascinating, it's one of like the strangest but also like most powerful and like in my opinion, like scariest stories on the whole Bible and it opens with a scene in heaven. And it says the sons of God, aka the divine beings of like this heavenly court, come and present themselves before God. And among them comes Hassatan, literally the adversary and this is still being used as a title. So it's not a name, but this entity is basically a member of the court of God. It's almost like the prosecuting attorney in God's like royal council going against God. And this is the one who's basically there to like bring, you know, hard questions. So God points out how faithful his servant Job is. And then this Hassatan, this accuser basically says, sure, yeah, Job is very faithful, you know, you've given him everything. But if you take it all away, if you take away all the happiness and light from Job's life, watch how he curses you. So he's like the skeptic in the room who wants to be the one to actually put Job to the test. And crucially, he can't do it without God's permission. My God sets the limits and then the accuser basically goes to town, just like ruining Job's life. So just pause right there and think about what this character is in the biblical sense. Still, like there's no horns, not really like in hell, actually like in the court of heaven somehow. And there's not like a clear rebellion. There's no war. He's not God's equal, right? Like he's not like a equal, like sort of anti sort of God. He's a member of the heavenly staff with like a weird job working under God's authority. So is it possible? That's like the devil, as we know it is a possible that's just like an angel that accuses and kind of like tests the waters, it's difficult to really say, but you almost get the same exact picture in the book of Zechariah. So there's a courtroom vision, the high priest is standing before the angel of the Lord. And again, Satan, the accuser stands at his right hand to accuse him. And in that story, God rebukes the accuser. So it's the same role, kind of same like kind of courtroom setting and the same word. And here's where it starts to kind of move late in the Hebrew Bible. So in the book of Chronicles, there's a story where Satan, again, that title rises up and incites King David to take a census, something that turns out to be a very grave sin, read the whole story. And for the first time, the Hebrew word drops the so it's not the adversary. So it's no longer like a title, like a job description, it's just Satan. And by dropping the the there, the title now just sounds like a name, like a descriptor for a specific thing. Now there's actually an older version of the same census story in the book of Samuel and in that older telling, well, who incites David to take the census? This is where it's interesting. It's actually not Satan. It's God. It's fascinating. Like the same event is retold generations later and the cause has shifted from God to this newly independent figure called Satan, not even though Satan just Satan. And that is a genuinely debated passage. I don't want to like oversimplify this and be like, oh, like the biblical authors are conflating God and Satan. That's not what I'm doing here. I'm just trying to point out that you can see something changing across the centuries and the stories and how people are understanding these events in their real lives and ultimately who to attribute the events to. So the Hebrew Bible gives us our start. You have this accuser in a courtroom, kind of like, you know, like a figure starting to stand on his own, but it doesn't really give us the fallen angel. It doesn't give us the Lucifer. So where does that come from? Well, we have to go to a poem about a camp. Fellas, this episode is sponsored by Blue Choo. 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It's basically Israel dancing above the tyrant who crushed them. That's ultimately what this passage is about and contained in it is the part that kind of changed our understanding of theology. It says this, how art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer's son of the morning? This kind of sounds like the devil's like order's story just kind of dropped randomly right in the middle of the Bible, except look at what's being said. The poet, the poet actually writing this is mocking the king. Like he said that, right? So he's saying, you shone so bright, you climb so high, you told yourself I will ascend to heaven. I will raise my throne above the stars. I will make myself like the most high and now look, you've been cut down to the ground. You've fallen so far from Reglory like the morning star fading when the sun comes up. You are going down to the grave with everybody else. So it's kind of like a diss track. It's kind of like an ether beat kind of situation. It's an insult. And it seems like it's being taken at the emperor's arrogance. So like that fall from heaven is the fall of this proud king from the height of his power that basically humiliated the nation of Israel. And now the people are getting kind of their, their, their laugh at the end of it. Now notice something here while we're here, this is really important because this is where the devil's whole motive kind of where everything comes from. I will ascend. I will raise my throne. I will make myself like the most high. That's the pride. When people are talking about pride, that's ultimately what they're talking about. That's the ambition to be God's equal. Though the way we usually tell it, Lucifer as a, the entity we are more familiar with is jealous of God. And that specific word jealous is more the poets than the text. Scripture gives us the arrogance and then we kind of add like the envy on top of it. So how do we get Lucifer meaning the devil? Like how did those two things get, get connected? Well, it's actually kind of simple. So in the original Hebrew, the phrase is Haleel Ben-Shakhar. That's the one I was talking about. Shining one son of the dawn. That sounds like the morning star. And then the Hebrew gets translated into Latin, centuries later by the scholar Jerome. And Jerome does a very natural thing. He translates, shining one son of the dawn into the ordinary Latin word for that star. Which as you guessed it is Lucifer, that is the lightbringer. So at that point Jerome isn't naming the devil. He's literally translating the star, the celestial body that comes up right before the dawn. It's literally the planet Venus. And more than a thousand years later, the King James translators reached this verse and the Latin says Lucifer. But instead of translating it into English as like the morning star that comes up right before the dawn, they do something different. They just keep the Latin word and then capitalize it like a name. And now it's Lucifer, capital L. And that's basically how it was done. The Hebrew phrase for the planet of Venus turned into a Latin word for the planet of Venus. And then it kind of got frozen into an English word that now is like a person's name inside a poem that's making fun of a Babylonian king. Like I know it's kind of complicated. But once you kind of break down, you're like, oh, that's interesting. And it actually happens multiple times because there's actually a second poem in the book of Ezekiel that people will know. read in the exact same way. And this one is actually like a lament over a different foreign king. This is the king of Tire, which at the time is like a very rich kind of like trading port city. And just like Isaiah, the language gets so grand, it literally says, "You were the seal of perfection full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were an Eden, the Garden of God." And so of course later readers are reading this and they decided it couldn't possibly be about a mere human king. This is not some type of poetry. This is literally secretly about Satan. And that passes where two more things that you know about the devil really comes from first, the most beautiful angel, kind of that depiction we were talking about of like this beautiful kind of tragic angel of black wings. It's kind of coming from Ezekiel, perfect in beauty, brought down by his own pride. Verse 17, "Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty." So it's like gorgeous and tragic and like, you know, like this angel that's doomed by vanity and pride, that's this chapter spoken originally. It seems like to a Phoenician king. Now it's possible it's maybe doing two things at once, but based off of reading the entire text, you're like, "Oh, this is about this king of tire." And then second, and this is the weird one, the angel of music. You probably heard before that Lucifer was like, you know, so skilled at music. He was like the heavenly sort of like a band leader, right? He's like the choir director and like music is like essential to him, which you know, sparked so many different kind of conversations in like the modern era of like music being used as like a satanic weapon because people associate Satan with, you know, being this very proficient musician. And it kind of comes from one line in the King James Bible. It literally says, "The workmanship of thy Tabrats and of thy pipes was prepared in the in the day that thou wast created." So what does that mean? It's like kind of hard to read like old English, but Tabrats are basically like these little drums and then pipes are obviously like wind instruments. So like, it seems like these instruments are built right into him. He's like heaven's musicians except if you crack open modern Bibles like the ESV or the NIV, the instrumentation that's actually found in that translation is just kind of gone. Newer translations read the same kind of Hebrew as jewelry. So it says like settings and mountains because the whole verse is just like a big list of like gemstones. So the angel of music may be once again like kind of this artifact of one's translation choice hardened into a sort of cultural thing that we all believe to know. And you know, it's the same move as like the Lucifer thing being like an actual description for a star that then becomes like a name with a capital L, just kind of a different verse. But that would just be too simple because that's not the end of the story. The very same Morningstar image, the Latin Lucifer, the Greek lightbringer shows up elsewhere in the Bible, but as a title of honor. Yeah, this is where things get really weird and where like you get like Gnostic tradition kind of tie into this. Again, I'm not trying to make that argument. I'm just trying to show like how scholars have understood this. So this term, lightbringer actually gets used for the coming of the Messiah. So in the book of Revelation, Jesus himself is called the bright Morningstar, the same imagery, the same light rising before the dawn. If Morningstar automatically meant devil, then there's like a pretty serious problem here because then the Bible gives that same title to the Messiah. So I can't have like a connotation to it, right? So what turned this particular Morningstar into the devil wasn't the word. It's kind of what happens next when a later generation of readers pick up Isaiah's insult about a king and then hear something I guess bigger, maybe more insidious, kind of in between the lines. So so far it seems like we have a little bit of a problem historically speaking, right? By the time of Jesus, a lot of Jews and then Christians clearly did believe in something much closer to the devil that we picture, right? They are picturing many times a powerful, personal supernatural enemy of God. They kind of like, you know, evil incarnate and there's armies of evil spirits and all sorts of stuff. But we just saw that the oldest Hebrew text don't really lay that out. So what happens from the oldest Hebrew text to like early Christendom? And the answer is one of the most overlooked chapters of all of religious history and it's the centuries between the old and the new testaments. This is a period that scholars will often call the second temple era. And it's ultimately from this era where the devil, like capital D devil that we know was born. So in these hidden centuries, Jewish writers were wrestling with this question, right? If God is good, where does evil come from? This is as philosophers will describe it as the problem of evil. God is all powerful. He's all good. He's very just. He's very merciful. Where's all that? Why is there so much evil? So so much unexplained tragedy and a rich new body of literature basically explodes to answer this question. So you have books full of angels and cosmic rebellions and really kind of wrestling with the origins of evil, all trying to answer this question. And the most famous from this era is the book of Enoch. This is one that I think is just fascinating and it basically tells a story that most people assume is in Genesis, but it's not. So in first Enoch, a group of angels called the Watchers looked down at human women and they desire them and then choose to descend to earth and then basically come together and like make a pact to rebel against God. And so they come to earth, they take human like mortal wives, and then they teach humanity a bunch of forbidden things, like knowledge that they're not supposed to have, things like weapons and sorcery and alchemy and all of that kind of stuff. And their monstrous offspring that they have with these human women are basically like these giants that bring violence into the world. And God had them all kind of basically like bound up and then imprisoned to basically wait for judgment. So it has like a full blown fallen angels epic of, you know, these angels, these Watchers that come down, they were bellow against God and then, you know, there's punishment and it all sounds pretty familiar. And a huge amount of what people think is in the Lucifer story actually traces to this era of imaginative Jewish literature written in that kind of in between second temple period and it's not directly in Genesis and or really the rest of the Bible. And this is the era when the puzzle pieces really come together. So like that neutral kind of accuser title hardens into a proper enemy named Satan. And the idea of angels who rebelled and like fall basically take the center stage and heaven gets kind of like this war cosmology. And now you've got a supernatural villain with a backstory and he's got a very clear motive. He's very prideful and jealous and he's got an army and all of this comes just in time for the New Testament. So by the time the book of Matthew starts happening, the writers aren't inventing the devil from scratch. They are inheriting a developed figure that kind of came out of this in between period and then they build on it. So in the New Testament, the parts written in Greek, the word satanus literally Satan shows up around like three dozen times and it's clearly not a job description anymore. It's clearly not a title. It is a personal supernatural enemy of God and of God's people. He's also just not like an accuser. He's like and he's a tempter more so like he's not like just like trying to like it's similar, but he's not like calling people out. He's literally coming to trick them. So he's the one who confronts Jesus in the wilderness and tries to get him to sin by offering the offering him the entire world offering him bread even though he's fasting and starving. He also shows up as the opponent. Jesus even turns to his own disciple Peter on point and says get behind me Satan when Peter tries to steer him off of his own path and he shows up as the deceiver and the afflictor basically kind of entering Judas before the betrayal. He's tormenting Paul. He's working against the mission at every turn. Now at this point, by the New Testament, he's the head of a kingdom of darkness directly opposed to the kingdom of God and by no means is he working alone. This is where the Bible actually does put him in charge of the demons under a different name. The name beels above. When Jesus' critics are accusing him of casting out demons, they say that he's doing it by beels above the ruler of the demons and Jesus's own answer. How can Satan cast out Satan? So even just in Christ's own words found in the New Testament, he treats beels above and Satan as the same guy. So yeah, he's got titles, right, ruler of the demons, the God of this world, the prince of the power of the air. He's like the head of something, but you see where the kingdom is, right? Like just even in those lines. The New Testament never directly sets like his throne in hell. Like it actually says like his kingdom is this one. The New Testament says like, you know, like his kingdom is almost like the world, right? He's the God of this world, the prince of the power of the air. And he's basically like, has the grip of the sin basically in the world. And keep that in mind because that's really, really important. It's not just in the Gospels. Paul writing the earliest Christian letters that we have adds some of the sharpest strokes to this entire picture. He warns that Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light, which for a figure that we're about to, you know, keep calling the lightbringer, it's like very spot on. He calls him the God of this world who blinds people's mind. He describes his own suffering as a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, basically like an affliction that God permits kind of like the story of Job. And then Paul promises that the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet, an echo of the serpent of Eden, which is going to matter for the knot that we're going to untie in just a second. Now, this is much closer to the devil that you've imagined, right? He's personal and very active and very dangerous, but there's still a few things that are kind of missing here. The New Testament calls him the tempter and the enemy and the evil one, but it doesn't call him Lucifer. That name is nowhere in the Greek. The connection hasn't been made just yet. There's one line though, one sentence from Jesus that becomes the bridge. So in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says, I watch Satan fall from heaven like lightning. Fall from heaven. You see that? That's the phrase that we were talking about earlier. Now go back and put it next to Isaiah's taunt, how you have fallen from heaven, O shining one son of the dawn. So now two different passages, two different original contexts, one about a king, one very clearly about Satan, but they shared that image falling from heaven. And once a reader hears those two lines next to each other, there's a line that gets drawn and it gives a very deeper meaning to this whole thing. The single echo in there is the crux of the entire Lucifer legend that we thought was kind of plainly told in the Bible. And at some point, it is somewhere in the Bible, right? But someone at some point puts Isaiah's falling morning star next to Jesus's falling Satan, and very reasonably decided that they were describing the same event. And perhaps they are, but it's not really super clear in the text. Now there's one more text to talk about in this, and it's the closest that the Bible actually comes to answering these questions for us, and it comes from the book of Revelation. It's one of the strangest books in the whole Bible. We've done entire episodes on it. You should absolutely check that out, like seen by scene, but regardless, just for this episode, here's what we need to know. Revelation describes a war in heaven. You have a great red dragon cast down to the earth, and then it does something none of the other texts do. It stops and identifies the dragon, and it literally calls the dragon that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. Now that line is like the Rosetta Stone. It is hugely important. It's like a master key. And a single sentence, Revelation kind of puts together the names that were, it seems like separate throughout the early parts of the Bible, and ties them all into one. The dragon, the ancient serpent, which then pulls from the Garden of Eden, all the way back in Genesis, a serpent that Genesis doesn't clearly say is, you know, Satan kind of makes reference that there's like this serpent that is tempting Adam and Eve. But regardless, you have that one line that connects it all together. You have the devil, which is the Diabolos, the literally like the Greek slanderer, and then you have Satan. This is the Hebrew word for the adversary. And four separate threads basically tied into one right there in one sentence at the very end of the whole Bible. And that's the one verse that really lets Christian tradition reach all the way back to Eden and be like, hey, the serpent that's tempting Eve, that's the devil all along. It says it right there in Revelation. Honestly, it's the one verse that changes how we look at the devil throughout the entire Bible. If we don't have that one verse, it's much more difficult to connect all of these things. And then Revelation 12 is also the one place that the Bible flat out says that there is a war in heaven. Michael and his angels versus the dragon and his kind of, you know, fallen angels or demons. And this is also where we get at third of the angels fell. So the dragon's tail sweeps and then a third of the stars out of the sky and throws them down onto earth. And this is the source. This is the war and the number. Though, again, fair warning, trying to be like completely unbiased here. Plenty of scholars think that the war there isn't a flashback to the beginning of everything, but something that happens at the end of everything. But again, maybe this is kind of in this sort of like apocalyptic literature genre. This is a way to reference things that happen at the beginning, but also things that happen at the end. It's metaphorical, so to speak. And, you know, this is kind of a picture, not necessarily a head count. Hey guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to tell you about one of the sponsors of this show. And that's perplexity. Every AI expert seems to recommend a different AI tool. And every time I start a project, I'm asking myself, I'm like, do I use this one for this or should I use another? Like one is better at research, a different, you know, LLM or another AI is better at like writing and other ones better coding or like finding flights. And then I need something that can turn all those answers into like actual information that I can really digest. And before long, I'm like, going through 500 tools trying to figure out how to do something. And that's why I'm so excited about perplexity computer. 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So for limited time, our listeners can try perplexity computer for free. All you got to do is head to pplx.ai/camp, that is pplx.ai/camp and try computer today. Most AI tools are still answering questions, but perplexity computer is completing full projects. Now let's get back to the show. We imagine Satan ruling hell. Like down there, he's running the place, you go to hell, you see Satan, and he's dishing out punishment, but the Bible doesn't really say that. When the dragon loses the war, he isn't sent down to basically rain and hell. He's thrown down to earth. So at the very end, in Revelation, Satan gets thrown into the lake of fire and his torments a day and night. So he's not the warden at that point. He's an inmate. Matthew even says that the fire was prepared for the devil and his angels. So it's built basically as his punishment. The demons themselves beg Jesus not to send them there. Hell in the Bible is at the end of everything, not the devil's kingdom. It's actually his sentence. It's actually the place where the devil ultimately ends up to crush evil once and for all. So now we can take a step back and look at all the pieces that we have. You have the accuser from Job's heavenly courtroom story, the rebel angel from the book of Enoch, which again is non-canonical. I don't want to conflate that necessarily with the Bible. It's just the same kind of literature that's circling in this time period. And then you have the falling morning star from Isaiah's taunt against Babylon and the king there. And then you have Jesus line about Satan falling like lightning. And then you have the serpent in the garden and then you have the dragon of Revelation tying the serpent to the devil and Satan all into one. None of those texts on their own gives you clearly the Lucifer story, but somebody read them all together as if they were chapters of a single biography. And out of that reading, this story was born. And there was one more guy who took all of this and then wove them into a narrative for the first time. And this is going to sound crazy, try to make Lucifer the good guy. Now this is just a bit of a diversion that I think is interesting because once again, it just sort of shows how this name and this kind of title and this idea in our minds kind of got made. So it was in 1667, a blind English poet named John Milton published an epic poem called Paradise Lost. And it's a great book. You should read it. It's fascinating. It's like a classic piece of literature. And honestly, the devil that we picture in our heads today in the large part is the devil that John Milton described. Paradise Lost has been hugely influential on how the West perceives the devil, whether they've read it or not. It's just kind of accepted into our subconscious. So Milton being a writer took all of those scattered biblical fragments that we just talked about and did what no theologian had really done before. He turned them into a singular character and turned that character into the protagonist. So his Satan, as John Milton describes it, is magnificent and proud and eloquent and defiant and kind of wounded. This is the Satan who stands on the burning lake, refused a surrender and declares that it is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. And that line right there is a kind of a beautiful sort of poetic understanding of the devil that we all know, but also kind of an example of the problem. It's the most famous thing that anyone has written about the devil, but it's kind of the opposite of what the Bible says, because like we just saw scripture, never lets him reign in hell at all. It's not clearly stated. Milton gave the devil the one thing the Bible refused to give him, which is a throne and like a autonomous kingdom, again, in a separate sort of celestial realm being in hell. And you know, in this story, he's charismatic and he is frankly the most compelling character in the poem. So compelling that even the poet William Blake later said that Milton was secretly of the devil's party without even knowing it. And this is more or less the first time that we see the modern devil appear with all those threads really tied up together. All the pieces of this puzzle kind of completed to give a full picture of the Lucifer the UNI know today, a picture that is, I mean, frankly, like so vivid that for the English speaking world, it kind of in a way like overwrote the Bible. Most people today when they're thinking of Lucifer, they're not thinking about Isaiah or Job, they're thinking about John Milton. So who is Lucifer, right? The devil, the one figure that were, you know, maybe so sure that we all know doesn't necessarily have the origin story that we thought we did not based off of, you know, the biblical text that we have, there's not a single chapter, no clean little moment where a proud angel falls and then hell basically opens up to receive him and all like the legions fall out with him. Like a lot of that stuff we built out of these fragments of scripture and over time developed this character. But still, even after all of that, after pulling all the threads apart, there's still questions that are still unanswered. Like, is the devil equal an opposite to God? Is this a rival power that is locked in a cosmic war? Is this like the Voldemort to the Harry Potter where like they both have great power, but Harry Potter just gets the best of him by a little bit? And if God created Lucifer, like, you know, he created everything. So obviously like he created Lucifer as an angel, then why are they enemies at all? Like, why would God allow this angel to become so prideful that it became an adversary? You know, is it the beauty of free will, giving angels free will? What kind of free will do angels even have? And the, you know, all powerful nature of God. Why isn't he just like, stop it now? Right? Why doesn't he just snap his fingers and call it a day? Like you destroy the devil, you destroy evil, you end all suffering, you fix the problem of evil. These are still questions that people are deliberating and theologians have many answers for. But even after the deep dive, it's still hard to say for certain. And frankly, with all the spiritual warfare in the Bible, like demons and possessions and voices in the wilderness, we still can't say for certain that Lucifer is a single person in all of these instances. And maybe he is, maybe he is a force. And you know, all of these sort of connections are accurate. But it's maybe not as certain as, for me at least, I thought that it was. So at the end of all this, I mean, it's kind of ironic, right? Because God, in a way, created the angels. And if you sort of go based off of this Christian sort of, you know, angelic understanding, in a way allowed Satan to be created, he allowed evil to exist. And so much of how we picture Satan based off of biblical texts and then, you know, later depictions, we also helped contribute to making Satan. We also contributed to understanding and trying to visualize what this entity really is. Because the, you know, single, you know, fallen angel, that doomed humanity that fell out of the sky. It's not in one single verse. It's something that is kind of put together over centuries. And, I mean, as ironic as it is to say, the devil always really was in the details. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief synopsis of where we get our understanding of the devil. I mean, yeah, it's a, it's an interesting thing. I remember like even just being like in class, like reading about these things, like when I was going to like Bible study and just being like, okay, so I thought it was like clear because I remember getting told the story that everyone kind of knows. Like, all the devils in heaven. He's beautiful. He's playing music. He's very prideful. And then he doesn't want to serve human beings because that's what the angels have to do. They ultimately have to like serve God and serve God's creation that are humans. And so he rebels gets cast out of hell. And that's where he basically like raining until like the end of times when Christ basically destroys Satan. And now he's on earth, like kind of like tempting human beings and like, you know, he's in the domain of the world, et cetera. And it's interesting because even just looking into it, I was like, oh, it's not actually said that clearly. You can understand how people tie it all together and how they got to that point, but it's not laid out so clearly. And my version is really John Milton's version. And I'm kind of drawing that connection, which again is helpful to, you know, paint these things in like a very like kind of like eloquent poetic modern version that people can understand. I think there's a use case for that. I'm not even bagging on it. But it's interesting. I mean, Chris, anything you picked up from this that goes against what your initial understanding of Diablo was. So the Greek version is the yavelus Diablo. Yeah. Well, that's where Diablo comes from. Let's read before the whole episode. Yep. I pronounced it wrong. Well, you couldn't. I thought it was Diablo. It is. So what are you saying in Greek B is a V? No, brother B is a V the original alphabet. So out AVCD. Exactly. Really? Well, it's Alfa Vita. Enough of this. Alfa beta. Alfa beta. What? No, it's supposed to be Alfa beta. Yeah, because dumb Americans. Okay. Including myself. And also the best devil portrayed in a film. Elizabeth Hurley. And the dazzled with Brendan Frazier. You've never seen this. No. So the showers are bad. She's so hot. Oh my god. See, you are just a dog. You can't see this. This is the devil. Tempty. The devil doesn't show up as a pointy guy with, you know, horns. He shows up as everything you've ever wanted. And I think we're about to see everything that creatures have ever wanted on the screen right here. Show me. That's the devil. But dazzled. I've never heard of this movie. That's crazy, Mark. What happens in the movie? Brendan Frazier sells his soul for three wishes. Every wish always just comes out bad because he doesn't wear it correctly. Typical storyline. Yeah, great. Yeah. Great storyline. A great movie though. Did he smash the devil? He does not. He's in love with some mother chick. An angel. I don't want to give it away. Oh goodness. Sorry. Final. You guessed it. No. Did I really? I mean, look at me. Look at me. I feel like that's sacral. I just haven't, I don't know. I guess maybe some people did hook up with angels. I don't want to get into it. Look, if you guys know anything more about this, if you're an expert in grim wars or the origins of Satan, please buy all means. Drop a comment. We did actually an episode about like how we the medieval depictions. So like pulling from like pan and like why people see him as like baffa med and like all that kind of stuff, which is a fascinating episode. You can check that out as well. But I'd love to know what your thoughts are. Anything I got wrong. Anything I missed. Again, I'm not immune to correction. I'm just a comedian with a Wi-Fi connection trying to figure this all out with my friends that are helping me research. So buy all means. Let me know. Also, if you like history content, great news. We have history camp where we go through everything that's ever happened. If you like crazy deep dives and like modern stuff, kind of like conspiracies, going through a cult stuff, going through like crazy interviews of people that have had near death experiences and trying to understand ultimately, what's going on out of here. Well, great news. Camp Gagnons is a place for you. Camp Gagnon, as they say in Montreal. That is the main channel where I do interviews and as well as deep dives just like this. And if you just like to rock with the religion vibe, well, great news. You're in the right place. We drop these every single Sunday. And I'm so glad you guys are here. I really appreciate you tuning in and being a part of this. So God bless you all. Have a beautiful Sunday. Go to church. And I'll see you next week. - Peace.