SPIRITUAL WARFARE: Lucifer—Soulless Evil

I’ve always thought of myself as the weirdest person on Earth.

One of the reasons for that is how, when I began the study of evil from its soul-structure point-of-view, one of the first things I wondered was, If evil has to do with the soul, and Lucifer doesn’t have a soul because he’s an angel, is he really evil?  And if he is, what kind of evil is it?

This question has been like a slowly drip of water at the very back of my brain ever since.

In fact, whenever faced with another lesson on evil, I wondered where Lucifer was.

Reading about Lucifer never helped me.

Pride.

Fall.

Battle.

Hell.

Is one who battles God by definition evil?

Isn’t evil something that affects human on Earth?

If evil is only in the realm of God, is it still evil?

As I said, definitely weird.

Years go by.

Same questions.

Not an inkling of an answer.

My study widens.

I study the evil that is the dragon.

I meet an evil that will, for me, anyway, remain without a name.  Just a face.

I study how today things are getting worse for us because different expressions of evil have figured out how to join together.

But still no Lucifer.

Not even a hint.

So for the past few weeks I have lived with angels.  Day in and day out.

All angels.  All day.

And night.

If I’m still awake.

No soul.

Various functions.

Some interaction with Man.

Where is Lucifer?

In fact, any reading on Lucifer usually leads off to another form of evil: Satan, the devil.

But to my mind, Satan and the devil are here with us, and they mess with our souls.

Like used-car salesmen with desperate people needing a way to get to work.

Step into my showroom.  Let me show you what I can do for you.

Still no Lucifer.

It’s like he’s hiding or something.

Or he’s such a nothing in God’s world that we don’t really have to be bothered by him.

But I’m bothered by him.

He’s there.

He’s labeled as evil.

I want to know.

And then it fell into me one day while I was driving.

There he was.

In all his glory.

The good “son.”

The best of the best.

Beautiful.  Intelligent.  Capable.

So what happened?

We happened.

God embodied us.

Doesn’t matter how.

Or when.

But we are here on Earth.  In bodies.

Irrefutable.

And with us came God himself.

His son.

His Spirit.

All in care for us.

Like a couple having a baby for the first time.

All attention goes to the baby.

Everyone else is left out.

And Lucifer did not like that.

Somewhere along the line, Lucifer has taken God’s adoration of him as something real.  Something tangible.

Not just the affection and love that God naturally gives to his own.

But something special.

And he was no longer feeling this adoration.

And then the real error occurred.

Lucifer had the notion that he deserved this adoration, and he began to conceive the ways in which it should be shown to him.

Lucifer became the object of adoration.

It’s not as though God can be such an object.  God is everything, after all.

Perhaps you can think that you adore the idea of God.  But that’s more gratitude, really.

Gratitude for what you are.  For what you have been given in life.

See, when angels chant their adoration for God, really they are chanting adoration for all that exists.

And for all that doesn’t exist.

Everything.

God is everything.

We’re not as capable as angels.  If we were told right upfront that when we adore God we are adoring everything, we would stop and say, Wait a minute.  I’m adoring the AIDS virus?  Child molestation?  Mosquitoes?

(Yeah, I know.  That’s probably just me.  And a few others.  Especially these days.)

And we find something else to do.

Most people can’t even conceive of adoring their own neighbors just for the gift of it.

Let alone all the mess we have to face every day.

Let the angels do it.  That’s what they are there for, after all.

OK.  Back to Lucifer.

Seeing Lucifer for the “first” time, I realized that the big deal with Lucifer is his growing obsession to be adored.

Above all others.

Even God.

Why not?  What’s God got that I haven’t?

Well, pretty much everything.  Not that that really matters in such an argument.

A false argument.

There it is again.

Just like in the Garden of Eden and the Good Snake.

Then I saw how we live with what we could call the Lucifer soul all the time.

People who do what they do just to get people’s attention and acclamation.

Movie stars.

Musicians.

Olympic gold medalists.

Some religious figures.

They are everywhere.

Give me your eyes.  Swoon over me.  Make me your idol.

Idol = Lucifer.

And when you find yourself in a relationship with a person like this, eventually you notice that for all the love you are putting into the relationship, there’s very little (if any) coming back to you.  You might even realize that the only time you get some affection, it’s to bind you to the relationship.

It isn’t there just because you are you.

I imagine that at the bottom of most broken relationships is this dynamic.

Lucifer on Earth.

After all.

Just without a face.

Caught in the idea that I deserve to be adored just because.

Perhaps one of the most dangerous ideas we have to deal with.

Because what will a person do to obtain and keep this adoration going?

Behind it all, of course, is yet another false argument.

Or, better, a mask.  A mask that convinces the world that adoration is right for this person, but a mask that hides the inadequacy that exists behind it.

On some level, Lucifer never could have forgotten that he was not God.  Could he?

But the spin happened, and the false argument formed, and he got caught in its eddy, and away he went.

We see this all the time.

Big stars who come crashing back down to Earth from their pedestals.

Once considered blessed politicians who get caught with their hands on someone else’s money.

Religious men and women exposed as nonreligious in their acts towards others.

It’s heartbreaking.  But we’ve become numb to it all.

We may even wind up thinking, There is no such thing as good.

Lucifer on Earth.

God is not here.  But I am. 

Worship me.

It’s the false argument that asks us to trade our willingness to be shown someone’s glory in exchange for our forgetting that God is here with us.

Every day.

And in every way.

Amen.