The Original Sin

Where did sin come from?  I'm not talking about The Fall of Man.  I'm talking about the "serpent" and where it got the idea to trick Adam and Eve.  Or a deeper question: who is this serpent, where did he come from?  And why?

In Christianity, we learned that sin came into this world through the decision of Adam and Eve in eating the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, in the Garden of Eden.  Eve had a conversation with "the serpent" who convinced her to eat the fruit so she will "be like God, knowing good and evil."  And then she eventually convince Adam into eating the fruit.  This is often call "The Fall of Man" in the Bible, where the story comes from the book of Genesis, Chapter 3.  Prior to this, God made a perfect world and a perfect universe, and He made man and woman, Adam and Eve.  There were no sin or evil at the time, but because of Adam and Eve's decision, sin came into the world.

But what do we know about this serpent?  Prior to The Fall of Man, nothing was said about the serpent or where he came from.  In Revelations 12:9, there is this one reference of an "ancient serpent" who is defined as the devil or Satan, so we can only assumed that this ancient serpent described in Revelations is the same as we saw in Genesis (Revelations 12:9 The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.)   All throughout the rest of scripture, we learned about Satan and his characteristics (Matthew 16:23-stumbling block, 1 Peter 5:8-9 - prowling to devour, Genesis 3:1-5 - crafty), so we can summarize that Satan is evil.

But where did Satan come from?  How did he get to be the way that he is?  To understand where Satan came from, we must under where angels came from.  The Bible is a little clearer on where angels came from and when God made them.  Most Biblical scholars point to a few clues in the Bible, but the one sentence that perked my interest is actually in Genesis 1:26, 

"Then God said, 'Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness...'"

Who is "us" and who is "our"?  Was God talking about himself, and giving himself the pronoun "us" or was He talking about the angels?  Job 38:7 could also referenced angels.  Leading up to this part of Job, Job is complaining to God about his situation, and God answers in a rhetorical question, "When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"  Reading between the lines, God is just saying that when the stars were created, sons of God (angels) shouted for joy.  (The overall big picture of the book of Job, God was pointing to Job of His glory and to remember God and His creation, not for Job to dwell on his own lost of his riches, and brag about how much he has done for God.)  

Satan was thought to be a fallen angel.  Ezekiel 28:12-18 is probably the only passage of Scripture in the Bible that I have found that could be talking about Satan, although Ezekiel addresses a "king of Tyre".  (It is thought that the "king of Tyre" is actually Satan, as God sometimes refer to rulers as "prince" to emphasize that God is the only King.)  Satan used to be a guardian cherub and a cherubs are like angels, or is an angelic creature.  So Satan may or may not have been a full angel.  Satan was described here as "full of wisdom and perfect in beauty."  He was blameless, and he was full of splendor.  But Satan became too prideful because he was beautiful.  Because of this, God banished him from His mountains.  

Satan worshipped himself.  He had an important role of guarding the precious stones and gems of heaven.  God made him beautiful.  God made him wise.  God made him blameless.  But Satan thought of himself as more important than God, and probably did not appreciate all that God has done, as Creator of the world and of the angels.  

Which actually leads me to a number of other questions and thoughts:

• Why isn't this the original sin story in the Bible?  (The only explanation I can think of is because God wanted to tell us a story we can relate to in Adam and Eve, and eventually through Jesus Christ.)
• Why did God placed the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, knowing that man's curiosity will eventually lead them to eat the fruit of the tree?  It was in plain sight.  
• Why did God made angels in the first place, before he made man?  Did God made a mistake in creating angels?  Were the angels some prototype until Satan's fall?  In Genesis 1:26, God did say, "Let us make mankind in our image..."  
• The act of Satan just goes to show, God did not make robots.  The angels were created to have free-will.  And just like angels, people have the same free-will.

These are questions and thoughts that can make even the most scholarly Bible theologians crazy.  But I've learned to accept that it's a mystery of the Bible that may still remain a mystery until I get to heaven.