Satan was created in the minds of men -- a concept to embody the illusion that evil is some physical 'thing' that exists out there in the real world. The one true God didn't create anything that is inherently evil, and you will not find anything in his creations that is. It's only how you perceive something that determines whether it's evil. Man was given the ability to think for himself and have free choice, and this is where the concept of evil comes into play. Not respecting God's creations and the rights and freedoms of others leads to evil thoughts and acts. Thinking only in terms of yourself and not considering the effect you have on others is where evil creeps in. God gave us the freedom to think and choose as independent entities who experience his creations, but it is up to us to learn how to live in balance with those creations that's important. Evil is what we've determined through learning and experience what works against that balance. Satan is one of the false gods that the Jews created out of their minds to represent evil. Satan is merely a mental concept. Allegorical tales are a very ancient means of conveying ideas, and they were very popular during the time when the stories of the Bible were first conceived. Satan came to be seen as a physical entity because of this, being a reference to that in man that causes evil thoughts and actions, but the deeper meaning of many of the tales have been lost through misunderstanding and are taken to refer to real things and events. If Satan is just a concept that embodies the idea of evil, then the fall from grace might more easily be understood as man's lost purity of mind as he began to develop his ability to think for himself using the higher intellect rather than always be driven by the lower intellect of the emotions and instinct, which is what all less evolved creatures rely on. Given that we have been evolving on this planet for 3.5 billion years, and the fact that there is more than just a little evidence of past civilizations as advanced as we are now, it might even be that this fall from grace is an allegory for a tragic end of a once great past civilization that threw us back on the evolutionary scale when it collapsed, causing our higher intellect to atrophy from lack of use before it began to develop again. If you consider the fact that without widespread knowledge and education and our technological tools to help us learn and advance from them, as a scattered people we would quickly lose what we know and have to start with the next generation at a huge intellectual disadvantage, and this would continue for a very long time, causing us to revert back to the baser mental capacities of emotion and instinct, and all understanding that we had learned about civility and humanity would be lost. The thoughts and actions that we consider evil (having learned through long experience) would have nothing to keep them in check. They would have to be relearned. Jesus Christ represents the teacher, the one who carries those lessons and rules that hold us together as civilized people. Satan represents the thing he seeks to keep at bay, knowing that it's the minds of men that develop the thoughts and actions that are to be avoided if we are to live in peace and enjoy God's creations.
Proverbs 14:12 There is a way which seem right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.
Best book ever written on the subject of good vs. evil is the Great Controversy.
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