And then Joseph Smith decided that God changed his mind and had to edit the Book of Mormon just five years later.
The only difference between Joseph Smith and earlier authors of scriptures is that the origins of Mormonism is recent enough that the evolution of theology can be clearly documented whereas the evolution of earlier authors isn’t quite as clear.
And speaking of Mormonism, their answer for why God created Lucifer is that he was one of our brothers in the “preexistance” and lead a revolution against God with a full, one third of our fellow spirit brothers and sisters going along. Jesus and his allies (most of us) beat them up and kicked them out, except that according to one teaching (now hushed up, but never officially revoked) Blacks were fence sitters in this great war.
When Lucifer and his hosts were kicked out, they came down to the earth and wonder around tempting people. If you think about it, the shear number of devils running around is pretty amazing. If you take one third of all the people who have ever lived or will live on the earth, and divide it up by the populations of the past, then there would be hundreds (thousands?) of devils per person. That’s a lot of tempting. No wonder Sodom and Gomorrah were so bad.
well, you’re getting into a huge ball of tangled canon and interpretation trying to differentiate between the two. while there is a case to be made against lucifer being satan, it’s common christian canon they are the same. from wikipedia’s entry on Lucifer:
it gets into a pretty intense theological discussion, going back to hebrew and greek terms, etc. i cannot find “lucifer” under the biblegateway’s search terms in NIV. i can also point you to controversy that morning star was Jesus, not Lucifer or satan.
i can get my concordance out and look for the hebrew words…give me a bit.
i don’t understand the point, here. are you attacking the veracity of the bible’s prophecies? does the bible need to be proven or disproven to suss out what it says about lucifer or satan?
i thought the discussion was about what it says, not about what it says being necessarily true. i think nearly everyone here doesn’t believe the bible as truth.
according to my Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, the only mention of “lucifer” is Isaiah 14:12, “art thou fallen from heaven…”
all other reverences fall under “satan.”
according to my dake’s annotated reference bible, luke 10:18 begins discussion over how satan had dominion over the earth after he was cast out of heaven.
(note: dake’s commentary is a bible is a KJV that contains an intense level of subtext breaking down what all the scriptures mean, cross-referencing other portions that pertain to the verse at hand and break down translations. it basically gives you a fairly thorough interpretation of things, then explains why it was interpreted that way. FWIW).
then he cites the passages in Ezekiel i posted before and some in Isaiah, etc.
so that’s what is generally accepted. you can find cases arguing that’s not a correct interpretation, but short of being a bible scholar it’s about the best i can do.
[QUOTE=the Bible]
But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?”
10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
[/QUOTE]
God doesn’t know yet that Adam and Eve have eaten of the fruit. He deduces it from Adam’s words. In fact, he doesn’t even know where they Adam and Eve are until Adam speaks.
there’s quite a few if you pay even a modicum of attention. i think christians just gloss over it. personally i couldn’t get past the part where God created man and decided man was wicked, so he decides to drown mankind, but then here we still are…“and God saw the hearts of men and saw that they were evil, but swore to never flood the earth again.”
so why the theatrics, since literally no resolution was achieved? it also indicates he changed his mind, then changed it again, the just kind of decided to accept we are evil. the best explanation i have gotten from theologians about it is that God simply wanted to kill *those *men, like a single hit. but he wanted to kill them for being wicked, then at the end declares we are ALL wicked, and nothing changed. i guess i’m missing the point…
A valid interpretation of the text, but it does not actually say that. There is no reason that this would be in conflict with God’s future-knowing powers. It just means that God’s questions were rhetorical.
I’m saying I don’t think the passage has anything to do with Lucifer/Satan/Whatever. That part of Ezekiel seems to be a series of prophecies about how God is going to destroy a bunch of cities. Chapter 28 is about Tyre and the whole thing is addressed to the king, not Satan.
there is some debate about that…depending on interpretation (it’s as murky as the rest of the bible, either way. a common analysisasserts it is talking about both, as “being in Eden” would not be possible for a human king as well as other supernatural references, so it is considered a “dual prophecy”).
regardless, in the Gospels there are several accounts of the fall of Satan, which only used the word “satan” in the NIV and KJV bibles.