Did God create Satan?
The Bible says that everything owes its existence to God, and it also speaks of a being who works against Him. That raises a fair question: if God made all things, did He make the devil, and is God therefore behind the evil that follows?
Nothing stands outside the Creator
When asked whether the creation of "all things" reaches every power in the universe, including the hostile ones, one writer answers without hedging.
George DavisonYes! For nothing came into being apart from Him. These infernal beings were not infernal when He created them; they became that by rebellion.
Evil began in the creature, not in God
So the being exists because God made him — but the evil in him does not trace back to God. It started somewhere else.
William KellyBut evil never came from God — only from the creature once innocent, now fallen, that kept not his first estate, but chose to do his own will and have his own way. An angel did this first. Man was misled by him who, straying and exalting himself, beguiled others both in heaven and on earth. That creature is called Satan — the Devil.
What he was on the day he was made
Commentators point to Ezekiel 28 for a picture of this creature before his fall. They hold the passage carefully: it is addressed to a human king, yet the language runs past him.
J. N. DarbySo Ezekiel 28, from verse 11, is commonly, and, I have no doubt justly, applied to the fall of Satan. It is not the same as the prince of Tyre, who is judged historically in the beginning of the chapter.
Read that way, the chapter describes a creature God had loaded with dignity, and it dates his corruption to a moment inside his own history.
William KellyIn him was found the perfection of creature beauty: "every precious stone was your covering," representing, I suppose, the various lights in which God's glory was reflected in creation. "You were an anointed guardian cherub" shows that he was charged with the execution of God's judgments, and that intelligently. "You were on the holy mountain of God," the seat or symbol of His holy authority… And yet, perfect as he had been, his heart became lifted up because of his beauty, and iniquity was found in him.
Pride was the turn
The gift itself became the occasion of the fall. What God gave in kindness, the creature took as a reason to rise against the Giver.
James BoydHe is not the author of it: the devil is, he sins from the beginning (1 John 3:8). There was no sinner before him. Set in the most exalted position in which creature was ever set, his pride rose up in rebellion against the One who had made him, and who in goodness gave him that exalted place… "You were blameless in your ways from the day that you were created, till unrighteousness was found in you." Sin began to exist in the thought of that anointed cherub.
Still a creature, and still limited
Because he was made, he can never rival the One who made him. He has no power to bring anything into being.
J. N. DarbySatan originates nothing. This is God's prerogative. The work of Satan is to mar and break down what God has wrought, when this is left, as an effect produced, to the responsibility of man. God created Adam. Satan spoiled the work through man's folly.
That limit is not only about creating. It runs through everything he is and does.
Arno Clemens GaebeleinBut caution is needed here lest powers be ascribed to Satan which he in reality does not possess. Satan is only a creature and does not share the attributes of God. He is not omnipotent; nor is he omniscient, nor omnipresent. If he displays powers it is with divine permission only.
Where the answers stop
One question remains, and it is the one most people really want settled. Here the writers refuse to guess.
F. B. HoleScripture also indicates that it was through pride that sin found a place originally with the devil (1 Tim. 3:6), and under the title "King of Tyre" we appear to get a description of Satan's original glory and irremediable fall in Ezekiel 28:11-19. But as to why God, knowing all that would ultimately be involved, ever created Satan or man, and why He permitted evil to ever invade any part of His fair creation, Scripture is silent, and we know nothing.
Summary
- Created — God made him; nothing came into being apart from the Creator, so the devil is a creature like every other.
- Good — He was not made evil. What God made was blameless from the day it was created.
- Corrupted — Pride turned him. His heart was lifted up because of his beauty, and iniquity was found in him.
- Contained — He originates nothing; he can only spoil. He is not all-powerful, all-knowing, or everywhere, and acts only by permission.
- Concealed — Why God created him at all, Scripture does not say, and neither should we.