Is There an "Ultimate Evil" in Christianity?

Is there really? I mean if you actually read the Bible, Satan isn't the God of Evil people make him out to be. He's weak as hell. Weaker than humans actually.

So is there actually an Ultimate Evil in the Bible? Or is it a series of loosely connected evil forces neither of which are literally described as "Evil Incarnate"?

In the bible, Satan is the "god" of evil in a sense; he is the undisputed leader of all demons (fallen angels in general and/or malicious fallen angels in particular), the enemy of God and humankind, the ruler of the world in its sinful state. Even if you don't count him as a "god", he is still the ultimate evil in the universe, the source of all sin (disobedience to God). That being said, I'm not sure your question belongs in this section unless you're using these concepts for a story.

edited 14th Apr '16 6:55:38 PM by nekomoon14

Did you get that info from the more modern depictions of Satan? No offense.

Satan is the driving force behind the events described in revelation, in which Earth and Heaven are destroyed and remade. When the dead, disobedient and the world of the dead itself are thrown into the fires of destruction. In that sense, Satan is the ultimate evil of Christianity, he's The Big Bad of the final book of the Bible...if you take Revelation literally and don't just see it as a critique of the Roman Empire thinly veiled with world ending imagery and threats of curses.

Otherwise, no. Most of the prior books have entirely unrelated conflicts, if there is conflict at all.

If evil is the opposite of good, and that dichotomy drives the conflict that is essential to any story... then the Bible has an "Ultimate Evil", and the religions that follow it miss this.

Assuming actual free will, beyond the temptations of Heaven and Hell, then the people who drive the story are both the good and evil the story requires to progress. (If they don't have free will in the Bible, then you have a bunch of marionettes who commit good or evil deeds based on the whims of the puppet-master.)

Satan as the Big Bad of Christianity isn't exactly a modern thing. In the Gospels he's clearly an enemy of Christ and is implied, if not outright stated, to rule the world (he offers to give Jesus dominion over the entire Earth if he worships him).

There's also mentions of "The Devil" throughout the Bible, who's clearly something along the lines of a Big Bad.

edited 15th Apr '16 6:37:20 AM by Protagonist506

Satan, pretty much. He's the Big Bad, at least in troper terms, of Christianity so to speak. The Big Good is still way bigger than the Big Bad, but it doesn't get that much further than that.

Actually if you think about it, why would Satan rule all devils? They are rebellious beings.

Also, no, there is no evil that can actually match God in power, sure it can match angels, but in the end evil will lose.

Demons are rebellious towards God and humankind, not Satan.

Being less powerful than God doesn’t invalidate Satan’s status as the ultimate source and ruler of all evil. It’s not a question of power but of status.

Keep in mind that Satan is usually considered to be very much an example of The Man Is Sticking It to the Man. He's more along the lines of an Evil Chancellor who wants the throne for himself.

Jesus implies that Satan is the ruler of the world at John 12:31, 14:30, and 16:11. Paul implies that he is god of the world at 2 Cor. 4:4. However, Satan is not god in the same sense that Yahweh is God. He is still the Big Bad of The Bible, though.

edited 15th Apr '16 5:14:24 PM by shiro_okami

Everyone seems to think all devils would follow Satan when that just doesn't make sense. If anything many would resent him for tricking them into a war with heaven which got them exiled.

They are not "all" devils. The Bible only mentions one Devil, Satan (for some odd reason, despite both of these being titles, Devil retained the definite article while Satan had its article dropped). The rest are called demons. And they were not tricked, they got exiled because of their own action of getting horny for some earth women.

the Bible never uses the term , not once. Devils is used though.

They weren't "tricked". They chose to rebel against God. Even good angels don't like humans; it's their love of God that makes them accept humanity's place at the center of God's heart.

However, you could decide that devils in your work are a fractious collection of rival kingdoms, principalities, etc. You could decide that Satan has been exiled from the company of the other devils due to his "treachery".

You can do what you want in fiction, but the bible says what it says.

Incorrect. I don't recall anywhere in The Bible where the plural of Devil is used, it's always in singular form. And the word demon is found several times throughout the New Testament (Matthew 8:31 is just one example).

Did you actually read The Bible or are you getting your info from somewhere else, because it does not seem to be reliable.

Where did you get the idea that good angels don't like humans?

edited 15th Apr '16 7:32:09 PM by shiro_okami

Satan would be the "Ultimate Evil" in the sense of the highest ranking creature of darkness, but the OP seems to be asking in the sense of Ultimate Evil trope-wise, a larger, ill-defined entity that is the darkness behind every problem. In a way, Anti-God.

In that sense, no, there isn't, but you could build up a compelling case that sin itself (or more specifically, Original Sin) would be the Ultimate Evil of the Bible (in the sense of "shadowy force bleeding its influence throughout the story"). In broad terms every single conflict and issue in the Bible is directly caused or related to human desire and capacity to sin against God (ergo Original Sin). So if you reinterpret things a bit, sin itself is the Ultimate Evil of the Bible.

Not so much dislike as don't care about. I worded it wrong. They don't seem to mind being commanded to slaughter people, though.

edited 15th Apr '16 9:06:38 PM by nekomoon14

As I understand the canonical chronology, Satan didn't fall from grace until well after man's banishment from the Garden of Eden. While he'd often touted as the Author of All Evil, clearly this cannot be the case, since the Original Sin happened without him. But you know who was there? The Serpent. Lowly little talking snake that nobody ever gives much thought. Though it is assumed to have been created alongside the other animals in the Garden, this is never explicitly stated to be the case, and nothing is known of what became of it after the indecent at the Tree in the Center of the Garden, but we do know that it was single-handedly responsible for engineering the Original Sin, the first temptation from which all evil and suffering on earth is said to derive. The Serpent's actual role, if any, in the overall cosmology is never expounded upon by any canonical source, so this is a pure theological epileptic tree on my part, but that seems like a mighty big accomplishment in pure evil for a mere garden variety garden snake.

Speaking of which, a common thread people love to pull at is why God created the Tree in the Center of the Garden Which Bore the Fruit of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the first place, if He knew it was harmful and was only going to forbid the Garden's only two residents from eating from it. The Tree's only purpose for existing seems to be as an object of temptation, which kinda runs counter-purpose to what God was trying to do. But it suddenly occurs to me that the Bible never actually says He was the one who created it.

Satan is weak because he's a patsy. True to the name of Azazel, he was just angel set up to take the fall. A nice, juicy red herring pushed from the heavens with all the brilliance of a falling star, all the better to draw everyone's attention away as the real Author of Evil slithers away right under our noses.

Also, I'm calling dibs on this idea.

edited 16th Apr '16 3:48:19 AM by BrokenEye

The book of Revelation implies that Satan was the serpant.

Leviathan could be considered a Bigger Bad, as according to out-of-date caananite myths he created the world by killing Leviathan. Essentially, YHWH falcon-punched Cthulhu and forged the Earth from his corpse.

Heavily implies but does outright state. Satan is a most ancient serpent. The problem here is that Revelation Satan is a multiheaded dragon, and the Greek "Wyrm" worked just as well for dragons as it did common snakes. Genesis itself is very much against the idea that the serpent was Satan. It was clearly just an animal there, an intelligent, manipulative one, but not a celestial being.

I took it as the Eden serpent was acting as an agent of Satan. Satan is a job title, meaning accuser, and the in Job it was shown the accuser is not above resorting to entrapment to create guilty parties where there are none. Why Satan would need to delegate the task, I don't know, but screwing people into curses and possible damnation is pretty much his MO in everything relating to the Tanak(Old Testament) and New Testament.

Still, there are the monsters of The Bottomless Pit, some of which are implied to be the most powerful evils ever, one of which is let out by Satan in Revelation. There is also "the beast" which cannot be defeated by human power in The Book Of Daniel(the Angels apparently can beat it and several other trouble makers but were/will be forbidden from interfering because God's apparently a glory hog and or will be making a point beyond my limited human perspective)

And of course, Leviathan and Behemoth. And The Rahab, though God's apparently killed whatever it is by the time Israel returns to the promised land. There's also the woman in the jar who is wickedness. The point being, if you read between the lines in the Bible, there are a lot of supernatural nasty things(haven't even touched on the Apocrypha, Enoch, Dead Sea scroll ect). The book doesn't go into much detail about them because it's not supposed to be about cosmology, demon hunting or horror stories, but about the history of the Jewish people, at first, then why we need to believe in this Jesus fellow. Still, Satan isn't implied to be behind all of them, he's simply supposed to be the last one that matters before this current world is destroyed and replaced with a better one. In fact, if you're going by the trope page description of something really bad but never actually depicted, there are several better candidates than Satan simply because the Bible, by its very nature, isn't too interested in describing them unless it somehow relates to events in Jewish history and or relates to Jesus. Satan tries to entrap John and opposes Jesus, fitting both categories, thus we know the most about him(which isn't much but enough to disqualify him from "unseen ultimate evil" status)

It's more like Satan was talking through the animal, making it say what he wanted. Also, a lot of the monsters in Daniel and Revelation are actually just part of symbolic visions, rather than the text supposing that they actually exist. And the beasts in the Book of Job may have referred to normal animals.

edited 16th Apr '16 3:28:28 PM by shiro_okami

The serpent thing always seemed like a retcon. Revelations is pretty ambiguous on how literal it was taken, but I think that's the first indication of connecting him with the Fall of Man. I guess it could make sense if you reason that the timeless nature of God's dominion meant Satan's fall was retroactive, but I'm pretty sure that's not what they were going through. Our current understanding of the Devil seems like a Composite Character of the Serpent, Lucifer(which is a more allegorical reference to Nebuchadnezzar) and Job!Satan with the Dragon of Revelations being the glue that holds him together

Another way to look at it is that Satan isn't actually a specific individual, but a title. It does mean both "the accuser" and "the adversary." My interpretation is that the famed Lucifer/Serpent of Eden was the original angel to hold the job, with the one in the OT(like the Book of Job) being his successor. So you have the Devil, who was the OG Satan until the Battle of Heaven and became the Big Bad, and the one from the Book of Job/much of the Old Testament, who got Put on a Bus in the New Testament. Which honestly feels like this is something more preachers should take, since to me at least it makes more sense

Leviathan seems like Early-Installment Weirdness. In much of the early OT, God seems less of an omnipotent Powers That Be, and more of a Physical God who a few times felt like he had rivals. Kind of like Zeus, except more responsible and far less horny. The concept behind a primordial force like Leviathan may have been their idea of an origin story for God, but by the time Christianity was in sight they'd decided that God was this all-powerful, ever-present force and thus making this pre-universal chaos irrelevant.

In other words, your Satan can be Morgoth or Sauron.

And your God might still have PTSD from battling Ungoliant, I mean Leviathan

edited 21st Apr '16 10:03:41 AM by nekomoon14

I would have to disagree. Satan and Devil are both titles, but to say that it was actually a job that God gave rather puts God in a bad light. It does not make sense that God would have an adversary on purpose. And even as early as Exodus, God is shown to easily dominate any rival power, not to mention the creation account in Genesis. God was omnipotent right from the first chapter.

Also, you have to consider that thematically The Bible tends to reveal things in progression, such as Jesus' life giving new meaning to many passages in the OT. When Satan the Devil is called the original serpent in Revelation, it is not a retcon but rather more like revealing an identity that was previously hidden. Also note that this was not the only time that the Devil was connected to the events in Eden, Jesus himself also makes a similar implication.