Reluctant Demon (23 page)

"Yes, my son?"

"Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?"

Abraham answered, "God Himself will provide the lamb." He turned his eyes upward as if hoping every word he had said would be true.

Exasperated by the tempter demon's failure, Satan screamed to the spirits of fear that hovered around Earth, waiting to inhabit humans. "Go for Isaac!"

The earthbound spirits were not accustomed to hearing from Satan himself, and at first they swirled about like a whirlwind in their confusion, doing nothing more than colliding with one another. At last, they organized their attack and surrounded Isaac, looking for an entry point.

"Where is he vulnerable?" one asked another.

"Did Abraham ever abuse him?" No one could remember such a thing.

"What about lies? Abraham must have lied about something. All parents lie," said another frantically.

"Did Abraham fail him or disappoint him when he was little?" said another, grasping for anything.

They were desperate to find an emotional scar in Isaac's soul. There had to be a legal entry point before the spirits of fear could overtake him and cause him to cry for mercy.

"Better yet," one hissed. "All together, as one, let's assault him with fear. Then he is sure to turn on his father; perhaps kill him."

It could have worked out that way. Isaac was taller and heavier than Abraham. He could easily have overcome the old man.

The fear spirits continued to spin and poke, but they could not find a point of entry anywhere in Isaac.

I could have told them so, but no one would have listened to me. Satan spun on his tail in his fury at their inability to penetrate Isaac's trust in his father, but the truth was that Abraham had never given Isaac any reason to fear his father's judgment or to doubt his love.

So in the face of suspicious and frightening evidence that something very bad was about to happen, Isaac continued to walk with his father up the mountain.

When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar and arranged the wood on it.

Isaac held out his arms while his father bound his son, then Isaac lay down on the stones.

"Father," Isaac began, "is there any other way?"

Abraham's eyes filled with tears as he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son.

Suddenly a loud voice from heaven called out to him.

"Abraham! Abraham!"

"Here I am."

"Do not lay a hand on the boy," God said. "Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear Me, because you have not withheld from Me your only son."

Abraham looked up, and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He untied Isaac, and the two of them took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering.

God reiterated His covenant promises over Abraham and Isaac while Satan returned to his previous state of moaning, wailing, and accusing God of having broken some kind of rule.

"He told Abraham to kill Isaac," he yelled at me.

"Technically speaking," I answered, "He did not. He told Abraham to sacrifice his son, which he did. God then exercised His prerogative to provide a different sacrifice."

"You should have anticipated this," one of the frustrated demons said to Satan. Realizing his extraordinarily poor choice of words, he attempted to back up. "Not you, my lord, of course, I meant him." He pointed to me.

Needing someone to blame, they swung at me at once, but I dropped to the floor quickly, so they ended up striking one another instead. The fighting escalated into a brawl between angry demons. I was no longer important to them, so it was easy to crawl out of the den under the claw fight taking place among them. I returned to my perch and thought about what had happened.

"How long will God persist in this notion that humanity can redeem what the angels lost?" I asked myself as I paced back and forth on my branch, calculating. "How many people are on Earth now?" I wondered. "Not that it's important, because whatever the number is, Satan has more souls than God has."

Then I found myself thinking more about Abraham and this thing called faith.

"What is faith?" I mused. I failed to notice one of the other demons had tired of the fight and was standing near me.

"It is an emotion," he answered. "That is all humans know. They are governed by their feelings."

"That cannot be it," I responded, actually glad to have someone to discuss this with. "If it had been emotion, things would have gone exactly the other way. Abraham's love for Isaac would have caused him to spare his son at any cost."

"Then it is some kind of special knowledge," the demon said.

"Maybe it's like foreknowledge; the human knows in advance how things are going to turn out, so there's no risk in obeying God."

"That's probably it. Otherwise, why would Abraham have been willing to take the chance that God might really have intended for him to kill Isaac?" Then I thought some more about it.

"That can't be it either," I said, somewhat disappointed we had not figured it out.

"It's obvious God was testing something in Abraham, so if Abraham had really known in advance that nothing bad could happen, it would not have been much of a test, now, would it?"

The demon grew bored and flew away, leaving me alone to ponder the idea of faith. Whatever faith was, it had to be something Abraham clung to so strongly that he would risk his life and the life of his son.

"Faith must be more powerful than hope," I thought.

"It must be more like belief."

My observations of humanity convinced me that when faced with real challenge and real consequences, you humans always act on the basis of what you believe is true, not what you hope is true. What was it Abraham believed so strongly?

"Why, of course." I finally figured it out. "Abraham believed in the character of God. Faith is as simple as believing God is who He says He is and will do what He says He will do."

"Oh, my." I exhaled slowly. "If humans ever learned they need not fear God because His character is all good and His power and His love for them are without limit and are unchanging, why, they would never fear Satan again. Earth would be lost to him forever."

I promised myself I would never think such a thought again. The very idea stirred something frightening in whatever sort of soul there might be in me. Satan was horrible. But he was all I had. If Satan lost Earth, where would I go? What would I do? God had cast me out of heaven with the rebels, and I could never return.

"God!" I screamed into the vastness of nothing. "I believe You are who You say You are. I believe You will do what You say You will do. Isn't that faith enough? Why is it enough for humans but not for me? Why don't I get a second chance?"

For the first time in my existence, I collapsed in a heap and cried.

CHAPTER 26

I CONTINUED TO OBSERVE
human history for many generations. It got somewhat boring because it became absolutely predictable. After Abraham died, Satan was frantic about what Isaac might become, but the truth be told, he led a somewhat ordinary life.

He married a woman named Rebekah, who had trouble conceiving, as had his mother, Sarah. Figure the odds on that, but that was the way it was. Before Abraham died, Isaac went to talk to him about the problem and to seek his advice on their childless state. Abraham was quick to tell him what was positively
not
a good course of action.

Eventually, Rebekah had twins, Esau and Jacob, who could have been poster boys for sibling rivalry. Those two never could get along, and Isaac and Rebekah did not help the matter by choosing sides. Isaac loved Esau, and Rebekah loved Jacob. Isaac and Esau were men of action while Rebekah and Jacob were schemers. In my observation of the human race, schemers win out every time.

Jacob, consistent with my theory on schemers, managed to finagle the family blessing away from Esau and married two women, Leah and Rachel. Between them, they had twelve sons and one daughter. God changed Jacob's name to Israel along the way. God was always changing names—no one knows why—but it seems important to the story to mention it.

Eventually, Israel's sons would become the leaders of twelve tribes. They would fight with the world and fight with each other. They would sin, repent, and sin again.

God would punish them, and the whole cycle would start over.

Satan was unconcerned with what he saw happening since none of these boys showed any real aptitude for redeeming the fallen Earth. The most promising one was named Joseph. He made Satan nervous for a time there, but at the end of it all, the Israelites (that is what we started calling them when we weren't calling them Hebrews) found themselves in slavery to Egypt as a result of one of Joseph's ideas that seemed good in the beginning but went very bad at the end. The Hebrews were really in slavery to Satan; Egypt was just his cover story.

For four hundred years they were in bondage, and it was brutal. They were treated like animals. There were so many of them that Pharaoh was happy when some of them were killed during their labors. The truth was that he feared their great numbers, although they were no more dangerous than a flock of frightened sheep. After the first one hundred years, they stopped trying to escape altogether. The other demons had begun to complain.

"This is no fun. They don't even try to get away. There's no sport in it," the torturing prince complained. (By this time, Satan had assigned specific roles to the worst of the demons, which made it easier to know who was in charge of what.)

"I liked it better when they used to cry to God," the demon in charge of religion replied. "It was exhilarating to see their agony when they realized no one was going to answer."

In one way or another, every tribe in Egypt was in Satan's hands. The demons didn't bother chasing after the souls we already had, and the only ones we didn't have were the Hebrews. For the demons, the only fun in the whole thing was the deception and the capture.

After humans were caught, the game was over as far as the rank-and-file demon was concerned. The only one who got any pleasure out of it was Satan. He received the worship he craved. None of the rest of us got anything like that.

For the demons, the world had become pretty ho-hum, except for the torture of the Hebrews, and that wasn't really any fun either—no payoff. The demons never could capture their souls. Deception loses some of its zing if there isn't a prize at the end, which with these strange humans, there was not.

The Hebrews were the only remnant of the human race God seemed to care anything about, and they had simply given up. They did not run, and they would not fight.

It had been four hundred Earth years since God abandoned them, and now they were enslaved to us through the Egyptians, at least physically. I suppose I don't really know whether God abandoned them or not, but Satan insisted that He had, so all of us lesser beings, not daring to suggest that his evilness might be wrong, went right along with it. They were born slaves, and they would die slaves, and not one of them expected anything else.

Four centuries is a very long time to keep alive some vague memory of a God who is supposed to be able to rescue His people. They had no textbooks. They had no religious services. They had mud and straw to make bricks and a pitiful existence to look forward to, the same as their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers had before them. They had legends of Abraham and Isaac, but did these people really exist? How could any of them know for certain?

The Israelites had become slaves and had no reason to hope for anything better. They had no cause to believe a deliverer would come to them by the hand of this same God who had allowed their disobedient ancestors to go into captivity and whose name no one could remember.

They had no reason to call to a God who had done nothing on their behalf for four hundred thirty (to be exact) years. No reason to believe any of it.

Nevertheless, they did. They continued to tell one another that somehow, some way, someday, someone was coming to free them from Egypt.

In the midst of their misery, the population of the Hebrew slave nation continued to grow until at last Satan succeeded in terrifying Pharaoh with the idea of what their great numbers could accomplish if they rallied against Egypt. Pharaoh himself ordered enforced population control.

"Throw every Hebrew boy into the Nile, but let every girl live."

Satan delighted in the slaughter of children—always has. Perhaps it was because he never forgot God's promise so long ago: the seed of the woman would crush his head. Maybe that is why he tried to kill them so many times in history.

His lust for human blood was satisfied daily as he used the Egyptians to torture the Hebrews. He desperately hated that particular breed of human more than the others.

We knew why. He could not get their souls, and he could not wipe them out. In spite of possessing the souls of all of the other people on Earth, Satan was still not satisfied, and he obsessed about the Hebrews. Of course, no one would admit it, but the demons just did not get it. Hebrews were simply not worth it.

It had to be that Satan was still fixated on God's promise to Abraham about his descendants being more numerous than the sand and the stars and all that nonsense. Maybe it wasn't nonsense at the time, but it certainly looked that way now. There was no possibility these pitiful slaves could resurrect their race to fulfill the promise God had given to Abraham. That deal was dead.

No one talked about it anymore.

It wasn't hard for him to cause a great lust for the blood of babies to sweep the land. People, who normally would never have considered doing such a thing, reported the births of Hebrew boys and then assisted in their destruction.

"It's for the common good," they would say to one another. "Better to die as an infant than to grow up in slavery and unwanted." They would nod and agree that if it were the law, it must be right.

I had no expectations that things were going to change for Earth. I wondered if God might be considering conceding defeat and getting on with His next project.