There’s a question people always seem to ask in a discourse about Christianity: why did God allow Satan to exist and tempt people, causing all sorts of suffering? Isn’t it God’s choice then, the outcome being his responsibility as well?
The Christians then talk about free will until they are blue in the face, but I have a somewhat different perspective. You see, there’s a thing God and Satan actually agree on, and it’s that undeserved salvation is abominable.
Satan had terrible motives hidden behind the apparent noble motives, but it’s like American financed opposition in some country America wants to destroy. They always protest against corruption, nepotism, and all kinds of scandals in order to gather support, but their actual cause is to destroy the country and allow the West to come in, break it up and sell it for raw material. That’s why Satan seemed to object to all kinds of beings inhabiting heaven, that would fail even the lightest imaginable test were it administered. Of course, he wanted to destroy everybody by making a test nobody could pass, but that’s a different matter. His nominal cause – pressure testing souls to see if they actually want God, or if they actually just want to feel good because that’s the consequence of God’s proximity – was something God seems to agree with.
Sure, they do it for different reasons. Satan sees beings who are of higher stature than him and feels jealousy, and wants to find a way to degrade and destroy them, and embarrass God for elevating them over him in the first place. God wants to be surrounded by beings who would be faithful to him even through greatest of hardships, instead of betraying him at the first sign of discomfort. Basically, what God wants from souls is similar to the situation a very wealthy man would want from his wife. If everybody knows he’s wealthy, all kinds of gold diggers will try to be his wife, but you don’t want to marry those because they will leave you as soon as they think the money is going to run out, someone better came along, or they think they can gain more from divorce than from marriage. What he would want to do is create a scenario that would filter out all the gold diggers, and leave only those who are there only for him, and would stay with him no matter what.
So, both God and Satan agreed that there needs to be some kind of a stress test. Satan wanted to make it a test everybody fails. God wanted to make it a test the truly loyal ones will pass, and not only that, but make it actually rewarding for them, and not just a terrible ordeal they were subjected to for no good reason, only to return to what they had before. No, there had to be a potential reward to match the potential doom.
So, this world is created by Satan in order to destroy you by testing you in a way you are not likely to pass, because the assumption is that you will want to choose the pleasant and the comfortable instead of God, and you will seek God in the direction of more power, more wealth, more pleasure, and that’s where the worldly traps are. You are not expected to recognize God without all the external things expected to accompany him. You’re not expected to recognize him if he were a shepherd or a carpenter, because you look for a king or a billionaire.
The trap looks terrible, because it bifurcates the essence from the energies that are expected to accompany it, and forces you to choose, with fatal outcomes if you choose wrong. Satan created this and thought nobody will pass, and was happy with his work. God saw this and thought, if someone passes this level of deception, they will indeed have proven themselves worthy and reliable, worthy of highest power and authority. Interestingly, the souls who looked at the test all thought it was easy and they could all pass. They all thought they could recognize God anywhere and remain loyal through anything, especially some illusion.
There were rules, of course. Both God and Satan were allowed to tempt and provide choices, but not directly influence outcomes. God wasn’t allowed to manifest Divine nature in a way so compelling that it would remove all possibility of doubt. Satan wasn’t allowed to use his authority over the world in order to kill. God is allowed to enter the simulation in order to present himself as a choice, but he needs to do so in ways that divorce him from his power, that would otherwise influence beings. Both shared profound contempt for spiritual gold diggers.
Satan thought he managed to hide his true intent from God. No, he didn’t. It’s just that God had his own plans and this seems to have played right into them. Also, Satan kind of had a valid point, the way all those colour revolution people kind of have a valid point about corruption. God’s way of filtering souls by allowing them to choose greater participation in virtues, but without a stress test, isn’t really effective. Basically, if you’re rich and handsome, how do you find a wife that isn’t a gold digger? All the gold diggers will swear they want you for your soul and your sense of humour and spiritual kinship or whatever. What you actually want is the one who would choose you over rich people even if you were a shepherd or a carpenter, and when she makes her choice, you remove the illusion.
God doesn’t like fair-weather friends. Satan is an envious bastard who will say everybody who loves God is a fair-weather friend. Both agreed there needs to be some kind of a test. Both agreed it needs to be hard and realistic. Where they didn’t agree, they agreed to limit both of their ability to influence outcomes.
And so, here we are.
I understand that Satan's alleged intention is to test souls in a particularly difficult environment. But even those souls, close to God, had to somehow earn that status, probably through certain hardships and faithfulness during them.
Did Satan spread the story that this was not enough and that particularly great hardships were needed? And how is it possible that he managed to hide his true intention and feelings? I can sometimes see other people's intentions and feelings clearly here, but how is it possible that his own were hidden for some reason from everybody and for a very long time? Did someone enable him to do this or were there some rules of the game?
Well, that's the trick – no hardship was involved because that idea didn't come up yet. There was no way to tell if someone was attracted to God or his energies, because the methods and outcomes would be the same.
Initially, I think, everybody saw what his agenda was, but God still allowed this thing to proceed because, likely, it fit into his plans. Later, Satan had the Jewel make a "pocket Universe" for him, the size of a house, where he could scheme and plan whatever he wanted and nobody could see inside, and he also did something to hide everything when he was outside, probably left his memories of his plans and ideas inside and reconnected with them when he was back. Basically, it was pretty easy to get a very good idea about what he was doing and why. However, proving it to the point of actualization of karmic consequences was a different matter. That became possible when he forgot himself and did his actual thinking on the outside while killing me.