O Death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? (I Cor. 15).
When our forefathers heeded to the voice of the enemy of their souls, death came to them as a curse and was carried out to all born of men. Disguising himself through a serpent, who was more subtle and crafty than any living creature of the field which the Lord God had made, (Gen. 3:1), he tempted Eve to doubt God’s reason for not letting them eat the fruit from the tree of the middle of the garden. He succeeded when Eve fell to his temptation. The seed of death entered into the world and from then on, humankind was subjected to condemnation of physical and eternal death, with Satan their master. However, in spite of all his power, Satan is resistible. James wrote, “Be subject to God, resist the devil [stand firm against him] and he will flee from you” (4:7). God has provided us His spiritual armor in order for us to wrestle with Satan. In the epistle to the Ephesians, Paul admonishes us to put on the armor of God, for we are not wrestling with flesh and blood but with Satan and his hosts. Satan manifests himself as an angel of light, changing his appearance in the auspice of good, when he is the prince of darkness, according to Scripture (Eph. 6). Satan is a liar, a deceiver, a tempter and an accuser of men. He was not happy when God created men; so, he became men’s enemy with the purpose to destroy them physically and eternally. His sting of death has taken many with him to hell, because men rejected God, choosing him, instead.
Satan was called the anointed guardian cherub. We read this in the Bible about him: “You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering, the carnelian, topaz, jasper, chrysolite, beryl, onyx, sapphire, carbuncle, and emerald; and your settings and your sockets and engravings were wrought in gold, On the day that you were created they were prepared; You were the anointed cherub that covers with overshadowing, and I set you so. You were upon the holy mountain of God; you walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire [like the paved work of gleaming sapphire stone upon which the God of Israel walked on Mount Sinai].” (Ezek. 28:13-14). What more did this angel want? He wanted to be God. In his pride, Satan rose against God and corrupted the beautiful garden God had created. Not only the garden, but the entire world. The Bible says, “All have sinned and became short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). Separated from God and His mercy, goodness, and love, men were destined to eternal death, for there was none that had not sinned. Men’s heart is perverse and contrary to God’s laws. The Prophet Jeremiah said, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and it is exceedingly perverse and corrupt and severely, mortally sick! Who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9). The world in its entirety suffered the consequences of sin. It left a stain only YAHSHUA could wash away. The stain of physical and eternal death; nature was also subjected to decay as Paul so said in Romans chapter 8:19-22: “For even the whole creation waits expectantly and longs earnestly for God’s sons to be made known, for the creation was subjected to frailty, not because of some intentional fault on its part, by by the will of Him Who so subjected it with the hope that nature itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and corruption into the glorious freedom of God’s children. We know that the whole creation has been moaning together in the pains of labor until now.”
Light from the Word 