Chereads / ...and there was War in Heaven / Chapter 18 - The Idea of Evil

Chapter 18 - The Idea of Evil

So it was that half of the angels were cast out of heaven. I begged, and I pleaded, but I was given no quarter. I had made my decision back in the hallway with Zeruel.

Down we were sent, into the only prison powerful enough to contain even the likes of Lucifer. Into the garden of Eden we tumbled, all of us. From there, it was all too simple to confuse the mind of that simpleton that God had made from Adam's rib, out of pity. Despite the ample warnings that God gave, Eve ate that fruit the very first chance she got!

Curiosity, I fear, was the downfall of mankind.

Thus did death enter into the world of man, and Eve spread this poison to her husband, Adam. He knew what she had done was evil, for God had warned him as much as her, but he loved his wife and decided to consume the poison without being tempted by sin. He had need of a different lure—Loneliness.

Abel was the first man that we permitted to slip between our fingers. Cain had jumped the gun and killed him before we had a chance to get him to sin; which was our failure—but we got better with time and practice.

On and on, time went ticking forward inexorably. We became more and more adept at leaving small clues in the minds of our playthings, until it seemed like our voice was nothing more than their thoughts themselves.

By the time Noah came around, we had very nearly won according to the terms of our agreement. God's faithful was down to one family. All we had to do was wait for them to die!

Then, God saw that we were intermingling our thoughts within their heads, and decided that was grounds enough for a reset. He was so furious and jealous over the choices of humanity, that he tore open the very firmament in the sky!

I have never seen such death on a massive scale as this. Out of the many billions of souls on this world at the time, God saved four men—Noah, and his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth—their wives, and their children. I tell you, I was bored out of my mind in these days.

Fortunately, Someone got to Noah after the flood had ended and got he guy drunk enough to sleep out in the nude, and Ham his son saw him before running to warn his brothers. The senile old man cursed Ham and all of his descendants for that, so we were back in business!

After that, they stuck together in faith, and were patient and meek and wholesome for a long time yet. It seemed like God's hail mary pass had worked, and we wouldn't even need to wait for the messiah to come and end the trial period. The more they did righteous things, the more they were blessed! It was so simple that a child could follow it.

This continued until the great family of humankind grew so powerful that someone had the bright idea to get them to build a tower tall enough to break out of this place. It would have worked, too!—the latent power that resonates within His image is a powerful thing to waste.

So, God fired back with the idea of language. Which was fair, we were kind of bending the rules to our favor. Now all of humanity was forever incapable of working together, as they each gathered in tribes of their own kind.

There would never again be peace for the entirety of human history.

There were a few more key events, but one of my favorites was the invention of other religions. It was an elegant solution. If men doubted the very existence of God, then how could they obey His laws?

God answered this with His "chosen people." All that meant was a descendant of Sham who was really loyal to Him happened to run into one of the angels doing some kind of business, and fought him to a stand-still. I guess that made him worthy of having the messiah to be born through his lineage, somehow.

God formed a covenant with the man, named Abraham, and so we focused all our efforts on shaking them up. Everyone else was already caught in our trap because they fell for the great lie that we didn't even exist.

Our word became natural law, because nobody valued life more than the short-term thrills we could give them. It was addictive, and it was only getting sweeter. Time marched on, and millions died. We hit the entire African steppe with a six-year famine to break their spirits, but God somehow leaked them insider info.

The were safe in Egypt, for the time being, so we slowly removed the memory of how instrumental they were in the nation's supremacy from the minds of the Pharaohs; transfixed by the vision of their dead stone idols. It was so hilarious to hear them pray to slabs of marble that they carved themselves, based on fake deities that they made up out of nowhere; while the very subjects they tormented beneath their boots with slavery were in contact with the only Seat of Power under the sun... aside from us, of course.

Our fun couldn't last for long, though. God pulled them out of there in His traditional exhibitionist display of tremendous power. You'd think that hailstorms of fire and a Nile of blood and a path opening up in the middle of a freaking river would be too obviously supernatural to get forgotten with time, but somehow we still managed to trick the guys into praying to a block of gold once their prophet's back was turned.

It was so easy! These stupid kids could not tell the difference! It was so obviously in the bag, that we lost track of time as they marched into the Promised Lands completely unopposed. Before we knew it, nearly two-thousand years had passed, and the messiah had already been born!

That was it, you know. The deadline we set from the very beginning. God's great bet was that He could carve off a piece of Himself, and put it in a human body. If He could bear to spend the entirety of His natural life in our world, and not sin once? Well, that would be proof, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that His way was better.

So, we called His bluff! At any point, He could give up and go back to heaven. I never imagined that He would actually die.