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Question 26

Hi, Father If no creature can behold God in His essence or nature, then what made Lucifer and his angels think they even had the slightest chance to succeed in a rebellion against God? Since as one theologian, Francopolous in his book "on the Orthodox Christian faith" put it, all of creation constitutes one big zero before God. Also, angels know more than we do!

 

 

Answer to Question 26

 

 I’m not sure if I can answer this, but knowledge of God is limited to all creatures. Angels may know more than men, especially on matters concerning the spiritual world, but they do not know everything. Just like men they do not understand the mysteries of salvation. Lucifer knew God in his energy or to put it simply he knew God according to how God had revealed himself to the angels, but had no way of knowing God in his nature or that there was a God beyond what he could see and understand. His pride and arrogance blinded him to see that he was a creature created by God. Also keep in mind that as created beings, we can only explain what we see, hear or understand, by other things in our earthly life. We cannot begin to describe the things that belong to the spiritual world. The Bible writers when faced with this problem described things by using anthropomorphic images. Thus it talks about God and that the angels appeared before him like human people would present themselves before an earthly king. We are told that Lucifer rebelled against God and that there was a war in heaven, but we should not understand this war as we would an earthly war. Certainly Lucifer exercised his gift of free will and chose not to be obedient to God’s will, but why and how this came to pass is beyond our human knowledge. Maybe in the eternal life some of these questions will be made known to us.