And said, “You may come so far and no farther;
Here your surging waves will stop.”?
Job 38:6–11 Tanakh, JPS 1985
God then began to rescue the matter he had created, operating within
the limits set by the free will of his rebellious prince of this earth.
Here I rely on a traditional view of Satan—a spiritual being created
by God who had authority regarding earth and chose to use his God-
given free will to rebel. There does seem to be room to question when
this occurred, and this is crucial to my thesis. Were spiritual beings cre-
ated before the heavens and the earth? Did some of them rebel before
the creation of the heavens and the earth? Was the prince of the earth
opposed from the fi rst instant to the good creation that God wanted,
spoke and continues to speak into being?—or perhaps we should also say,
made possible, in spite of his appointed prince’s rebellion, and continues
to make possible through his Word. There seems no strong reason to insist
that material reality and spiritual reality were created at the same time. I
am speculating here that spiritual reality was created fi rst. This seems to
agree with Levenson’s thesis. 18 Warren 19 also leaves open the timing of the
appearance of evil, though she seems reluctant to see evil in as concrete a
way as, for example, Boyd, 20 arguing for something less noisy and abuse-
prone than warfare language and a quasi-realness for evil that makes it
qualitatively different from goodness.
As for Yong’s proposal 21 that spiritual beings (other than the Trinity)
only exist if only in part because they emerge from something created by
God (supervening upon some thing, some one), it may well be read in
line with his more recent thinking, that the spiritual opposer of God that
we call the Satan supervened upon the very creation from the beginning
lending a malignant tone to an otherwise good thing. 22 So, while coinci-
dent with material creation, spiritual entities immediately emerged from
it, from the fi rst instant. The rebellious ones had signifi cant negative effect
on the outcome from that fi rst instant. This, in time and in turn, led to
the emergence from human beings of negative spirit as well. The serpent
in Genesis 1 strongly suggests that existing malignant spirit had something
to do with the negative spirit that emerged from fi rst and subsequent
humans.
Or the view of Yong could be combined with that of Horace Bushnell 23
to yield an understanding of opposition to creation that might well sit
comfortably with what Walter Wink proposes in his world systems model. 24
LET THERE BE LIFE!: TOWARD A HERMENEUTIC OF BIOLOGICAL... 305
