Reluctant Demon (11 page)

She could barely assimilate the idea that this man upon whom she had depended, believed, and loved was now willing to sacrifice her to the certain wrath of God.

An awful thing happened in that moment for humanity. A breach occurred between men and women that has never been successfully mended. Satan would nest forever in that breach. Both of them were truly horrified when they realized that their enticer ridiculed them in the presence of God.

"Kill them," Satan ranted to God. "They defied You like I told You they would. Destroy them for their ambition. Just like You did it to me, now do it to them."

God's eyes blazed as He turned from Adam and Eve and faced Satan, who stopped ranting and fell down under the weight of His gaze, laying still on the ground in front of Him.

When I saw the wrath in God's eyes, I was too terrified to continue watching. I tucked my head under my wing and pretended I hadn't seen a thing.

CHAPTER 1 3

I TRIED HUMMING A
tune so I would not hear what God said to the serpent. " H m m . . . "

Humming is not a natural skill for angels, and I had a little trouble getting a rhythm for it. Finally I ran out of breath and gave up. I did not want to hear because I had no desire to be the only witness to Satan's further humiliation. When I couldn't hum any longer, I couldn't help myself. I heard every word.

God told the serpent, "Because you've done this, you're cursed beyond all cattle and wild animals, cursed to slink on your belly and eat dirt all your life."

It was amazing to see. The serpent began a meltdown before them. His legs and arms contracted, and he turned into the serpent you humans are familiar with: long, full of scales, and when he tried to speak, he could only hiss.

His teeth became fangs filled with poison—a bad idea if you ask me. The serpent wriggled violently, and I knew it was Satan trying to escape the serpent's body, but God would not let him go. He held him captive inside the snake until He finished speaking.

OK, I know I said earlier that Satan shape-shifted. It made sense at the moment, but hearing the curse made me rethink things. Maybe it was not shape-shifting I saw, but a kind of possession.

Until God spoke the curse, it had not occurred to me whether the serpent might have been complicit in some way with Satan's scheme. Otherwise, why curse a helpless animal? Before Satan seduced Adam and Eve, my guess is he first charmed the serpent to allow him to use his body.

Shape-shifting or animal possession—it doesn't really matter. The deed had been done. I thought about asking Satan about it but gave up the idea. The answer would not be worth the beating.

God continued, "I'm declaring war between you and the woman, between your offspring and hers. He'll crush your head, and you'll wound his heel."

I had already figured out that offspring had something to do with that multiply and subdue commandment from earlier. But what could God have possibly meant when He said Satan was going to have offspring? How was that going to happen? Not wanting to miss a word, I hung as far over the ledge as I dared without falling off.

I couldn't believe Satan didn't jump on that idea right away. He didn't seem one bit mystified or interested in the offspring comment as it pertained to him. God released Satan from the serpent that slithered away very quickly.

Satan pulled himself together as best he could and more or less slumped over. Unable to stand upright before God, Satan must have been truly terrified, thinking this time He would certainly destroy him completely. Otherwise, I'm sure he would have insisted on more clarity on the bizarre notion of offspring.

God surprised me when He allowed Satan to escape the garden unscathed. One might have thought the enemy of both man and God would be feeling victorious after his bloodless coup, stealing Earth from Adam and Eve.

Instead, when he summoned me to his den, he seemed nervous. He demanded I recount all that happened in the garden encounter with God. I was afraid when I realized he knew I had listened to the whole thing.

I tried to explain. "I wasn't paying that much attention. I barely heard anything."

"Liar," he shouted at me rising from his seat. I assumed the groveling position and he sat back down.

"Tell me exactly what He said. Don't change any of the words," he demanded.

I raised my head a little. "I wasn't eavesdropping, sir," I wanted to be sure he didn't think I was spying on him.

"Don't grovel, imbecile."

"Right, I just thought I should explain why I happened to overhear..."

He cut me off. "Do not think. Watch and report, nothing more."

"Yes, of course, not a problem," I quickly agreed. Then I sat very still waiting for his reply.

"Then tell me what He said, you idiot!" Clenching his claws and grinding his teeth, he shouted at me loud enough for all creation to hear. I was terribly embarrassed by it, but that did not quell his rudeness the slightest little bit. He continued, "How long must I endure your ineptitude? Just tell me what you heard Him say."

"Right, well, it was something like this," I began.

"Cursed is the ground—"

He interrupted. "Not that part, after that."

"Right," I jumped ahead, "and cursed are you above the livestock—"

"After that," he interrupted again.

"You will crawl on your belly—" before I could finish the sentence, he threw a stone right at me.

"After that, toward the end," he dropped his head to rest on his claw and waved me on with the other one.

"Oh, right, I know what part you mean." Obviously, God's comment about offspring had not gone right by him after all.

"God said He was declaring war between your offspring and the offspring of the woman." I stopped right there, thinking that was the intriguing part. But, he waved me to go still further.

"The last line, give me the last line." He sighed as if weary of the whole ordeal.

"God said something about you striking the heel of her offspring and then her offspring would stomp on your head and crush it to dust." He glared at me.

"God said He would stomp on my head?" he demanded.

"More or less," I realized I shouldn't have added my own translation. His eyes shot fire at me. I tried to amend what I said. "Actually, now as I recall, maybe it wasn't quite that." He glared at me more fiercely, and I backed up more trying not to trip over my tail.

"Now I remember," I managed to get the words out.

"It was more like her offspring will crush your head, but I'm sure He did not mean it literally."

Satan drew back and sat down on his throne, saying nothing more. I didn't know what to do, so I stood there.

He went deep into his own thoughts, and when I was sure he was no longer aware of whether I was in the room or not, I crept out as quickly and quietly as possible.

I went back to my perch to see if anyone was still in the garden. I wondered if God had destroyed Adam or Eve or both of them for their disobedience. Instead, I saw God was talking to the woman. Adam stood by; both of them looked ashamed about the whole thing, but he said nothing. I strained to listen to God's soft voice and then could not believe what I was hearing.

"Eve," God said in the most tender tone. "You sinned against Me. Why?"

"The serpent beguiled me, and I believed him," Eve whispered, her eyes full of sorrow at what she had done.

Then God turned to Adam. "Adam, you sinned against Me, knowing full well what you were doing. Then you hid from Me and blamed Eve for your actions." God's voice was quiet but stern.

Adam shuffled his feet in the leaves and shifted his weight uncomfortably, but he did not reply.

God continued to speak to the man. "Your intentional, unrepentant sin prevents you from remaining in Eden.

I told you to obey Me in just one thing. Was that too much to ask? " I could tell God was grieved by the judgment He was about to pronounce on Adam. "You must leave. You cannot stay in Eden."

Then God turned back to Eve. "Eve, because you were deceived, your sin is not as onerous to me as that of Adam. Do you want to stay in the garden without Adam?"

"What did He say?" I blurted out to no one at all as I tripped over myself, trying to get to the edge of second heaven to hear better. I could not be hearing God correctly.

God continued, "You may stay here, and I will watch over you, or you may go into exile with your husband."

Eve looked over to Adam, who pleaded with her with his eyes not to abandon him, although, in my mind, he had been perfectly willing to do that to her. God saw the pain and sympathy in Eve's eyes as she looked back at Adam.

"If you go with him," God spoke softly, "then your desire will be to please him. He will misinterpret your love for weakness and he will rule over you."

Adam did not dare say a word, but his eyes said it all.

"I won't, I promise. I'll take care of you. I'll love you." It was all right there in the tears welling up and spilling over his cheeks. Eve was distressed as she looked first to God then to Adam.

I could not stand it anymore. I leaned over the edge and shouted at Eve, not caring who in heaven or Earth might hear me.

"Eve! Listen to me. Don't do it. Adam is not worth it. Stay in the garden with God. Nothing is worth being separated from Him."

When I heard her say she would go with Adam, I collapsed in a heap of emotional exhaustion. I did not have the energy to climb back on my perch. I sprawled there on the rim with one claw and half my tail hanging precariously over the edge of the abyss. I didn't know whether God was as distressed with her choice as I was, but if He was, He did nothing to show it. I thought He would leave them right then, but He didn't. In fact, He did something completely unexpected, and, dare I say, out of character. He made garments of skin for Adam and Eve.

"Why does He think they need more clothing?" I muttered. "If He thinks they need apparel, why not let them keep the coverings of leaves?"

That would have made much more sense since the garden was quite warm and much better suited to grass skirts than wool and fur. They were going to be conspic-uously overdressed for their surroundings.

That by itself was not the "out-of-character" part I mentioned earlier. In order to make clothes of skins for them, God had to kill one of His wonderful animals and shed its blood. Now think about that for a moment.

To God, the giver of life, all life is precious. He did not destroy the rebellious angels, some of whom most certainly needed to be destroyed; yet here He was sacrificing the life of an innocent animal.

"For what?" I asked myself, "So Adam and Eve could have more useless clothes, which they did not need to start with?"

I have pondered this question for a very long time, and until now I haven't figured it out. It had to have something to do with the blood, but what?

So the Lord God exiled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden to work and sweat over the ground from which they had been made. After He drove them out, He placed cherubim on the east side of the garden where they stood vigilant with their flaming swords flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

Having chosen the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve were banished from their home and never allowed to return.

I knew just how they felt.

CHAPTER 14

THE MORE
I thought about Adam and Eve's meltdown in the garden, the more I found myself annoyed with God about how He handled

it. They committed intentional sin, and yet their entire punishment consisted of being moved outside the garden to another perfectly acceptable place on the planet.

Furthermore, contrary to what I thought would happen and what
should have
happened, God continued to watch over them. I sinned against God by accident, and look what happened to me—thrown out of paradise to a foreign place with no chance to appeal my sentence.

W h y should humans and nobody else get a pass—or at least a second chance—when it comes to sin? I've now chronicled humanity through several generations of Adam and Eve's kids, and I can tell you there has not been any noticeable improvement in any of them. For someone with the responsibility for worlds and universes beyond the scope of earthly imagination, God was spending way too much time trying to fix humans. He does so until this day. Why does He keep trying to make you people into something you cannot be? He gives you much more credit for using your intelligence than you deserve. Mankind falls into such a predictable pattern of behavior, it isn't entertaining to watch anymore.

Act one: God gives people a choice between obedience and rebellion. Act two: they always rebel. Act three: He finds a loophole in the law and forgives them. End of play. Then the cycle starts again. Humanity does not learn a thing from experience. That's why I cannot understand why He didn't save Himself millennia of grief by canceling the mandate to Adam and Eve to multiply.

"Cut your losses," I would have told Him. "Start with a fresh batch of clay and forget the free will thing altogether."

Surely He must have known that any offspring born of Adam and Eve would be just like them. And indeed that is what happened.

God was right when He warned Eve that her child-bearing would come through great pain. Cain came screaming from Eve, who was in writhing pain and all alone because Adam had passed out at the first glimpse of Cain's bloody head emerging. I don't know how Adam thought he was going to get any kids, but I'm confident this was nowhere in his thinking. One can hardly blame him, though. His only experience with new life was when he took a nap, woke up, and there was Eve—all cleaned up and pretty, fully functional and able to take care of herself from day one. He probably thought it was always going to be like that.

Eve was mostly on her own in birthing the baby. It made me nervous to watch. In my mind, no other human experience would more clearly define the difference between man and woman than childbirth. Man will endure pain for what is to be gained by it. Woman will endure pain for what is to be loved, with no guarantee that she will be loved in return.