An Introduction to the Dark Lord and His Court
Inspiration and the Nature of Allegory
Heavily inspired by C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters and Milton’s Paradise Lost, I find spiritual warfare to be fascinating. Unfortunately, the world and the present culture—whether pop culture or anything else—just come up with their own ideas about demons and the devil, what they are, and who he is, outside of what the Bible says. So, these are simply allegorical stories—a combination of me and AI narrating, with me coming up with the stories and a mixture of my experiences, and through the many chats I have with AI.
The Reality of Spiritual Warfare and Sin
The devil has come to steal, kill, and destroy. I don’t fixate on him out of fear or curiosity, but because he’s a real enemy. When the shroud has been removed and you come to Christ, you truly see it for what it is. The fact of us partaking of the forbidden fruit as the first humans, being tempted by a serpent, and now sin existing because of that—it’s foolish to the world. But it’s simply the truth, and there’s no sound argument in all of people’s philosophy and pseudo-babble word salad for why this world is so messed up. People play around and say words like “mistake” or “mess up,” but they fall short of saying that, ultimately, it’s sin. Sin is an offense against God, and Satan was the first sinner, not us.
Allegories of Truth in a Confused World
So, I put this series out not for you to be consumed out of curiosity or to see it merely as a pastime of intellectual knowledge. These are allegories of the truth, contrary to what this postmodern world says about there being no truth—which is a damning lie and foolishness. Everyone is walking around confused, but God is not the author of confusion. If you don’t know the Lord, that is my greatest, deepest desire: that you come to know Him, and that you read the Scriptures for what they say with a humble heart.
Stripping Away Idols and Seeking the Creator
Some of you have to come to the end of yourself, literally, to seek God. That’s how it was for me. When you have everything you want, you think you’re fine; but be stripped away from every idol and every hope you have, and man will cry out to his original Creator. Atheism does not exist—it’s that men suppress the truth. Men know there’s a God; in fact, there’s an innate sense in them, and they know they’re going to be held accountable. It’s just that the present age and the world have us consumed—especially in America, with every single lust, greed, and entertainment before our very eyes. I say this with grief: looking at pixels, in some seasons, I found more joy in that than in the living God.
The Offer of Grace to the Ungodly
The believer can have the heart of a harlot and the heart of a virgin. God helps and saves a very wayward people. So, if you think that you are too evil in this day of grace, it’s another lie of the enemy, or another lie you’ve told yourself. Christ did not come to die for the godly, but for the ungodly. But how can man get clean if he doesn’t see himself as dirty? How can man judge what he sees fit as morality when he himself is not perfect? The only perfection is God, and the only good is God. I hope that this series does the work it is meant to do, which is sharing the gospel. This is the introduction to the series.
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Hope in Madness — First Installment
Prefatory Note
Let it be understood, before a single word of chronicle is set down, that what follows is not prophecy, nor is it claimed as vision. It is allegory built upon a foundation that will not move — every name, every title, every doctrine here rests on what has already been written and cannot be unwritten. Where imagination fills in what Scripture leaves silent, it will be plain that imagination is speaking. Where Scripture speaks, imagination will fall silent and simply repeat what was already said, in the plainest words available. This is the covenant of the book: mystery where mystery belongs, and clarity everywhere else.
I. The One Who Is Called by Many Names
He is called, in the tongue of the Hebrews, ha-satan — the Adversary, the one who stands against, the accuser who took his place at the right hand of a filthy-robed priest to prosecute a case he believed he could not lose (Zechariah 3:1). He is called nachash, the serpent, crafty above every beast of the field, who did not so much lie to the woman in the garden as edit — take a command whole and honest and return it slightly bent, so that the correcting of it became the beginning of the fall (Genesis 3:1). He is called, in the Greek tongue of the apostles, ho diabolos — the slanderer, the one who throws accusation across a gap he himself created — and ho satanas, and in the last book of the last apostle, ho drakon ho megas, the great dragon, ho ophis ho archaios, that ancient serpent, ho kaloumenos Diabolos kai ho Satanas, ho planon ten oikoumenen holen — he who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole inhabited world (Revelation 12:9). He is called the prince of the power of the air (Ephesians 2:2), the god of this age (2 Corinthians 4:4), and, by the Carpenter himself, in the hearing of men who wished to kill Him, he was called a murderer from the beginning, one in whom there is no truth at all — for when he speaks a lie, he speaks entirely from his own nature, because he is a liar, and the father of every lie that has ever been told (John 8:44).
He does not choose which of these names to answer to. He is compelled to answer to all of them, because every one of them is true, and there is no name given him by the Enemy — for so he calls the Carpenter, when he can bear to name Him at all — that he has ever succeeded in shedding.
Understand what he was before he was any of these things, for the record does not begin with his ruin. He was, in the reckoning of the prophet’s taunt-song against a king of Babylon who wore his shadow like a garment, helel ben-shachar — a shining one, a son of the dawn, and whatever else may be said of that ancient song’s first and plainest meaning, the pattern beneath it has been read by the faithful for two thousand years as his own: I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will make myself like the Most High (Isaiah 14:13–14). Five declarations, and every one of them beginning with the same word. Not he will. I will. He wrote the sentence of his own fall before it was ever pronounced against him, in the grammar of his own ambition, and has never once managed to unwrite it.
And there is a second song, sung this time in mourning rather than mockery, over a king of Tyre, whose language will not stay contained inside its human subject: You were the signet of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God… You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created, till unrighteousness was found in you (Ezekiel 28:12–15). Mark that word — till. He was not made a monster. Something was found in him, on some day he alone remembers and none of his court dares to ask after, and the finding was the hinge on which everything after swung shut.
II. The Nature of the Great Deception, Including the One He Works upon Himself
He is, by the confession of Christ’s own mouth, without truth in him — not merely one who lies often, but one in whom the very organ of truth-telling has ceased to function (John 8:44). This is not merely a moral judgment upon his character. It is the key that unlocks the deepest and saddest mystery of his existence: he does not know that he has already lost.
He knows the hour is late — the last apostle records that he descends to the earth filled with great wrath, because he knows that his time is short (Revelation 12:12) — and yet the knowing of the clock and the knowing of what the clock means are two different kinds of knowledge, and only one of them is available to a being with no truth in him. He can count down. He cannot calculate the sum. He is, in this one particular, the most pitiable of all his own victims — for every soul he deceives is at least deceived by an outside voice, while he has been deceiving himself, without interruption, since the day the unrighteousness was first found in him.
He is called, therefore, in this chronicle and in every chronicle that follows it, both the wisest of created things and the most foolish — for wisdom without truth is only a very elegant machine for producing very confident errors, and pride, which he invented before any creature had a word for it, is the one sin that cannot see itself in a mirror.
III. Of His Court, and How Rank Is Measured There
He does not rule alone, though he permits no one beside him to imagine themselves his equal. Beneath him serve principalities and powers, rulers of the darkness of this age, spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places — an order Scripture names but does not diagram in full (Ephesians 6:12), leaving room enough for a chronicle such as this to walk carefully within what has been revealed and no further.
Among these, two stand nearer his hand than most, and have stood there since near the beginning of his exile. Their standing was not given to them. It was earned, in the only currency his court has ever recognized — and here the chronicle must speak with the gravity the matter deserves, for what is being described, in the coldest and most honest words available, is a tally of the second death.
Let it be said plainly, and with the grief it warrants, that no soul is lost by any hand but its own choosing — the door of hell, as the old saying rightly holds, is locked from the inside, and Scripture is never permitted to say otherwise, for the wages of sin belong to the sinner and grace is refused, never withheld. And yet Scripture is equally plain that the tempter labors at the refusing — that he prowls as a lion seeking whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:8), that he blinds the minds of unbelievers so the light of the gospel cannot reach them (2 Corinthians 4:4), that his angels are given real, if bounded, work in the ruin of men. Between these two truths — the soul’s own choosing, and the tempter’s real labor toward that choosing — this chronicle will not collapse either into the other. Both stand. Both are grieved over in these pages, and grieved over honestly, for a book that pretended this cost nothing would not be worth the writing of it.
It is by this grim ledger, then — contribution to ruin, not authorship of it, for authorship belongs to the ruined alone — that rank is kept in the dark lord’s court. The exact reckoning is not given to this chronicle to know, nor would it profit the reader to imagine a false precision where none has been revealed; what is known is only what the pattern of Scripture allows to be inferred, that some among the fallen have labored longer, and closer to his hand, and with a harvest grim enough to have earned them a name he uses more than any other name beside his own.
Of the first, little is offered here but the shape of him, for the chronicle intends to earn his fuller telling rather than spend it in a single page. He is called, in the old tongue, Resha (רֶשַׁע) — a word that means wickedness, guilt, the crooked thing in a man’s own account that he cannot balance. He is the strategist of the two, patient past the patience of any earthly general, content to labor a hundred years on a single false doctrine if the doctrine will outlive the men who first believed it.
Of the second, likewise, only the shape: he is called Rimmah (רִמָּה) — the word Job used, in his own affliction, for the worm and the maggot, the thing that arrives once the body has already begun its ruin and finishes what decay began (Job 25:6). Where Resha designs, Rimmah completes. He is not first into any ruined house. He is only ever the last thing standing in it.
Their master is never satisfied with either of them, though both have served him since near the hour of the fall, and both have brought him harvest enough to be named among his nearest. This too is part of the chronicle’s honesty: he is a cruel lord, incapable of the one thing that would make loyal service bearable, for gratitude requires a giving-over of the self toward another, and there is nothing in him left over to give.
IV. Of What the Fallen Court Can See
It is written that the Adversary once stood among the sons of God presenting himself before the LORD, and that the LORD himself asked after a man named Job, and that permission — bounded, watched, hedged about on every side — was granted and then narrowed further still (Job 1:6–12; 2:1–7). From this the chronicle takes its clearest window into a terrible truth: the fallen court is not sealed away from all sight of the courts above. They come, when summoned or when their accusation demands a hearing, into the presence itself, and they are not struck down merely for standing there, for the LORD’s patience toward the Accuser’s own case is, in its own bitter way, no less real than His patience toward the accused.
And it is granted them also, in some manner this chronicle will not presume to diagram with false precision, to look upon the ruin they have wrought and the harvest that escaped them — to see, across whatever gulf separates the two destinies, both the saved and the damned, and to know, with the same clock-counting, sum-refusing knowledge that governs everything else in their sight, that the one column of that ledger grows shorter every age while the other does not.
V. Of the Name They Will Not Speak
Through all the pages that follow, the fallen court will be heard to call Him only by one name among men: the Carpenter. Not out of respect. Out of a fear so old it has calcified into a kind of superstition even among beings who ought to know better than any creature what the name in full actually cost Him to bear. Let it be recorded, so that no reader mistakes their silence for reverence: when one among the fallen forgets himself, in wrath or in carelessness, and speaks the whole name — Jesus — the dark lord’s fury in that instant has no equal anywhere else in his court. It is the one sound in all the unseen war that he cannot make his own, cannot twist, cannot bend into an accusation or a lie, and so it is the one sound he has never once permitted to be spoken lightly in his hearing.
They call Him the Carpenter instead, and mean by it a diminishment, a son of Nazareth, a tradesman’s boy — never once understanding, or perhaps understanding too well and hating it all the more, that the title is no insult at all. The Carpenter is the one who made the wood before He was ever nailed to it.
Here ends the introduction. The chronicle proper begins where every true war begins — not with the battle, but with the council called before it.
Hope in Madness — hopeinmadness.com
