5-20 The God Of This World

2 Corinthians 4: 4: “In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them”.

See 2-4 “The Jewish Satan”.

The Eastern (Aramaic) text reads: "To those in this world whose minds have been blinded by God, because they did not believe"

Note in passing that it is darkness which blinds men’s eyes (1 Jn. 2:11), i.e. not walking according to the light of God’s word. There is only one God- not two. And it's also noteworthy that Is. 6:10 speaks of God as having the power to blind Israel. The New Testament repeats this. Rom. 11:8 says that God (and not Satan) blinded Israel to the Gospel; 2 Cor. 3:14 says that their minds were blinded or “hardened” (RV) as Pharaoh’s was. Whoever “the god of this world” is or was, God worked through it and is therefore greater than it. Henry Kelly comments: "Given this track record, can we see the God of this Aeon as our God, as Yahweh? He is, after all, in charge of everything" (1). It is God and not any independent Satan figure who sends people an energeia of error to believe falsehood (2 Thess. 2:12)- the ultimate 'energy' in the process is fro mGod.

For something to be called “the god of this world” does not necessarily mean that it is in reality “the god of this world”; it could mean ‘the thing or power that this world counts to be God’. Thus Acts 19:27 speaks of the goddess Diana, a lifeless idol, “whom all the world worshippeth”. This doesn’t mean that the piece of wood or stone called Diana was in reality the goddess of this world.

Even if it is insisted that Satan exists as a personal being, the question has to be faced: Who created Satan? Is his power under God's control, or not? Time and again the 'satan' and 'demon' passages of the Bible indicate that however we are to understand these terms, God is more powerful, God is in control. The book of Job shows how the Satan there had all power given to him by God. The power of the Lord Jesus over 'demons' makes the same point. And in that context, note how Ex. 4:11 assures us that God is the one who makes people deaf, but Lk. 11:14 speaks of how such muteness is apparently caused by demons. Clearly, God is in control. This world, with all the evil and negative experience in it, has not been left under the control of some out-of-control evil being. With this in mind, it should be apparent that the 'god of this world' can't mean that the world is under the ultimate control of Satan rather than God. Rather, "the god of this world" [aion] "can also be read as merely a personification of all the forces of this aion that would thwart the success of the Christian message" (2).

The way that the idea of 'Satan' is used to describe both individual sin and societies governed by the principle of sin is very much in line with the way that first century society was very much a communalistic rather than an individualistic society. The society was the person. Further, social scientists and psychologists have time and again confirmed the Biblical teaching that the fundamental motivation of human beings is the ego, self-interest- what the Bible calls 'Satan'. This is what drives people at the individual level, and thus drives societies (3). It's appropriate, therefore, for 'Satan', the personification of human sin and self-interest, to also be a term applied to human governments and societies as a whole. Truly in this sense (the Biblical) Satan could be understood as "the god of this world".

Notes

(1) H.A. Kelly, Satan: A Biography (Cambridge: C.U.P., 2006) p. 66.

(2) Neil Forsyth, Satan And The Combat Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) p. 275.

(3) See R. Harre, Personal Being (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984) and many others.