Imago Dei is Latin for “Image of God” and people throughout time have erroneously concluded that because Genesis 1:27 states, “God created man in his own image . . . ,” we humans are all created in the image of God. The reality is Adam was the only man God ever created and it’s him who’s being referred to in the verse.

“Adam was created in the image of God and you and I were born in Adam’s likeness; in his image,” explains Jordan. “Now, was Adam’s image effaced—messed up? You see, rather than us being created in the perfect image and likeness of God, Adam was created in that image and we were born in Adam’s image. Read Genesis 5. You’re born a sinner, man!”

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Just like Adam was specially created as a human, Satan was specially created as an angelic creature. As God says of Lucifer in Ezekiel 28:15, “Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.”

Jordan explains, “That’s God saying He gave him this job and he did it completely, superbly . . . and this guy became the original performance-based acceptance thinker. He did the job God gave him perfectly and thought, ‘I’m accepted before God because I’ve done my job perfectly.’

“I talk to you all the time about performance-based acceptance being the opposite of grace. Grace is being accepted on the basis of a free gift. Law is being accepted based on your performance.

“It says, ‘Till iniquity was found in thee.’ You know what the strength of sin is? It’s the law, and it was that performance-based thinking that got this guy messed up. Now that verse right there is the answer for a lot of questions: Where did sin come from? Why is there sin in the world?

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As the next verse (Ezekiel 28:16) goes on to explain, ‘By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned: therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God: and I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire.’ ”

Jordan says, “So Lucifer sinned. Now sin and iniquity are two different things in the context. The iniquity was the plan he developed. His sin (I Timothy 3:6) was pride. Didn’t it say over and over in Ezekiel 28 that he was ‘lifted up’? God says, ‘You lifted up your heart.’ What did that? Pride.

“Pride was the sin. Pride was the thing that got him, and it made him think he was as God. It was his beauty, looking at himself . . . You look at verse 17 and it says he was ‘lifted up because of thy beauty.’

“If you study the passages about where he’s at, on the holy mountain of God, and that he’s ‘the anointed cherub that covereth,’ if you think about that . . . Here’s the throne of God, and here’s a cherubim over here and a cherubim over there, and there’s this sea of glass that the throne of God rests on. Here’s Lucifer up overhead as the anointed cherub that covers and he’s up there looking down.

“He looks down at these stones of fire in this sea of glass that’s like crystal. Well, what happens when you look at glass and you’re all lit up? Window-shopping. Look at yourself when you’re inside a shopping mall. You suck it in, you stick it out, you try to make it look as good as you can, but that’s all you’re doing.

“Instead of focusing here (atop God’s throne), he begins to focus on his reflection down there, and focusing on himself produces self-aggrandizement: ‘I ought to be God.’ He set his heart as the heart of God. He reasoned, ‘That ought to be me on that throne! Look at how beautiful I am, how wise I am, how exalted I am! Look at the wisdom I’ve got!’

“And what he did through being ‘lifted up by pride’ is he developed this ‘beautiful plan.’ God calls it iniquity, which means something that’s crooked, warped, twisted.

“The sin, the rebellion, the independence from God’s will—that self-will and self-worship—was introduced into the universe by Lucifer. That’s how he became Satan. It’s the sin of idolatry, and the way he did it is he got stuck on himself and decided he knew how to run creation better than God, and that he ought to be God. Then he developed a plan to accomplish that.

(Editor’s Note: To be continued . . .)