People ask, "Well, why did God create the Devil?" but God didn't create the Devil as the Devil. It was the Devil's decision to turn evil and make a liar out of himself.

In John 8:44, Jesus Christ says to the religious bosses in the nation Israel, "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it."

By calling Satan a "murderer from the beginning," Christ's referring to him as the "man-slayer" who KOed Adam with a first punch inside the Garden of Eden.

As a cherub, Satan was able to approach Eve as a handsome, articulate, intriguing man. His line was, "Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." (Gen. 3: 4-5)

This is the lie he's propagated all through human history and it's his overriding policy and program.

What he's saying to Eve is, "Hey, don't let God cheat you out of this—eat of this tree and you'll be like the gods."

God had told Adam and Eve they could help themselves to anything in the Garden except the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Tree of Life, for example, was perfectly open for snacking.

What God didn't want happening is for them to know anything about human good and human evil.

They understood right from wrong and what was good through daily instruction by God Himself in the Garden.

But the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was about man going his own way, separating himself from God's good and doing his own good based on his own viewpoint, thereby entering into evil through self-willed rebellion.

Of course, this is what Satan himself got hung up on when he was "lifted up by pride" as Lucifer, the light-bearer.

"Lucifer marveled at his beauty, became stuck on himself and developed a plan and an ambition," explains my pastor, Richard Jordan (Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill.) "His original policy was to make God out of himself. He says in Isaiah 14, 'I will ascend above the heights of the clouds,' meaning, 'I'm going to go up to where God sits on His throne and I'm going to be on an equal plane with Him.' His ambition was to go up and there wasn't any way to go up except to take God's seat, because he had all the others—he had all the other thrones."

In Romans 1:21-25, the Apostle Paul reiterates the fact that the essence and heart of all idolatry is making God out of the creature. It's about rejecting God's will and revelation and turning to self-devised schemes and strategies aimed at a person getting his/her own way and doing their own thing without God's intrusion.

"Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened," Paul writes. "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

"Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen."

Historically, Paul is referring to the Tower of Babel and the evil that gained a universal foothold only 200 years or so after the Flood.

God's command after the Flood had been for humans to scatter and replenish the earth, but mass rebellion led to the bright idea, "Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." (Gen. 11:4)

The attitude was, "God isn't going to tell us what to do. We're going to do our own thing. We're going to do what we want to do, when we want to do it and how we want to do it."

What they developed was a religion and the tower was meant to be a physical means for more closely reaching their gods (fallen angels aligned with Satan), offering them sacrifices. Hence, the beginnings for all pagan worship.