Addressing Charles Weisman’s What About the Seedline Doctrine? Part 7, Evil for Wicked or Good
Here we shall continue our address of chapter 3 of Charles Weisman’s book, which is simply titled “The Serpent”. As I had said before we began this endeavor in our last presentation, because this is probably the most important chapter in his book, we may present and address every single paragraph, so that none of our detractors can claim we purposely missed anything which they may then imagine that we cannot answer.
At the beginning of his chapter on “The Serpent”, we have already discussed most of the points made by Charles Weisman where he had presented a list of uses of the words satan and devil as they are found throughout the Scriptures. His biggest mistake, in my opinion, was his failure to distinguish between these words where they appear as simple nouns or adjectives or where they appear as a Substantive along with a definite article. The word diabolos is an adjective which can mean slanderer. But when it appears with a definite article it is used as a noun to describe a particular slanderer. Then where the definite article appears with a noun, it is referring to a known, particular instance of the given noun, rather than to just any instance. In other words, satan or a satan, without the definite article, describes anyone who at one point or another may be an adversary, but the satan, with the definite article, describes a particular and already known entity which is an adversary. Weisman exploited his examples of the use of these words by not explaining that difference. So thus far in his arguments in this chapter, Weisman has lied by omission.
So where we left off, we will repeat the last item in Weisman’s list of examples, because we did not discuss it sufficiently:
And this too is a lie, because it is an oversimplification. First, the children of Israel had sinned collectively, as it is described in 1 Samuel chapter 8, because they were to have no governmental authority at all, and when they insisted on a king, Yahweh told them that they had rejected Him as king, and therefore they would suffer under earthly kings. That suffering was not a decree of punishment, but rather, Yahweh was only telling them what the natural outcome of their decision was going to be.
However oppressive governmental authorities by themselves are not the devil. What Yahweh told the children of Israel would happen to them under a king, in 1 Samuel 8:11-18, had happened under Saul, David, Solomon, and all their successors. But David and Solomon were not devils, and neither were their governments.