I decided to share some thoughts I have gleaned from reading Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 and give a quick rundown on a few things, using a macro view, that I see in these two complimentary chapters of these fascinating books.
My overall assumption from reading Isaiah chapter 14 is the Lord starts with a broad stroke and then narrows it a bit in focus. It seems He starts with Israel in the end-time, the last days, looking back upon the author of their oppression and trouble who has been defeated. A personage that The Lord refers to as the king of Babylon. He then narrows his scope and we find He is taking about Satan, giving an account of his mistreatment of, not only Israel, not only the people, but of all the creation. The Lord then continues with an account of Lucifer’s fall because of his pride and arrogance against the one that created him and then The Lord spells out, in no uncertain terms what he has in mind for Satan and The Lord’s contempt for him comes through rather plainly as he spells out his eternal sentence for his iniquity. The narrative continues once again about the creation and the burden that has been lifted from it.
What about Ezekiel 28? In this passage I see The Lord referring to Satan again as a king, this time king of Tyre, another earthly kingdom. The Lord starts this time with the beginnings of Satan and the esteem he seemed to have held in The Lord’s eyes. He continues about the pride and fall of Satan because of Lucifer’s vanity and how The Lord it seems, paraded the fallen Lucifer before the other ranking angels, cherubim, I assume as a poster child of his sin of vanity so that they could gaze upon him with derision and then cast him down upon the earth so all his equals could look on him in horror.
Before I continue, I am going to say that Act 17:11 is in full effect here, for what is see when I combine these two passages is purely conjecture on my part and could simply be the harvest of an active imagination.
From what I read from these two passages, I see this scenario; Satan is referred to as a king of two earthly kingdoms in these passages. He is held in contempt and paraded before kings and those that knew him. That tells me that there is a version of a ruling hierarchy in heaven. We already know that because of the fact that The Lord is the ruler of all things and those that are subjugated to him and Christ, including these cherubim kings…and Satan was one of these cherub kings. In my thinking, if there are kings, there are kingdoms. OK, what was Satan’s kingdom? The theme in Isaiah 14 seems to include a repeated reference to the freedom the earth also feels with the removal of Satan in verses 7, 8 and 25. My conjecture is Satan was given the earth as his kingdom to oversee. Satan’s pride and vanity caused him to attempt to elevate himself as God’s equal, an act that caused him to be cast out of heaven and into the creation he was ruling over which he had already corrupted and because of his corruption, a creation he caused to die by the introduction of entropy1
We also learn that Satan was cast down, along with a third of the angels into this creation and after he introduced iniquity into it it has been groaning from the burden of Satan until it’s release as the above verses indicate. Satan also apparently has limited powers for we can infer elsewhere in the bible that the tree of life is guarded by a cherub to prevent Satan from partaking of it and gaining immortality. I assume this because it wouldn’t take a super-angel like a cherub to guard it from Adam…however it would take an equal of Satan to guard it from him.
What about the idea of kings in the heavenly realm? I infer from this that there are other universes being watched over and ruled by other cherubim kings that probably are buzzing happily along, unaware of the bitter stench and ooze of the corruption caused by Satan that is emanating from this one.
God Bless
Jim Bussell
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28information_theory%29
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