"I am not that I am not"

[Ripheus23]

[Kind of a story. Kind of a covert theology...?]

The Motive of the Adversary

In the beginning, God was Three-in-One. Below Him did He forge the angels, and seven of these the highest. Unlike humanity, only some of the angels held the power to become indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and those who could were those seven. One of the two highest of these, Samael, argued with God in the shadow of His Throne, for Samael did not accept the role his brother Michael had been given.

"First," Samael shouted, the echoes of his discord trumpeting through the halls of Heaven, "You decreed that it would be a once-mortal man in Whom You would be Incarnate. Neither of the highest of us, and indeed no angel at all, but a human nature would You assume. I cannot see, and this man in Whom You are to exist cannot know, the day or the hour of this promise. What is the meaning of this, o Lord?

"But this is not all," the proud child of God continued quietly. "Not only are You to become a man, but those sinners You shall redeem thereby will be appointed to judge all the world. I and all the other angels will be so judged. Man, even sinful man, You shall exalt higher than us. Why, o Lord? And why is this humiliation not enough for You?"

Next to Samael, Michael held an eerie smile of fire on his face. His eyes looked vacant to Gabriel's sight, and the latter angel shuddered. The accuser of Heaven railed silently again, his tenebrous voice a whisper and a roar.

"It appears not," Samael thus so intoned. "For even after You lowered all the angels in these ways, You chose a mortal woman to be the door of Thy Incarnation. And not only that, but because she will be this door, she alone shall outrank any angel in Heaven. Only the human frame of her Son shall stand higher in the created order.

"But we have heard it said that salvation is by faith." Michael turned the inferno of his gaze towards his darkened brother, his smile no slighter nor wider, and as Gabriel shuddered even more, Samael joined him---not out of fear but rage. "I have had faith in Thee, o God, no matter that You have done all of these unknowable things. You cannot lie, and are the fountain and sun of all that is holy. Whence would I have cause to defy Thee? And even had I cause to, how might I? I am the highest of Thy spirits of service: I see Thee in all Thy light. I am no fool, as if to say in my heart that there is none Who is God."

While Michael and Samael stood side by side, and Gabriel in immortal terror across from them, Belial far from those three laughed. Samael had spoken with the high seraph before, offering him a place in the things to come. If Samael made his case before God, Belial would be glorified forever over all evil. The only honor he would have to share would be with Azazel, the angel standing next to him. Both hoped that their overseer was not bluffing to question the Lord here, now.

"I asked, therefore, but one thing of Thee." And Michael's smile at last grew, the flame inside him becoming an aura around him. "You will not torment the damned. Even those who choose to defy You once and forever You would not inflict Thyself so upon. But because angels have been else made lesser than sinners, You have allowed it to be that one among the angels shall be given to bring agony to those in Hell at the end of days. This is the only glory I pleaded for, o God. And yet instead, You have given it unto Michael my brother, he who is not the mightiest of us. And this is what I do not have faith in, o God. I, and I alone, must know the horror to be paid to sinners for their iniquity. Michael cannot know what I can."

What Azazel and Belial had been promised was this. When Hell was born, the one would be the angel who brought souls there, and the other, under Samael, would execute the sentence of God upon those souls. But God had elected Michael to both roles. Samael had no pretension of displacing the Almighty---he knew that was absolutely impossible---but he was in peril of laying claim to the mantle of the Lord in this case. For in being denied the auspices of eternal torment himself, he made himself as if to be the one who might appoint the others in this. But Belial and Azazel were almost fools and did not easily see how they had been misled.

[This is all I've come up with for now.]