God is Satan himself, but hear me out before you shout blasphemy 😂. When you have a good thought, you might say God put it in your heart, but when you suddenly have a horrible thought, you attribute it to Satan. When you do something good, God used you. When you do something terrible, somehow it becomes the devil’s handiwork. I started wondering if the people who wrote the Bible did something similar. Maybe whenever something fitted the good image of God, they attributed it to God, but when something became difficult to reconcile with that image, Satan became the explanation. One example I genuinely can’t get past is David’s census. In 2 Samuel 24:1, God is angry with Israel and incites David to count Israel. But when the same story is told in 1 Chronicles 21:1, suddenly it is Satan who incites David to do it. So who actually did it? And it gets even more interesting when you keep reading. God tested Abraham by telling him to sacrifice his son. God hardened Pharaoh’s heart and then punished Egypt. 1 Samuel says a harmful spirit “from the LORD” tormented Saul. In 1 Kings 22, God permits a spirit to deceive Ahab through his prophets. Even in Job, Satan doesn’t behave like some rogue supernatural enemy that God is desperately trying to stop. He appears before God, discusses Job with him, gets permission to attack Job and is given a limit on what he can do. That’s why I’ve started wondering whether ancient people originally attributed both sides to God: the blessing and destruction, healing and killing, protection and testing. Then as the idea of a perfectly good God developed, the darker side needed another character to carry it. Maybe Satan isn’t another powerful being fighting against God at all. Maybe “Satan” became the explanation for the side of God that people couldn’t reconcile with the God they wanted to understand as completely good. Because if one part of the Bible can say “God did it” and another part can tell the same story and say “Satan did it”, I think asking whether we’ve actually separated one character into two is at least a fair question. God, was Satan you?