In the earliest dawn of time, before history, when the first man awakened to himself, to awareness, he brought with him out of the sleep of the animals, out of that thoughtless, constant present of raw instinct, devoid of consciousness, a female companion, and together they observed the world and knew that it had been made. In the same moment, they also gained the power of choice, and the opportunity to choose between love and selfishness.

Waiting for them, in that pivotal moment, was one of the “nachash,” one of the high immortal keepers of the realm, who had aided in its very construction and even now were given to rule is domains—the seas, the air, the high mountains, the fertile plains. Only the one garden, where God had placed the Man and the Woman, did He reserve to Himself, and to the Man and the Woman, and not for any power in heaven. Now the nachash, which we call serpents today on account of what this one did, were in fact among the most resplendent of the sons of God, broad-winged, long-tailed, sleek, and clad in gems, glittering like stars on a night sea; and this nachash was perhaps the fairest of those, and cleverest. In his pride over his own glory, though, he fancied himself in the role of an accuser before the great Lord of creation, and he had no love for the Man and Woman, knowing them to be weak, frail, and to his eye less beautiful than any creature of the Divine Council. Perhaps he envied them the special love of their creator, as a first-born son who, having honored his father and lived rightly in his father’s household, might envy the tears and embraces of the father toward a younger brother who returns home in humility after many years of debauchery, crime, and squandering of the family wealth. We will never know for certain why this one hated the Man and Woman so. We can only guess.

But what do I mean when I say he fancied himself in the role of an accuser? I mean that he thought to himself, “I will show our Father-Creator how weak these things are, and how ugly in their hearts. I will test them, and He will see them fail, and He will see that He has erred in giving them His favor over us.” He would not simply go before the Throne, in the chambers of the Divine Council, and denounce them. No, he needed to show God His error, His folly. He would show God the true nature of Man.

God, in His wisdom, had given the Man and the Woman dominion over the garden, that they might rule it as the sons of God ruled the rest of creation, to shape and cultivate it, to name its beings and order them and make of them and the garden something befitting His glory. And in this garden He took human form and walked with them, and talked with them, and they were His friends. But lest they be without true freedom, and so less than human, He did leave one door open for them most dreadful: that they could choose, instead of embracing the kingship and queenship which he had bestowed upon them in His service, to serve themselves instead. It was such a simple test. “Do not eat of this fruit. Of any other you may eat, but not this, for with this comes the knowledge of good and evil.” Many today believe the fruit itself was magical, but I am not so sure. I think the fruit is just a choice, and it is in the choice that the deep magic resides. When we choose evil, we do come to understand certain things, and the understanding is madness.

As I said, in the very moment they woke, and were placed in the garden, and had the freedom to choose, this nachash serpent was there, glorious and beautiful and wickedly clever, and he knew just what to do. He told them a lie: “Eat this fruit which He has withheld from you, and you can make yourselves as you see fit. You will be lords of your own destiny.” Alike and together, in their frailty, they chose to eat, and so the very first man and first woman ever to look upon the earth with human hearts doomed themselves to die, and doomed all of their children, forever. Made to be children of God, they chose instead to be children of the serpent, and the serpent became the god of all the earth.

The Most High allowed this, for He had foreseen it all. He knew it must come to pass, that if he made Man free, Man would choose evil, and the children whom God desired, children made in His own image, ultimately to be lifted up above even the Divine Council, He could only have by allowing them first to fall according to their own will into depravity, so that they might see the folly of selfish pride and learn not to lean on their own glory, as the Accuser had done. The Lord God had ready the plan for their rescue, unknown to the Accuser, ordained from before the foundation of the world, and so cunning that the Accuser, for all his guile and his hatred toward Man and toward the father-creator, for all his intent to destroy what the Father had made, had only played his part exactly according to the Father’s design. And before He cast out the Man and the Woman into the serpent’s earth, God foretold of the rescue to come, that by the Woman’s line would come a Man in the far future, whose heel the serpent would bruise, but who would crush the serpent’s head. By the woman’s line, the Accuser would perish, and her descendants would be saved from death.

Ten thousand years passed. The descendants of Man forgot their Creator, which is not to say they did not know of Him, but rather that they did not keep Him in mind but pushed Him out, choosing death, as the price for lives of war, torture, rape, and conquest, over life as His servant. Nor did the Most High remember them, which is to say He did not give them anything of Himself except the judgement they demanded: death, unto all of them and the world they had conquered. But the few who remembered Him He also remembered, and spared, for though they too were wicked, yet by the standards of mankind they were righteous, and more importantly they followed their Lord and trusted in Him and in His promises. Moses was one of these, and God brought him and his family through the waters of death to a life after the destruction. Did Moses understand this was a symbol of things to come? That he was a living preview of the end of the world?

Even as God swept humanity from His lands and scattered them to the four corners of creation, and assigned them under the rulership of divine councilors and other principalities whom He knew had already followed the Accuser into rebellion and ruin, He kept safe a line from Adam through the ages, from father to son of those whose faith was in their God, until He was all but truly forgotten among the species of mankind, and only a single pagan idol-maker remained willing to hear Him, ten millennia after the Fall.

That man the Most High put to the ultimate test. As the idol worshippers around the man were wont to sacrifice their children to proclaim their devotion to their gods and seek favors, the One God, the Living God, told Abram to sacrifice his first-born and most precious son and then, in the last breath before the knife plunged, God stayed Abram’s hand. It was enough that the world see, and Abram see, that his devotion to his God was the equal of any priest or cultist in those lands, and then God made himself known to Abram in this: That the Living God needs no blood from mortal man, but rather will provide the blood. While the pagan idol-worshippers rendered up life and blood to their gods for their own prosperity, the True God would offer up His own life, His own blood, for the everlasting life of His children who loved Him. God said, “I will provide the lamb,” and that very day, God provided to Abraham a ram to die in place of Isaac, so that Isaac might live and have many descendants, a line in perpetuity, according to God’s promise.

Not a lamb, but a ram, that day, and Abraham did understand. He understood that the lamb, the true sacrifice which would save not just Isaac but all the children of the Most High, was still to come. He named that thorny hilltop glade “God Will Provide,” and it is said that over the next seven hundred years, as the nearby settlement of Salem (in Abraham’s time under the kingship of the mysterious priest Melchizedek) fell finally into ruin, and was forgotten (while the Twelve Tribes were in bondage in Egypt), and then rediscovered by the House of David, and walled in, and the Temple raised by David’s son Solomon, and the City of Peace constructed around it, that once wild hill was cleared and given a new name: the Hill of Moriah. On that very place, it is said, was the Temple of God built.

That seven hundred years passed, and another thousand, and God watched over the descendants of Abraham, his son Isaac, and Isaac’s son Jacob, who wrestled with God’s Messenger (the same who walked in the Garden with Adam and Eve, and stood in the mountain pass overlooking Sodom with Abraham as Abraham bargained for the lives of the people there) and fathered the Twelve Tribes. And Abraham and his line witnessed much of the wonders of the Lord, his wrath raining from the heavens and filling a valley with fire, the plagues wrought through the Prophet and the High Priest, the pillar of smoke and fire and the splitting of the sea, the serpents and the bronze serpent, the Commander of the Lord’s Armies and the toppling of Jericho, the terrifying miracles of the Ark, and even the decimation of the army of Sennacherib of Assyria (by that same Messenger), when Sennacherib came against Jerusalem a thousand years after the binding of Isaac and Abraham’s ram. Through it all, though the people ever turned against their Maker, and though He allowed them to fall into the despair their rebellion earned them, and allowed them to be scattered over and over across the Accuser’s lands, yet He never forgot them, and always, in the end, brough them home, for the Most High was still through them preparing the way for the One who would undo the work of the Accuser once and for all. And through all these mighty wonders, over the seventeen hundreds years and the ten thousand, the Great Lord of Hosts never forgot the other people’s of the world either. Time and again He sent His signs, his foreshadowings, and his prophets, not just to the people of Israel but to all the nations, as when he sent Jonah to the Ninevites, or Daniel to the King of Babylon, or when Elijah raised the dead boy in Zarephath. The Israelites, though they were not faithful followers, yet faithfully recorded all of these things and sought through them for meaning, for hints of the coming savior promised to Adam and Eve at the dawn of history.

Once all the prophecies had been given, and all the lessons taught, and all the wisdom the Lord had sent down had been recorded by the Jews in their holy writings, and once the last count of years expired and all the descendants of Jacob were gathered again to Jerusalem (under the oppression of the Fourth Beast, mighty Rome) and waiting upon the hour, then the Lord God allowed that hour to come.

It began not with the birth, though. The first signs of dawn were a lonesome voice, crying in the wilderness, and a message written in the stars of night. The voice cried, “Make straight the way of the Lord!” and, “Repent and be baptized with water for the remission of sin, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” And many followed that crier and were baptized in the River Jordan. As to the stars, though, there were none in Israel who could read them. As I said, God sent many of his signs beyond the borders and peoples of the sons of Jacob, to the gentile nations. It was in one of these, the Parthian empire far to the east, as the last years of waiting expired, that a small school of sages (Zoroastrians who knew nothing of prophecies and Messianic fervor of the Jews) observed the movement of constellations in the heavens, and saw in them a sign the likes of which they had never seen before in all their generations of watching. This is what they saw in the stars, as it is written:

“And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth. And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it. She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne, and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which she is to be nourished for 1,260 days.”

Unlike all the portents they had ever read among the movements of the stars and sun and moon and the other stones of fire in the firmament, this one was unique, for as the wise men interpreted it, they realized it was not a sign of some far off future event, nor specific to this nation or to that king. No, the stars were telling them that these events were for the whole world, a turning of the tide for all mankind, and they were happening right now. The child of destiny, the king of all kings, had arrived.

Who’s child they could not say, nor what might be the significance of his advent. They had no way to know that at that moment, in a small Roman province inhabited by a stubborn and rebellious people, the remnants of the last two surviving tribes of the Twelve, that messengers from the Lord’s Council, those sons of God still loyal to Him and privy to His great plan, came to the mother and her husband, and to the shepherds, and overhead sang in great council chamber hymns of rejoicing for the child who had been born and the rescue of mankind which had begun.

The wise men of Persia knew only that the child’s star had risen in the west, amidst these great and terrible signs in the night sky, and each night it rose again and again, and hung shimmering, beckoning for them to come and see, and they knew no more important sign had ever been shown to star-watchers since the firmament was made. They took a collection among them for gifts worthy of the highest of emperors, and then a few of them with these gifts set out westward, departing Parthian lands for Roman and venturing ever onward following that one strange star, until they came to Jerusalem almost a year after the child’s birth and from there found him with his mother and father in a house in the small village of Bethlehem.

Of course we know the rest. Thus it is told:

“Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon and his angels fought back, but he was defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, ‘Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death. Therefore, rejoice, O heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!’

“And when the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle so that she might fly from the serpent into the wilderness, to the place where she is to be nourished for a time, and times, and half a time. The serpent poured water like a river out of his mouth after the woman, to sweep her away with a flood. But the earth came to the help of the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed the river that the dragon had poured from his mouth. Then the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus.

“And he stood on the sand of the sea.”