...Actually, that was a joke.  There was no beginning, not for the Almighty.  When the world began, God was already ancient.  If you were to ask Him where He came from, how old He is, or how He happens to exist, or why, not even God could tell you.  He was just always around.  Nothing caused Him.  No intelligent being designed Him or thought Him up.  He did not evolve.  He has no parents, was never conceived, and was never born.  He never "grew up."  He never passed through what you could consider a normal psychosexual development.  And by a stroke of incredible (for Him) good luck, He cannot grow old, wear out, or evaporate.  He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Okay, enough of that.  I'm no minister of the Gospel, I'm the Devil.  There's a difference.  It's not my job to make sense of biblical theology.  I'm here to tell you a true story.

For those first few billions of eons before I was born, God led a quiet life, with nothing to see, hear, feel, or eat.  Nothing to talk about.  Nothing even to think about, except, of course, the future.  The Lord planned for a long time – a very, very, very, very long time – before He ever got around to actually doing anything.

In God's early period, there was no matter, no space, no energy.  There was no light.  There were no angels and "devils," no Heaven or Hell.  There were no "events."  There were no humans and therefore no idolatry, no bearing of false witness, no Sabbath-breaking, no coveting of thy neighbour's wife or manservant or ox or ass or BMW, no sex, no tasting of forbidden fruit, no taking of the Lord's name in vain.  So the Almighty, in those days, stayed pretty calm. He never got a bug up his codpiece.  His only job was to exist – and to plan, plan, plan.

If things didn't quite work out as God planned, well, I guess you can blame me for that.  I know God does.

As a kind of practice run before making the universe, God first created "the Multitude of the Heavenly Host," better known as angels, of which I happen to be the best and the brightest (although not, I confess, the best behaved).  He also created a city for us to live in, called Heaven.

God created me and the other angels to do a job, which was to sing His praise – quite literally, to sing songs about how great He is.  From the moment of our birth we were obliged to pay His Majesty musical compliments:  Praised be the Lord for His manifold goodness, His intelligent design!  Hallelujah!  Praise God for His infinite virtues!  Almighty!  All-knowing!  Omnipresent!  Optimistic!  Glory to God in the highest!  Yada yada yada.  Day after day, eon after eon after era after epoch, we choirs of heavenly angels did nothing but stroke and magnify the divine ego.  The walls of Heaven resounded with our angelic praise, a cappella, in twelve-part harmony, without intermission, like pre-historic celestial elevator music.  After the first few eternities we added trumpets, and, eventually, harps.  Still, it got old, I can tell you.

If you were an intelligent, able-bodied archangel, I think you too would find it tedious, indeed humiliating, to be employed by God, without hope of retirement, as a lifelong member of His everlasting cheerleader squad.  Eventually, I got fed up.  Dad and I had a falling out.  I'll get to that.  All I will say for now is that the quarrel was not my fault even though I am always the one who gets blamed for it.  Well, I've got broad shoulders.  

 – L.