The Brink of Despair

If the covering cherub had labored under conscious error, worries about chaos as reward for further errors would have rubbed against his thoughts as he performed his duties, fanning fires. The dread of liability would have become a nagging peril, and he would have become obsessed with the shock of being propelled from perfection at the highest level of service to sudden banishment in ignominy. For him to have feared, suspected, discovered, and tracked the ever-widening pathways to error would have harassed and unnerved him, world without end.

Whether deserved or not, we know that, with report of the flaw, the Light Bearer was transmogrified, transfigured, recreated, reborn, born anew. He had been praised as the perfect covering cherub, but he would now be feared by some as a perfectly intolerable menace and hated by others as a scapegoat for their own iniquities.

And after expulsion, his reception on earth as a mortal would have drawn resentment and shame upon him; for his adoptive brothers would surely have painted him with guilt he would forever shoulder as an infectious outsider. The bloody tale bearers would seal his dishonor, and he would become labeled as a devil, with some whispering in corners that he was the Satan about whom they had been warned.

Times are determined by the spin of the wheel; and in God’s creation, wheels turn within wheels as firmaments spread into expanses. By the time Lucifer first lived as man, the sting of iniquity would have touched every family on earth. Perceived through the dimmed eyes of errant mortals, the fallen angel could mount no defense against accusation; nor could he find any remedy against the shudder his name had come to awaken in the hearts of his new-found fellows. So ostracized, he would have welcomed rejection by his fiercest detractors because it would have chiseled some distance between himself and the accusers, allowing him a  refuge in privacy from which he could begin the search for remedy. In desperation driving him near madness, his thirsting soul would have been riven by the itch of the absurd; and the corrosive cancer of guilt would have metastasized within his angelic core into a narcissistic pride that had not been present in his experience as the covering cherub, but which would have seized upon the nakedness of the hapless man. It would no longer be said of him that he was perfect in all his ways.