Whom should I trust, God or the Devil?

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The TV show, Lucifer is a fun examination of this question. God is distant, difficult to relate to, and does odd things for inscrutable reasons. Lucifer is fun, understands us, and never judges our moral failings. It’s a take on Biblical myth that takes itself as seriously as, well, most Americans take their religion.

Over time God is revealed to have a plan not just for the humans he created, but also the various angels and celestial beings. And Lucifer’s rougher edges get filed off by his partnership, friendship, and occasional romance with the other main character, Chloe.

This personification of celestial entities, necessary for the purposes of storytelling, cuts to the heart of the nature of divinity. It’s a mixing of traits. vulnerability coexists with power, even makes one more powerful. Even if you can’t be killed whilst being able to kill others, you can still be vulnerable. To be divine is not to give up humanity.

And the only way to become divine is through God. Relaxing and letting the process work. Lucifer figured this out over the course of the second season, the other celestials have to catch up to his ability to intuit God’s intent.

It’s this ability to reflect humanity’s wishes back onto them that makes him perfect for the job of overseeing Hell, managing the process of redeeming those who torture themselves over their perceived failings.

Lucifer isn’t without empathy, but to him, there’s no end to the depths people can sink, and he himself can sink all the way down to that level if and when required, and come back up just as quickly, Tom Ellis is masterful in the role. There was one episode where he gets to see the video moderators at a big social media platform do their jobs, and the horrific nature of the subject matter is typically traumatizing, but Lucifer just sees it as an exciting new way to do his self-appointed job of bringing punishment to those who deserve it.

Heroes, myths, divine persons, are all slices of human possibility. God himself is not a singular instance of one of these slices, but all of the slices melded together into the whole of potential. Lucifer, who we call the Devil among many other names, represents human self-loathing. Self-loathing is the water that Lucifer swims in, and his other name in the show, the Morningstar, the shining one, the bringer of the dawn, intends to evoke the hope, the light at the end of the tunnel of despair.

The show aims to show us how.