If God cannot be in the presence of sin, how can Satan have access to heaven?
divine omnipresence də-ˈvīn äm-ni-ˈpre-zən (t)s Someone once asked me, “If God cannot be in the presence of sin, why does Satan can have access to heaven? The idea is that Satan enters into heaven to accuse the righteous in the books of Job (Job 1:11, 2:5) and Zechariah (Zech. 3:1-5). The problem comes when reading about final glory in the Book of Revelation, wherein there is a picture of the New Jerusalem coming down as a bride adorned for her husband, and John the Revelator says, “nothing unclean, and no one who practices abomination and lying, shall ever come into it, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life” (Rev. 21:27). How can this be? Some might parse out the semantics in Job and Zechariah in such a way to contend that “the Satan” in these Old Testament prophets is someone other than the Devil. So the problem is simply a case of mistaken identity. I’m not bought and sold on that one. So how it is that Satan can accuse the brethren ...