God (Yahweh)

There used to be two strong points in Lucifer: first, the unresolved tension between Lucifer and Chloe Decker; second, the constant presence of God, who remains unseen behind the curtains but is always referred to (except for the episode Once Upon a Time in which Neil Gaiman voices Him as a narrator). Season 5 decides to make a risky move, resolving the tension between the protagonists and having God appear in person in the mid-season finale, Spoiler Alert, portrayed by Dennis Haysbert. God is not exactly an easy character to deal with (just see the awful job Holly Black did with Vol. 2), and from now on the writers will have to be very careful with their material. In the DC Universe, there are many, often contradictory stories regarding the Supreme Being, who is obviously inspired to Judaeo-Christian traditions, but doesn’t mean to represent them faithfully. Let’s try together to draft a consistent biography of the most powerful being in the DC Multiverse.

At the beginning, there was Yahweh, the one and first being, alone in the void of nothingness. Then, He spoke, and started creating: this first manifestation was The Voice, who created the Endless, eternal embodiment of primeval forces, and the Host, angels who were His first children. From that moment, The Plan started: everything God created had His name written in it on a submolecular level, He was literally present in everything and everyone, and everything that happened within His creation was part of a grand design He had conceived, to a sole end that apparently, and quite mysteriously everything considered, was the ultimate happiness of all His children. After creating the spiritual realm, God entrusted His two most powerful sons, Samael and Michael, to create the material one: He gave Michael power enough to create dull matter, and Samael to bring it to life, thus making His family part of His project. Once the material world finally came into existence, the creative work of God didn’t cease: He created other immortals, deities who would have become the gods and goddesses of endless pantheons all over the universe, and even demons; it was about this time that He cast out of Heaven one of His closest servants, exiling Him to Hell for his defiance, and making him become the First of the Fallen. It was also this moment of creation of the material world that Krona witnessed with his forbidden time travel, and he witnessed another manifestation of God, The Hand, giving shape and order to the universe, that split into a Multiverse following Krona’s intermission… and following The Plan, of course. It was here that The Plan started to become more complicated and unfathomable to anyone but its Maker: God created Adam and Lilith, the two first human beings, and had them inhabit the Garden of Eden, but then exiled Lilith when she proved to be a rebellious wife to Adam, and created Eve in her stead. By that time, God had started speaking to the Host only in the form of The Presence, only heard and never seen, and some of his angels started to doubt His ways, partly inspired by Lilith’s defiance. Finally, Samael led a rebellion against God, convincing many of his brothers that they had to rebel against the incomprehensible Plan and be the makers of their own destiny.

Despite being directly called into cause, God didn’t participate to the following battle, and apparently He didn’t even approve violence between His children, but the always loyal Michael gathered a number of faithful angels and made war with Samael and his followers, who were eventually defeated and cast down to Hell. Genuinely believing that Samael, who now called himself Lucifer, the Light-Bringer, would have been happier far from Him, God entrusted him with the rule of Hell, already foreseeing what would have happened later. As expected, Lucifer entered the Garden of Eden, tricked Adam and Eve into rebellion against God, bringing to their exile from paradise onto Earth. This was exactly what God wanted, as now humans were mortals, and had begun the dance of free will, molding their own destinies (albeit everything they did, said or thought, He had been knowing since before they were born), choosing virtue or sin, good or evil. With rebellion and sin, also the concept of justice was born, and some celestial beings, first Eclipso and then The Spectre, became the embodiment of God’s Wrath and Vengeance, respectively. Eons passed, and The Plan unraveled in all its details: faithful angels like Zuriel and rebellious ones like Asmodel, redeemed demons like Etrigan and corrupted ones like Neron, all played a part in their eternal lives, but so did mortals, who contributed with each action to the grand design. The only one who kept trying to escape the Plan was Lucifer, who eventually even abandoned his place in Hell, entrusting it to Dream of the Endless and wandering Earth in his new rebellion. Dream organized an auction among gods and demons to find a new lord of Hell, but eventually The Presence ordered two angels, Duma and Remiel, to take possession of Hell on His behalf, an authority that vanquished that of all the other auctioneers. The time had come for the last phases of the Plan, apparently, as following Lucifer’s escape God started acting strangely: first, He granted His rebellious son a Letter of Passage out of Creation in exchange of a task that any other of his angels could have done, then He organized things so that even the faithful Michael was cast out of Heaven, and eventually He disappeared, abandoning His tower in the Silver City, with His name starting to fade from all atoms of Creation, a condition that could end only with its dissolution. But again, everything was part of a Plan that only He could fully understand: all the others just needed to have faith in Him…

Yahweh is, simply put, God: He is infinitely good and benevolent, an all-knowing and all-present entity who regards all of His creatures, being them good or evil, as His beloved children, and follows their lives, short, long or infinite as they may be, with infinite care and tenderness. He is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, there’s literally nothing He can’t do, all His thoughts and words become reality, and He is present in every single molecule in the infinite Multiverse. God is good, and the ultimate goal of His incredibly intricate Plan is the happiness of all His creature… but it takes quite a leap of faith to believe that in spite of all the bad things happening everywhere since the beginning of time, something that not everyone is willing to do…