The Devil Unmasked

For over a century now, belief in the devil has seemed to be on the way out. The toothy red imp with the tail and the trident has become a secular figure of fun, while Protestant theologians generally have banished the personal devil of the Bible to the lumber-room reserved for broken-down myths. No doubt this state of affairs is just what the devil has been working for, since it allows him to operate now on the grandest scale without being either detected or opposed. Nor has he wasted his chances. During the past hundred years, he has engineered a world-wide collapse of evangelicalism in all the older Protestant denominations. The present spineless, powerless, unevangelical state of these churches, as compared with what they were a century ago, gives heart-breaking proof of the skill and thoroughness with which he has done his job. The Bible is no longer fully believed, the gospel is no longer thoroughly preached, and post-Christian paganism sweeps through the world like wildfire. Not for centuries has Satan won such a victory.

Was it rational and enlightened, as liberal theologians thought, to give up belief in the devil? Not particularly. The natural response to denials of Satan's existence is to ask, who then runs his business?—for temptations which look and feel like expressions of cunning destructive malice remain facts of daily life. So does hell in the sense defined by the novelist John Updike—“a profound and desolating absence” (of God, and good, and community and communication); and “the realisation that life is flawed” (Updike goes on) “admits the possibility of a Fall, of a cause behind the Fall, of Satan.” Belief in Satan is not illogical, for it fits the facts. Inept to the point of idiocy, however, is disbelief in Satan, in a world like ours; which makes Satan's success in producing such disbelief all the more impressive, as well as all the sadder.

In recent years something of an antidote to the habit of denying Satan has been administered by the charismatic movement's heavy stress on spiritual warfare against the demons and the devil, their general. It was right to take seriously this aspect of New Testament Christianity, but wisdom has not always marked the emphasis. Firstly, demon-possession of unbelievers and demonic attacks on Christians have not been sufficiently distinguished from forms of mental illness and collapse that yield to rest and drugs. In the gospels, demon-possession is known not just by disintegration of personhood, but also by recognition of Jesus' identity and authority as Son of God, and hostility towards him. Only when this factor appears can demon-possession ever be diagnosed with confidence. Secondly, the assumption that demon-possession today might be as common a problem as in Jesus' day is doubtful. From Acts and the epistles it does not look as if it was a common problem even in the apostolic age. The natural way to read the evidence is to suppose that the coming to earth of the Son of God stirred up a great deal of demonic activity which subsided after his ascension. It is to be feared that the preoccupation of some with finding demons everywhere is really an obsessional ego-trip, which Satan can use as a smoke-screen for his real work of spiritual corruption no less effectively than he can use disbelief in his existence to that end.

From all this it is surely clear that Satan is a person whom churches and Christians ignore at their peril. The New Testament repeatedly cautions us against ignoring him. Paul never fell into this trap: he took the measure of the devil, and could say with truth, “we are not ignorant of his designs”—“I am up to his tricks”, as a modern scholar puts it (2 Cor 2 : 11). It is vitally important that we today should be able to say the same. Like it or not, each of us is personally at war with the devil, for the devil has personally declared war upon each of us. Face this, Paul urges, and learn how to fight him, “that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle...against principalities, against the powers...Therefore take the whole armour of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day” (Eph 6: 11 ff). The Christian's life is not a bed of roses; it is a battlefield, on which he has constantly to fight for his life. The first rule of success in war is—know your enemy. The purpose of this present study is to enable us to know and to assess Satan, in order that we may fight him effectively.

Difficulties of demonology

It is hard to have right thoughts about the devil; for, in the first place, that branch of demonology which deals with him is entirely a matter of revelation, and, in the second place, our demonology cannot be any more true or adequate than our doctrine of God is. We can see the truth about the devil only in the light of the truth about God. Demonology concerns one aspect—the basic aspect—of the mystery of evil. Evil has to be understood as a lack, or perversion, of good, and we know what good is only when we know what God is. Only through appreciating God's goodness can we form any idea of the devil's badness.

A pitfall, then, confronts us at once: if our thoughts of God are false, our thoughts of the devil will be false too. For instance: if, with many, we should imagine God as every man's heavenly uncle, a person whose job (not always too well done) is to help us achieve our selfish desires for irresponsible fun and carefree comfort, we shall think of Satan as merely a cosmic sour-puss whose sole aim is to thwart our plans and spoil our pleasures. But this is really no nearer to the truth about Satan than the celestial Santa Claus idea is to the truth about God.

The knife-edge

Moreover, when we study demonology we walk on a knife-edge; at our feet all the time are two yawning chasms of error, into which we can all too easily topple. On the one hand, we can take Satan too seriously, as some in the early church and the Middle Ages did. This will cause us to fall out of the peace of God into morbid fears and fancies: the devil will become the main theme of our theology, and we shall take up a negative view of the Christian life as primarily a course of devil-dodging exercises and anti- Satanic manoeuvres. This was the mistake that led men to become monks and hermits in the early church: they withdrew from ordinary life in order to fight the devil full-time and without distraction, believing that they could not otherwise keep clear of his clutches. The root of their mistake was unbelief: they would not trust God to keep them safe if they stayed in the world (see Jn 17:15). They were vividly aware that the devil is an adversary of terrible malice and great power, but they failed to realize that by virtue of Christ's cross he is now a defeated foe. The biblical answer to their fears was given by the Reformers and Puritans, who, without minimizing in the least the devil's ferocity against the people of God, offered a worthy exposition of the triumph of Calvary, the scope of Christ's promises and the reality of his keeping power.

On the other hand, we can also err by not taking the devil seriously enough. This, as has been said, is the characteristic mistake of modern times. The denial that Satan is a personal agent is an extreme form of it. Unwillingness to take the devil seriously has two bad effects: it fools men, by keeping from them the knowledge of their danger as objects of the devil's attacks, and it dishonours Christ by robbing the cross of its significance as a conquest of Satan and his hosts (cf. Col 2:15).

The only way to avoid these mistakes (both of which, we may be sure, please Satan enormously) is to stick close to Scripture. To Scripture, therefore, we now turn.

Portrait of Satan

Peter speaks of “your adversary the devil” (1 Pet 5:8). ‘Adversary’ is what the Hebrew word ‘Satan’ means; ‘devil’ (Greek diabolos) means ‘slanderer’. Both terms point to the same basic truth—that it is Satan's nature to think, speak and act in constant malicious opposition to God the Creator, and therefore to God's people also. The devil is ‘your adversary’ just because he is God's adversary. Man is God's creature, made in God's image to enjoy God's glory; Satan's ambition ever since man was made has been to deface that image and thwart God's will for our life and destiny.

Satan is an angel, one of the ‘sons of God’ (Jb. 1:6; 2:1—but a fallen one. He is one of “the angels that sinned” (2 Pet 2:4, AV), “that did not keep their own position but left their proper dwelling” (Jude 6). He is now “the commander of the spiritual powers of the air” (Eph 2:2, NEB), leading “the superhuman forces of evil in the heavens” (Eph 6:12, NEB). In order to tempt, he can become “an angel of light” (2 Cor 11:14), but his rule is more properly described as “the power of darkness”. This is darkness in the broadest sense—intellectual, moral and spiritual (Col 1:13; cf Lk 22:53). Scripture pictures the devil as a serpent (Gen 3:1; Rev 20:2), a dragon (Rev 12; 20:2), and a roaring lion (1 Pet 5:8). This indicates his cunning, hatred, ferocity and cruelty against the people of God. Scripture also calls him the tempter (Mt 4:3; 1Thess 3:5), the evil one (Jn 17:15, RV), a liar and a murderer (Jn 8:44). These words indicate the character and aim of the strategy with which he assaults us.

Satan was the original sinner. “The devil has sinned from the beginning” (1 Jn 3:8). We are told no more about the premundane revolt of the fallen angels than that it took place. The Bible is a practical book, and never spends time on things that have no direct bearing on our lives. Some have thought that the terms in which the proud kings of Tyre and Babylon are described in Ezekiel 28:11-19 and Isaiah 14:12-14 respectively owe their origin to traditional accounts of the fall of Satan, whose image these arrogant monarchs strikingly bore, but the matter is incapable of proof. What is clear, however, is that from the very moment of the creation of this world Satan was on the scene, a rebel against God, seeking by deceit (the first lie, Gen 3:4f; cf 2 Cor 11:3) to involve Adam and Eve in a similar rebellion.

His mentality

The mentality of Satan is a mystery whose depths we can never fully plumb: not just because Satan is an angel, while we are men, but also because Satan is purely evil, and we cannot conceive what pure evil is like. No man is so far gone in sin that no vestige of goodness or truth remains in him; no man is wholly motivated by hatred of others; no man has literally no aim in life save to wreck and destroy the creative achievements of another; no man ever says to himself in literally every situation and every sphere of value, ‘evil, be thou my good’; no man's character is integrated solely by the power of hate towards God. Though in fallen man God's image is spoiled at every point, so that nothing man does is ever entirely right and as it should be, none of us is purely evil, and we simply cannot imagine a being who is purely evil. We can never, therefore, form a really adequate idea of what Satan is like. Not even Milton could imagine Satan as entirely lacking in nobility; nor is C. S. Lewis's Screwtape entirely without good humour. But Scripture clearly means us to believe in a Satan, and a host of Satanic myrmidons [attendants], who are of quite unimaginable badness—more cruel, more malicious, more proud, more scornful, more perverted, more destructive, more disgusting, more filthy, more despicable, than anything our minds can conceive.

One certainty is that, like other professional liars, Satan has at one point at least lost his grip on reality. There is a maggot in his mind, a softening of his brain we might say, which compels him to deny that he is a captive and beaten foe and to believe that if he fights hard enough against God and God's true children he will overthrow them in the end. Like Hitler in his bunker, Satan cannot bring himself to believe that he has lost the war, and cannot now win. In Revelation 12:12 a voice from heaven warns the earth that “the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!”. Evidently this knowledge takes the form of a furious denial and a vigorous attempt to prove that it is not so, just as fallen man's natural knowledge of God regularly takes the form of a willed, defiant nonacknowledgment of him. But the intense energy of denial proves that the knowledge is there.

There is not much in the Old Testament about Satan, though when he does appear it is always as the adversary of God's people, trying to exclude them from God's favour either by leading them into irreligious attitudes and actions (disobedience, Gen 3; presumption, 1 Ch 21:1; blasphemy and despair, Jb 1:6-2:10) or by slandering them to God's face (Jb 1:9ff; 2:3ff; Zc 3:1f; cf, the description of satan as “the accuser of our brethren...who accuses them day and night before our God”, Rev 12:10).

In the New Testament, however, the revelation of Satan is much fuller. It there becomes clear that his power is exceedingly great. He can manipulate physical events (2 Thess 2:9; cf Jb 1:2) and suggest to the mind wrong thoughts (Mt 4:3 ff). Not only that; he can also inflict disease (Lk 13:16) and even death (Heb 2:14). Worse still, he actually holds mankind prisoner behind the locked doors of spiritual darkness and unbelief. He “is now at work in the sons of disobedience” (Eph 2:2) to make and keep them blind to God's truth (2 Cor 4:4) and out of line with God's will, until the time comes to end their lives and so fix their eternal state as one of pain, grief and loss. In this way the devil acts as, first, the gaoler, and ultimately the executioner, of the entire human race. “The whole world is in the power of the evil one” (1 Jn 5 :19). From Christ's standpoint, the world which he came to save was enemyoccupied territory, Satan being its ‘prince’ (Gk archon, ruler: Jn 12:31; 14:30;16:11)—indeed, its ‘god’ (2 Cor 4:4).

His captivity

Not that Satan holds any power independently of God. Satan (though doubtless he has never admitted it, nor will ever believe it) is God's tool. In allowing Satan as much power as he does, God is using him to execute divine judgment on a rebel world. Just as a man can make use of a savage dog which hates him, to drive trespassers off his estate, so God makes use of Satan to punish those who have sinned. Satan and the demons are themselves in a prison-state, and have been since their fall: they are “kept in everlasting bonds under darkness unto the judgement of the great day” (Jude 6, Rv; see Mt 25:41; Rev 20:10). They are all in chains. They never have any more freedom of movement than God allows them; and in all that they do, as Calvin said, they drag their chains with them. Satan likes to think, and likes others to think, that he is this world's real ruler (cf. Lk 4:6). The truth is that he cannot exert any power beyond the limits that God sets him (cf. Jb 1:12; 2:6). God keeps him on a chain: it may be a long chain, but it is a real one.

When the Son of God came into the world “to destroy the works of the devil” (1 Jn 3:8), Satan used every means to thwart him—and failed. In everything Christ conquered. Not only at the start of his ministry (Mt 4:1ff), but consistently throughout it (Lk 4:13; 22:28), Satan tempted him to swerve in one way or another from the Father's will (cf. Mt 16 :22 f. ). But Jesus never fell into Satan's traps; not once did he sin (Heb 4:15; 1 Pet 2:22); he repelled all his adversary's attacks, and went on triumphantly to rob Satan of a great part of the dominion that he had hitherto enjoyed. Jesus did this, first by his healings and exorcisms (Lk 11:17-22; 13:16), and finally by his prayers (Lk 22:31f; Jn 17:15) and his atoning death. This made certain the salvation of all that great company whom he came to redeem (Jn 12:31 f). Calvary was thus a decisive victory over Satan and Satan's hosts (Col 2:15), which made certain the subsequent dethroning of the devil from life after life. The cross ensured that countless numbers would be “delivered...from the dominion of darkness and transferred...to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Col 1:13f). This comes to pass through the preaching of the gospel which summons men to turn from Satan to God (Acts 26:18), and the concurrent work of Christ from heaven who moves men to the response of faith and repentance (Acts 5:31). Satan resists every time and every step of the way, but he cannot stop it happening. He is a decisively beaten foe.

The holy war

A man who is not a Christian is Satan's prisoner: Satan has him where he wants him. If, however, he becomes a Christian, Satan views him as an escaped prisoner and goes to war against him to try to recapture him. He tempts (i.e. tests) the Christian with malicious intent, hoping to find a weakness and betray him into a course of action that will ultimately lead him back into the prison out of which Christ brought him. Satan seeks to ‘enter into’ the Christian, as he entered into Judas (Lk 22:3; Jn 13:27), i.e. to recover control of him and so make him a ‘son of the devil’ once more (Acts 13:10; 1 Jn 3:10). All Satan's temptations have this ultimately in view: they are so many ‘welcome’ notices set up along the broad road that leads to destruction.

His tools

How does Satan tempt? By ‘wiles’, i.e., deceit (Eph 6:11; cf. 2 Cor 11:3). Normally he keeps out of sight, manipulating ‘the world’ (external stimuli) and ‘the flesh’ (inordinate desire within us) as his tools of seduction. Sometimes he works through seemingly innocent wishes and wants (cf. Gen 3:6; Lk 4:2f), or well-meant advice from our friends (cf. Mt 16:22f). There is no limit to his subtlety. He has his own servants even in the church (Mt 13:38), playing the part of pastors and theologians (2 Cor 11:13-15); they do not, of course, suspect that their teaching and leadership represent Satanic perversions of Christianity, but they do, and Satan makes full use of them accordingly.

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When Satan gets into the pulpit, or the theological chair, and pretends to teach Christianity, when in reality he is corrupting it...pretends to be teaching Biblical Introduction, when in reality he is making the Bible out to be a book that is not worthy of being introduced—then look out for him; he is at his most dangerous work

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(R.A. Torrey, What the Bible Teaches, p. 517).

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Wrong beliefs about God (e.g., resentment and despair, cf. 2 Cor 12:7), wrong conduct in the sight of God (cf. 1 Cor 7:5)—these are the tactical ends for which Satan works, and he has a hundred and one ways of beguiling us into them.

Let us be clear on this. Satan has no constructive purpose of his own; his tactics are simply to thwart God and destroy men. As David Livingstone's motto was “anywhere, provided it be forward”, so Satan's is, in effect, “anything, provided it be against God”. He is always seeking to produce unbelief, pride, unreality, false hopes, confusion of mind and disobedience, as he did in Eden; if he cannot do this directly, then he labours to do it indirectly, by fostering unbalance and one-sidedness. Living the Christian life is like playing a piece of music on the piano: if you get the notes wrong, you fail; if you get the notes right but the tempo, rhythm, volume or expression wrong you still fail; only when both notes and style are right does the performance succeed. Satan tries both to trap us into doing what is formally wrong and also to distort enough of what is formally right in our habits and actions to make it wrong in its effect. Thought without action, love without wisdom, love of truth without love of people or vice versa, zeal with error, orthodoxy with unrighteousness, conscientiousness with morbidity and despair, selectiveness in one's concern for what is true and right, are samples of this kind of distortion. If we watch against Satan at one point on the battlements of our living, he will try to break in at another, waiting for a moment when we feel secure and happy, and our defences are likely to be down. So it goes on, all day and every day.

Our weapons

What security have we against his attacks? How can we avoid falling victim to them? The only security, as Paul forcefully tells us, is to take to ourselves ‘the whole armour of God’—the girdle of truth (the biblical gospel); the breastplate of righteousness (the integrity of an honest conscience); the firmness of stance provided by the gospel of peace (assurance of being reconciled to God); the shield of faith (active trust in Christ and his promises); the helmet of salvation (confidence in Christ's keeping power, now and for ever); and ‘the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’, the weapon with which our Lord routed Satan in the wilderness. Take these weapons, says Paul, “pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication”, and you need not fear Satan's attacks; you will recognize them and be able to resist them (Eph 6:11-18).

We need not fear the outcome of this fight. For, in the first place, God is always overruling when Satan tempts. He will not allow us to be tempted beyond our strength (1 Cor 10:13); indeed, he exposes us to temptation only in order to make us stronger (1 Pet. 5:6-10), and he has promised to crush Satan in due course under his servants' feet (Rom 16:20). And then, in the second place, Satan always flees when we resist. “Resist the devil and he will flee from you” (Jas 4:7). Pray, and fight; ask Christ to stand by you, and tell the devil to get away from you; and for the moment, at any rate, he has to withdraw. It is remarkable that Paul's inventory of the Christian armour includes nothing to protect the back! We are given no promise of protection if we run away, but we are promised victory every time we stand and give battle. Satan is a defeated and doomed foe; therefore “Resist him, firm in your faith... And...the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, establish, and strengthen you. To him be the dominion for ever and ever. Amen” (1 Pet 5:9-11).

Ch. 6 ‘The Devil’, God's Words, J.I. Packer, IVP, 1981. Used by permission.