What Christians get wrong about Satan

Have you noticed how, despite living in an increasingly materialist world, the spiritual realm keeps breaking through? Pretty much everyone I know – Christian and non-Christian alike – has had an encounter with something they describe as spiritual, or even demonic. I’m meeting increasing numbers of young people training in deliverance ministry. We’re hearing more talk of devils and demons in churches again and seeing their stories pop up in movies galore.

So, what is going on? What is the Holy Spirit trying to tell us? What is happening in the heavenly realm right now?

As we discern our cultural moment, it’s vital that we right-size the devil. This is not a cosmic arm-wrestling match between two opposite-but-equal powers. Martin Luther said: “The devil is God’s devil”, and everything the evil one is allowed to do forms part of God’s ultimate plan to redeem the whole of creation to himself.

Who, where and what?

So, who is this devil? Firstly, his name is not Lucifer. That word doesn’t appear in the original Hebrew and Greek Bible. It shows up in a much later Latin translation and then disappears from modern translations for good reason. A lucifer – or light-bearer – is obviously not what the devil is. That Latin translation calls Jesus a light-bearer. Creation is a light-bearer. Christians are light-bearers. Technically, it’s you, I and Jesus who are the true lucifers!

His name isn’t Satan or Devil, either. Those are just English names for the Hebrew ha-satan (pronounced ha-sah-tahn) and the Greek diabolos. If we wanted to give the evil one an English name that roughly equates, we’d call him Accuser-Adversary. (And before we get too hung up on the idea of anglicising the devil’s name to make it more understandable to the modern English mind, let’s not forget that previous generations did the same thing when they turned the Hebrew Yehoshua ben Yehoseph into the English Jesus of Nazareth.)

The devil is not the main character in God’s history or your story

Accuser-Adversary doesn’t show up very often in the Bible. Satan (with a capital S) makes an appearance on just three unique occasions in the Old Testament. Devil (with a capital ‘D’ and no ‘the’) makes an appearance on just three unique occasions in the New Testament. The Bible talks more about donkeys than it does the devil. It contains more stories about olive oil than Satan. The devil ranks somewhere between cheese and bread; a veritable Satan sandwich.

He doesn’t speak much, either. When you eliminate the repeats, he speaks a maximum of just 230 English words, a trifling 0.03 per cent of the Bible’s total word count. He’s essentially a rounding error, especially when you realise that nearly half of what he says is either quoting or misquoting scripture.

So where is he? And what does he do? 

Many Christians have a sense that he’s permanently perched on their shoulders, personally tempting and torturing them around the clock. But nothing in the Bible suggests Accuser-Adversary is omnipresent. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Revelation 12:10 says he spends his days darting back and forth between heaven and earth, accusing Christians before the courtroom of heaven. Luckily, Christ our advocate defends us with his very life.

Most Christians have almost certainly never had a face-to-face encounter with the devil. If you do the maths, in a world with 8 billion people, over the course of a century Accuser-Adversary could only spend 0.39 seconds with each of us. In all likelihood, most humans will go their entire lives without ever encountering him at all.

But that is not to say we will not encounter the lies, accusations and life-destroying systems he has been designing and detonating in human hearts since the beginning of time. 

During the second world war, 99 per cent of Allied forces never came face-to-face with Adolf Hitler, but they encountered his lies and allies from Belgium to North Africa. And we’re still digging up bombs dropped by Nazis 80 years later. 

In the same way, you can’t walk ten feet without encountering a dozen of Accuser-Adversary’s schemes in everything from shopping addiction to the promise of viral internet fame. 

Resisting his schemes

How, then, do we “resist the devil” so that he will flee from us (James 4:7)?

It helps to know his game plan. Accuser-Adversary, like all free will spirits – including our own – wants to be God. To accomplish his mission, he tries to establish strongholds in people’s lives, virtual pillboxes from which to snipe, “steal…kill and destroy” (John 10:10) and launch further sallies to expand his territory. 

The Bible talks more about donkeys than it does the devil

The devil only gets a stronghold after first establishing a foothold – getting a foot in the door of your life and then ratcheting it open. We see this foothold-to-stronghold dynamic play out across the Bible and human history. Self-will becomes rebellion. Anger becomes violence. Hatred becomes murder. Distraction becomes idol worship. Unforgiveness becomes bitterness. Lust becomes adultery. Guilt becomes condemnation. Fear becomes paralysis. Conceit becomes pride. False teaching becomes apostasy.

This happens through three stages of entrapment:

1. Temptation: A desire is introduced. In most cases, it seems simultaneously seductive and innocuous.

2. Fixation: An obsession begins to form. We must have the object of our desire. We obsess over it. We crave it.

3. Possession: We reach out and snatch it. Once we take possession, we hoard and hide it jealously like Gollum’s ring or a dragon on a pile of gold.

If we are well-versed in Accuser-Adversary’s lies, understand how footholds and strongholds work, and are keenly conscious of the three stages of entrapment, we can let the Holy Spirit reverse engineer a game plan to keep us from sinning.

Avoiding temptation

If we don’t want Accuser-Adversary to grow strongholds of sin habits in our lives, then we need to avoid footholds.

To avoid footholds, we need to avoid possession. To avoid possession, we need to avoid fixation. To avoid fixation, we need to avoid temptation.

That’s why we ask God to lead us away from temptation in the Lord’s Prayer. The easiest way to prevent Accuser-Adversary from growing fortress-like strongholds in our lives is to steer ridiculously far from temptation in the first place.

The reason the Titanic sank wasn’t because it hit the iceberg head-on. The largest ship in the world sank because it scraped open the starboard hull rather than charting a wide berth around the lethal obstacle. Steering miles clear of temptation is far easier than trying to patch up your sinking life. 

Steering miles clear of temptation is far easier than trying to patch up your sinking life

Here are some practical examples. It’s harder to fall into a stronghold of dairy gluttony if you don’t stock your freezer full of Häagen-Dazs. If you struggle with a shopping addiction, do what we did and move an hour away from the nearest shopping centre. It’s difficult to fall into a stronghold of wealth accumulation if you fire your financial advisor. If drugs have a grip on your body, living in a crack house won’t help. It’s significantly easier to not profit off the poor if you sell your stocks, bonds and rental properties. I’ve never encountered porn on a mobile phone for the simple reason that I don’t own one.

No opportunity, no temptation, no fixation, no possession, no addiction, no destruction.

But there’s more at play than just the devil and his emissaries. Martin Luther identified the three major enemies of your faith: the world, the flesh and the devil. I’d wager most of the evil in this world is actually caused by the first two. At the end of the day, the devil can’t make anyone do anything. He can tempt you to pull the trigger and murder someone, but only a human can make the ultimate choice. In fact, to claim “the devil made me do it” is heretical. After all, if the devil is ultimately responsible for all human sin, but God punishes humans, then God is not good, just or God.

Whether from the world, the flesh or the devil, even temptation is a servant of God. Thank God for allowing it, because it’s an opportunity for victory. The proper use of Accuser-Adversary is to see his trials and temptations as tests to grow our faith and character. The theme of a refiner’s fire pops up all over the Bible. A white-hot crucible is how you get out the gold. The point of all our testing is to create everlasting kingdom worth. When the purifying work is done, 24-carat-gold Christians will emerge from the rubble.

I hope you’re beginning to see that the devil is your unwitting and unwilling ally in service to your King. God uses the devil for all sorts of redemptive activities:

To repulse sinners to repentance: (ie the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15:11-32).

To harden rebellionists for his greater purpose: (ie Pharaoh in Exodus 7:3-4).

To strengthen Christians: (ie Peter in Luke 22:31-32).

To discipline the disobedient: (ie Ahab in 1 Kings 22:19-23).

To dispense justice: (ie King Saul in 1 Samuel 16:14). 

To sanctify faithful disciples: (ie Paul’s thorn in the flesh in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10)

To deliver his witnesses home: (ie the church of Smyrna in Revelation 2:10).

Purpose in the pain 

But why does God allow the devil, sin and evil to persist? Must we really endure war, child abuse, central banking and human trafficking for God’s ultimate purpose to be fulfilled?

The answer is an unequivocal yes. Free will is a non-negotiable prerequisite for the possibility of love to exist. Imagine my wife was a robot, and every time I pressed her shoulder, she said: “I love you.” Is that real love or compelled lip service? Love can only exist when a free will chooses it over rejection. God had to give us free will so we could choose to love him. Anything less would make him not good.

The possibility of evil was the only way to open the door to us choosing love and obedience to God out of free will. God had to risk our rebellion in order to make a way for us to choose to love him. Love required free will. Free will chose sin. Sin led to universal fallenness, suffering and death. But through Jesus, love is now redeeming all things back to Christ.

This leads us to only one conclusion: sin, pain and fallenness exist because God’s love is the most important thing in the universe.

So, even more than right-sizing the devil, we need to right-size our God. Every book about the devil is actually a book about Jesus. The devil is not the main character in God’s history or your story. Ironically, the devil is a minor player even in his own biography. When all is said and done, all that will remain is the manifest presence of God dwelling with his people forever.