When you think of the devil, most likely you associate him with being evil, whether you believe in him or not. To believe that there is a devil who has a distinctive personality and embodies the power of darkness1 seems ridiculous to natural man. Is there really an evil being sitting on our shoulder tempting us to be sinful? The Bible describes the devil as being much more sophisticated than most people are aware.
Who Is the Devil and What Are His Characteristics?
There are plenty of verses in the Bible that refer to the existence of Satan, the devil, demons, principalities and powers (Lk. 10:18; Matt. 4:1;
Ja. 2:19; Col 2:15; etc.). The Evil One is most commonly referred to as Satan and the Devil. These two names are used interchangeably throughout the Bible. Basically, Satan means “adversary, resister,” and the name Devil means “accuser, slanderer.”
It is popular belief that Isaiah 14:12-15 and Ezekiel 28:11-19 describe the character of Satan who was formerly known as Lucifer, which means bright morning star. According to these verses he became full of pride and desired to usurp God’s throne, resulting in him being cast out of heaven. He is known as the prince of the powers of the air (Eph. 2:2) and was given permission to tempt mankind to sin against God and thereby enabling him to be the temporary ruler of this world (Luke 4:6), causing mankind to be enslaved to him (Rom. 6:16; Eph. 2:3), although he has blinded the minds of people of this fact (2 Cor. 4:4).
Satan is not greater than God, for God created him as stated in Col. 1:16. Job 1:6-12; 2:1-6 shows that he has access to God and cannot do anything to mankind without God’s permission. These verses also reveal his agenda, as the adversary, to cause God-fearing mankind to curse God. Eph. 6:10-12 also mentions how the children of God are to be prepared against the strategies and warfare of Satan. Although he was judged at the time of Christ’s crucifixion, he still has power on the earth until the fullness of time according to Biblical prophecy. When the future tribulation comes as a result of war in heaven, he will then be cast out of heaven and be limited to his activities on the earth. When Christ comes to reign during the millennium, he will be bound in the Abyss, then be released for a short time only to be defeated by God and cast into the lake of fire forever (Rev. 20:10).
To understand how Satan operates in this world in such a profoundly deceptive way, Lewis Sperry Chafer writes, “It is also revealed that Satan in his warfare will counterfeit the things of God, which undertaking will likewise be in accord with his purpose to be “like the most High.” He will promote extensive religious systems (1 Timothy 4:1-3; 2 Corinthians 11:13-15). In this connection, it should be observed that Satan can promote forms of religion which are based on selected Bible texts, which elevate Christ as the leader, and which incorporate every phase of the Christian faith excepting one—the doctrine of salvation by grace alone on the ground of the shed blood of Christ. Such satanic delusions are now in the world and multitudes are being deceived by them. Such false systems are always to be tested by the attitude they take toward the saving grace of God through the efficacious blood of Christ (Revelation 12:11).”2
How Can We Know?
But how can we know they are real if we can’t see these evil beings? What keeps us from believing what the Bible says about the existence of God who is also invisible for that matter? How can we who are visible and physical beings comprehend the invisible, spiritual realm? It is the spirit of man that has the ability to communicate with the spiritual realm. Since the fall of man our spirit has become deadened to the Spirit of God, we now live from the dominance of the flesh (the figurative term for the fallen nature and sinful way of life of the body and soul of man) influenced by the spirit that temporarily rules the world, Satan.
When we begin to seek to restore our relationship with God, He will reveal Himself to us and enables us to understand His spiritual kingdom. If we choose to believe, we can receive the Lord’s salvation. When we ask Him into our lives, our spirit is resurrected from being dead to God, it is able to receive new life just as Christ was resurrected from the grave and lives. Our spirit has been redeemed from the grave by the price Christ paid to His Father when He died on the cross for us. Our spirit begins living in the new freedom of having a restored relationship with God, in which we attain the undeniable sensitivity to the reality of God’s existence. Our invisible spirit is alive and now able to commune with the invisible Spirt of God. He communicates with us directly by means of the presence of the Holy Spirit who comes to dwell within us when we become born-again.
The devil is real. If he is not, then how can we accept the reality of the crucifixion of Jesus? For if He is our Savior, then what is He saving us from? Hebrews 2:14, 15 14 Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, 15 and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.
Does the Lord’s crucifixion make sense if we cannot face the truth behind the nature of those who wanted Him dead – those of the devil? John 8:42-45 42 Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and came from God; nor have I come of Myself, but He sent Me. 43 Why do you not understand My speech? Because you are not able to listen to My word. 44 You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it. 45 But because I tell the truth, you do not believe Me.”
If the crucifixion of Jesus never happened, then we cannot face the reality that we are fallen (via Adam, Romans 5:12 12 “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned”) and have come under the power of the devil as well. 1 John 5:19 19 “We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one.” Galatians 1:4 4“who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father.”
From a Human Standpoint
From a human standpoint, there are ways that testify that God is real and we are fallen, and have become blinded of spiritual realities as a result.
One way of knowing Satan is real is when you experience unconditional love. This can only be sourced from God. How willing are you to suffer and take the punishment, even to the point of death for someone who doesn’t deserve it? So if God is real, then His Son Jesus is real, and therefore Satan is real because that is who Jesus came to defeat, the works of the devil, when He atoned for our sins on the cross and conquered death (1 John 3:8).
If you have a problem believing because of what you can’t see, then believe because of what you can see – you can start by looking within yourself and your own tendency to be evil (consciously do what you know is wrong), or by seeing how we lack self-control. Consider the endless effort for unity and justice because we are all diversified and think we know what is right in our own eyes, and notice how we naturally have a disdain for people full of prideful self-adulation. God has made much use of visible things to convey spiritual realities that you can observe through nature itself as well as human behavior. Consider the fact that every living thing dies and the earth is in the process of decay. Psalm 19 speaks of how the natural wonders of all creation declare the glory of God. Romans 1:19-20 speaks of how God has made the knowledge of His existence obvious to man, how His invisible qualities of divine power and nature can be known by observing everything He has made, so that we really are without excuse.
Also, think about the fact of how we even became aware of good and evil in Genesis 3:6-7. Something dramatically spiritual happened to Adam and Eve when they ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil after they were forbidden by God not to. We all have a sense of what we think is good and evil, don’t we? Where does this sense, this intuition come from? Is it not spiritual?
The fact that we respond to sin with an undeniable guilty conscience testifies that God exists and that He is a moral God with holy standards. His law reveals His moral character and also reveals our sinful nature when we realize our failure to fully abide by it. The legal letter of the law of God convicts us of sin and therefore instills fear and anxiety within us because it requires punishment and causes separation from Him. But we can become free of that by the work of Jesus Christ, who fulfilled all the requirements of the law and is able to cleanse us of sin through the blood of His atonement (Rom 3:19-26; 5:18-21; Matt. 5:17; Gal. 3:24). God is love and He is spirit. The devil is evil and he is spirit. We have fallen into the devil’s realm through our sin, our disobedience to God. We can stay in this fallen condition if we like, or we can accept the free gift of forgiveness from God and spend eternity with Him, having been restored into to His kingdom.
I cannot deny my guilty conscience. I have two choices, either admit my wrong-doing or deny it, which would be very hard to do unless I tried to quench it with substance abuse or subject myself to mental insanity, because you can’t ignore guilt, because God is real. Fortunately, knowing the great love that God has for us by what He was willing to suffer in order to save us will take away all fear of admitting to Him any guilt and shame we have.
Satan’s nature is everything opposite of God, he is anti-God and wants to murder and destroy everything that is of God, and he will lie, tempt, accuse and deceive to no end in order to accomplish this. Think about why we can be so resistive to God. If the devil is not real then who is there to blame for instigating mankind to be evil? God does not tempt. If we are ignorant of knowing God’s intended plan of creating man with the ability to have free-will, and how that includes the ability to act upon the evil potential within ourselves, then we will mistakenly reason that God is to blame for evil because we do not understand why He would allow it to exist and manifest.
If It’s So Important…
We are physical beings who naturally are skeptical of the spiritual realm. If it is so important for us to be aware of our fallen condition before God and to see our need of His salvation, then why doesn’t it seem more obvious to us? Why does God allow Satan to make us so blind of our fallen condition and of His existence?
When Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they died (became spiritually dead and alienated from God) like He said they would. Although they were deceived, this decision was an act of rebellion against God by wanting to be like the Creator, all knowing (which implies independence of Him, to be self-sufficient), instead of being content in being dependent on Him as His creation. Dead people in the grave don’t know they are dead (although their spirit is fully aware that their physical body has expired). In the same way, spiritually dead people don’t know they are spiritually dead, separated from God who is the source of life. Although we may be spiritually dead, we are still capable of being aware of God’s existence. Fortunately, God has provided a way to justifiably resurrect us from our dead condition (Col. 1:13-14). Unfortunately, until Satan is cast into the Lake of Fire in the end, he remains ruler of the world and will magnify every aspect of our physical senses to keep us content in remaining lost in the physical realm in his attempt to keep us blind of the spiritual realm (2 Cor. 4:4). This is a spiritual battle happening in the heavens for human souls. This is why Christians are persecuted. The devil is working through his missionaries whose purpose is to kill and destroy Christians who can bring the light of truth about God’s kingdom to lost souls.
If we are spiritually dead, how can we know the things of God? God has provided us with plenty of ways of enabling us to see the light of truth, especially by reading the Holy Bible. We can see how the crucifixion of Christ exposed our blindness – God is just, and the cross revealed the need for propitiation and atonement for our sins. But notice how the sin offering of Jesus, the Lamb of God, involved the suffering of brutality to the point of not being humanly recognizable at the hands of wicked men. The devil wanted people to see Jesus as a criminal for blaspheming God rather than the Son of God who came to take away the sin of the world. Satan wanted us to believe that the physical death of the Messiah would be the end of Him, not taking into account of the spiritual significance of what the Lord’s crucifixion accomplished for us. So we can see how Christ’s resurrection fully exposed the reality of Satan and his evil agenda.
Satan is the temporary ruler of this world and uses the “flesh”3 to keep us enslaved to the physical realm, using our pride to make us feel foolish to believe in the spiritual realm (1 Cor. 2:14). Satan wouldn’t reveal himself and make himself obvious to us since that would scare us into the arms of God. To keep us ignorant of God he just has to blind us of the spiritual realities and keep us content in being self-sufficient.
God can reveal Himself to the world in one moment if He wanted to, but He doesn’t. He gives us enough evidence through the things He has made and through our awareness of good and evil, and patiently waits for us to seek Him out. When He did make Himself visible in the form of man through His Son Jesus Christ, He was actually here walking on the earth amongst us, and look at what happened to Him and how He was treated. Not everyone believed He was God, many people were skeptical, and you have to wonder why anyone would want to crucify an innocent, sinless man who lived His whole life demonstrating the love of God and His supernatural power that testified of His identity as being the Son of God.
Summary
God wants us to realize that He has set us free from the darkest stronghold imaginable. Satan is the great deceiver and will use every power of the flesh to deceive us into thinking that this temporary shallow life is where we want to be and that this physical realm is all there is to life. He will even go as far as to appear as an angel of light to deceive us once we do come to have faith in God in order to keep us in the dark about the truth of the gospel.
It is God’s desire to open our eyes to see that we are in a place where we don’t belong, that we were cast into a whole different world, a whole different culture ruled by Satan when Adam sinned against God. But now we have the opportunity to be restored to where we belong and learn how to live by the power of the Holy Spirit.
God is the source of life, if you are disconnected from Him then you die. Satan has the power of death, which Christ conquered. Satan used his power of death by getting Adam and Eve to sin. He couldn’t just go and kill them, he had to disconnect them from their life support, God, or rather, get them to disconnect from it, by deceiving them. So if you are not living in the realm of spiritual life, you are existing in the realm of spiritual death and ruled by its master, Satan.
Think about this, if the devil is not real, then what did Jesus come to save us from? “He who sins is of the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil.” (1 John 3:8). Why are Christians and Jews persecuted? Why is there only one way to God (Acts 4:12)? Why is it foolish to believe that the devil is real? What did Jesus mean when He said “My kingdom is not of this world (Jn. 18:36)?” Why is the cross so offensive? It exposes our fallen nature, and we can be too prideful to be humiliated by it or too sensitive to face the shame it brings.
God is the creator of all things and that includes Satan, so he has to answer to God. He is not greater than God in any way, therefore there is no need to be afraid of him if you have put your trust in God. If you don’t know God personally, then how can you trust Him? If you experience the works of Satan in your life then he will be able to have you shaking in your boots if you do not have confidence in the Lord and His love for you.
The devil is real – but there is no need to fear, for he was defeated when Christ was crucified on the cross and then resurrected from the grave. Whenever he tries to scare me I just picture that scene from “The Passion” movie when Jesus stomps on the serpent’s head to remind myself of his defeat. He will accuse you to no end. The Holy Spirit will convict us of our sins out of love so that we will turn to God in repentance, but the devil will maliciously accuse us, making us feel rejected by God which will therefore keep us distant from Him. Either way, we are made aware of our sins. They need to be fearlessly exposed and dealt with before the loving mercy and grace of the Lord. Just make sure that when you lay them down at Jesus’ feet you leave them there.
Notes
1. “In the New Testament he is called both Satan and the devil…and is not only the ‘accuser’ (Rev. 12:10) and ‘tempter’ (Matt. 4:1-3), but a distinctive personality who embodies the power of darkness. He is the enemy of light and of God (Acts 26:18), being ‘the prince of demons’ (Matt. 9:34; etc.), ‘the ruler of this world’ (Jn. 12:31; etc.), the one who has the power of death (Heb. 2:14), and ‘a murderer from the beginning…a liar and the father of lies’ (Jn. 8:44); yet in the end he will be defeated forever (Rev. 12:9; 20:10).” – Myth and Mystery- An Introduction to the Pagan Religions of the Biblical World by Jack Finegan, 1989 Baker Book House Company, Pg. 116
“To the Christian, the existence of Satan as a real person is proved by the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ recognized him as such. He referred to him frequently by name (e.g., Luke 10:18; Matt. 4:10; etc.) and indeed called him ‘the prince of this world’ (Jn. 12:31; 14:30; 16:11). – The Bible Has the Answer by Henry M. Morris, 1971 Baker Books, Pg. 214
2. Major Bible Themes by Lewis Sperry Chafer, chapter 22
http://www.lewissperrychafer.org/Themes.pdf
3. “The final evil influence that Paul drew attention to is what he termed ‘the flesh.’ This is Paul’s favorite expression to convey the inner drive of people to act in ways deviant to the standard of God’s righteousness. It points not only to the inner motivating force behind actions that are associated with the body, such as sexual sin, but also to aspects of the thought life as well, such as envy and anger. This inner impulse to do evil is set in contrast to the new impulse to live with moral integrity provided by God’s gift of the Holy Spirit (see Gal. 5:19-23).” –Powers of Darkness by Clinton E. Arnold, 1992 Inter Varsity Press, Pg. 125
For Details See:
AMG Publishers Word Study Series:
The Complete Word Study Dictionary N.T., Spiro Zodhiates, ThD., #1228 diablos, Pg. 418; # 4567 Satan, Pg. 1282.
The Complete Word Study Dictionary O.T., Warren Baker, D.R.E. and Eugene Carpenter, PhD., # 7854 Satan, Pg. 1127
Other Resources:
Flashback: Justice Scalia: “I Even Believe in the Devil” https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/michael-w-chapman/justice-scalia-i-even-believe-devil
Satan – His Motives and Methods by Lewis Sperry Chaffer (1871-1952)
http://www.lewissperrychafer.org/SATAN.pdf
Satan- His Person, Work, Plan and Destiny by F.C. Jennings (1847-1948)
(Although much of this book was very enlightening, I found part three questionable, and sometimes his writing style can be hard to discern what he means.)