RIC
Various Scriptures
In response to questions you asked and topics you suggested, we are beginning a three-part series on spiritual warfare. Today I will focus on Satan and his strategies. Next week I will focus on Satan’s power broken and then the third week, Tracy will preach on protecting ourselves from the devil.
When I began to do my research for this sermon, I was surprised to discover how little we know about the devil from the Bible. I discovered that most of our knowledge comes from documents not in our Bible and scattered references to those documents within our Bible.
The Old Testament begins with the account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden where the devil, portrayed as a snake, deceives them.
The book of Job was written to discuss the age old struggle to understand suffering and in this story, the devil and God have conversations about what can and cannot be done to Job.
In Zechariah 3 Satan stands as an accuser of Joshua, the High Priest, trying to disqualify him for his office because of his past sins.
In I Chronicles 21, the devil incites King David to sin by taking a census of Israel.
This is the sum of the references in the Old Testament to the devil.
It was in the period between the Old and New Testaments, a period of four hundred years, when there was much more attention paid to Satan. This may be because much of Israel was in captivity in Babylon, the capitol of Persia – modern day Iran. Because of the Persian influence, a discussion of why Israel had suffered such a defeat focused on forces of good and evil and the devil was understood to be behind Israel’s defeat.
It is in the writings from this time, books titled Wisdom, Enoch, Apocalypse of Moses and others, that the picture of Satan is fleshed out. And it is from these books that we pick up our popular understanding of who Satan is and why he rebelled against God.
The early church had access to these books and the obscure references to the devil in the New Testament and reinterpretation of some Old Testament passages (especially Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28) come from the understanding of the devil as revealed in these Apocryphal books.
My point in all this is that there is not much clear teaching in our Bible about the biographical details of the devil.
Why didn’t God think it was important to us to have a more complete understanding of the devil? Why didn’t Jesus teach more about who the devil was or why didn’t God reveal more to Paul or one of the other writers of the New Testament?
I think the reason why there is not a lot of detail about the devil in the Bible is because God does not want us to focus on the devil.
C.S. Lewis wrote a book titled, The Screwtape Letters, which consists of letters written from a senior devil to a junior devil. In the preface to these letters Lewis wrote:
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.
Curiosity is often a good thing. Wanting to know why things work the way they do and why people act the way they do is good. But there are some things about which curiosity is not helpful.
I was looking for images of an injured football player this week and as I searched through page after page of images, pictures of sexy females kept showing up and curiosity made me think, what is the relationship of those pictures to an injured football player? All I had to do was click on one of those images and find out, but that is taking a step on a path that leads to nothing that is good. This is an example of when curiosity is not helpful. There are some things not worth knowing.
Wanting to know more about the devil falls into this same category. Our curiosity about the devil can lead to a preoccupation with the devil and his demonic forces that will be harmful to our spiritual life.
The little there is in the Bible about the devil tells us all we need to know. It is important to know that he is our adversary and will use his powers to pull us away from God. So Jesus warned us about the wiles of the devil and the New Testament writers warned us about the schemes of the devil.
More than this we do not need to know.
What does the Bible say about the devil?
The most important thing to know about the devil is that he is a created being. The devil did not exist before creation. The devil is not an eternal counterpart doing battle against God. The devil is only an angel, created by God.
What is the significance of this? This means that the devil has limited powers. The devil does not have the powers of God. God is all-knowing and all-powerful. The devil is limited in its knowledge and limited in its power.
A second implication of the devil being a created being is that what God creates, God can destroy. God has the power at any point in time to destroy Satan. In Revelation 20:10, John describes the ultimate fate of the devil and his demonic angels.
And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.
God, as the creator, has the power to do this to Satan at any point in time. But God has purposes and in some way, the devil is serving God’s purposes. Perhaps it is because God wants us to grow in faith and the presence of the devil provides the proper environment for our faith to grow. We are tempted and when we hold on to Jesus and are obedient to him by resisting the temptations of the devil, our faith grows.
Maybe there are other ways in which Satan is unwittingly helping God’s purposes to be worked out but this much is clear, Satan will be destroyed when God no longer has use for him.
This is not a contest in which the outcome is unclear. God will destroy the devil when it is the right time to do so.
What is the goal of the devil?
The Apocryphal books indicate that the devil was jealous of the planned gift of immortality to humans and rebelled. These books and some obscure references in the New Testament talk about the pride of the devil. I don’t believe we really know why the devil rebelled against God but he did. And in the rebellion of the devil, he seeks to work against the purposes of God.
It doesn’t matter what it is God wants, if God wants it, the devil works against it.
So because God wants to create life, the devil wants to destroy life. God wants to renew life, the devil works to cut off hope. God wants to bring peace, the devil works to bring chaos. God seeks to create love, harmony and unity, the devil works to encourage hatred, discord and disunity.
God is steadily building his kingdom and the devil works to prevent people from leaving the control of his earthly kingdom. When someone enters into God’s kingdom, the devil works to cause them to lose faith and fall away, or at least influence them to lead ineffective Christian lives that are unable to encourage others to join them.
Now it seems irrational on the part of the devil to do this. Proverbs 21:30 says:
There is no wisdom, no insight, no plan
that can succeed against the Lord.
Doesn’t the devil know this? On what rational basis would a created being think it could overcome the creator?
Perhaps when God gave men and women free will the devil saw a loophole through which he could win. But when Jesus defeated Satan and took the power of death away from the devil, didn’t the devil get the message?
It is clear that evil is not rational. Evil does not think about consequences. Evil seeks simply to destroy and the devil and his demonic angels exert their influence to destroy what God seeks to create.
How does the devil try to accomplish his goal of working against the desires of God?
Remember that because the devil is a created being, he is limited in his powers. As a consequence, the devil does not know what you are thinking or what you are doing unless one of his demonic angels is paying attention to you.
The devil is like a burglar who keeps watch on your house for the one day you leave a door unlocked and then takes advantage of you in your moment of weakness.
In Job 1 we read:
The Lord said to Satan, “Where have you come from?”
Satan answered the Lord, “From roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it.”
When Jesus was tempted by the devil in the wilderness and Jesus resisted the devil’s temptations, Luke wrote: (Luke 4:13)
When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.
When Luke wrote until an opportune time, it is clear that the devil kept watch on Jesus until he could once again come to tempt Jesus.
This is also the teaching of Peter (I Peter 5:8)
Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.
The devil and his demons roam around the world seeking an opportunity and when the devil sees an opportunity he seizes it like a hungry lion looking for someone to devour.
The devil works to create opportunities for himself. To see how the devil does this, all you have to do is look at the names of the devil in the Bible and you can see his strategies.
Satan is the accuser. The word devil comes from a root word meaning to accuse.
Revelation 12
Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
“Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Christ.
For the accuser of our brothers,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down.
One of the Old Testament references to the devil that I mentioned earlier says Satan stood as the accuser of Joshua, the High Priest, saying that he was not qualified to be High Priest because of his sins.
It helps to see Satan as our accuser by painting the picture of a court trial. In the trial God is the judge. The devil is the prosecuting attorney. We are on trial and Jesus is our defense attorney.
The devil presents evidence about why we are unfit to be brought into God’s service, why we are unfit to be considered a daughter or son of God. The devil points out all our weaknesses, all our sins. The devil points out all the ways we have given in to temptation. The devil points out how judgmental we are, how hypocritical we are, condemning others while minimizing our own sins. The devil points out how weak our faith is, how we come back again and again and again to the same old patterns of sin.
The devil paints a compelling case about why we are unfit to be considered a child of God, unfit for service in the Kingdom of God and then Jesus steps forward to say, “I have paid the penalty for this man’s or this woman’s sin.” and because of the action of Jesus, we are accepted by God into his family, into his service.
This is a picture of our future state when at the end of time there will be the great judgment but it is also a picture of the ongoing work of Satan in the present.
Even though Satan knows we have been accepted by God because of the action of Jesus, he continues to accuse us. Satan continues to whisper in our ear, telling us we are unworthy, unfit. Satan reminds us of our sin, reminds us of our continuing struggle with sin and tells us, “Do you really think God still loves you? Surely God has given up on you by now.”
Satan is the accuser.
Satan is also referred to as the tempter.
Matthew 4
Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. 2 After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3 The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”
The devil tempts us by offering us shortcuts. The devil tempted Jesus by offering him the kingdoms of this world which would eventually be his as Lord of Lords and King of kings. But the devil offered him a way to have the kingdoms of earth without having to go through the pain and agony of crucifixion and death.
The devil is much more clever than simply holding out a cookie to a child who has been told not to eat a cookie. The devil does not simply hold out pornography to entice a man to take a peek. The devil works at a much more sophisticated level than that.
It is God who created pleasure and all that is pleasurable and who delights when we experience his pleasures. Satan cannot create pleasure but he can twist it around and entice us to experience what promises to be pleasure. Pornography is held out as an exciting and pleasurable prospect but then turns around and delivers the opposite. We are promised pleasure and are delivered unsatisfying enslavement.
Frederick Buechner defines lust as “the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.” We are dying of thirst and what the devil offers can only make us more thirsty.
Satan tempts us with sex, power and money and all that sex, power and money makes possible. The promise is great but the payoff is miserable.
Satan offers us shortcuts to success, the easy path, but when we step out on the devil’s path, it becomes empty of anything that satisfies us.
Satan is the accuser, the tempter and Satan is the deceiver.
John 8:42
Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own; but he sent me. 43 Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. 44 You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
Do you hear the disdain for the devil in these words of Jesus? The devil is a liar and that is his natural state. The devil does not have to try to lie, when the devil speaks he lies.
When the devil tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, what did he say?
Genesis 3
[The serpent] said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ ”
4 “You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.
Notice that the devil takes truth and twists it to serve his purposes.
The devil started out by misstating God’s directive. God had instructed Adam and Eve that they could eat of any tree in the garden except for this one tree, but the devil twisted this to engage Eve in debate. “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
Eve knew what God said and corrected the devil. She entered into the debate.
“We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ ”
In her correction of the devil, she overshot the truth and added the injunction that she should not touch the tree, something God never said.
Now the devil has Eve in a discussion of her interpretation versus his version and Eve is getting pulled into his web.
The devil is very clever in his lies.
C.S. Lewis expanded the argument of the devil in the second book of his space trilogy, Perlandra. The devil explained that God wanted Eve to grow in knowledge and that she needed to choose herself to do something God did not give her permission to do if she were to actually grow. Doing only what God told her to do would limit her ability to grow as God wanted her to grow.
This is what the devil always does. He takes what is true, Jesus is fully human, for example, and then whittles away at the divinity of Jesus to minimize what is also true, Jesus is fully divine. The devil takes the truth and gives it just a little twist so his lies seem credible.
A man in a marriage who is unhappy with his wife reasons that the woman he has met who makes him so happy is a gift God has given him and so he divorces his wife to marry the other woman. How could God be displeased when this has made him so happy?
This is the way the devil leads us to think. The devil helps us to rationalize our sin by taking the truth of God and twisting it to make it a lie. God created us to enjoy pleasure and created a pleasurable world for us to enjoy. But the devil twists God’s good gift and through his lies leads us into the diminishing of pleasure rather than the enjoyment of pleasure.
What chance do you have against the devil?
The devil is an angel. The devil is a fallen angel, but still an angel. And an angel has far more power than we do. From a reference in Jude, there is an indication that Satan is a powerful angel, so powerful that the archangel Michael did not dare to bring a slanderous accusation against him.
At any rate, when it is you versus the devil, you will lose. You will lose every time. Peter thought he could stand up for Jesus on his own but discovered that he was not able to do so and he denied knowing Jesus three times.
You do not have power over the devil. But as a Christian you are filled with the Holy Spirit and it is the power of God that defeats Satan.
I John 4:4
You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them (false spirits), because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.
Every time there is a conflict between God and the devil, God wins. It may be that a soul is lost to eternity but that is not because God is not more powerful than the devil. It is because God will not violate our individual free will that it becomes possible for the devil to win.
I will talk more about this next week but I cannot leave this sermon without reminding you of what the Bible tells us to do when we are attacked by Satan.
James 4:7
Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
I Peter 5:8
Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. 9 Resist him, standing firm in the faith
Resist! When the devil whispers in your ear in a moment when you are feeling particularly discouraged about your Christian life and tells you God is frustrated with you and probably ready to give up on you because of your weak faith and lack of discipline, resist. Don’t listen to his accusations. Sit up and speak truth:
Romans 8:1
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus
I Timothy 1:12
I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day.
When the devil tempts you with money, power or sex, resist and ask God for help to make you strong. Stand on I Corinthians 10:13
No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.
Choose to stand with Jesus and resist the devil’s temptation. God will give you the strength to resist if you cling desperately to him and ask for his help.
When the devil speaks his lies and attempts to deceive you with some false pleasure or some easy path to success, resist and quote the words of Jesus
You were a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in you. When you lie, you speak your native language, for you are a liar and the father of lies.
In the allegory Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyon, the main character, Christian, is making his way to heaven, the eternal city. He turns back because he hears that there are lions ahead on the path. His fear of the lions prevents him from going ahead toward the eternal city but then he is reassured that the lions are held by chains and if he keeps to the center of the path, they will not be able to touch him. They will growl and claw at him but they will be unable to touch him – if he keeps to the center of the path. So he turns and walks safely through the roaring, clawing lions and continues on to the eternal city.
The meaning of this allegory is obvious. If we walk obediently with Jesus, we will be safe but as soon as we yield to temptation or listen to the accusations of the devil or are deceived by the lies of the devil and stray away from Jesus with our anger or envy or jealousy, we are vulnerable to the devil who can attack us. Our safety in Jesus comes only when we walk in the center of the path with him. We need to live obedient lives to live safely.
We observe the sacrament we call Communion or The Lord’s Supper this morning.
Use this sacrament to draw near to Jesus. If you are actively engaged in sin, turn away this morning, repent and replace your evil behavior with godly behavior. If you are being tempted, find strength from Christ to resist. Walk with Jesus in the center of the path. You will be safe and protected from the roaring and clawing of the devil when you walk with Jesus.
