April 14, 2026 Show with Ronald L. Kohl on “Our Ancient Foe: Satan’s History, Activity & Ultimate Demise”

Iron Sharpens Iron Intro and the Need to Address Satan and the Demonic Realm

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

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And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth, who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 14th day of April, 2026.

For the next two days, today and tomorrow, we are going to have two different guests addressing Satan and the demonic realm, and I think that this, sadly, is a topic that has been neglected and overlooked and downplayed in its importance by people from my own background, the theologically Reformed.

But thankfully, there are Reformed folk who have studied this issue in depth and have provided the body of Christ with very valuable information regarding this biblical subject. Tomorrow, we have joining us Dr. Keith Evans, who is on the faculty at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina.

He is a biblical counselor, and he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the demonic realm, and we will have him joining us tomorrow. And he's also going to be doing a Reformed analysis of some of the Roman Catholic exorcists that have begun to appear on podcasts every day, and the major ones as well, like Tucker Carlson's program and others, and so it should be a very informative program.

Ronald L. Cole, Grace Bible Fellowship, and the Book Our Ancient Foe

But today, we have an old friend of mine who's been on the program before. We have Ronald L. Cole, who is senior pastor of Grace Bible Fellowship Church of Quaker Town, Pennsylvania, a church that I have visited on many occasions for their Quaker Town Conference on Reformed Theology.

And I think the last time I was there, I had the opportunity to see one final time on this side of glory, Dr. Harry Rear, who not long after that perished in an automobile accident and went into the immediate presence of our Lord, God, Savior, and King, Jesus Christ.

But today, Ron is going to be discussing his book that he edited, Our Ancient Foe, Satan's History, Activity, and Ultimate Demise. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Pastor Ronald L. Cole.

Good to be with you, Chris. Just mentioning Harry Rear's name brings back such fond memories. The last time he was with us, and he was with us I think three different times, he was one of the speakers along with Jason Halopoulos, who was one of his mentors.

And Jason just looked at an opportunity to serve with Harry, and Harry was very committed to the work of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. So we're a small conference in a medium-sized town, and Harry just loved to be with us.

He was a dear brother.

Yes, and he was kind enough to sacrifice time out of his busy schedule to be on my show on a couple of occasions. And one time, he actually contacted me requesting that he come on, and he wrote a glowing commendation for my show, which I will cherish forever.

But why don't you tell our listeners more about Grace Bible Fellowship Church of Quakertown, Pennsylvania?

We are one of about 65 to 70 Bible Fellowship churches in Quakertown, and I always say, yes, there are real Quakers in Quakertown. The Society of Friends is still there. We're part of a denomination, the Bible Fellowship Church, that dates back to over 150 years ago when a group of six young men, German-speaking, in the Zionsville area of Pennsylvania broke away from their Mennonite bishops around the subject of wanting to hold a prayer meeting.

And when the bishops put the kibosh on it, they broke away and formed something in German called the Evangelical Mennonite Society, which eventually grew up to be the Bible Fellowship Church, although we went through many different forms and iterations until about 1960, when some of our men went away to seminary and discovered Reformed theology.

So we were not particularly good Mennonites even at that time, but it was time to make the break. And we are, as far as I know, Chris, the only denomination that actually went from an original Arminian position on soteriology to a classic Calvinist Reformed position.

Yes, I knew everything you said about your history, except that the initial cause of the breakaway was because of the refusal of the Mennonites to have prayer meeting. That's bizarre.

Well, I wasn't—despite how I look, I wasn't around for that particular—but I understand it was really more of a case that the bishops wanted to have some authority and control over what they prayed about.

And these young men, all Armin-speaking, our forebears, our first pastors were—the original, you know, most of our churches in Quakertown was one of the first. We always argue with our church in Zionsville that they had the first congregation, we had the first building.

But originally, pretty much all the churches, all the pastors were lay preachers who preached in German, and eventually we gradually—German and English, and now you won't find a Pennsylvania German sermon in any of our churches.

Well, if anybody wants to find out more about Grace Bible Fellowship Church of Quakertown, Pennsylvania, go to QuakertownBFC .org. That's QuakertownBFC, for BibleFellowshipChurch .org. And God willing, we'll be repeating that later on in the program.

Why Reformed Christians Often Neglect Satan and Demonology

Well, would you agree, Ron, with my assessment that this subject of Satan and the demonic realm is something that Reformed folk, both theologians and even pastors, tend to shy away from it? They don't seem to want to give much deep study to it.

I think sometimes Reformed folks are worried that they're going to appear like they are charismatic and Pentecostal. They know that the topic has been sensationalized and so forth. That's just my presumption.

But do you have any thoughts on that?

Yes. Now, I will say up front that I am no expert on Satan and demonology, but I think that one of the matters that we in the Reformed community—we're modern, we're post-modern. That's for a previous time.

Martin Luther might have dealt with so many of those things, but no, we've left that behind. It's not a major concern. And yet the devil, C .S. Lewis, said something along the lines of, if you've ever read his book on script tape, the script tape letters, that he said, that's the way the devils prefer.

It.

They prefer that we ignore them. And yet they are very real. And I have traveled to some places in the world where I especially felt a demonic presence. And Chris, I will tell you, it's one of the eeriest, most frightening things I've ever experienced.

And the Bible clearly says the devil prowls around like a roaring lion. You ignore a roaring lion at your peril.

And could you explain in more detail, if it's possible, what it was like to come to the conclusion that you were feeling the presence of the demonic realm?

The word I would use, Chris, and I felt it in—I was on a mission trip to Tanzania in 2007. The word I would use would be oppression. There was a heaviness in one of the villages that we went to, and I had not felt it elsewhere.

In 2007, we had a missionary who was serving there in medical missions. We went to dedicate a medical clinic, and we traveled around among the people group known as the Sandawi people. Our church at Cedar Crest in Allentown had found this people group, and they had several people on the field.

And by the time we got there, where there had been no gospel witness, there were now seven churches, which has more than doubled since then. We went to one village, and from the moment I got there until the moment I left, I felt a heaviness I don't think I had ever felt before.

And how else would I attribute that? Because that part of Tanzania, there were witch doctors operating. There was very much a mixture, even among those who were understanding Christ. There was an animism, an animistic spirit there that I felt.

It's such an intangible—how would I describe it? But I know what I felt, and I have felt it on one or two other occasions since then.

Do you think that's because of some kind of built-in alarm system, for lack of a better term, that the Holy Spirit, when someone is born again, that there's something within us that God has given us that makes us aware that this dark realm is around us?

I agree wholeheartedly. And indeed, though, that should prompt us to not want to ignore teachings on Satan and his demons in our pulpits. And yet we do too often shy away. I think, Chris, one of the benefits of expository preaching is you're going through whole books of the Bible sequentially, that when you get to passages, you don't skip over them, or you don't belittle them or take a light approach to them.

You actually have to deal with them. And so, yes, the presence of the Holy Spirit in the believer should more than convince us of the reality of the spiritual warfare that we are engaged in. I am preaching through Galatians, and here we are in Galatians 5, talking about the desires of the flesh, the sinful nature, and the Spirit.

And it clearly says we are at war. Galatians 5, 17, and the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, but these are opposed to each other. And so we cannot ignore, we ignore to our peril.

Amen.

Satan’s History, the Fall, and His Identity with Lucifer

Did this book that we are addressing today, Our Ancient Foe, and the subtitle is Satan's History, Activity, and Ultimate Demise, did this not come about as a transcript, perhaps, of one of the Philadelphia conferences on Reformed theology?

It does. I know it's been mentioned and publicized, even as this is the work of the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed theology, but it really began as one of the themes for the Quaker Town Conference.

Oh, okay.

I am the chairman, going to be in our 19th year this year, and one of my responsibilities as the chair of what we call QCRT is to develop themes. And we work very closely with this organization, Ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, that was started by the late James Montgomery Boyce to bring the evangelical church back to Reformation.

But the Alliance people, wonderful people to work with, leave to me the subject material, the thematics, and then the individual sessions, and I look back through all the years of the Philadelphia Conference, which is the longest-running, continuous Reformed theology conference, I believe, anywhere in the world, but they had never done anything on this subject.

And so it was the germination of an idea, well, why would we ignore such an important subject theologically and personally? So I'm also responsible for the speakers, and by God's grace, men like Ken Hughes and Tom Nettles and Pete Jones, Peter Jones, agreed to come and speak on that particular subject.

And Chris, I will tell you, is one of our best-attended conferences because of the uniqueness of the subject material. But that was the foundation, the genesis of the idea for a book, because after the conference took place, I cannot remember particularly, and the QCRT that dealt with it, in fact, it was called, For Still Our Ancient Foe, based on Martin Luther, him, of course.

I cannot remember precisely, that was back in 2017. The book came out in 2018, so we're talking a while ago. I can't remember who it was, whether it was either the Alliance or PNR Publishing that said, why don't you turn this into a book?

So I had the foundation because I had two chapters, each two plenary messages from both Ken Hughes and Tom Nettles, and that was, in a sense, the skeleton of the book. And then what I did was I looked around at all the many PCRT messages over the years and said, are there messages, even though they haven't done a whole conference on this theme, are there messages that would be appropriate for such a book as I'm putting it together in a sequential sort of way?

And I found messages by Derek Thomas, Roger McCall, Joel Beeke, and Sinclair Ferguson. So that doubled us from four chapters to eight, but I still felt there was one gap, and it was the subject of, what's Satan's methodology?

And I asked, because my background is in journalism, as well as having been the pastor here for about 22 years, I asked if I could write that chapter, and they allowed me to do that. And so that was the chapter three, I believe, which is Malevolent Methodology.

And so nine chapters, and we had ourselves a book, but it was based on the transcript.

Let me just let our listeners know the chapters and authors of those chapters from this book, which is published by PNR Publishing. And every one of these men I'm about to list have been on Iron Trip and Zion Radio, with the exception of the late Roger McCall and Sinclair Ferguson, who I've been trying to get on this program for decades.

And the last time I saw Sinclair at a Bible conference, I approached him and said, Dr. Ferguson, I don't know if you remember me. This is Chris Arnzen, I host Iron Trip and Zion Radio. I have been so enormously blessed by you and your ministry since the 1980s, when I was a new believer, and I would love it if you would come on my program.

I've been trying to get you on the program for as long as I've had one, since it launched in 2005. I keep hitting a brick wall, will you please come on the program? And his answer to me was, but I loathe that sort of thing.

So far, I haven't been successful. But the authors of this book, our ancient foe, include R. Kent Hughes, who wrote a chapter titled Satan in the Garden. My friend, Dr. Thomas J. Nettles, Knowing Satan.

My guest today, Ronald L. Cole, Malevolent Methodology. Dr. Derek W. H. Thomas, who I've had on the broadcast as well, The Word, the Flesh, and the Devil. The aforementioned Roger Nicole wrote a chapter, Conflict with Evil.

Another one by R. Kent Hughes, Deliverance from the Evil One. My friend, Dr. Joel R. Beeke, wrote a chapter, Preserving in Satan's Sleeve. And another one by Dr. Thomas J. Nettles, The Final Demise. And the aforementioned Dr. Sinclair Ferguson, All Things New.

So that is quite a lineup of great men of God to write chapters for this book, which were actually transcripts of messages. I would like to give our email address out to our listeners in the event that they would like to join us with questions of their own.

Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. Well, I think it'd be wise to start, as the order of your subtitle, Satan's History, Activity, and Ultimate Demise, that we start with Satan's history.

For the first time in my life, I've encountered theologians who do not believe that Satan and Lucifer are the same being. I don't know where you fall on that. But who is Satan, and how did he become Satan?

Well, again, I will not profess to be an expert of this, but Kent Hughes just goes, takes us right to the garden. And his chapter obviously stresses the fact that Satan and Lucifer are the same person.

But he noted how Satan immediately worked on Adam and Eve. And Kent Hughes is a marvelous speaker, but he also is an excellent writer. And it transferred in terms of working on the manuscripts for these pages.

Let's just say that was one of the easiest ones to deal with. Chris, I almost want to go back. I appreciate your struggles with Sinclair Ferguson. He has not, you know, sometimes when I'm responsible for getting speakers and I do not easily give up.

But everything I've heard about Sinclair, and I appreciate your Scottish brogue, you said Sinclair has a brogue all his own that's very deliberate. But he just never would never answer me. And what I've heard from folks at the Alliance, they said basically just doesn't want to hurt anybody's feelings.

So you're in good company. But yes, the chapter really starts right at the beginning where Scripture begins with Genesis, the chapter three and the fall and the ways that Satan twisted and gave half truths.

And Adam and Eve, for lack of a better term, bit.

I'm sorry. Was there a reason you stopped there?

Well, that was that was a bad play on words. They literally literally.

Yes, that's right.

I'll even quote a little bit of what he said, what Kent Hughes wrote. And and here I'll also further tell you one of the challenges of editing a book is tracking down footnotes, tracking down sources for quotes.

And I will say that several of the writers were kind enough to to help me out with that with the exception of Roger McCall, because he'd been promoted to glory. Obviously, I had to track down his footnotes on on his own.

But but here's Kent Hughes quoted from Paradise Lost. But I'll read you a little bit of his of his methodology. This is page 10 and 11 of the book. What Satan had told them was true. Half true. They did not die that day.

In fact, Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years. Yet Adam and Eve did die their constant communion with God died. Their eyes were grotesquely open as they received the knowledge that they saw. They saw evil.

They saw themselves as naked so that they desperately sought to cover themselves. Their innocence was no more. One of Kent Hughes is he is definitely an artist with words, but he really clearly presents the biblical picture.

And as far as the story that many of us have heard, even. Unbelievers very often have a relative idea of the story that Lucifer was the most beautiful of all the angels and his pride led him to rebel against God, being envious of God's exalted position over him.

And. After a battle ensued in heaven, he was cast down to earth with a third of the angels. Can you give us any further detail on that?

Well, it's interesting, Chris, because you this is where you have to go to the value and benefit of the understanding of the church throughout history, because a lot of the teachings of Satan as Lucifer, as the son of the Morning Star, are things that we piece together from passages in Isaiah and elsewhere.

And and initially, if you just read this on them on surface value, you'd be you begin to wonder, is this is this really about Satan? Are we talking about a human figure? And yet the witness of history has really confirmed throughout history that this is who that represents.

And yes, the story that you're told in broadest form is absolutely true that he wanted to ascend, that pride was his fault and he was cast out and and took myriads of angels with him. And so and that is an ongoing war.

Although I love the fact and I as loosely as I can say, I've read the end of the book and we win. There is a final battle coming. But but between now, between the garden being, you know, and Adam and Eve being cast out and that final victory, we are still engaged in war.

And we have to go to our first commercial break, folks, and once again, if you'd like to join us, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com. As always, give us your first name, at least city and state and country of residence.

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Welcome back, if you just tuned us in. Our guest today is Ronald L. Cole, who is senior pastor of Grace Bible Fellowship Church of Quakertown, Pennsylvania. And we are addressing the theme of a book for which he was the editor for PNR publishing.

And that book is Our Ancient Foe. Anybody who knows the lyrics to that wonderful hymn, A Mighty Fortress, will remember hearing Luther describing Satan in that way. And one of the best lines in that hymn are, For lo, his doom is sure.

But we are discussing Our Ancient Foe, Satan's History, Activity, and Ultimate Demise. And if you have a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.

And I understand that sometimes with subject matter like Satan and the demonic, people may want to remain anonymous because it involves some horrible experience that they had or are continuing to have.

Or perhaps it's something related to a loved one in that matter. Well, we will obviously accept your request to remain anonymous and therefore will not divulge your identity. And you don't even have to provide it in that case.

But if it's a general question, please just give us your first name at least, your city and state, and country of residence. We have a very good question from RJ in White Plains, New York, Pastor Ron.

RJ says, I think that it is unfortunate that very often people have a concept of the battle between good and evil, as if God and Satan are almost on equal terms as foes, and that God has any kind of a struggle in defeating Satan.

But isn't it true that, as the book of Job reveals, that Satan cannot do a single solitary thing without permission from God?

That is absolutely true, Chris. That is absolutely true. And you find it right in the beginning of this dramatic presentation of Satan coming into God's presence. But he only acts when God allows him to do so.

And the question that the questioner asks is very true. I'm looking at a quote from someone I really respect, and when talking about the battle between the flesh and the spirit, he describes them like two giant sumo wrestlers trying to push each other out of the ring.

I love the imagery of it, but the simple fact is that greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world. It is not an even struggle. There is not any question, according to Scripture, about who is going to emerge victorious.

And Satan only acts and only is given an entry point by God's leave. We know who's victorious. We know who is sovereign. And Satan is not. And that's why we have to go back, in a sense, to the Scripture, to how everything is revealed in Scripture, including the enemy of our souls.

I'm going to quote Tom Nettles from the book. He says, we think that we are doing God a favor. We think we are defending the character of God by denying a plain revelation. When our rationality begins to operate independently of divine revelation, when it opposes the clearly revealed propositions of Scripture, we have fallen into the error of the first opponent of God's infinite wisdom, who is Satan.

So sadly, pop culture, movies like The Exorcist, and it seems like every other month there is a new movie that comes out with some satanic aspect to it. We begin to elevate Satan that the Bible never presents.

He is powerful. But the devil will flee from you. If that's us, what about Jesus? What about the Father? What about the Spirit? They're infinitely more powerful than he is.

Amen for that. Yes. And I happen to be from Amityville, Long Island.

Yes, so you know what we're talking about, Chris. Yes. The Amityville Horror, many years ago.

Yes. And that was based, well, what led to the story, I should say, was that Ronald DeFeo, the oldest of, I believe, six siblings, he murdered his parents and all of his siblings. And the reason it became, later, a ghost story is that, apparently, Ronald DeFeo's lawyer told him to make up a story about how demons told him to do this.

He later admitted this, and he came up later with an excuse that I don't have time to discuss right now. But now, no doubt, there was demonic influence in something like this. It is believed that since he was a drug addict and wanted to receive the sole inheritance of those murders, after those murders, from his parents, that that was the motivation, so that he could be the sole heir and have money to fuel his drug habit.

But Satan, no doubt, had some role in this. It's such a horrific crime. There has been some pushback from Reformed folk about the demonic activity involved in heinous crimes, in that we believe, very strongly so, that man, in his nature before his regeneration, is totally depraved.

But it seems to me, and you could correct me if you disagree, it seems to me that even though we are totally depraved, sometimes to commit an act so heinous as even the betrayal of Jesus Christ, it seems that Satan needed to give Judas even a push, because Satan entered him before the final betrayal.

So, do you have any comments about that?

I will only go as far as Scripture goes, and Scripture does say that Satan….

And I'm sorry, folks, Ron is frozen right now. Hopefully, this will….

You know, it's always interesting, Chris, I find that Satan does work on specific individuals, and we must talk about how this is major. This is the crucifixion of our Savior and redemption. But I, personally, myself, I'm not that important.

That Judas was important to Satan's purported plan, which was carried out, but without omniscience and what he thought was his victory was his great defeat. But yes, we can only go where Scripture goes, and absolutely that Satan did enter into Judas would already become progressively disillusioned that Jesus' ministry was not turning in the direction he wanted, and that's where he took him.

Satan’s Deceptive Methodology and the Need for Vigilance

Okay, and why don't you go into, before we go to any more listener questions, I'd like you to go into the chapter that you wrote, Malevolent Methodology. Tell us about that.

As a lover of history, I began with an example of how, if we are not aware, if we are careless, we can very easily get sucked in and deceived. I used the example, lover of American history, there was a civil….

Yes, for sure.

…from fighting. He was, he had a group of, one with such audacity that he thought with a few dozen he could defeat the entire Sioux nation. And with 80 men, he didn't recognize the typical Native American ruse, which was to bring a few horsemen out and run away.

And so he took his 80 men and followed them, raced after them. And suddenly he was surrounded, and the battle was over a few minutes, and all 80 of them died. If you don't begin to recognize Satan's methods, you are going to fall prey.

Here's the C .S. Lewis quote, which is pretty familiar. 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.

They themselves are equally pleased by both errors. And hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight. So I really focused in that chapter on seeing Satan as a liar, but he is a very good liar in the sense that, you know, some liars, like a parent with a child who says, you know, I didn't do it, and yet they are sitting there with chocolate on their face and in their hands, you know, they did.

That's not an easy lie to fall prey, but he makes the lie sound so attractive. And usually, as was the case in the garden, there was an element of half-truth to the lies. So the best liar is one who looks like he's telling the truth, and Satan does that, and he's also a deceiver.

Again, to go to the garden, you know, he twists slightly to get even, then Adam, and it always impresses me that Adam was right there by her side. Did God really say this? Did God really say he would do this?

And it's a slight deception, but Verne Poythress, a professor at Westminster, says Satan uses deceit as his main weapon, and he does. And to be honest, if we're not planted in the Scriptures, we are always going to be gullible.

Yes, and you reminded me of a conversation I had many years ago during a break at one of my many theologically Reformed Protestant versus Roman Catholic debates that I have orchestrated over the years, primarily featuring as the Protestant representative Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, debating Roman Catholic apologists.