Pleasing God with R. C. Sproul, “The Battle With the Devil,” 5

The Reality of Satan in Christian Life and History

When Martin Luther said that the triad of enemies of the Christian life include the world, the flesh, and the devil, he didn't include the last one, the devil, simply as a theological abstraction or as a matter of doctrine, but Luther had a keen and profound personal awareness of the reality of Satan.

I think you have to understand that when people were concerned with living the Christian life in the sixteenth century, they had a slightly different view of reality from what is commonplace today. Luther was so acutely conscious of the presence of Satan that he often spoke of the Anfechtung, the unbridled assault that the enemy, the prince of darkness, was bringing against him in his personal life.

And Luther would find that the presence of Satan at times was so tangible that on one occasion he picked up an inkwell that was on his desk as he was writing and threw it in the direction of where he thought Satan was standing, and what he got for his trouble.

Was a wall full of ink.

He had some other less tasteful means of getting rid of Satan, but I won't mention those in passing, but we do have this preoccupation almost in the sixteenth century with the reality of Satan, but times have changed, and people don't live in that kind of framework for the most part in our day.

A few years ago I was teaching a course in philosophy here in the United States in a secular university, and I had about thirty students in my class, and somehow the question of the devil or Satan came up, and there was sort of a lively discussion and debate among the students, and so finally I decided to take a poll to find out where everybody's heads were, and I said, how many of you believe that there really is a personal devil?

And three hands went up out of thirty, and that's ten percent. So as I phrased the question, ninety percent of my students in this contemporary philosophy course did not believe in the existence of a real personal devil.

So we carried on some more discussion, and I asked the next question, I said, how many of you believe in God? Now, I didn't know what to expect with that question, but in this particular classroom every single person raised their hand.

That is, they didn't all necessarily believe in the same view of God and so on, but they all believed in some kind of supreme being, everybody in that classroom. And I said, well that's puzzling to me.

Why is it that we have a hundred percent concurrence with the idea of God and only ten percent agreement with the idea of Satan? And I said, tell me. I said, let me ask you this. How many of you believe in God, if I define God this way, that God is a supernatural being who has the ability or the capacity to influence human beings for good?

They all agreed with that. I said, now what if I define Satan as a supernatural being who has the capacity to influence people.

For evil?

What is it that makes you so willing to affirm the supernatural being who can influence us for good, but so quick to deny the supernatural being who can influence us for evil? Is it because in our experience we walk through a culture and a world that is so overwhelmingly balanced in favor of good over evil, that there's so much more evidence for supernatural influences to good than there are to supernatural influences to evil, that we don't give any credence whatsoever to the evil influence?

And they said, no, no, no, that's not the reason, and I said, well why is it that you affirm the one and deny the other? And one of the students responded and said, well, you can't be involved in the sophisticated realm of contemporary science and still believe in things like devils, and I said, oh, it's the scientific revolution that has brought an end to Western civilization's belief in Satan.

And they said, yes. I said, well, help me here. I mean, I'm not in the natural sciences. I'm in philosophy, and you're going to have to bear with my ignorance here. Tell me what it is that in the scientific laboratories or in scientific theory that has suddenly made the existence of Satan untenable.

Is it the second law of thermodynamics or, you know, the discovery of the genetic code that has suddenly banished Satan from scientific credibility? And I waited for a good long while for the students to come up with some argument, some discovery that has come out of the scientific realm that would cast a shadow over the notion of Satan, and nobody could come up with anything until finally one of the students said, but don't you see that in our literature we put the devil in the same category as we put witches and goblins and elves and leprechauns and that sort of thing?

And I said, well, you know, I noticed that too in our culture, that we lump all of those things in the same category. And then I thought, I wonder why. Obviously, we have sound reason to be skeptical about goblins and sound reason to be skeptical about witches, but Satan is something altogether.

Why?

Because whenever we're debating the question of the existence of one thing or another, we want to consider what is the source for affirming these realities. Is it somebody's fantasy in their imagination or something else?

Now I can't get away from the fact that the sacred Scriptures emphatically teach the reality of Satan, and that that as a source has been subject to more critical scientific analysis than any written source on this planet.

Now you may not be persuaded that it's a very credible source. I happen to be very much persuaded that it's a credible source, and when the Satan tells me that I'm excuse me when the Scriptures tell me that there's such a thing as Satan, and that carries far more weight with me than the personal testimony of Shirley MacLaine about reincarnation, and yet I have billions of people will believe in that just because she says so, or Bridie Murphy, something like that.

So we have to consider the source. Now one of the reasons I'm convinced that the whole idea of Satan that has fallen into disbelief is a profound misunderstanding of medieval history. In the Middle Ages, in the Middle Ages, the church did believe in a real Satan, and the church was very much concerned about finding ways to resist the influence of Satan.

The Lord's Prayer and the Evil One

Let me just back up a second. Do you realize how many times Jesus speaks of the reality of Satan, and how Jesus prays earnestly for the protection of His people from Satan? How many of you know the Lord's Prayer?

Come on, you know the Lord's Prayer, the most famous prayer ever. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the day.

Oh, that's it.

Surely goodness and mercy. There's three girls in the Old Testament. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.

On earth as it is in heaven.

And so on and so on.

And it goes on into the Lord's Prayer where it says, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Now that's the modern translation, deliver us from evil. Now in the New Testament, the general and usual word for evil is poneron, and that last two lines indicate something.

You remember when you had to take languages and you had to tack on the different endings for the accusative and the nominative and the ablative and the genitive and all that stuff to drive you nuts, trying to keep all those different endings straight?

Well, not only do they have endings for cases, but they also have endings for gender, whether it's masculine or feminine or neuter. Remember all those exercises you had to do?

Okay.

The word poneron is neuter, and that's the normal word that is used for evil. If this neuter ending is changed to the first person singular masculine ending, os, then it becomes what we call a terminus technicus, a technical term that is a title for a specific.

Person.

Poneros in the New Testament is a title that is reserved for Satan.

Ho poneros.

It means literally, the evil one. Now ladies and gentlemen, the Lord's Prayer as it is recorded in the New Testament does not use poneron, it uses poneros. What Jesus was saying to His disciples was this, when you pray, you pray like this, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the enemy, from the evil one.

God protect us from the machinations and the influences of Satan. If you're a Christian, then that should indicate that you give some stock and some credibility to the teachings of Christ. To be a Christian is to follow Christ, to follow the teachings of Christ, and what I'm trying to say to you is that at the heart of Jesus' teaching was a profound concern about the stark reality of Satan.

Satan as a Personal, Formidable, and Deceptive Enemy

But in spite of the centrality of Jesus' teaching about the reality of Satan in our day and age, there is this persistent opposition to it. But again, as I discuss this with people, they will say, well, R .C., we grant perhaps that there is some kind of evil force out there.

It's when you start talking about it in personal terms, like some individual guy, you know, that's what causes us to choke to death, but we believe that there is some kind of malignant force operating out there in the universe.

Have you heard that? That Satan, the idea of Satan, if it's to be credible to modern man, to be more sophisticated, has to be understood as an evil force rather than an evil being or person. Now we make that change to make it more palatable to our intellectual progress of the twentieth.

Century.

If we analyze that, I think we'll see that what we have done is substituted an intellectually sound concept for one that is manifestly unsound. Just think about it for a minute. How is it possible to have an evil force unless that force is personal?

Can a wind or a hurricane be judged to be immoral, ladies and gentlemen? Do you understand what I'm saying? Forces, sheer forces, have no moral capability to them, and so it's not sound to talk about an evil force unless we're talking about a force that is flowing out of a personal being that has a mind, a will, and consciousness, because we don't say that flowers are performing sins.

They can't perform sins because they don't have the necessary natural equipment to perform sins. Do you understand what I'm saying? Now back to the Middle Ages. Why is it that we have this resistance in our day and age?

In the Middle Ages, the church did believe in the reality of Satan, and they were concerned about ways of protecting themselves from his onslaught. And they devised various means, Luther, Inquil, and so on, but they did this.

They said, what we know about Satan is that Satan fell because of pride. And so in all likelihood, the greatest point of vulnerability of the enemy is in his pride. And the Bible says, resist Satan, and he will flee from you.

And so the church put all that together, and they said, well, the best way to resist Satan is to make fun of Satan, attack his pride, humiliate him, and that will drive him away because he can't stand to be humiliated.

And so what the church would do, they would invent these gross caricature drawings of Satan, making him look like the court jester, where they would put him with horns and cloven hooves and this red flannel suit and a pitchfork and all that stuff.

They're looking like Mephistopheles. And then they would put these horrible caricatures up on the wall to mock Satan. But what happened was the next generation saw the pictures, and they said, don't tell me that my parents believed in this little guy in a red flannel suit who went around with a pitchfork and cloven hooves and horns.

What kind of naivete is that? What kind of mythology are they embracing? Now certainly a cursory reading of the Scriptures shows you that Satan is nowhere described as a buffoon in a red suit. On the contrary, his first introduction in the Old Testament is how?

Now the serpent was the most crafty or subtle of all of the creature. I might add first of all that Satan from a biblical perspective is a creature, but he is a creature with extraordinary gifts, if you will.

The first gift that is displayed is his gift of craftiness or subtlety that he used on Adam and Eve. The New Testament says that Satan appears as an angel of light. He appears as an angel of light. We have a phrase in philosophy and theology that goes like this, subspecies boni.

That means something that appears subspecies boni means that it manifests itself under the auspices of the good, but in fact is malevolent. That is to say, the ultimate hypocrite in all of the universe is Satan.

Satan doesn't come along looking like oil can Harry's, you know, and tries to enter into a deal like that.

No, no, no.

He masquerades as an angel of light. His subtlety, his cleverness is to be sophisticated, eloquent, handsome, deceptive. All that the Scriptures speak about the Antichrist and his connection with Satan is important.

Again, let me just say that word Antichrist, the word anti in the New Testament is used two ways, and there's a play on this word with respect to the Antichrist. You know, obviously, the one way in which it's used, anti means against, someone that's opposed to something, so that the Antichrist is the one who stands over and against, opposed to Christ.

But also Antichrist, the word anti means instead of or in place of. That the way in which the Antichrist is manifested biblically is as a substitute for Christ. It is the counterfeit trying to imitate the genuine, and the warnings of Scripture say that Satan and the Antichrist and so on are so good at what they do that if possible they could deceive even the very elect.

And so I'm laboring this point that you will understand, that the portrait of Satan I see in the Scripture is so different from what we…how it's portrayed in modern culture that no wonder nobody believes in Satan anymore.

Who would believe in such ludicrous caricatures? But Satan in the Scripture is the angel of light who will manifest himself not as a Hitler or a Mussolini or an Idi Amin or anything like that, but he'll come along looking more like Billy Graham.

Now I don't mean to suggest to you for a second that Billy Graham's in league with the devil. Don't distort what I've said there. But I mean it's that kind of person who will have that kind of credentials, I think, that.

Will fool us.

He's an angel of light. And so at the same time he's called a roaring or devouring, a roaring lion seeking, going about seeking those whom he will devour. So the Scriptures tell us that not only is Satan real and clever, but that he is formidable, so formidable that the same term of strength, ladies and gentlemen, that is used for Christ is used for Satan.

Christ is called the lion of Judah, the figure of kingship. Satan is called the roaring lion who seeks those whom he will devour. I mean he is so much stronger than I am, so much stronger than you are, that his opposition, as I say, is formidable.

You remember Peter when Jesus warned him of Satan entering into his heart, saying, you are going to betray me. Oh, no I'm not, Jesus said. Peter said, I'll never do that. Jesus said, you'll do it in the next twenty-four hours, and you'll do it three times.

Not me.

Let everybody else fall into that kind of temptation, Jesus, but, you know, I'm following you to the end of the road, and nothing would ever make me. Do you ever talk like that? What did Jesus say? Simon, Simon, Satan would have you and sift you like wheat.

The big fisherman, the strong, impetuous Peter who can stand against anybody. Jesus said, you're a piece of cake and putty in his hand. Sift you like wheat. Don't ever underestimate the power of Satan.

He is stronger than you are. He is smarter than you are. He's more deceptive than you'll ever be. And when I look at the warnings here in Scripture about this, it's enough to make you want to run for your life.

The Cosmic Battle and the Christian’s Armor

Listen to what Paul says in a passage in Ephesians that you've heard many times, put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

Wherefore, take unto you the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Christianity is thoroughly supernatural. Take away the supernatural from the New Testament, and you have gutted the New Testament.

In fact, to try to reconstruct Christianity without the supernatural, I believe, is fundamentally a dishonest enterprise. Here the apostle in a didactic manner said, look, you're in a struggle. You're trying to please God.

You want to live a life that is one that manifests sanctification, but it's a battle. It's a battle with the flesh. It's a battle with the world, but the battle that you're on goes beyond this. We're not wrestling against flesh and blood, but powers, principality, spiritual wickedness in high places, in the uranus, in the heavenlies.

Cosmic evil is what we're dealing with here in an unseen realm. That is the realm of supernature. See right at the heart of the Christian declaration is that Christianity is based upon revelation, that we receive information that is beyond the scope of normal empirical perception, that we get information of the metaphysical realm, of the noumenal realm, of that which transcends the observable, and that God tells us that there is a dimension of reality there that is not visible to the naked eye, but that that reality that is not visible to the naked eye has a profound influence on our lives.

Now we understand that by way of analogy, don't we? I mean there are sub-microscopic particles and realities that we've been able to discover in recent centuries that previous generations of human beings knew nothing at all about, about an unseen world that has a profound impact on their lives.

Now there are two problems that the Christian has with Satan. One is in underestimating the reality and the power of Satan. Satan makes there's nothing that makes him happier than a generation of Christians who don't believe that he exists, because then he has safe conduct.

He's got a diabolical American Express card. He can go anywhere he wants and get in. Nobody's going to bother him because nobody believes he's there. What better deal can he have than that? But if that doesn't work, people tend to change from one extreme to the other in a culture.

The other danger is to overestimate the power of Satan. We have a reaction in our own Christian culture now that is so preoccupied with Satan that there's hardly any room left for human activity, that all evil and all sin is the result of satanic oppression or possession.

In fact, it is the accusation of Satan that I believe is the major work of the devil in the life of the Christian. And it's that dimension that we're going to take up in our next session, where we consider how important it is to have a clean conscience, to have a sense of strong assurance of forgiveness as we carry on this struggle for personal growth.