“All war is based on deception,” begins Sunzi’s famous treatise The Art of War, and that’s likewise true of spiritual war. It’s to the devil’s advantage that people don’t know what it is. Nor what power it commands, or doesn’t. Previously I explained what it is and isn’t. This time around, my emphasis is on why we’re willing to believe—and perpetuate—the myths about the devil.
The most obvious reason is the one I hear immediately after I rebuke one of the devil myths. Essentially it’s, “You underestimate the devil.” These folks believe the devil is far more powerful, far more connected, far more coordinated, and has far more allies than we think.
This post is part of a synchroblog, a bunch of different Christian bloggers reacting to “The devil made me do it.” Wanna get in on it? Visit the synchroblog blog.
They take it at its word when it claimed, as it tempted Jesus, that the world’s kingdoms belong to it. This despite many verses to the contrary, including entire books of the Prophets, which state God rules those kingdoms. If God didn’t, he’d have no right to judge them when they violated his laws. They forget the devil’s a liar. We can’t base our theology on statements the devil has made, because they’re not reliable statements. Even if there’s a bit of truth in them, it’s truth told for a deceptive reason: It’s inherently untrustworthy. Always presume it lies, or is trying to manipulate us.
The heights from which it fell.
The origin stories of the devil—how it opposed God and went wrong—don’t come from the bible. Not one of them.
Church father Tertullian came up with the theory that Isaiah 14 was actually about the devil, and not the king of Babylon. Christian and Jewish mythology have both played with this idea a bit. The typical story is God created the devil to be an angel. This supposed angel’s rank has escalated over time. Christians have assumed it was an archangel, a mighty prince. In Out of the Silent Planet it’s the oyarsa meant to rule this planet as if it’s our god, but really a viceroy beneath the Highest God. But, say the myths, power corrupted it, and so it fell. The reason it led many angels in its fall, and still leads so may astray, is because it’s always been a leader.
Of course that’s human thinking, not Kingdom thinking. In human governments, the vizier or prime minister or general is always the likeliest person to stage a coup. In God’s system, it’s just the opposite. God’s leaders serve. Had the devil been a great heavenly leader, it would’ve been a great heavenly servant. Power wouldn’t have corrupted it, because any true heavenly leader shuns it, like the elders who throw their crowns before God.
Only the lowest functionary in heaven—the one with the least responsibility—would understand service the least, and demand power it didn’t merit.
What was Satan before it fell? The word satán means accuser. In Zechariah and Job and elsewhere, that’s the job we see Satan doing: It accused. Still does. Apparently its job was to provide the contrary opinion, probably in case anyone was being more idealistic than realistic: “That person isn’t worthy. That action isn’t so great. Those motives weren’t honest. There are flaws in that plan.”
Because of Jesus, the devil actually doesn’t serve much of a purpose. It’s not likely to win its case. “That person isn’t righteous” might be totally true. But since Jesus has made us righteous in God’s eyes, the devil’s argument is moot. Well, what would you do if your purpose in life was negated? Find a new purpose? If you were optimistic, sure. If you weren’t—if in fact it was your job to be a pessimist—you might resort to something desperate. The devil tried to kill its boss, which sounds mighty desperate to me.
In any event, the fall of the devil had nothing to do with a mighty leader gone wrong. More like a minor functionary gone wrong, going postal, riling up a mob, and getting tossed out on their collective asses.
But since we humans don’t understand the Kingdom, and wrongly respect power and authority, the devil can use this to spread its myth. It serves the devil’s purposes to make us think that the mighty have fallen, instead of the lowly. Because we’ll assume the devil still retains some of its original mightiness, and therefore be more fearful and respectful. We picture it as a prince in exile. In fact it’s just another corrupt trial lawyer.
The territory it covers.
The devil is a creature. It’s a creation of God, and though spirit, is limited and finite. It’s not almighty. Not everywhere at once. Not all-knowing, though it knows an awful lot. But it loves to play God, and has managed to convince a lot of Christians it’s as much like God as any creature could be.
Fr’instance. Most Christians, when tempted, assume it is the devil, Satan itself, on their case. That’s the language we tend to use. We don’t assume, as makes more sense, that Satan is off on some other more relevant project. We assume it’s multitasking: It’s tempting us, tempting our friends, tempting that noisy family down the street, tempting every convict in the jails, tempting our pastors, running the heretic churches in town, manipulating every member of Congress and the President, mastering the entire nation of Iran, and so on, worldwide. We may say we don’t believe the devil is infinite. But we act as if the devil is functionally infinite. After all, if you’re a spirit, you’re not limited by space and time. Right?
Wrong. As we’ve seen when Jesus had to deal with devil-possessed humans, devils are finite beings. Perhaps “size” is not a proper way to describe spirits; they may not have any length or breadth or height as we understand it. But they do exist in one place at one time. Seems you can pack a herd of them into a small space. Likewise they can be so occupied with a task that they can’t multitask. And though spirits might be quick at travel, they still do have to travel.
Since devils work on humans, they have to work at our speed, not theirs. It takes more than a microsecond for it to get a fully formed temptation into us. It needs to be dropped in. And if we’re resistant to the temptation, it needs to be massaged. The devil simply doesn’t have time to tempt everyone at once. That’s why it has angels —under-devils which can tempt when Satan can’t do so itself. The devil’s angels can create the illusion of an omnipresent devil, and it seems we’ve fallen for it.
One of my pet peeves is when someone interrupts a prayer to God, and prays to the devil. I’m not kidding: Right in the middle of asking God for help, the prayer-leader will suddenly burst out with, “And Satan, we want to tell you that you have no authority here, and we reject you, and bind you, and cast you out, and put you under our feet, and stomp on you with our hobnailed boots, and…” well, I won’t get into the rather carnal, violent threats we make towards it. That’s another issue.
I jokingly ask such people if it’s a good idea to call upon Satan, who’s probably in Washington D.C. tempting the Congress to ignore the needy, and make it respond, “Huh? Some tiny church in Podunk, Nowhereistan, is trying to talk to me? Maybe I oughta check ’em out.” Okay, an unlikely scenario, but still: It’s based on this idea of an omnipresent devil. Omnipresent it’s not.
The greatness of its power.
Another false belief is that the devil has supernatural powers. Christians assume it can do things, like Harry Potter-style magic, that we can’t: The devil can make a bus smack into a pedestrian, or make a tornado smite a trailer park, or turn an ordinarily benign virus into a deadly disease, or turn Nicolas Cage into the Ghost Rider. It can manipulate matter.
Theologians have guessed, but we honestly don’t know, how far spirits can interact with material things and physical people. Of course God can, being unlimited. But spirits appear to be limited to interacting with us spiritually. They can drop ideas into our spirits, like the Holy Spirit does; only instead of knowledge and encouragement, we get lies and fear. It’s probably safe to saywhen a spirit does something physical with a human, like visibly appear or perform miracles, if God’s not empowered the spirit, it’s pure trickery. It’s an illusion put in the human’s mind, like schizophrenia, which nobody else can see or experience.
When it is an objective experience which others can see, it has to be achieved through the same power we use to perform miracles: God’s power, granted because God wants to do something despite that evil spirit. Just like he did when the devil went berserker on Job. The devil can’t pull such stunts without God’s permission. The rest of the time it’s forced to resort to tricks, and make us think it can do more than it can.
So, selling your soul to the devil in exchange for a wish—an idea that’s awfully popular in fiction—makes a fun story, and teaches the appropriate lesson that the devil’s a dirty cheat. But in real life, the devil can’t grant a thing. It has nothing to give. Its actions are no more than magic tricks and illusions. And your soul doesn’t belong to you anyway; it’s either a slave to sin or to God. The devil knows this and will take advantage of people’s ignorance, and keep them enslaved to sin. Anything which proves the devil’s regular point: We’re not worthy of God.
The irresistibility of its temptations.
“The devil made me do it” is a popular excuse. Some junior high school students of mine used to use it on me as often as they could. So I made a sign for the classroom that read, “The devil didn’t make you do it. Only God can make you do anything.” (A Sunday school teacher who borrowed my classroom greatly objected to that sign. He believed God would never interfere with our free will. Missing the point, of course. But I dealt with that elsewhere.)
While Christians largely know better than to claim the devil made us do anything, the rest of our behavior indicates this is in fact what we believe: Thanks to original sin, and the belief in a near-almighty devil, there’s just no way we can resist temptation. We’re doomed to sin and sin and sin, forever. They interpret “All have sinned” to mean all, even Christians who are now freed from sin, will sin. The figure Jesus “came to destroy the works of the devil” isn’t present-tense; it means Jesus will destroy the works of the devil, in the future, in heaven. Not now, not yet.
It’s a cop-out, one which allows us to be lazy and take the path of least resistance—sin. And it’s not one that we’re all that consistent in applying. We adopt it when we find it convenient to sin. But when others sin, especially against us, suddenly we get all Methodist on them: “Christians aren’t supposed to do such things! Don’t tell me you can’t resist temptation. What about ‘Resist the devil and it’ll flee from you’?” Amazing how quickly the correct interpretation can come to mind when it serves our purposes.
We can resist the devil. We’ve been empowered by the Holy Spirit to do so. We’ve been armored to fight it, provided we ever bother to put the armor on. We have to crucify the works of the flesh, not assume God will magically take them away, nor that we’re obligated to live with them because we think the Kingdom isn’t here yet.
“Oh, there’s no devil. It’s a fairy tale.”
Up to now I’ve discussed Christians who believe in the devil, though wrongly. There’s still a minority of Christians who think the devil’s not real.
Often it’s because they’re materialists. Like the ancient Sadducees, they don’t really believe in spirits. They’ll make an exception for God, but not angels; why does an almighty God need ’em? Nor devils: They figure there’s plenty enough evil in the universe committed by us humans, and again, why would we need ’em?
Well, if you wanna be reductionist, why does God need humans, for that matter? But we don’t believe in the devil because it’s a convenient shorthand for the concept of evil. We believe in it because Jesus taught us it exists. Agreed, the cartoon devil, and the popular myths about it, are stupid. But while the myths are likely false, it doesn’t logically follow the devil itself is false. (Same as we try to tell atheists who dismiss God for the same reason.)
The devil is of course pleased with this bit of information. If you don’t believe it exists, you’re much easier to trick. Yeah, you’ll correctly blame yourself when you sin, instead of blaming the devil. But you’ll have plenty of blind spots, because you won’t expect a non-person to employ tactics, of all things. Like when you’re trying to resist the temptation to steal, and concentrate on that so much, you don’t notice another, smaller, weaker temptation to lie. Sometimes this is coincidence, but often it’s a devil trying to getcha one way or another.
Christians rail against the cartoon devil because we recognize that the devil needs to be taken more seriously than that. And the cartoon devil serves the devil’s purposes in that way too: We take the devil too seriously, and fall for all the scams above.
The catch-all for anything we don’t like.
I can write reams about how the devil is a dumping-ground for everything Christians don’t personally approve of. Everything we don’t like gets blamed on the devil. Socialism? It’s of the devil. Gangsta rap? The devil invented it, yo. Gay marriage? Devil marriage. The new New International Version? The devil’s bible. And so forth.
While pundits try to demonize something by trying to find a way to attach it to something Adolf Hitler would think or do, Christians don’t even bother to find the logical attachments: We just say it’s of the devil. Period. End of discussion.
Of course, this presumes that God shares our tastes, and the devil doesn’t. Original sin being what it is, the truth is more often the opposite. (Which is probably good news for those of you who were hoping God was not as big a fan of Thomas Kinkade paintings and Precious Moments figurines as some of your friends.)
We already know God doesn’t give a rip about appearances. Nor does he care about aesthetics; only the motives and morals of the people who produce art. Just because a song name-drops Jesus every other lyric, or because a shirt has “Jesus” splayed across the front of it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t created for the sake of amassing wealth to be spent on the twisted desires of one’s heart. Likewise, just because a song is (to you) discordant and angry, or because a TV show appears to glorify values you hate, doesn’t mean it wasn’t created out of a passion for seeking the truth—or even to glorify God.
It always comes down to fruit. The devil’s fruit is the works of the flesh, and lots of ’em. Don’t object to something when it produces, in itself and not out of its critics, the Spirit’s fruit. Be careful to call nothing “of the devil” that might actually be of God. Don’t risk blaspheming the Holy Spirit simply because you don’t care for something.