1. Who is the Devil, and What Influence Does he Have in the World? 

According to quite a number of biblical writers, Devil is a powerful angel. What is an angel? Angels are described in scripture as personal, ethically responsible beings like us. They are called “sons of God” in the Scriptures (see below). Like ourselves (see Gen. 1:26-28), God gives them responsibility for the administration of the creation.

[God says to the man Job:] Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements–surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:4-7)

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them. The LORD said to Satan, “Whence have you come?” Satan answered the LORD, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.” And the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?” (Job 1:6; see Job 2:1)

God presides in the divine council; in the midst of the gods God holds judgment: “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? [Selah] Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.” They have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken. I say, “You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, you shall die like men, and fall like any prince.” Arise, O God, judge the earth; for to you belong all the nations! (Ps. 82:1-8)

We see that angels are given the task of serving God by overseeing human affairs in some way. We also see that they don’t necessarily do a good job at it (as in Ps. 82 above; cf. also Dan. 10:4-14, where angels are seen as overseeing nations, and opposing God’s servant angel). Like us, they can be unjust and rebellious. 

Angels can bring help to human beings in need:

Because you have made the LORD your refuge, the Most High your habitation, no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent. For God will give God’s angels charge of you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone. (Ps. 91:9-12)

Angels also are given the task of representing God to human beings. They are agents, messengers of God, and they can function like prophets. They can cause themselves to appear in many different ways to people:

Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Mid’ian; and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, “I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.” When the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here am I.” (Exod. 3:1-4; cf. Acts 7:30, 35)

Note how an angel insists that true testimony about Jesus is prophecy whether brought by human being or angel:

Then I fell down at the angel’s feet to worship him, but he said to me, “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brethren who hold the testimony of Jesus. Worship God. For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” (Rev. 19:10)

Then again, angels as well as human beings can be false prophets too:

But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to the Gospel that we preached to you, let him be accursed. (Gal. 1:8)

And Micai’ah said, “Therefore hear the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing beside God on God’s right hand and on God’s left; and the LORD said, ‘Who will entice Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?’ And one said one thing, and another said another. Then a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD, saying, ‘I will entice him.’ And the LORD said to him, ‘By what means?’ And he said, ‘I will go forth, and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ And he said, ‘You are to entice him, and you shall succeed; go forth and do so.’ (1 Kgs 22:19-22)

“Satan” isn’t so much a name as a title, meaning “accuser” or “prosecuting attorney.” He’s pictured in scripture as an extremely high ranking angel that will someday be kicked out of heaven.

And another portent appeared in heaven; behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems upon his heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, that he might devour her child when she brought it forth; she brought forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to God’s throne, and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which to be nourished for one thousand two hundred and sixty days. Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world–he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of God’s Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death. Rejoice then, O heaven and you that dwell therein! But woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!” And when the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had borne the male child. But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle that she might fly from the serpent into the wilderness, to the place where she is to be nourished for a time, and times, and half a time. (Rev. 12:1-14)

This recalls Isaiah 14, a picture of an angel who decides to try to compete with God, but who is ejected to earth, and even to the underworld, Sheol.

“How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High.’ But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the Pit. (Isa. 14:12-15)

Jude discusses this idea of angels being confined in the underworld: 

. . .the angels that did not keep their own position but left their proper dwelling God has kept in eternal chains in the nether gloom until the judgment of the great day. . . .

When the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, disputed about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a reviling judgment upon him, but said, “The Lord rebuke you.” (Jude 5-9)

It appears that Satan is not presently one of the imprisoned spirits, since he is regarded throughout the New Testament as being active in the affairs of the world. For example, Peter says, “Be awake and alert, because your adversary the Devil is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to eat.” (1 Pet. 5:8). In the Revelation 12 passage above, Satan is pictured as kicked out of heaven. He then terrorizes the earth for approximately 3 1/2 years. That is the same time allotted to the “beast,” who becomes a kind of “antichrist” in relation to the false god Satan, as Jesus is Christ in relation to God (see Rev. 13:5; 42 months = 12+12+12+6, i.e. 3 1/2 years). At the end of that period, the book of Revelation pictures Satan suffering imprisonment in the underworld as in Isa. 14:12-15 (see also Isa. 24:21-23):

Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years were ended. After that he must be loosed for a little while. (Rev. 20:1-3)

In the book of Revelation the final end of Satan comes in this way:

And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be loosed from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations which are at the four corners of the earth, that is, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea. And they marched up over the broad earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city; but fire came down from heaven and consumed them. And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulphur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever. (Rev. 20:7-10).

We see from this sample of biblical portrayals of Satan that he is a very powerful angel—at least in relation to human beings. He has great influence, however, not because he is able to turn faithful people into faithless people. He has great influence because his mentality of hatred and competition against God resonates with the same attitude in the great number of faithless people and angels. He therefore is more the great organizer of evil and rebellion than the generator of it. 

Satan is pictured as a master not only of accusation, but of deception. If human beings want to believe lies, Satan will figure out a way to help them with illusions so that they don’t have to face the truth. It is possible to see Paul’s words below as paralleling those of Revelation. What John sees as a kicking out of heaven to earth, Paul may be seeing as God giving Satan permission to tempt humanity on earth:

Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our assembling to meet him, we beg you, brethren, not to be quickly shaken in mind or excited, either by spirit or by word, or by letter purporting to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. [The “man of lawlessness” is Paul’s expression for the “beast” or the “antichrist.”] . . . And you know what is restraining him now, so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains it will do so until he gets out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, and the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of his mouth and destroy him by his appearing and his coming. The coming of the lawless one by the activity of Satan will be with all power and with counterfeit signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are to perish, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false, so that all may be judged who did not believe the truth but took pleasure in unrighteousness. (2 Thess. 2:6-12).

Note the last sentence here. According to Paul, God gives Satan the authority to fool people who are open to being fooled. Paul is picturing a time when great numbers of people in the world will claim to love Jesus, just as the Jews in the time of Isaiah worshipped God “with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Isa. 29:13). Those of the great “rebellion” or “apostasy” (2:3 above) are “judged,” that is, examined, by God (v. 12) and found not really to love Jesus, because they welcome Satan’s counterfeit christ, the “Lawless One.” 

In conclusion, Satan is viewed in Scripture as a very potent force for evil in the world. But this is not so much because he is able to cause people to do evil, but because he is a catalyst for evil. He tempts people to do what they are open to being tempted to do. Like Adam, he is seen as a key cause of the problems in the world. But also like Adam, he is only a cause for evil because he chose to go into evil before us, not because he is able to draw into evil those who are not willing to go there. 

What about Evil Spirits?

Our thinking about “evil spirits” can partly build on what we learned from our inquiries about Satan. One thing to be aware of is that they are not “evil” in the sense of being created evil. God did not design the universe with inherently evil beings in it. I say this because so much of fantasy literature and movies present a dualistic world.

A dualistic world is one in which good and evil are more or less equal, and both are permanent. Think, for example, of vampire, alien and monster movies. In the pretend world created by the writers of such movies, vampires and monsters are a permanent evil feature. There is no question of a monster starting out good, or a vampire starting out good. Evil is their nature. Thus, vampires and alien invaders make other vampires and monsters make other monsters, and aliens keep on making more alien hosts. They don’t do this by invitation but by force. If they are smarter or more powerful than you, they get you. You have no choice in the matter. The more harmless and good-natured you are the more likely you are to get captured.

Further, monsters and vampires have no right to life. In the dualistic world, the enemy creature belongs to the class of things that cannot be controlled, and cannot be reasoned with. Therefore they must simply be stamped out. Human beings have a license from the powers that be to kill them, and the appropriate response to them is to exterminate them on sight (if you can). Otherwise, they will “get” you. There is no respect, no rules of fairness. Any tactic will do against a monster or alien or vampire. The principle is, no holds barred—all out war. 

Our leaders make hidden use of this kind of view when they want to go to war against another country. The enemy is fundamentally evil, they imply, therefore it is ok to bomb them out of existence. Those people over there don’t have a right to live, but we do. They are the monsters. They appear human, but they’re not. They’re another kind of creature that just looks human. The right thing to do is to wipe them out. 

A perfect example of this mentality was given in August 1984 by then president Ronald Reagan. He said “jokingly,” into what he thought was an off-air microphone, “My fellow Americans, I”m pleased to tell you today that I”ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” Reagan’s comments were recorded by several networks and picked up by papers worldwide. In my frank opinion, this kind of attitude is where ethnic cleansing comes from. It is where genocide comes from. It is where slavery comes from. And most people’s imaginations, fed by countless television shows and movies and books, unconsciously agree. 

This, however, is not a Christian view of the enemy or of evil. Evil things don’t spring up in God’s universe without God’s being able to predict or control them. Nothing lives in God’s universe without the grace and love and patience of God supporting it. Also, everything—whether it chooses to act beneficially or harmfully in the world—remains under God’s ultimate authority. Some creatures are made of flesh and blood, and have chosen to live in a harmful way. Some creatures are not made of flesh and blood, and have chosen to live in a harmful way. Each of these are created by God in love and allowed to have their being despite their choice to do harm. Ultimately, just as God will judge human beings that persist in doing evil, God will judge angelic beings that persist in doing evil. 

In the mean time, we are called to respect the inherent dignity of all God’s creatures. Thus, according to Jude: 

Yet in like manner these men in their dreamings defile the flesh, reject authority, and insult the glorious ones. But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, disputed about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce an insulting judgment on him, but said, “May the Lord reprimand you.” But these people insult certain things that they don’t understand, and by those things that they know by instinct as irrational animals do, they are destroyed. (Jude 8–10)

What I am saying is this: it is a mistake to fall into the habit of taking a horror-movie/alien movie attitude towards demonic beings. Rather, look at them as you would look on a human being that was disturbing you or a friend. You have the right to command them to leave you or other people alone, but it is not appropriate to insult them in your attitude or your words. God has not finished giving God’s grace to such creatures, and neither should you.

What about “Unclean Spirits”?

It is significant that, in the New Testament, spirits that disturb or “infest” people are often called “unclean spirits” (about 20 times, the exceptions being Lk. 7:21; 8:2; Acts 19:12-16, which speak of “evil” spirits). Bear with me as I try to unfold some implications of this. 

In the deepest sense, what is it that makes something “dirty” (i.e. unclean)? It is not that it is made of earth. Think of the beach. Its sand is composed of silica, the raw materials of the earth, and most of us would find it easy to say the words “clean sand.” It’s not particularly about making marks on your skin or clothes, either. A grass stain is not unsanitary–it’s just a visual blemish. But suppose I am cooking and I want to grate some cheese for the table. I ask you to hand me a cutting board, on which you have earlier seen raw chicken being cut up. There is no visual evidence of contamination on the board. Yet you will say to me, wait, it’s dirty—let me wash it first. Why? As I said, not because it has something on it that will stain the cheese, and not because there is literal “dirt,” earth, on it. What makes it dirty, unsanitary, unclean, is the fact it is likely to have on it substances that will make people ill. 

What makes something unclean or unsanitary in the deepest sense is that contact with it carries the risk of illness. Not only that, but disease that comes from contact with something unsanitary can cause the person who suffers from it to become contagious. The substance—almost always a living substance—that causes disease has now taken up residence in the body of the infected person, and will, if given the opportunity, spread itself to others through contact with that person. The person has become a living host for the illness-causing organism. Roughly speaking, we are talking about a parasitic lifeform. What makes a lifeform parasitic is not that it lives in your body. There are perhaps dozens—maybe even hundreds—of different identifiable lifeforms that benefit from living inside our bodies, and our bodies don’t mind most of them; in fact our bodies benefit from and even depend on some of them. This is not disease, but mutualism. God has designed the living world to be full of mutualistic—i.e. mutually beneficial— relationships between different types of living beings.

Parasitism, on the other hand, describes what happens when one living creature takes benefit from the life-energies of another, and, instead of giving benefit in return, tears down that creature’s health. Infectious disease—roughly speaking—is parasitism that is aggressive and spreads illness from one organism to another.

Now all this medical information leads to three important insights about “unclean” spirits. 

First, to the extent that the term “unclean spirit” names an angelic being, we remind ourselves that God does not create personal beings to be harmful by nature. God did not make good angels, then think, hmm, I think I’ll create a few evil ones to balance them out. Everything that God creates has the purpose and potential to live in mutual benefit with the other creatures it lives with. As I said above, if human beings or angels become destructive, it is because they have turned away from the nature of the gift of God’s life. It is not because God created them to be negative influences in God’s good creation. 

Nevertheless, when a creature turns away from the spirit of life and towards destructiveness, it becomes unclean. Other creatures suffer harm from contact with it. Thus it has to be avoided, and it also has the potential to “infect” other creatures. We know, for example, that the world is full of human beings who are open to being tempted towards various evils because they have a hidden ill-will towards others. But what happens when someone comes along and organizes that ill will? You get phenomena like Hitler, or the KKK. The writer to the Hebrews expresses the dynamic like this:

Strive for peace with all people, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God, that no “root of bitterness” springs up and cause trouble, and by it many people become contaminated (Heb. 12:14-15). 

All this is to say, angelic beings, no less than human beings, become agents of illness in God’s world when they turn away from the love that God has for all creatures. An angel, that is, a spirit, becomes an unclean spirit when it stops living in the love of God. It then turns from serving the creation in love and starts seeking its own selfish interests. When it does this, it becomes a parasite, interfering in the lives of other created beings such as humans, and causing them harm rather than benefit. What is the difference in principle between a selfish angelic spirit that takes over the life of a human being and ruins it, and a selfish human being that enslaves another human being and ruins their life? There is no difference. 

This line of thinking has crucial implications for how we think about exorcism, the casting out of demons. First, we don”t address a demonic being and command it to leave someone on the basis that it is a sub-form of life that has no rights and whose dignity we can trample. We confront it as a fellow created being that is acting harmfully or unjustly. God has given us the authority to command such creatures to leave people alone, and we should learn to take up and use that authority. But we will lose God’s authority—and even open ourselves to attack—to the extent that we deny the created dignity of the beings we confront. Jesus warns us,

don’t judge, so that you will not be judged yourselves. With the judgment you use, you yourselves will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. (Mt. 7:1-2)

And Jude says, once again:

Even Michael the archangel did not presume to pronounce an insulting judgment on [the Devil himself]. But these people insult certain things that they don’t understand, and by those things that they know by instinct as irrational animals do, they are destroyed. (cf. Jude 8–10)

Some readers will already have begun to realize the second insight I want to bring out from the medical meaning of uncleanness. Let me put it in the form of a question: Why should Christians focus on the idea of demonic spirits enslaving people, but take for granted all sorts of human enslavements? The answer is, it’s not right. Furthermore, this raises the very issue of to what extent and in what manner we are called to confront human evil and cast it out. Jesus says, if a person had faith the size of a mustard seed, they could command a mountain to jump into the ocean and it would obey (Mt. 17:20). Are there unconscious reasons why Christians sometimes display passivity in the face of the human injustices, enslavements, parisitisms, that plague our world today? Could it be that those who benefit from such injustices acquire a hidden vested interest in the status quo? What would it cost us to radically break out of such systems? Is that cost any more than Jesus plainly stated as the cost of being his disciples?

don’t think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a person’s enemies will be those of their own household. The person who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and the person who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. In fact, the person who does not take their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. The one who finds their life will lose it, and the one who loses their life for my sake will find it. (Mt. 10:34-39)

The third and final insight I want to draw from the medical meaning of “dirty” and “unclean” links in with the quotation from Jesus about commanding mountains. 

We don’t know to what extent a mountain (or a tree—Lk. 17:6 par. Mt. 21:18-22) can “hear” a human being who commands it. However we do know the story of Jesus commanding the wind and the waves, as though that were the most natural thing in the world to do (Mt. 8:36 par. Mk. 4:39; Lk. 8:24). At whatever level the creation understood Jesus, it was able to obey him. And it is crucial to realize that he did not command the creation as its creator (God the Son), but as a human being (the Son of Man). In each case that he did this, Jesus told his disciples off—not for disbelieving in him—but for not considering the authority they had seen him exercise as their natural right as children of God! 

This means that we don’t have to worry about whether illnesses or diseases we encounter are caused by microbes or by demonic spirits. Given all that we’ve discussed, it is not an important distinction. If, when we are praying, we sense the presence of a personal entity acting against the person we are praying for, we can confront that personal entity in Christ’s name and command it to leave the person alone. On the other hand, if we sense that the person is suffering from unseen microbial attack or virus infection or something of that type, it is still entirely appropriate—in faith, prayer and trust in God—to confront those destructive beings, and tell them to leave the person alone. 

The person, to all intents and purposes, is suffering from inhabitation by an unclean spirit. Just as our bodies are made up of trillions of individual cells, so the body of the infection, which is harming the person, may well be made up of billions of individual bacteria, fungi, virus molecules, or whatever. It doesn’t matter that the infection does not hear and understand you in exactly the same sense that a human being hears and understands you. Neither, presumably, does the wind, the water, a tree, or a mountain. The point is that in some way established by God, various elements in the creation can hear and obey you. The weight of your authority to command harmful entities in the creation at any moment of time remains no more or less than the weight of the trust you put in God as to your authority as a child of God. Astonishing as it may be, this is what Jesus teaches.