We’re going to now take a break from the theology, and look at where all this leads in practice. We have spoken of history, of ideas, of theology, of Biblical interpretation. But if we leave all this at the level of mere ideas, lodged merely within some complex brain chemistry beneath our skulls—we will have totally missed the point. These ‘ideas’ must have real encounter with our whole personalities. I mean that reading the Bible, or this book or that book about the Bible as we ride to work or a few pages each night before sleep takes us… really should and can have a gripping effect upon human personality, upon our entire world-view, taking us far beyond our safe, sleepy little bedtime studies, out into the most fundamental issues of the cosmos, and into the real issues of the dirty lives we humans live out on the face of this spectacularly beautiful planet. The fruit of correct understanding of these issues will in the end be love, and walking humbly with our God. We now want to reflect on what these ideas mean for us in these intensely practical terms. I urge you to take these reflections especially seriously; for I believe there is a huge danger in purely academic study of God’s word which doesn’t lead to any praxis. For all that he was a Roman Catholic priest, Raimundo Panikkar put it well: “If intellectual activity divorces itself from life, it becomes not only barren and alienating, but also harmful and even criminal [because]… I am convinced that we live in a state of human emergency that does not allow us to entertain ourselves with bagatelles”1.
The idea is generally held that ‘Satan’ tries to stop people being righteous, and uses every opportunity to tempt people, but is overcome by spiritual mindedness and quoting Scripture. If Satan is a personal being, exactly why and how would this evil being be scared off, so to speak, by spirituality? Exactly why is this supposedly powerful being somehow driven away by spirituality or encouraged by unspirituality and moral weakness? I see no real answer to those questions. To simply say ‘Well, he’s like that’ only throws the question a stage further back—why is he like that? How did he become like that? Ephesians 4:27 says that anger and an unforgiving spirit give a foothold to the Devil; 1 Timothy 5:14 warns that young widows will give Satan a door of opportunity if they don’t remarry. When we are told: “Resist the Devil and he will flee from you” (James 4:7), we hardly imagine us wrestling with a literal beast who runs away just because we put up a fight. Putting meaning into those words, seeking to understand what they really mean for us in daily life, it’s surely apparent that James speaks of the need to resist sin in our minds, and that very process of resistance will lead to the temptation receding.
These kinds of passages make so much more sense once we understand the real adversary/Satan as being our own temptations, our own weak mind. We all know how anger and a hard spirit within our hearts lead us to sin more. We can imagine how for a young widow in the first century world, being single could lead her into a range of temptations. But the psychological processes involved in those temptations would all have been internal to her mind [e.g. sexual unfulfilment, lack of status in society, being childless, economic difficulties etc.]. Not remarrying didn’t of itself allow an external Devil to lead her to sin; rather the situation she might chose to remain in could precipitate within her a range of internal temptations.
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Author: Duncan Heaster
Keywords: Satanology, Resist the devil, Devil, Satan, personal sin
Bible reference(s): 1 Timothy 5:14, Ephesians 4:27, James 4:7, Hebrews 2:14
Source: “The Real Devil A Biblical Exploration.”
Page indexed by: inWORD Bible Software.