If you've just joined us, this next lot of Saturday posts will focus on hell, judgement and the Sabbath. Last week, we looked at why good people go to hell and bad people go to heaven. This week, in an excerpt from his book, God's Words, JI Packer explains why it is perilous to ignore Satan, that malevolent being who would like nothing more than to see us locked up in the pits of hell:

For over a century now, belief in the devil has seemed to be on the way out. The toothy red imp with the tail and the trident has become a secular figure of fun, while Protestant theologians generally have banished the personal devil of the Bible to the lumber-room reserved for broken-down myths. No doubt this state of affairs is just what the devil has been working for, since it allows him to operate now on the grandest scale without being either detected or opposed. Nor has he wasted his chances. During the past hundred years, he has engineered a world-wide collapse of evangelicalism in all the older Protestant denominations. The present spineless, powerless, unevangelical state of these churches, as compared with what they were a century ago, gives heart-breaking proof of the skill and thoroughness with which he has done his job. The Bible is no longer fully believed, the gospel is no longer thoroughly preached, and post-Christian paganism sweeps through the world like wildfire. Not for centuries has Satan won such a victory.

Was it rational and enlightened, as liberal theologians thought, to give up belief in the devil? Not particularly. The natural response to denials of Satan's existence is to ask, who then runs his business?—for temptations which look and feel like expressions of cunning destructive malice remain facts of daily life. So does hell in the sense defined by the novelist John Updike—“a profound and desolating absence” (of God, and good, and community and communication); and “the realisation that life is flawed” (Updike goes on) “admits the possibility of a Fall, of a cause behind the Fall, of Satan.” Belief in Satan is not illogical, for it fits the facts. Inept to the point of idiocy, however, is disbelief in Satan, in a world like ours; which makes Satan's success in producing such disbelief all the more impressive, as well as all the sadder.

In recent years something of an antidote to the habit of denying Satan has been administered by the charismatic movement's heavy stress on spiritual warfare against the demons and the devil, their general. It was right to take seriously this aspect of New Testament Christianity, but wisdom has not always marked the emphasis. Firstly, demon-possession of unbelievers and demonic attacks on Christians have not been sufficiently distinguished from forms of mental illness and collapse that yield to rest and drugs. In the gospels, demon-possession is known not just by disintegration of personhood, but also by recognition of Jesus' identity and authority as Son of God, and hostility towards him. Only when this factor appears can demon-possession ever be diagnosed with confidence. Secondly, the assumption that demon-possession today might be as common a problem as in Jesus' day is doubtful. From Acts and the epistles it does not look as if it was a common problem even in the apostolic age. The natural way to read the evidence is to suppose that the coming to earth of the Son of God stirred up a great deal of demonic activity which subsided after his ascension. It is to be feared that the preoccupation of some with finding demons everywhere is really an obsessional ego-trip, which Satan can use as a smoke-screen for his real work of spiritual corruption no less effectively than he can use disbelief in his existence to that end.

From all this it is surely clear that Satan is a person whom churches and Christians ignore at their peril. The New Testament repeatedly cautions us against ignoring him. Paul never fell into this trap: he took the measure of the devil, and could say with truth, “we are not ignorant of his designs”—“I am up to his tricks”, as a modern scholar puts it (2 Cor 2:11). It is vitally important that we today should be able to say the same. Like it or not, each of us is personally at war with the devil, for the devil has personally declared war upon each of us. Face this, Paul urges, and learn how to fight him, “that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle...against principalities, against the powers...Therefore take the whole armour of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day” (Eph 6:11ff). The Christian's life is not a bed of roses; it is a battlefield, on which he has constantly to fight for his life. The first rule of success in war is—know your enemy. The purpose of this present study is to enable us to know and to assess Satan, in order that we may fight him effectively.

Read the full article online (3982 words).

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