The Angel of 'Light'

One of the things that's most often overlooked about the nature of Satan is his metamorphic character. When we speak of metamorphosis, we speak of that which changes in its outward appearance. For instance, the crawling caterpillar goes through a metamorphosis to become a beautiful butterfly.

What I mean in describing Satan as metamorphic is his capacity, as we say in theology, to manifest himself subspecies boni, which literally means "under the auspices of the good"—that far from being the ludicrous character in a red suit and carrying a pitchfork that we talked about in the last chapter, he rather has the capacity to manifest himself, as Scripture says, as an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14). He doesn't come against us baring fangs, with a hideous visage; rather, he approaches us disguised in beauty, looking attractive. That's part of the allure of his seductive techniques. If Satan were to manifest himself in a human person, it would not be some horrible, famous, miserably wicked person like Osama bin Laden or Adolf Hitler. Rather, he would come on the stage of history looking like a saint.

Satan would try to appear as someone laudable, someone who manifests some kind of righteousness, but of course he would do it in a hypocritical manner because he is a liar.

Satan is called in Scripture "the ruler of this world" (John 12:31), for that is his domain. His two main activities in the world are temptation and accusation, and it's very important to understand both of these. The one with which we're most familiar is his function as the tempter. We've already seen how, in paradise, he seduced Adam and Eve by tempting them to sin. We also know that his full powers and expertise were unleashed against Jesus in His hellish experience of temptation in the Judean wilderness. I shudder to think of what our Lord went through in that forty-day experience.

The differences between the environment in which Jesus was subjected to the power of Satan and that in which Adam and Eve were tempted are overwhelming. Adam and Eve were tempted in the midst of paradise, in a

luscious garden where food was available at every point. Jesus was subjected to the assault of Satan in the midst of the Judean wilderness, one of the most desolate places on earth. The only living things there are a few birds, rabbits, scorpions, and snakes. It's a horrible place. And yet, there was Jesus, for forty days, in this place of desolation, subjected to the unbridled attack of the adversary, of Satan. Adam and Eve faced their attack on full stomachs; Jesus was assaulted after forty days of fasting, when He had the natural, biological pangs of hunger. Also, the assault came against Adam and Eve while they had the mutual strength of human companionship and fellowship. Søren Kierkegaard said that there's no more devastating condition for a human being to be subjected to for any period of time than that of solitude. If we want to punish a prisoner who is already behind bars, we put him into solitary confinement. But Jesus was utterly alone during His period of forty days, when the temptation came.

Think of Jesus' parable of the prodigal son, who behaves one way when he's in the father's house and with the family, and doesn't manifest his radical degeneration until he goes into a foreign country where he's anonymous and there is no expectation of a certain manner of behavior. Our Lord was subjected to anonymity there in the desert, and Satan tried to exploit it, saying: "Just kneel down to me. Genuflect once. No one's going to know; no one's going to see it. If you do it, all the kingdoms of the world will be Yours." This is Satan's forte: to come to the people of God and try to seduce them to sin.

Sin itself has such great attraction for us. If we know anything about the things of God, we know that sin can never make anyone happy, yet we're driven to seek our own happiness. Jonathan Edwards once said that the action of the will, the action of volition, is the mind choosing what seems to be good for us at the moment. So when we do something, we choose to do it, not because we think it has any moral righteousness to it, but because we think that it will be good for us. We get confused between happiness and pleasure. Sin brings pleasure, but never happiness. We haven't learned that yet; we won't learn it until we find our only happiness in God and in the things of God, when we enter into the heavenly state. In the meantime, we're subject to these seductive advances by Satan, who makes sin look good to us, with the promise of pleasure.

Satan tempted Adam and Eve; he tempted Jesus; he tempted Peter. He seems to go after all of the people of God in the pages of Scripture. By

contrast, we are told, God never, ever tempts us (James 1:13). This is a great difference between Satan and God. However, Scripture tells us that God sometimes will put us in the place of testing. He tested Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice Isaac. It was the Holy Spirit who led Jesus into the wilderness to be tested by Satan. Yet God never tries to encourage us to sin. This is where the story of Job is so instructive for us.

In the first chapter of Job, we read this description of him: "There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was blameless and upright, and one who feared God and shunned evil" (v. 1). What a tremendous description of integrity. He had seven sons and three daughters.

He had seven thousand sheep and three thousand camels. This may have made him the richest man in the world. "His sons would go and feast in their houses, each on his appointed day, and would send and invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them" (v. 4). The family was wonderful. "So it was, when the days of feasting had run their course, that Job would send and sanctify them, and he would rise early in the morning and offer burnt offerings according to the number of them all. For Job said, 'It may be that my sons have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.' Thus Job did regularly" (v. 5). He was the paradigm of virtue as a father in Scripture.

And then what happened? What caused Job's world to cave in and disintegrate?

There was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them. And the LORD said to Satan, "From where do you come?" So Satan answered the LORD and said, "From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking back and forth on it." Then 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, one who fears God and shuns evil?" So Satan answered the LORD and said, "Does Job fear God for nothing? Have You not made a hedge around him, around his household, and around all that he has on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land.

But now, stretch out Your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse You to Your face!"

(vv. 6-11)

This is the challenge that Satan brings to God. He's already accusing Job of hypocrisy. He's saying: "I've been all over the earth, and everyone down

there is in my pocket. I'm the prince of that world. They're all following me." So God says: "What about Job? Have you seen My servant Job, who is upright and blameless?" "Ha!" Satan says. "Of course! I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. You've put a hedge around him; You've given him more wealth than anyone else in the world. Does Job serve You for nothing? Of course not. But let me at him and I'll show You that Job is a fair-weather follower. When I'm finished with him, he'll curse You to Your face." So God says: "I'll take the hedge away, and we'll see what happens."

That leads to this incredible story in the Old Testament of the persistent misery that Satan wrought in the life of this godly man.

This should teach us something about the activity of Satan. Satan can introduce great harm to our lives—bodily afflictions, loss of possessions, all kinds of misery. But this is where we're most tempted to separate Satan from God and to blame all of our calamities, all of our misfortunes, on Satan, as if he has a power all his own to wreak havoc in our lives. We need to see that everything that Satan does is always under the sovereign authority of God. Satan can't move a finger without divine permission.

Jesus understood this. Also, He understood the situation in which Job was placed, the situation Adam and Eve faced in the garden, and certainly He never forgot the situation He endured in the isolation of the Judean wilderness. Thus, when He taught His disciples to pray, He said, "In this manner, therefore, pray" (Matt. 6:9), after which He taught them the Lord's Prayer, which includes this line: "And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one" (v. 13a). There are two things about this portion of the Lord's Prayer I want to mention. The first is that it's stated in a grammatical form called parallelism, where the second line means the same thing as the first line, only in different words. Second, for the life of me, I can't understand why most English Bibles for years and centuries have translated that phrase as "deliver us from evil," where evil is spoken of in the abstract. The Greek word so often translated as "evil" here in the Lord's Prayer is poneros, which is more accurately translated as "evil one," as the New King James Version does. "Poneros" is a title for Satan.

So what is Jesus saying? Is He saying we should pray that God would put a hedge around us and not put us into the place where we are exposed to the assaults of Satan? That should be our prayer, knowing that we are vulnerable all the time to the enemy. We say: "God, protect us. Be our citadel. Be our mighty fortress. Protect us from the attacks of Satan." We

see what happened with Job. The hedge came down and, literally, all hell broke loose in his life. His suffering was so severe and so intense that his best friends, who previously had assumed that he was a man of great integrity, came to him while he was sitting on the dung heap with his sores, saying: "Job, you must have done something really bad to be in this kind of condition, because you're the most miserable man in the world. You must have the most miserable record of sin in all the world." Even his closest companion, his wife, couldn't stand to see her husband suffer, and she said, "Give up, Job. Curse God, and die. You are going to get relief only if you will curse God." Job was saying, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him," but she was saying: "Stop that. You can't take any more. Curse Him and die."

But Job doesn't listen to her counsel, and Satan is defeated. God is glorified and Job himself is vindicated, as all that he has lost is restored abundantly. What a fantastic story about the power of Satan and the vindication of God's people by the Lord.

Earlier I mentioned two main activities of Satan—tempting and accusing.

Satan tried to tempt Job to repudiate God, and the power of the temptation was in the pain that he brought. But not only that, he came in his favorite mode of activity for the believer. Another title for Satan in the Bible is diabolos, which means "accuser," and Satan is seen as the accuser of the brethren (Rev. 12:10). The accusation he brings against Job is that the only reason Job is serving God at all is in response to the prosperity that God has given him. That's not true. It's a false charge, a false accusation.

We are all familiar with the way in which Satan tempts us, but his greater work, for the Christian, is accusation, to point his finger in your face about your guilt, to take you away from the cross, away from the gospel, and point out how bad you are. The thing that's so terrible about Satan functioning as a prosecuting attorney is that he doesn't have to make up false charges. He can point out the reality of our sins and try to take away our joy, our peace, our trust in the gospel. One of the difficult things in the Christian life is to discern between the work of the Holy Spirit in convicting us of sin and the work of Satan in accusing us of sin, because they both may be pointing at the same transgression. But I've noticed this difference: When the Holy Spirit convicts us of sin, as painful as it may be for a moment, there's always something sweet in it, because in conviction, the Spirit always gives us the promise of forgiveness and restoration. However,

when Satan accuses us, his purpose is to destroy us, to paralyze us, to cause us to abandon all hope. That's why Paul, when he talks about the grace of God that is so abundant and so magnificent, raises a defiant charge against Satan: "Who shall bring a charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns?" (Rom. 8:33-34a). So when Satan comes with his accusations, we have to say: "Sticks and stones, Satan. Get out of here. We know we're guilty, but we have Christ. We have the gospel, and that is our shield against your accusations." I love the Heidelberg Catechism's statement that Christ is our only comfort in life and death.

That's why we have to cling to Him and to the gospel, because Satan is going to accuse us every minute.

Finally, we read in the Scriptures that Satan has an army of assistants, the demons, and we see that their activity was heavily concentrated during Jesus' tenure on this earth. In fact, the very first beings to recognize the full identity of Jesus were demons. They called Him the Son of God and asked, "Have You come here to torment us before the time?" (Matt. 8:29). They understood that their days were limited. They knew there was a time when they would be finished, but they also knew that the time wasn't yet, and so they tried to negotiate with Jesus. Jesus released them from inhabiting the man they were tormenting, drove them into the pigs, and sent them to their destruction. People ask, "Why didn't He send them to hell?" It was simply because the time hadn't come yet. But He dealt with them.

These demons are in many places. In the Bible, we see them possessing people and oppressing people, causing bodily harm, property damage, and all kinds of things. The Christian is always faced with this question: Can I be demon-possessed? I don't believe so. I believe that people can be demon-possessed, but I don't think that this is possible for a Christian, because God the Holy Spirit resides in the regenerate person, and the Scriptures tell us, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty" (2 Cor. 3:17). So, no demon can hold us hostage to the power of Satan. Demons can oppress us, they can harass us, they can tempt us, attack us and so on, but thanks be to God, He who is in us is greater than he who is in the world (1 John 4:4).