Underestimating the power of the Adversary or practically ignoring his existence—these are extremely dangerous thoughts. Someone said, “The more a man knows Christ, the more he apprehends having to deal with Satan.” It may be useful to sketch briefly: first, under what names Scripture designates him; then his origin, character and activity as this fearsome enemy; and finally the terrible judgment that will befall him.
1 - Names of Satan
In the Word of God he bears different names:
- Satan (for example Matt. 16:23), that is, the adversary, the one who opposes God and His people;
- the Devil (Luke 4:2), meaning the accuser, the slanderer, and especially “the accuser of the brothers” (Rev. 12:10);
- the serpent (2 Cor. 11:3), because of his craftiness, and because he used that animal to seduce Eve in Eden;
- the ancient serpent (Rev. 12:9), because he led man into evil from the beginning;
- the dragon (ibid.), who uses the powers of the world to do evil;
- the tempter (Matt. 4:3);
- the enemy (ibid. 13:25);
- the ruler of this world (John 12:31);
- the prince of the power of the air (Eph. 2:2);
- the god of this age (2 Cor. 4:4);
- the Wicked One (1 John 3:12).
All these names already tell us much about his character.
2 - Origin, history and character of Satan
Satan is a creature of God, and he was adorned with the most excellent gifts. Most of the expressions in Ezekiel 28:12–19 that directly apply to the king of Tyre seem also to fit Satan figuratively. He was “the model of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.” He was in the holy mountain of God and walked among the stones of fire. He existed before the creation of man. One day his heart was lifted up against God. Then he was cast down “from the mountain of God” as a profane thing, bringing down with him the angels who served him. Stripped of his glory, he thereafter exercises “the power of darkness” (Luke 22:53; Eph. 6:12), with a multitude of demons under his authority.
He “was a murderer from the beginning, and has not stood in the truth, because there is no truth in him… He is a liar, and the father of lies” (John 8:44).
He caused the fall of man, and he rules him through passions and lusts. He knows how to excite them by means of his penetrating intelligence, increased, as someone wrote, by long experience with the human heart. He stirred up the whole world, political and religious, against Christ in order to have Him killed, and it was then that Christ explicitly called him the ruler of the world (John 14:30). Since then he has relentlessly pursued the disciples of Christ. Even today he can raise persecutions against faithful Christians, as he did in past centuries insofar as God allowed it, and as he will do against the faithful of the future. From a roaring lion (1 Peter 5:8 ) he can also transform himself into an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14), and his activity is all the more dangerous to us for that reason.
Thus he is a powerful being, a spirit full of wisdom and craft, whose dominion we must not despise, since even the archangel Michael did not dare to pronounce a reviling judgment against him when disputing with him over Moses’ body (Jude 9).
3 - Activity of Satan up to Christ’s cross
The earth became the place where he exercises his activity without respite while still having access in heaven to accuse men, and there he is at the head of “the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12). Scripture shows him running to and fro on the earth and walking about there, then coming into God’s presence with his accusations and slanders (Job 1:6–12). He acts in permanent opposition to God, seducing men, drawing them into evil, seeking from the beginning to frustrate the designs of God’s grace toward guilty man. He it was who pushed the pre‑Flood world into corruption and violence. He it was who led Noah’s descendants into idolatry and the indulgence of every passion. He it was who urged Pharaoh to kill every son born to the Israelites, and Athaliah, daughter of Jezebel, to destroy the royal family of Judah, in order to annihilate divine promises. But God always thwarted his schemes, and the promise of a Deliverer was fulfilled in its time: Christ came into the world.
As soon as the Son of God appears on that stage, Satan deploys extreme energy: all his forces are put into play, against God, to thwart the Lord Jesus. Does he not know that it is He, “the seed of the woman,” who is to crush his head, according to the oldest prophecy? (Gen. 3:15). He tries to have the child who is the Savior killed in Bethlehem. He tempts Jesus three times in the desert, seeking in vain to make Him sin. In Gethsemane he delivers a last assault: he makes Jesus see what the price of atonement will be, the wrath of God, without any alleviation. He would stop Jesus from the path of sacrifice. But the Savior goes all the way.
He will go all the way and will triumph. If he had already plundered the goods of the strong man (Matt. 12:29), his power will be broken. By death Christ made powerless him who had the power of death, that is the devil, and delivered all those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage (Heb. 2:14). He stripped the principalities and authorities and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in the cross (Col. 2:15). Satan, who held sinners captive, is himself taken captive (Eph. 4:8 ).
But, although defeated at the cross—this victory made manifest by Christ’s resurrection—Satan does not disarm. As he had the Master crucified, he has the disciples persecuted, and all who believe in Him. His activity does not slacken. At the dawn of Christianity he seized Ananias’s heart to make him lie to the Holy Spirit, others to lead them into the saddest sins, others to propagate or receive false doctrines. And he has continued, and he continues. He never rests.
4 - Activity of Satan since Christ’s cross
However, since the cross, though he still bears dignity, he has lost all authority over the believer. He has been made powerless and, if we resist him, he will flee from us (James 4:7).
Shortly after the rapture of the saints, and following a great battle in heaven between Michael and his angels and Satan and his angels (Rev. 12:7–9), Satan will be cast down from heaven to the earth. He will enter into great fury, for he will know that he has little time left to pursue his work of destruction and seduction. He will have at his service two powerful auxiliaries: one political—the head of the reconstituted Roman empire—and the other religious—the Antichrist, or the false prophet. The three of them will ally in a sinister trinity of evil. They will send out spirits clothed with demonic power performing miracles (Rev. 16:13–14). Seduced by them, men will prepare to revolt against God. The saints who will be on the earth at that time, and in particular the faithful of the Jewish remnant, will be terribly persecuted (Rev. 12:17). Those who will wish to keep God’s commandments and have the testimony of Jesus (ibid.) will refuse to submit to the Antichrist whom the Jewish people, as a whole, will acclaim. This faithful remnant, while being led to recognize its guilt toward the Messiah, will preach the gospel of the kingdom in all the cities of Israel. Persecuted even more violently because of its fidelity by the Antichrist who will establish idolatry in the temple, this remnant will flee (see Matt. 24:16–21), and find refuge among various nations. There too it will preach the gospel of the kingdom; many will receive it and among them there will also be martyrs.
Then the kings of the earth, in their delusion, will gather to make war against the Lord, who will come down from heaven with his army. They will be destroyed; the head of the Roman empire and the false prophet will be thrown alive into the lake of fire (Rev. 19:20) and Satan, bound, will be thrown into the abyss for a thousand years (20:1–3). He will not be able during that time to exercise his harmful power.
When the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released for the final test of mankind (Rev. 20:7). His long captivity will not have changed him, and immediately he will seek to deceive the nations. Many will listen and will make war on the saints (ibid. 8–9). But God will put an end to the activity of the terrible adversary: he will be thrown “into the lake of fire where are the beast and the false prophet; and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever” (ibid. 10). He will be there forever, among the fallen angels and the unhappy men who refused God’s salvation, keeping company with their former master in the “eternal fire,” which God had not prepared for them but “for the devil and his angels” (Matt. 25:41).
5 - Beware and watch
Such is the enemy of our souls. Let the unbeliever who rejects Jesus as Savior know well that he binds his eternal destiny to Satan, and this is weighty to consider! Let the believer, forewarned of the power of the Adversary, be on guard and watch so as not to fall into his traps. His only refuge is to stay near Him who, after binding Satan by the Word in the desert, and stripping him of his goods during his ministry here below, made him powerless by the cross. Soon “the God of peace will crush Satan under your feet,” it is said to the saints (Romans 16:20). The decisive events we have recalled are near. Those who have not known “the depths of Satan” are exhorted to hold fast to what they have, until He comes to execute judgment, He who, Son of God, was made Son of Man (John 5:22, 27; Rev. 2:18, 24).
6 - Hidden things
Why has God allowed Satan, until now, his place in heaven and his activity on earth? Why has He delayed applying judgment to this rebel? These questions and many others belong to the hidden things of God, and we must be content with what is revealed for our profit: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deut. 29:29). As soon as a creature loses sight of its dependence on God, nothing attracts it so much as becoming the equal of its Creator. That was precisely the sin of our great Adversary, and it is in this same sin that he would lead us, as he led the first Adam.
