I had never read either 1 Chronicles nor Zechariah until I was in Bible college. But I had heard Job’s story often as a teen, and Satan’s appearance in the book was always difficult to reconcile with the Lucifer myth:
One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them. The LORD said to Satan, “Where have you come from?” Satan answered the LORD, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.”
The LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.” Then Satan answered the LORD, “Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.”
The LORD said to Satan, “Very well, all that he has is in your power; only do not stretch out your hand against him!” So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD. (Job 1:6-12)
In Job, Satan is presented as a member of the heavenly court. His role is scouring the earth, recording the sins of humanity, and reporting them to God. The conflict in Job—at least in heaven—is because Satan is unconvinced that Job’s faithfulness to God is earnest. In Satan’s eyes, Job is untested. God allows Satan to test Job, to prove his faithfulness.
Again this story is problematic if Satan and God are already adversaries. But if Satan is a functionary of heaven, his presence in the heavenly court makes sense.11
THE ACCUSER IS THROWN DOWN
What about Satan in the New Testament? We get echoes of the Old Testament accuser as we hear Jesus warn Peter that Satan wanted to sift the disciples like wheat (Luke 22:31-32), implying a testing to see who is truly faithful. And even Jesus’ wilderness temptation can be read in light of Job; could it not be that Satan tested Jesus’ faithfulness to see whether he was in fact fit to be Israel’s Messiah?
But elsewhere Satan is the devil, a word in Greek that means “deceiver.” He is called a roaring lion (1 Peter 5:8), one who has sinned from the beginning (1 John 3:8-10), a schemer (Ephesians 6:11), a murderer from the beginning who has no truth in him (John 8:44), and one who has the power of death (Hebrews 2:14).
What happened between the Old and New Testaments? How did Satan go from divinely appointed prosecutor to deceiver and liar? The short answer is this: Jesus was raised from the dead and ascended to the throne of heaven.
All the books that comprise what we now call the New Testament were written at least a generation after Jesus was raised from the dead. They are shaped by decades of reflection by the new Christian community on the meaning of Jesus’ incarnation, death, and resurrection. And most of the New Testament writers were Jewish, drawing on the long Jewish tradition that includes on the periphery the figure of the accuser.
Again and again, the New Testament writers insist that something fundamental changed in the cosmos when Jesus was raised from the dead. By dying, he defeated the powers of sin and death. By rising from the dead, he proved that God’s way leads to life—even if God must resurrect to make it so. In the wake of Jesus’ resurrection, there is no longer a need for an accuser. In raising Jesus from the dead, God no longer counts our trespasses against us, as Paul observed in 2 Corinthians 5:19, and as he says in Romans 8:1-2: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.”
The book of Revelation tells us that when Jesus ascended to heaven, when his work of rescue was completed, Satan went to war. He was cast down, of course, but that’s not quite the end of the story. Revelation tells us,
Rejoice then, you heavens
and those who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
for the devil has come down to you
with great wrath,
because he knows that his time is short!” (12:12)
In the wake of the war in heaven, Satan was cast down to the earth. He knew his time was short, so he embarked on a mission: to take as many people with him as he could. But how? Death cannot stop the God who raises the dead. So how would the dragon make war on the throne?
Revelation tells us he is the deceiver, the devil. Satan’s weapon is lies—a theme that runs throughout the New Testament. The Satan of the Old Testament, God’s accuser, was anything but a liar. He reported the sin of humanity that they might stand justly convicted before God. But now that there is no condemnation, Satan can only lie.
Revelation goes on to tell us that Satan set out specifically to make war on the people of God, to deceive us into idolatry and faithlessness. Satan convinces us, like Cain, to ground our identity in temporal, temporary things rather than in the eternal love of God. Satan whispers in our ears that, like Samson, we should satisfy every craving and take whatever our eyes find desirable, so that we cease to be God’s holy people. Satan teaches us to be afraid so that, like Jezebel, we look to false gods for safety and security.
Satan convinces us that if we work hard enough, we can make everyone happy so that, like Herod, we overlook and devalue the most vulnerable among us. Satan blinds us to the rot in our family trees so that, like Herodias, we perpetuate the sins of our ancestors. And Satan tells us stories of a god who wins, a god of victory and conquest, so that, like Judas, we cannot hear the voice of the crucified one.
Lie after lie after lie—all were designed to distract us from the power of the Spirit at work in us to bring new life.12
No wonder, then, that by the time Christians were writing, Satan had become for them an eternal evil, someone rotten from the beginning. John the Revelator embodied him as a fearsome multiheaded sea serpent. For him, Satan was the Leviathan of ancient Near Eastern mythology that lurked in the depths of the seas, the embodiment of the chaotic forces of anticreation. Satan was the antithesis of God’s life-giving power.
All of this is because Jesus’ resurrection eliminated the need for an accuser. Satan is not the heavenly worship leader exiled from heaven before the creation of the world. So he is someone who’s basically mad that he’s out of a job. That sounds silly, but could it be the most insidious evil?
AGGRAVATING GRACE (THAT SAVED A WRETCH LIKE ME)
Satan found God’s grace so offensive that he went to war with the Creator. Unfortunately Satan’s attitude is common. Jesus encountered it again and again, particularly among the religious of his day. During his ministry, he developed a reputation as a friend of sinners. He was apparently quite the party animal, because rumors swirled that he was a glutton and a drunkard.13 Again and again, the religious leaders of Jesus’ day were scandalized that a respectable rabbi like him would be caught dead with the likes of the sinners he hung around.
Luke wrote, “All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them’” (Luke 15:1-2). In response, Jesus told three parables to illustrate why he was where he was—at a very public feast with sinners. The first is about a shepherd who loses one sheep out of a hundred and leaves the ninety-nine to search for the one lost. Jesus said there’s a bigger party in heaven when one sinner repents than when ninety-nine righteous people persist in their faithfulness.
The second is about a woman who loses one coin out of ten. When she finds the missing money, she throws a party for her village.
The third story, which is commonly called the parable of the prodigal son, features a father and two sons. The younger demands his inheritance, flees, squanders it, and returns home groveling, only to be met by his father with open arms. The father even throws a party.
Jesus really liked parties.
This story doesn’t end with a party, however. It ends out in the fields, where the older brother is working and re
fusing to come to the party. The father pleads with him to come, but the son replies, “For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him” (Luke 15:29-30).
The older brother refused to be under the same roof with a long-lost son who had been welcomed home. And Jesus compared the religious leaders to this older brother. He said that if they knew God as well as they claimed, they would be right where he was—in the midst of the sinners and tax collectors.
Instead the Pharisees’ religion had made them bitter and angry. Somehow their zeal for God had led them away from reflecting God’s character. Rather than rejoicing that God’s wayward children had come home to find forgiveness and reconciliation, they got angry. They went to war with Jesus, much like Satan went to war with God.
At stake is a fundamental misunderstanding of God’s character—or an outright rejection of it. If Jesus’ characterization of the Pharisees in the person of the older brother is accurate, they are blinded by scarcity. The younger brother took his inheritance, which means the father’s reply—“All that is mine is yours”—is literally true. The father was using the older brother’s property to throw the welcome-home party. What good can come from wasting resources on a son who’s already wasted so much?
But grace is not a limited good. God is infinite and unbound, the very Creator of the universe. God cannot run out of grace.
The older brother had a legitimate complaint. It wasn’t fair, in his eyes, that the younger brother got to waste his father’s property and then come back and all was forgiven. One brother never sins and one does nothing but sin, yet in the end, both receive the same reward. It’s profoundly unfair, and we might excuse the Pharisees’ anger. Again and again, the prophets of Israel raged against injustice. Again and again, they insisted that God will reward the righteous and punish the wicked.
But the Pharisees forgot how the prophets described God again and again. As Jesus reminded them in another showdown over the same issue (a dispute over the call of Matthew the tax collector), “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners” (Matthew 9:12-13).
Jesus was quoting the prophet Hosea, pointing out to the Pharisees that their view of God’s justice was skewed. Yes, God is just. And yes, God punishes the wicked. But God is slow to anger and quick to show mercy. And what God is most interested in from God’s people is not slavish adherence to rules. That’s the sacrificial system embodied in the myopic concern for justice we see in the Pharisees.
Jesus reminded them that to be like God is to rush to show mercy and to celebrate when sinners repent and find life. That’s supposed to be good news, and it’s worth throwing a party for.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this graceless attitude we see in the older brother, in the Pharisees, and in Satan is a conviction that they are not living the best life. The older brother complained that he had been working like a slave while his brother went off and lived it up. You don’t have to hang around too many church folks before the Pharisees’ attitude rings true. Frankly, a lot of religious people view a religious life as a sacrifice. Sinners get to have all the fun—sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll—while the religious folks sacrifice fun, joy, and excitement for an eternal reward. As a fringe benefit, we’ve decided we get to sit in judgment over the sinners, and it’s not long before a certain smug self-satisfaction creeps in as we contemplate their eternal torment.14 Have all the fun you want now. We’ll see who’s laughing for eternity! No wonder the religious folks get upset when God shows up. Rather than standing aloof and apart in judgment with them, God is partying with the sinners.
Behind all of this is the conviction that to serve God is to work like a slave and that the life God calls us into isn’t good, isn’t fun, isn’t life. This simply isn’t what we see in Jesus. Everyone wanted to be around him. Wherever he went, people found life, a life that was so attractive they left the patterns of sin they’d been living to follow him. So many of God’s children who had been prodigal with God’s grace found in Jesus something better than they had known in their sin.
No wonder they called it good news. No wonder they wanted to be with him.
It should bother us that our churches are full mainly of Christians. We should lose sleep over the fact that most pastors don’t have significant relationships with people outside the church, let alone those the church typically derides as sinners. If your faith has turned you into a boring, joyless stick-in-the-mud, there’s something wrong with your faith.
Christians who refuse to extend God’s grace to the world around them are truly satanic. Maybe we can’t believe grace is free, or we think we’ve earned more than someone else, or we’re simply not convinced life with God is the excessive, overflowing, abundant life Jesus promised. In any case, our sinful picture of God poisons our relationships with our neighbors.
But when a church gets this right, it’s life changing.
I knew I wanted to be a part of Catalyst Church from the moment I heard about the chairs. The church had just lost its lead pastor and had gotten my name through the grapevine. I was on the phone with the other staff pastor, and I asked him to tell me about the church. He said, “We’re a church that’s for all the people who aren’t here yet.”
He then told me a story that began shortly after they had moved into their building. They were a small congregation, but as part of moving into the building, they had ensured they had enough chairs for the time being. Their pastor, Levi, knew they would need more if they were going to grow. But being a small, young church that had just moved into a new building, they didn’t have much extra cash.
Levi took it to the people. He reminded them that Catalyst had always been a church for people who don’t like church—people who have been burned in the past or can’t connect with God through the more traditional forms of worship in which they had been raised. He called them to picture the people in the community surrounding their new building, and he pointed out that there was literally no place for those people in the new building. They had enough chairs for themselves, but not for anyone else.
The congregation dug deep and quickly raised the money for all those extra chairs. And sure enough, the chairs weren’t extra chairs for long. More and more people discovered a church that was for them, a place that welcomed them as they were and gave them the space—and the grace—to learn to trust the Spirit to make them new.
Catalyst is a party thrown by a father who’s overjoyed that his prodigal children have come home. We’ve got plenty of prodigals, and we’ve got plenty of older brothers too. Many of them thought for way too long that religion was all about arbitrary rules handed down by a distant God. They had spent their lives working like slaves, and now they’re slowly realizing they’re not slaves but children, invited to the party.
God’s party has enough chairs for everyone.
The older brothers among us need healing as much as the prodigals in our midst. The antidote is to listen to the voice of the God who stands pleading with us in the field. We must reconnect with our first love, the Jesus we meet in the Gospels who came to announce good news, to topple the powerful from their thrones, and to lift up the outcast and oppressed. The God who was proud to associate with prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners, because they were finding life in him. The God who allowed himself to be interrupted by children and the chronically ill and Roman centurions.
For our churches to become hospitals for sinners rather than country clubs for saints, we need a good dose of humility, realizing that we’re all sinners in need of grace. Spiritual pratices such as confessing our sin to each other or daily prayers of examen can help us to remember that all we do is through
God’s grace.
Our churches must quit hiding in our sanctuaries. If we are the body of Christ, we must go where we know Christ’s body went when he was incarnate among us.
The sin of Satan is refusing to extend grace to the world around us. Receiving grace is easy. Extending that same grace to others isn’t easy. We must remain in the Spirit to allow the Spirit to cultivate in us the fruit of love, joy, peace, and patience. As we are transformed more and more into God’s image, we become more graceful as God is graceful. We rediscover the joy of sinners turning from their sins to find life. And we realize that’s something to celebrate.
EPILOGUE
Empathy for the Devil
What to Do When It Turns Out You’re the Villain
The summer after my junior year in college, I worked for the grounds crew at my university. It was miserable work, but several of my friends were on the crew, so we had fun despite the long hours and summer heat. Our boss quickly noticed we were hard workers, and he noticed the other crew was lazy. While we mowed fields and edged dormitory sidewalks, the other crew parked their truck outside a classroom building and sat in the air-conditioned lobby.
We could tell our boss knew what the other crew was up to, because he started assigning our crew all the hardest and most important jobs. We were furious. Why didn’t he fire them or at least discipline them? Days stretched into weeks, and nothing improved—least of all our workload.
A deep hatred grew in my spirit for my boss. Okay, it didn’t just grow. I cultivated it. I fantasized about telling him off all the time—even when I wasn’t at work. I became consumed by how much I hated him. When I finally noticed how toxic my attitude had become, I began praying both that God would change him and that God would help me deal with my anger.
Empathy for the Devil Page 18
