Our English word “devil” comes from the Greek diabolos where it’s a compound denoting one who rips/tears/shears apart. Now, whether or not at the ontological level you believe ‘ol Scratch” is a distinct personal entity, or whether you believe that Scripture gathers up and anthropomorphizes all of the diabolical forces that one encounters in reality under one heading as a single being, i.e., the devil, the fact is that any movement in any domain towards greater unity, cohesion and communion is certain to be met with diabolical pushback.
If you’ve ever wondered why God keeps the devil around, the diabolical serves righteous purpose, albeit unwittingly. For if “nothing impure,” nor “anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful” may have a place in God’s eternal future (cf. Rev. 21:27), Heaven must have some mechanism to segregate between the pure and the impure. “Satan hath asked for thee,” Christ told the apostles, “that he may sift each of you as wheat, but I have prayed for you, that your faith will not fail” (Luk. 22:31). So whatever else the devil is, the term seeks to identify the destructive, divisive, resistant spirit that’s encountered whenever we attempt to cohere a multiplicity into a unity. That’s why we say, “the devil is in the details,” for lurking in what goes unaccounted for lies the potential of ruin. Peter writes “be sober-minded, be alert. Your adversary the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for anyone he can devour.” (1 Pet. 5:8)
For example, think what the church of God is: it is the assembly of a people from every tribe and language under the Lordship of King Jesus. Any initiative towards that goal, that telos, is going to be met with difficulty, challenge, sabotage, persecution, hate, etc.—after all, the world is governed by a “diabolical” spirit. (cf. 2 Cor. 4:4) And yet, according to Scripture, that opposition is not countervailing to God’s will or good purposes—there’s no legitimate reading of the Bible that envisions Satan as God’s “equal but opposite.” As John writes, “the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.” (1 Joh. 4:4)
Marantha,
Jordy
