Satan: Is He? Who Is He? Part 1

Selected Scriptures

We have a couple of weeks before summer is ended, and we get into our fall schedule, and everybody comes back. And I was hesitant to get right into the II and III John series on Sunday nights, and so I decided to just do a little short series on Sunday mornings in the subject of God: Is He? Who is He? And what is He like? And at night, Satan: Is he? Who is he? And what is he like?

And so, for tonight, and for the next couple of weeks anyway, we're going to be looking at the character of Satan. I think it's very important that we have an understanding of Satan. I can remember when I was in college, that one of the things that we did in football, and we did a lot of crazy things in preparation for football games, but one of the things that we always did was to take the third or fourth string, and this is generally how a lot of people spend their...their whole football career if they play a lot of third string or fourth string football, take that unit and make that unit look and act and play like the team we were going to play on Saturday. And then we would practice against our own guys, doing what our opponent was going to do in order that we might better know the enemy. Being able to predict what your opponent is going to do is very important.

In pro football and even in college now, the sophistications of the systems are boiled down to computer science. And they can predict exactly what an opponent is going to do almost always by the computer. They know how many times a certain team runs a certain play at a certain point in the game on a certain yard line, at a certain down. Their computer tells them what that's going to do and so they've got it premeditated. The only thing? that really enters in anymore is the human error.

But they realize to understand the enemy is very important.

One of the things that a pitcher does in baseball is to take a card, the team that he's going to be playing that day and go over it very carefully to find out all the weaknesses of all of the hitters that he's going to face in order that he can put the ball where he wants to put it. This is just wise in athletics. A boxer is going to fight a fight, he learns where his opponent's vulnerability is and attacks at that point. This is true in anything we do in terms of competition or combating a foe.

Well, it's no less true in the area of the spiritual. If we're going to understand how best to win the victory, we ought to know what our enemy is all about. The better we understand our enemy the better we understand his inabilities. The better we understand his inabilities the more vulnerable he becomes to us. And that's what we want to do is look at Satan. Certainly not to glorify him, but to unmask him in order that we might see him for the corrupted and defeated character that he is.

Now we are all aware of the account of creation in Genesis 1 and 2. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God brooded over the waters and then the creation began." We're all aware of that.

There were already beings alive in the universe. You say ‑ Who were they? Turn in your Bible to Job S8 and let's find out who was around when God made the world...Job SS, verse 4. Now here we find the Lord making some interesting statements to Job. In verse 4 of Job 38, He says, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding." And the implication, of course, is that Job was nowhere. Job hasn't got any answers cause Job wasn't around to see. "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth, Job? " "You weren't anywhere." "Who hath laid the measures of it, if thou knowest. Or who has stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are its foundations fastened. or who laid its cornerstone? Tell Me, Job, tell Me the process of creation."

Were you there? No, he was not, obviously. But, verse 7, "Where were you when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"

Now here, watch this, God identifies the morning stars singing together and all the sons of God shouting for joy with the time of creation. Do you see it? Where were you when I created?

Where were you when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God...shouted for joy? Then the morning stars can't be real stars, what are they? They're the same as the sons of God, what are they? None other than angels.

Angels were already made when God made the world. That's the implication of this text. Angels are called bene Elohiym in Job 1:?, that means sons of God, Job 2:1, and here in Job SS, verse 7. And as we saw this morning the term ‑ sons of God ‑is reserved for those who were created by a direct act of God.

Now we do not know when angels were created but I think it's safe to say they were around when the world was made. We don't know just how long they'd been around because there is no revelation on that. But the important thing is they were around.

Now in Colossians 1 it says, "By Him were all things created that are in heaven, that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities or powers, all things were created by Him." Now notice, thrones, dominions, principalities and powers are all titles for angels. Those are all ranks of angelic beings. And it says there in Colossians 1:18 that God created angels. And it is an aorist verb meaning at one point in past history God made the angels. And incidentally, it seems clear to me from the Word of God that all the angels were created at the very same time. All of them created by a direct act of God. In fact, it was His Word that did it. His Word is what created everything and angels are no different.

It says in psalm 14g, verse 2, "praise ye Him all His angels.

praise ye Him all His hosts. Praise ye Him sun and moon. Praise Him all ye stars of light. Praise Him ye heavens of heaven, ye waters that are above the heavens, let them praise the name of the Lord for He commanded and they were created." Everything, including angels, is to praise God because they were created by His command. And as instantly as God created everything in Genesis, so instantly by a spoken word did He create all the angels.

You say ‑ Well how do you know He didn't create a couple of angels and they began to reproduce? Because angels can't do that.

Angels do not procreate. You say ‑ Where does that come from?

It comes from Matthew 22, verse 28, and, of course' this is a...

we won't go into the whole text here, it says: "In the resurrection whose wife shall she be?" You know, they give the deal about a guy dies and his brother's suppose to take up his wife. if his brother isn't married, you know, he's suppose to take up his wife and continue the family. The husband dies and the guy does it and then he dies and the next guy does it, and she goes through seven brothers. And the question comes to the Lord, "In the resurrection.

whose wife of the seven shall she be?" And, of course, that's really a bizarre situation anyway. By the time you got to the third or fourth brother they'd become a little suspicious if all of them kept dropping off like that. But if you did happen to make it to the seventh guy and the question that they're asking Jesus, the Sadducees, trying to trip Him up because they didn't believe in the resurrection, was ‑ Whose wife is she when they get into the resurrection? Jesus answered and said unto them, verse ??, "You do err, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God for in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels of God." Angels do not marry and they do not procreate. They were all created instantly at one spoken word in the past, an act of God in creation. Evidently, before the creation of the world so that they could sing together and they must have been having a terrific choir number when the world was being created. They were created for the purpose of serving and glorifying God. That is the purpose for which all angels were made.

Just two things to remember; to serve and glorify God'..to praise Him and obey Him. And if you read Revelation you find out in chapter 4, that's exactly what they do. They praise Him. If you read Hebrews in chapter 1 you'll find out that's exactly what they do, they serve Him. Angels are called in Hebrews 1 ‑ ministering spirits. The word means serving. They serve the purposes of God, carrying out His bidding and they honor and praise and glorify Him.

Now it's interesting to speculate about how many angels there are. And I'm not trying to get back into the old theological question‑How many angels can God put on the head of a pin ‑‑ which, of course, is .irrelevant. That isn't what we're saying. But it is interesting to imagine from the viewpoint of numbers, how many angels there really are. Jesus, at the point of His crucifixion, said that if He wanted to He could call 12 legions of angels. And a Roman legion was 6,000 men.

Now one angel would have been ample...no question. One angel before slew 185,000 men in the Old Testament, so you really wouldn't need a whole lot of them.

You say ‑ Is that how many there are? No, there's more than that. In fact, the Bible tells....I'm just kind of working up to it...in Revelation chapter 5, can't tell you everything at first, says in verse 11: "And I beheld and heard the voice of many angels." How many? "Round the throne and the living creatures and elders, and the number of them was 10,000 times 10,000 and thousands of thousands." And what he's trying to do here is not be exact but be inexact, and just show that really they're beyond the ability to count.

In fact, in Hebrews 12:22 it says: "You are come on to Mount Zion to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem," listen, "to an innumerable company of angels." You know how many angels there are? There are too many to count. You say ‑ You believe there are billions of them? Some believe they are equal to the stars of heaven because they are called stars. Some say that that is an inference that probably there are as many angels as there are stars. How many stars are there? Don't ask me that, there are billions of them. Other people have assumed that because our Lord alludes to His angel in seemingly in reference to every individual that there's an angel for every individual , who has ever lived. I'm not too sure that's correct because an angel would only have 80 years or so of something to do and then he'd be hanging around for the rest of time. So, they may trade off now and then, I don't know. When somebody goes they may pick up on somebody that was just born. But the point is there are angels, folks, and there are plenty of angels. There are too many angels to be counted. There are...there are over 200 million angels, even alluded to, if we take Revelation 5 exactly. So, when God created angels He did something. That was a mighty act.

You know, we think of creation as a simplistic thing ‑ God made man. He just took a little dirt and kind of pounded it together.

Well, ii you want to think about creation in its vastness, just imagine God speaking one word and multi‑billions of beings coming instantly into existence. All of them beautiful, all of them wise.

all of them powerful. all of them glorifying and serving Him. And He called them into existence with one spoken thought in His mind...

one unspoken thought in His mind.

Now you say ‑ Well, somewhere along the line before Genesis 8, something happened to mess those angels up cause one of them really is a mess by the time you get to Genesis 8. He's sneaking around in the garden like a snake. You're right. You know what happened?

The angels fell. A tragedy happened...a large group of angels in heaven rebelled. One of the most difficult questions in all of theology is what we call the problem of theodicy. Where did sin come from? Well, we say angels, they sinned first. They fell. Where did it come from? The best answer is ‑ We do not know. But, believe me, it came...that we do know. That's immediately evident.

And you know, I ask myself the question ‑ How could angels possibly rebel? I mean, what were they rebelling against? An absolutely holy God? An absolutely blissful situation? They had intelligence. They looked at the situation that they existed in, they must have seen that it was an absolutely glorious situation.

They had the ability to communicate. They had the ability to respond to God and God to respond to them. They had emotions. They spent their time praising God. They were creatures who were responsible.

They weren't robots. They were intelligent, emotional. They had will, as evidenced by their choice, but they rebelled. I don't know why. I don't know how. I don't know how the temptation could have ever generated itself in the mind of Lucifer, but I know that it did because I'm a product of the results.

The leader of the rebellion is Satan. And in Matthew 25:41 our Lord speaks of Satan's hosts as his angels...Satan and his angels

Now listen to me. How many angels fell? According to Revelation chapter 12 we have a clear answer. I would draw your attention to that and show you. Revelation chapter 12 tells us in verse 3 and 4 about Satan, and he's called the dragon...in verse 8 called the great red dragon. And verse 4 tells about his fall, listen:

"And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven." How many of the angels were in the rebellion? One third of them.

They're out numbered two to one by holy angels, but that's how many were in the rebellion.

Now, one third of the angels rebelled with Satan. You say ‑Are all those angels loose, running around the earth as Satan's angels which we call demons? No, not all of them are running around. Some of them are locked up. Did you know that? Did you know that some of those demons are locked up? Some of them are locked up for a little while and some of them are locked up forever. Let me give you a little diagram...just like we were diagramming a sentence. Let's have a line and say ‑ Angels, split into two parts ‑ holy or elect angels. On the bottom line we have fallen angels. Of the fallen angels there are two kinds; the loose and the bound. The loose ones we call demons. The bound ones, there are two kind; permanently bound, temporarily bound. The permanently bound ones are given to us in Jude and in Peter where they are reserved in everlasting chains. And we believe those are the ones that sinned in Genesis 8. cohabitating with women, producing giants in the earth which were destroyed in the flood. The ones that are temporarily bound may be the ones that have been cast into the pit. And in Revelation ? they're seen coming out of the pit during the tribulation. But there are a lot of them loose now.

So there are billions of demons, some bound temporarily, some bound permanently and many, many of them loose, they are Satan's angels.

Now, that's a brief introduction to the concept of a real living personal being called the devil. He is the leader of that rebellion of angels. Now, is it true? And that's a fair question. Is there really a devil? Some people think that the only thing that's very real about the devil is the fact that he's a Halloween costume and nothing more. That the caricature of Satan is simply something that somebody dreamed up to scare little children into doing what their daddy tells them. Is there any evidence to believe there is a devil. a personal active being opposed to the plan of God? Well, certainly. if you look carefully at reason, at philosophy, at just thinking it through, there has to be an adversary. Take it philosophically. There is a God, He makes a world. He is powerful enough to make the world the way He wants to make a world. In the midst of that world which He has made, absolute harmony does not exist. There is a puzzling dichotomy of happiness and sorrow, of wisdom and stupidity, of fulfillment and failure, of kindness and cruelty, of life and death.

There seem to be two things running side by side that confuse us and whenever we say to somebody who is ungodly ‑ God is a good and loving God ‑ they're apt to come back and say ‑ Oh really? Well, tell me about it....what about this and this and this and this tragedy? The very fact that all of this opposition to God exists is evidence enough of some other personal being actively engaged in trying to stifle the plan of God. Can the same being create His good thing and then create its opposite and fight against Himself and then stand there frustrated in the fight? No.

That's like the old question ‑ Can God make a rock so big He can't lift it? It doesn't make sense.

Dr. Vaughn Gertile says, quote: "On the one hand it shows too much intelligence." he's speaking of the universe, "too much wisdom and happiness to justify a denial of God. On the other hand it shows too much lack of intelligence, evil and unhappiness to make belief in God probable." end quote.

Eric Sauer says very helpfully in his book MAN, THE KING OF THE EARTH, "The existence of sorrow and evil throughout the world proves the existence of a transcendental real dynamic hostile power not willed by God." For God would never, and I'm saying this now, God would never create and then stand there and turn out opposition to that which He purposed. That would be as if a man were building a gate and walling it up at the same time. You can't do that. Sauer says, quote: "The fact is that the devil is a spiritual being whose existence cannot in any way be assailed by philosophy or natural science since it is just in our world and in our universe immediately surrounding us that we observe disharmony, death, destruction, even a purely speculative contemplation of nature focuses on the conclusion that this world and presumably the solar system connected with it are the domain of this world ruler and potentate." end quote.

It's obvious that there's a being existing to fight the purposes of God.

Now in addition to the philosophical necessity, there is plenty of biblical evidence that the devil exists. And I think the most strong evidence, at least in my mind, is the evidence of our Lord Jesus Christ. He believed in a personal devil. He believed the devil exists. Look with me at Matthew chapter 4:

"Then when Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tested by the devil, He fasted forty days and forty nights and afterwards became hungry. When the tempter came to Him, he said, If You be the Son of God, command these stones to be made bread. He answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone." And you know the whole conversation. The Lord spent ten verses recorded there, at least, talking to the devil.

There's no question about the fact that our Lord was convinced of the reality of Satan. All throughout His ministry He spoke regarding Satan. He went around casting demons out. He went around undoing the deeds that Satan was attempting to do.

In John 12:31, "Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the prince of this world be cast out." Our Lord is saying ‑ I'm in conflict with Satan, I'm going to the cross to win the victory.

Our Lord knew what He was doing. He knew that He was in conflict with a real person. Why? Because He had known this being in eternity from the time that He created him and He knew him all the way through till he fell and from then on He knew him. He knew exactly who He was dealing with. And there's one person that the devil will never fool, and that's the God that made him.

Jesus said in John 14:30 ‑ I'm not going to talk to you much anymore, for the prince of this world comes and has nothing in Me. The prince of this world comes. Jesus believed in a conscious activity of Satan in the earth.

In John 16 He says: "The prince of this world is judged." There's no question about the fact that our Lord was in conflict with Satan. In John 8:44 Jesus says: "You are of your father, the devil." But in Ephesians 2:2, Paul says: "The spirit now working in the children of disobedience." Paul believed in the devil. John believed in the devil. In I John chapter 8, we've been studying this recently in our study of I John.

"He that commit a sin is of the devil, for the devil sins from the beginning, for this purpose the Son of God was manifest that He might destroy the works of the devil." Listen to me...to say you believe in Christ, like some do, and not to believe in the devil makes a mockery out of what Christ was doing. You have to believe in both or you don't even understand the New Testament. In fact, it tells us in I John 5:1?, "The whole world lies in the lap of the wicked one."

James believed in the devil. "Resist the devil and he'll flee from you," he said, chapter 4, verse 7. Peter believed in the devil. Chapter 5, verse S of I Peter, he says: "He goes around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour."

The whole New Testament is full of it. They believed. They knew what the purpose of God was, to send Christ to deal with the devil. If you study the Bible at all you have to believe the devil exists. Just listen.

He tempted Eve in Genesis 3.

He tempted Christ in Matthew 4.

He perverted the Word in Matthew 4.

He opposed God's work in Zechariah 3.

He hindered God's servants in 1 Thessalonians 2.

He hinders the gospel, Matthew 13, 2 Corinthians 4.

He ensnares the wicked, 2 Timothy 2.

He deceives the nations, 1 Kings 22 and Revelation 16 and 20.

He is an angel of light, 2 Corinthians 11.

He accomplishes the entrance of sin and the fall of the race, Genesis 3.

He appears before God, Job 1.

He walks about as a roaring lion, 1 Peter 5.

He is the accuser of the brethren, Revelation 12.

He has the power of death, Hebrews 2.

And the whole world lies in his lap, 1 John 5.

Pretty obvious from the Bible that he exists. In fact, he's very busy. If you deny the devil you would as well deny Christ for they are equally presented as existing persons in the Bible.

Not only philosophical speculation and biblical revelation indicates the devil is but so does human experience. Anybody who lives today in our world, in the twentieth century, and denies the existence of a personal devil just isn't really reading what's going on. The devil has manifested himself greatly today. There are people who are so obviously assured that he exists that they overtly and openly worship him. And there are deeds of healing and wonders that he is already doing in our midst, in the world, that give evidence of his existence. Is he? Yes...he is.

Now the second thing we want to consider about him is ‑ who is he? Just as we did about God, this morning. He is ‑ Yes, but who is he? Well, we've already seen that he is an angel. He is a corrupted one. He is a fallen one. But he is an angel.

And listen to me, people, listen to this. Angels have personality.

We think of angels, I think, as a...as a rather ethereal thing, something that's white and flaps its wings and...and doesn't have a personality....angels have personalities. Do you know....do you realize that the angels have names? That's right...proper names.

God knows all the angels names. When He calls an angel He doesn't say ‑ Angel number one million four hundred and..... No. He'll say ‑ John, or Bill, or whatever the angel's name is, God knows their names. God knows that they have personal character. Angels are persons. They have all the properties of personhood. They feel, for they rejoice. They praise God. And they defend God.

And they fight the demons.

We look at Satan and we know he's a person for many reasons.

Just like God is a person, so is the devil. Number one' he has the traits of personality. You know, one of the very commonest traits of personality ‑ the ability to plan. Did you ever know a dog that laid a plan? Ever see a dog in the corner mapping out his strategy? One of the characteristics of personhood is the ability to make a plan, or to scheme a scheme. Animals don't do that.

Animals don't make plans. Persons do. You read II Corinthians and you're going to find out, and not only that you read the whole New Testament and you're going to find out Satan is busy making plans. One of the reasons I believe he is a person is because of the things that he's doing. Se