What should you think about Satan?

What's the difference between evil and sin? Who is satan and what role does he play in these things. These are big questions, and in this week's post I'm going to tell you exactly what you should think about them. Sort of.

Strap in, this one is going to be looooong.

Satan

It's become trendy in trendy Christian circles (oxymoron?) to not believe in satan. It's not cool anymore- it's like we've all grown up and we've stopped believing in Santa and we want to tell all the other kids to stop believing in him too. Spoiler alert- I do believe that satan exists, but perhaps not in the stereotypical way we think of him.

Consider Job 1. It paints a picture of God holding a board meeting with the "heavenly beings." Among the heavenly beings is, you guessed it, satan. Now, in Hebrew, satan (ha satan....roughly) is a word, and it means "an adversary," or in the case of Job 1, the adversary. So, long story short, the satan wasn't just the evil opposite of God who lived in hell, he was a part of the council of heavenly beings and it was his job, apparently, to be a naysayer.

We'll spare you the nuts and bolts of a history lesson here. But- a funny thing happens. When the OT gets translated into Greek, rather than using the Greek word for "adversary," they used a Greek word that sounded like "satan" (satanos) and this gave the impression that Satan was the name of the a person, rather than a role or title. Slowly over time we start to think of Satan as being an evil hell-dweller who does all the evil stuff and is red and has a pitchfork and so on. A very different image from Job 1, we can all agree, which describes a kind of annoying guy who goes around looking for ways to prove God wrong, or upstage Him, or what have you (and let's be clear- this annoying guy is given quite a bit power, by God). But, even so, this is a strange linguistic phenomenon: a somewhat bizarre translation decision spawned Satan.

Now, does this mean the satan is not an evil hell-dweller? Well, I'm not so sure. The New Testament certainly makes references to the "evil one" and suggests that there is a personal element behind sin and evil, as if there is a grand director of evil who is looking for fresh recruits. Even so, the adversary's relationship to God, as well as to us, is rather unclear. Do they still have meetings together? I have no idea. Perhaps his designated number of years on God's board of directors expired and he know works as a freelancer in a gig economy.

The bottom line, for me, is that it seems perfectly biblical to believe that sin and evil is a force that lives in the world outside of us and that it has a desire or a purpose: to pull us away from God. Now, let me caveat this again. There was this whole "satanic panic" thing that happened in the aftermath of the release of William Friedkin's The Exorcist in 1973 that still exists in many Christian communities today. The net result of this satanic panic is the belief that satan, demons, and evil all live in our bedrooms closets and other nearby places and they're trying like hell (pun intended) to make you evil too.

Just a personal aside- I don't know anyone who I would describe as purely evil. And I don't think I've ever seen someone go from functioning as a "regular non-evil type" to committing murders and becoming destructive and things like that overnight. Most people are going about their business, living pretty regular, non-evil lives, and occasionally making mistakes. So, anecdotally, I see no reason to live in constant fear that a demon is "gonna get ya."

(Also as a side note- I knew one exorcist when I was in seminary- and he didn't do a lot of business. So, if the only game in town isn't thriving...we can probably put some of those worries to bed).

Sin, Evil, and You

Let's set satan aside for a minute and talk about sin, evil, and how it relates to who you are as a person.

The Greek word for sin is hamartia. One of its translations is "missing the mark." It seems to me that this is a rather helpful way to think about sin. We can miss the mark in different ways. We can behave in ways that we feel are NOT indicative of who we are for a number of reasons. It could be because we're overwhelmed. And, we can be trying to do one thing and become tempted to do another. Self control, we might call that. We can miss the mark because we don't understand something or because something isn't clear to us or because we lack all the information we might need. We can make simple mistakes.

It can also be more intentional. Suppose get angry and want to take revenge on someone, or punish them for what they've done to us, or because sometimes it feels "good" to be "bad." Can anyone deny this? Rebelling is fun. It's just not always in our long-term best interests.

In any case, this is all very human and understandable. But, as we consider these possibilities, where is the transition between sin and evil? Well, that's complicated. I'm going to give you two answers to this- one is the biblical answer, and one is a more pastoral answer.

• On the biblical side of things, scripture uses the word evil a lot more casually than we do. It is evil, in the New Testament, to resist God's way of seeing things, or to oppose God's actions- perhaps even when it is unintentional. It is considered evil, in Matthew, when people ask Jesus to prove himself. They were doing this to trap him and make a fool of him, so there's that. But even so, this kind of thing might be more of an eyeroll or shoulder shrug scenario for us than something we'd really consider evil.

• I suspect that this brings up a lot of questions for many of you. Does this mean I'm worse off than I thought? Does this mean I'm evil? Does this mean I'm unlovable? And so on. One of the things that is going on here is simply a cultural difference. The people of the Bible, which of course spans a long stretch of time, are more simple people. They are more simple thinkers. Frankly, they were a far more primitive people. They thought in black-and-white terms, and we see that reflected in scripture. You are either sinful and evil, or you are a child of God and good, that kind of thing. We do not need to adopt that kind of thinking in order to remain faithful today.

• For my pastoral answer, I would say this. Regardless of whether or not sin and evil are the same thing, there are two important things to keep in mind. One, there are obviously levels to all this. It became quite a common thing to say in churches at some point: every sin is as bad as another, so a white lie is as bad as murder. That is quite obviously untrue. If you tell your child you're proud of them when you aren't, that does not make you the moral equivalent of Hitler. Two, even if you were the moral equivalent of Hitler, this is not a problem for God because God is powerful enough to transform you into a child of God, and at that point He will refuse to hold your past against you.

So you're probably wondering, "Wait, so what was the pastoral answer to all this? This seems like bad news!"

I'll make it simpler. Regardless of who you are or what you've done, you're not evil. You're not evil, and everything is going to be okay. God is going to take care of you because He loves you just as He loves all His children. You are, at times, going to miss the mark, as we all do. But as a child of God, you can know that He is going to overlook that and that He will not hold it against you because He doesn't want to hold things against you. There is evil in the world, of course. Evil itself will, at times, try to tempt you away from God's way of seeing. Perhaps you will succumb to that temptation, at times, and perhaps at others you won't. In either case, you are a child of God. You are a beloved part of his family. He will not push you away. He will remain close, to guide you, comfort you, nourish you, and to slowly transform you more and more into the most hopeful version of you.

As for evil the force and satan the person, well, God has plans to take care of all that too.