Sunday, June 30, 2019 | 4:00 p.m.

Is Satan for Real?

Joseph L. Morrow
Minister for Evangelism, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 82
Ephesians 6:10–18

Some years ago, as a young college student in Washington, D.C., I watched the 1973 horror film The Exorcist for the first time. While a few decades had passed since its release, filming had taken place on our university’s campus. So student groups saw fit to annually host a screening of the film on Halloween.

Based on a book, The Exorcist depicts the possession of a young girl by the devil and the priest affiliated with the university who is summoned to help exorcise or cast out the evil spirit from her body. The saga becomes a trial of faith for all involved, and as the film reaches its crescendo, the priest is dramatically propelled by the evil spirit down a steep set of stairs that can, in fact, be found on campus.

At first I found the film’s horror to be rather campy and wasn’t particularly intimidated by it. But on my quiet walk home through the neighborhood at night, the wind began to howl, leaves rustled violently, and my route ominously brought me to the precipice of those slippery “exorcist” stairs. Admittedly, I was spooked. In that moment, a film about the devil flooded my imagination with foreboding and fearful images, though I could see nothing unusual around me.

Whether we call it Satan, the tempter, the devil, or the enemy, many of us come to the question of the devil’s existence similarly spooked. Satan appears like a phantom we cannot see but whose presence, nevertheless, has purchase on how we think and behave. Like the air we breathe, the devil appears as an elusive figure in our popular imagination. The grotesque monster with horns and menacing eyes, the subject of frightful dreams and horror films, are all masks concealing a more complex reality.

In scripture those masks change quite often, because the devil is not a character lurking in the background but hardly in the biblical spotlight. In Genesis 3 of the Hebrew scriptures, we are told of the serpent in the garden who tempts the first human beings into disobeying the commands of God. Now, the serpent in Christian tradition has been referred to as Satan but is never called that by name in the book.

Flash forward to the story of Job, likely written during the Jewish exile in Babylon, and you’ll find Satan as a trickster and accuser, anxious to test the faithfulness of humans like Job. But all along the devil is God’s sidekick, albeit a pesky one.

When we delve into the Gospels, we see a Satan who becomes Jesus’ tempter in the wilderness, but then there are numerous demonic figures who possess sickly persons and require exorcisms to release the captive from their grasp. Then in Paul’s letters and those of other apostles, like John the author of Revelation, we get a glimpse of the devil as representing commanding and comprehensive power within the world of human beings.

The biblical devil, like evil spirits found within many religious and cultural traditions, contains multitudes, mocking, provoking, and frightening us from the corners of human minds.

While the devil is hard to pin down in scripture, evil feels very much present reality. Few of us find it difficult to recall daily acts of hate, cruelty, or violence we see firsthand or absorb from news sources. Evil is neither myth nor legend.

Just last week, we marked the 154th Juneteeth, a holiday marked by African Americans as the day that the message of freedom via the Emancipation Proclamation made its way to the last outpost of the confederacy in Texas. It reminds us that evil shows up in the temptation to capture others for our own comfort or profit. Fifty years ago last night there were the Stonewall Riots in New York City, reminding us that evil can show up in the cruelty human beings can unleash on each other because we love differently. This week, the image of a father and daughter face down in the dangerous waters of the Rio Grande and children crowded into border camps reminds us that evil shows up in the suffering we inflict on the vulnerable because they are on the wrong side of a border, a culture, or a policy. All these incidents point to the ways in which the temptation to sin and evil is real, tangible, concrete.

As Christians who are Presbyterians, we often talk about this reality as the “total depravity of humankind.” It sounds uncomfortable when so much of what we preach here at Fourth Church is hope. But it simply underscores that no human being is completely free from possible corruption. There is something in each of us that is capable of turning to what is evil. No one is too sophisticated, educated, experienced, or pure to withstand evil by our own power.

But if evil and the temptation to succumb to it is tangible and real, determining how to locate and battle its source is perilously difficult. Do we look for evil in an individual person, a group, or perhaps an institution like that of slavery or even economic structures? At first glance, evil could stem from any one of these, and yet there seems to be something more behind the veil of these categories at the heart of evil.

Jean Claude von Itallie tells the story of a fugitive from a kingdom and a journeyer on his way there. The fugitive warns the traveler ominously, “The beast is in the king.” The traveler, alarmed, questions, “The beast is in the king?” Yes, says the fugitive, but the king doesn’t see it. The traveler is perplexed, because he received an invitation from the king to kill this beast and bring back its claws. But the fugitive tells him the palace members killed the king. The traveler is astounded, but the fugitive gives him the truly frightening news. “Yes, we killed the king,” the fugitive says. “But there was still the beast. We put a doll on the throne. But there was still the beast. We destroyed the doll. But there was still the beast.”

This is a tale that could be applied to what Paul calls in his letter to the Ephesians the powers and principalities of this world. The story appears in theologian Walter Wink’s book on the subject, entitled Engaging the Powers. It’s a visceral illustration of the evasive beast that lies at the heart of humanity. As Paul suggests, such adversaries cannot be fought with violent combat or sophisticated weaponry. The beast can’t be found in any single person, ritual, organization, or environment. Instead, the beast hovers in the powers and principalities of this world. As the spirit of these powers, the beast embodies the unseen attitudes, cultures, and corruptions within the political, social, and economic life of our world.

From Wink’s perspective there are three important things to know about the powers. The first is that the powers are good. In the Ancient Near East, from which the Bible emerged, there were stories, like the Babylonian myth of the god Marduk killing the monster Tiamat and then using her body to create the known world, that present the world as marked by inherent violence and warlike forces. By contrast, in the creation story of Genesis we see no divine struggle, no epic battle of angels and demons, only a world spun into being by the word or breath of its Creator and called successively good. The political, social, and economic aspects of our world stem from this good creation. They are made for our benefit and the rightful flourishing of all things.

Secondly, the powers are fallen. As good as they were created, the powers and principalities continually defy the character and rule of God as shown in Jesus Christ. This happens not because they are evil in themselves, but because the good they produce becomes idolized. Our government protects the safety and rights of its citizens, but treasuring these things, citizens find themselves idolizing the nation and its comforts even at the cost of conscience. We forget God’s call to compassion toward the poor and marginalized. Or we find money and possessions allowing us to live a life of security and free of want. Soon we start to so value the state of ease that we are unwilling to part with it to benefit our neighbor. This idolization of the powers and principalities of the world will not allow them to bend toward the sacred and just purposes of God.

Third, Wink tells us the powers must be redeemed. This is what Paul is encouraging us to do with his imagery of battle: not to slay demons and menacing creatures but to stave off the temptations hiding deep within ourselves, our communities, and institutions. When the forces of evil seem real, but their sources are elusive, the temptation is to give evil a human face so that we can blame all that is wrong in the world on someone else, because if it’s all another person’s fault, then we can, with good conscience, ignore, exile, or eliminate them. Then after we have done our worst, as Jean Claude von Itallie’s fable reminds us, the beast still lives. The ultimate devil is demonization.

To contend with this temptation to demonize, we will need the full armor of God. That includes the stories of faith, the practices of righteousness, the ability to bring words of peace in a hostile world, and our willingness to submit all things to persistent prayer. Perhaps the unspoken art by which all of Paul’s commended defenses are deployed is patience.

Patience is in short supply in our society. Our condemnation of others has made morning coffee before facts even get up out of bed. One of the reasons I believe Paul discourages battling flesh and blood is in order to draw our attention to overcoming the enemy within ourselves that divides and alienates people from one another. Patience is the surest sign that we refuse to demonize each other. Remembering God’s deep love for all creation, we refuse to give up on the redemption of all humanity or of the created powers that are easily idolized or corrupted. This doesn’t mean we merely acquiesce to evil in the world, but rather we do not yield to any spirit of cruelty and hate.

While evil and the enemy within is real, here is a truth more real than Satan. It is a truth found in a simple but powerful hymn penned by South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, that “goodness is stronger than evil. Love is stronger than hate.” Victory is not the possession of any one of us alone. From the greatest to the least, from the sinners to the saints, as the hymn proclaims, “victory is ours through God who loves us.” Thanks be to God. Amen.