Satan

And the seventy returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in Your name.” And He said to them, “I was watching Satan fall from heaven like lightning. Behold, I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall injure you. Nevertheless do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are recorded in heaven.” --Luke 10:17-20

The Epistles mention Satan only fifteen times, the whole of the Bible forty-seven times, and of that, fourteen are in the book of Job. In contrast, Jesus is mentioned 880 times and Christ 493 times.Elementary math reveals that Jesus is leading, thirty to one. How, then, has Satan become the focus of so many believers? Why has he been given equal billing and considered by many to have power equal to Christ’s? 

“Again, the devil took Him to a very high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world, and their glory; and he said to Him, ‘All these things will I give You, if You fall down and worship me.’ Then Jesus said to him, ‘Begone, Satan! For it is written, “YOU SHALL WORSHIP THE LORD YOUR GOD, AND SERVE HIM ONLY”’” (Matthew 4:8-10). Some of what the word “worship” means is “to give attention to.” The thing that we give attention to is actually the thing that we worship. It is frightening to find so many believers that worship Satan by giving him their undivided attention. When Satan is our focus, it is not unlike any other obsession: we will find him everywhere in everything.

In the early 1970’s a brand new emphasis entered the church scene; I say “brand new,” for aside from the fact that there are absolutely no Scriptures to back up the claim, Church history is also void of the emphasis. The new teaching was that Christians could be possessed by demons. In all of Paul’s dealings with troubled believers, not once did he even hint that the solution to their freedom rested in having demons cast out of them. In fact, that would be a basic contradiction to Paul’s making this point in I Corinthians 3:16: “Do you not know that you are a temple of God, and {that} the Spirit of God dwells in you?” “Temple” here refers to the Holy of Holies, where no evil can dwell. Faced with this theological problem, some Christians, still wanting to prove the point that we could have demons, restated “possession” to mean “oppression,” with yet a need for the casting out of demons in the body, though not the spirit. The result of this mindset is that Satan gets everyone’s attention and no one gets on with Christ; naturally, Satan would prefer that we busy ourselves casting him out instead of inviting Christ in.

I questioned a brother concerning this particular kind of “ministry.” If someone has a demon of lust that could be cast out, and then he finds himself lusting again, what is he to do? His response was, “Once the demon goes, he needs to abide; he is lusting again because he is not abiding in Christ.” I thought that rather interesting, for if in the end abiding in Christ keeps a fellow from lusting, why did he not just begin with abiding? Again, lesser truth always gives way to the greater.

In a meeting I was once asked a loaded question by a person who knew that several in the room were casting demons out of believers; what did I think of the practice? All I would say is, “There are a lot of waves that take us from shore.” He pressed me further, but I only repeated my answer, because indeed, this emphasis has been a wave that passes back and forth through congregations; if it were truth, it would become foundational, but it always seems to give way to the next wave, the next titillating catch phrase or notion to ripple through meetings. We are not disagreeing with the fact that there is activity from Satan; however, dealing judiciously with him merely involves lifting up Jesus! At the very same moment Christ is lifted up, Satan is renounced.

- Mike Wells