The Devil Doesn't Matter

A Chair in a Demonstration Lesson

Picture a trainee teacher giving a demonstration lesson on matter. She keeps it simple. Matter, she says, is anything that has mass and takes up space. To make it real she points at an ordinary classroom chair, four legs and a backrest, the sort that has held a thousand half asleep students through a thousand morning lectures. It has mass. It takes up space. And unless some force moves it, she says, it stays exactly where it is.

The class nods. Nothing in the lesson is dramatic, which is exactly why a remark like that can go off later. Some explanations are slow. You take them in calmly, walk home, and an hour afterwards they start doing something to your thinking.

Now picture the same evening. A friend’s status update goes past on WhatsApp, a line from a preacher that has been forwarded around Pentecostal circles for a while: “Learn to confront the devil from your space because he has lost his place.” I couldn’t trace who first said it, so I won’t put a name to it. But it’s a good line. And if you’ve just been thinking about chairs, a thought arrives uninvited. The chair is in the room. The devil, supposedly, has left it.

That’s the argument I want to test. I think a good deal of it is true and I think it helps people. I also think it is stated a little too neatly, and that the neatness can leave a tired believer feeling cheated when the enemy plainly hasn’t gone quiet. So let’s open it up and see what is alive in it and what isn’t. If it survives the examination, it will be a better slogan. If it doesn’t, we’ll have lost nothing except a tidy line for a mug.

What the Slogan Gets Right

Start with Jesus. When the disciples he had sent out came back delighted that even demons submitted to them, he said this.

“I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.”

— Luke 10:18 (ESV)

Nobody agrees on exactly what Jesus was looking at. The verb in Greek is in a tense that can mean “I was watching,” so he may be describing something in the past, or he may be describing what he saw happening as the demons yielded. The context favours the second, I think: the success of the mission is the visible edge of a defeat that goes deeper. Either way the direction of travel is clear. Lightning doesn’t drift, and the enemy’s authority is going down, not up.

John records Jesus saying much the same as the cross comes into view.

“Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out.”

— John 12:31 (ESV)

And Paul says what the cross did to the powers behind the world’s cruelty.

“He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.”

— Colossians 2:15 (ESV)

So the slogan has solid ground to stand on. The enemy has lost something that matters, and the thing he lost was won at the cross. A believer who learns that is standing on firmer ground than most of us feel we are standing on at three in the afternoon on a bad week.

Where the Physics Gives Out

Here the chair starts to wobble. And I’ll say it plainly, because it is usually said in sermons with a straight face.

Two ordinary objects can’t be in the same place at once, which is why you can’t sit on a chair that somebody else is already sitting on. The sermon version says that Satan once occupied a place in heaven, he was thrown out, believers now sit there, and so he can’t. But the textbook definition does him an unexpected favour. Matter has mass and takes up space. A spirit has neither. By the very definition that started this conversation, the devil is not matter, and the tidy proof falls over. The pun in the title is a good pun. It is not a proof.

The Bible also puts it differently from the physics. In Ephesians 2:6 Paul says that God has seated believers with Christ in heavenly places.

“and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,”

— Ephesians 2:6 (ESV)

Four chapters later he says this.

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

— Ephesians 6:12 (ESV)

Same letter, same phrase. The believers are seated in the heavenly places, and the forces of evil are in the heavenly places too. So it can’t be that the enemy has been evicted from the space where we sit, because Paul has him in the same neighbourhood. What the New Testament says is subtler and, I think, better. The enemy’s authority has been broken, his claim has been cancelled, and our standing has been settled. He can still be loud, and he can still do harm, which is exactly why Paul tells us to wrestle.

A Passage That Can’t Carry the Weight

There is one more repair to make, and it concerns a verse that this argument leans on in its popular form.

The old sermon lines about Satan wanting to occupy the highest space come from Isaiah 14. There the speaker says, among other things, this.

“I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.”

— Isaiah 14:14 (ESV)

Many of us were taught that this is Satan’s own voice, the original ambition, five “I wills” in a row. Tertullian and Origen read it that way, and so did a long line of preachers after them. But Isaiah introduces the passage as a taunt against the king of Babylon, and a great many careful commentators, from Calvin to John Oswalt to Daniel Block on the parallel passage in Ezekiel 28, read it as about human kings, with the pride of empire as the real subject (these are summarised in Spriggs, n.d.). Some allow that a darker power lies behind such rulers. Few of them think the passage describes the fall of Satan.

I don’t think we should rest the argument on it. It isn’t needed. Luke 10:18, John 12:31 and Colossians 2:15 carry the weight without it, and they say what the sermon wants to say. Better to let the passages say what they say than to ask Isaiah to testify in a case he wasn’t called for.

What Seated Means

Take the chair seriously for a moment longer, because the Bible does.

The letter to the Hebrews contrasts the priests of the old order with Christ.

“And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God,”

— Hebrews 10:11 to 12 (ESV)

The priests were always on their feet because there was always more to do. Christ sits, and the writer wants us to understand that the work is finished. When Paul says we are seated with him, he isn’t telling believers that they’ve retired from the fight. He is telling us where we are fighting from.

And yes, that creates a small puzzle you’ve probably noticed. In the same letter the people who are seated are told, four chapters later, to stand: to put on the armour, to stand firm against the schemes of the enemy. I don’t think that is a contradiction. We sit for our position and we stand for our posture. A person who knows she belongs to the winner stands differently from a person who thinks the result is still in doubt. She doesn’t charge up the hill to win the right to be there. She holds ground that has already been paid for.

Why the Devil Still Matters

So does the devil matter? In one sense, no. He doesn’t decide who you are, and he can’t revoke what Christ has done. In another sense, yes, and Peter does not let us forget it.

“Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”

— 1 Peter 5:8 (ESV)

Paul himself wrote to the Ephesians as a prisoner, describing himself as an ambassador in chains (Ephesians 6:20), and nobody could accuse him of naivety about spiritual opposition. A lion that has lost his claim to the territory is still a lion. C. S. Lewis put the danger on both sides of the road in the preface to The Screwtape Letters (1942), which he signed in July 1941.

“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”

— C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942), Preface

Anyone who has spent time in Nigerian church life has met both errors, and sometimes in the same household. There’s the believer who treats every delayed result and every bad Tuesday as a demonic operation, and there’s the cooler one who has quietly stopped believing in any of it. Neither has much to say to the person who is really being harassed, which is why I’d rather lean on what the Bible and the African church have actually said. Kwame Bediako (1993), the Ghanaian theologian, described how African Christians have come to see Jesus as supreme over the spirit realm, writing that “he is supreme over all ‘gods’ and authorities in the realm of the spirits.” That conviction is older than the slogan and sturdier. It doesn’t depend on a clever pun about matter. It depends on a resurrection.

For the Person Who Doesn’t Feel Seated

There is always someone reading this who has heard the declarations and sung the songs and still feels the enemy winning. It’s late on a Wednesday, the praise music has stopped, and the anxiety is louder than the sermon.

To that person I’d say two things. First, your position in Christ is not a mood. It doesn’t rise and fall with how much you feel on a given evening. Second, feeling besieged is not a sign that you’ve failed to believe. Believers in every age have written about it honestly, and the psalms are full of it.

I’d add something a slogan can’t. If what you’re facing is persistent anxiety, low mood or sleeplessness, it is not unspiritual to see a doctor and talk to someone you trust, and it will not weaken your faith. Plenty of people are helped by prayer and by treatment, and the two were never meant to compete.

The enemy can’t take your seat. What he can do is persuade you to stand up and walk off, through fear or tiredness or the sense that the chair has become less solid than the trouble. So the invitation is a small one, and it can be kept this week. When the accusing thought comes, the one that says you’re too far gone and God has left the room, answer it out loud with a sentence that Christ has already settled, the way you’d answer a stranger at your gate. If you’ve never given your life to Jesus, you can begin where Paul begins in Romans 10:9, by saying that he is Lord and trusting that God raised him from the dead. The chair is there for you too.

References

Biblical References

Luke 10:18 (ESV). Jesus sees Satan fall like lightning; the anchor verse and the frontmatter verse.
John 12:31 (ESV). The ruler of this world will be cast out; the cross as the point of defeat.
Colossians 2:15 (ESV). The powers disarmed and shamed at the cross.
Ephesians 2:6 (ESV). Believers seated with Christ in the heavenly places; quoted as a single verse to keep the wording exact.
Ephesians 6:12 (ESV). The spiritual forces of evil are also in the heavenly places; used to correct the physics argument.
Isaiah 14:14 (ESV). The ambition passage; used to show why the Satan reading cannot carry the argument.
Hebrews 10:11 to 12 (ESV). Standing priests and the seated Christ; the finished work.
1 Peter 5:8 (ESV). The devil as a roaring lion; quoted from the second sentence only, to keep the wording exact.
Ezekiel 28. Cited by reference: the parallel passage about the king of Tyre.
Ephesians 6:11 to 14. Cited by reference: believers are told to stand.
Romans 10:9. Cited by reference: the confession that closes the article.

Other Sources

Bediako, K. (1993). Jesus in African culture. Evangelical Review of Theology, 17(1). https://gospelstudies.org.uk/biblicalstudies/pdf/evangelical-review-of-theology/ert_17-1_bediako.pdf
Lewis, C. S. (1942). The Screwtape letters. Geoffrey Bles.
Rolwes, E. (2018, July 3). Preface to the Screwtape letters [Reproduction of C. S. Lewis’s preface]. The Catholic Thing. https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2018/07/03/preface-to-the-screwtape-letters/
Spriggs, J. (n.d.). The fall of Satan. https://julianspriggs.co.uk/Pages/FallOfSatan.aspx

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.