When I was baptized in the Lutheran church, the minister asked my parents, “Do you renounce all the forces of evil, the devil, and all his empty promises?”
The devil and demonic activity are significant realities of life in this world, so it is not inappropriate that the Lutheran baptismal rite (and others) include an explicit rejection of the devil. But do we rightly understand the work of demons in this world?
In my experience we tend to give the devil either too much credit or too little attention.
When we yield to temptation, it’s far too easy to proffer a slightly more refined version of the child’s excuse (“the devil made me do it!”). Do you ever find yourself responding to sinful choices by asserting, “I’m under severe demonic attack!” when the reality is you simply haven’t been partaking deeply in the means of grace for some time? Or perhaps I am the only one who has experienced that?
We know Satan and his interns (i.e. demons) don’t often have to work very hard to get us to yield to temptation:
But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. (Jas. 1:14–15)
More likely, it wasn’t the devil who made you do anything; it was your own wicked desire. It’s not as though any of us are like Eve or Adam with wholly pure desires.
Three Goals of Demonic Activity
I do not at all mean to suggest the devil is not active in the world now that sin has entered into our race and corrupted our desires. The Belgic Confession (Article 12) summarizes ongoing demonic activity in this way:
The devils and evil spirits are so corrupt that they are enemies of God and of everything good. They lie in wait for the church and every member of it like thieves, with all their power, to destroy and spoil everything by their deceptions.
I will not be giving a thorough treatise on the origin and activity of Satan and his minions in this world. Nonetheless, as I see it there are three primary categories of satanic activity in Scripture.
A. Discredit the Church
The Scripture gives numerous instances in which Satan (whose name simply means adversary or accuser) brings charges against the Church of the Living God. For example Satan insists Job loves His Creator for mercenary reasons:
Then Satan answered the LORD and said, “Does Job fear God for no reason? Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.” (Job 1:9–11)
Much later Satan returns to accuse the Church – represented by the High Priest in filthy garments – but God refuses to allow Satan even to make his accusations:
And the LORD said to Satan, “The LORD rebuke you, O Satan! The LORD who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this a brand plucked from the fire?” Now Joshua was standing before the angel, clothed with filthy garments. And the angel said to those who were standing before him, “Remove the filthy garments from him.” And to him he said, “Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with pure vestments.” (Zechariah 3:2–4)
In that instance, Satan had many scandalous and glaring charges to bring against the Church; he wouldn’t even have to make anything up. But God refuses even to give Satan a hearing.
It’s not that God doesn’t want to hear how bad His people are (the prophets brought ample indictments throughout the history of the Kingdom of God), but rather God will not tolerate anyone to speak ill of His bride:
If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? (Romans 8:31–35)
B. Destroy the Church
Time and again the agents of the devil attempt to wipe out God’s people in order to scuttle God’s promise: Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, Pharaoh and Israel, Herod and Jesus.
At one point in the history of the Church, the line of promise seemed to rest entirely upon one little baby hidden in a linen closet as the wicked scion of Jezebel and Ahab, Queen Athaliah, conspired to murder all the line of David (cf. 2 Kings 11).

The local church is where we commune with Christ in means of grace, but it’s also the primary context where the fellowship of the communion of saints takes place. It’s not enough to sit on the sidelines or watch a livestream; we need the community of believers that stirs us up “to love and good deeds” (Heb. 10:24) and offers encouragement as we await the day of judgement (Heb. 10:25).

Several years ago, I went hiking in the Smokies with a group of friends. This wasn’t a trail I was familiar with, and I wasn’t in the best of shape at the time. I soon began to lag behind the group. They would always return for me to try and encourage me and walk with me. My pride would always reject their help because, “I know what I’m doing. I don’t need your help. I can go at it alone.” Soon they got so far away I could no longer hear them, nor did I know exactly where I was headed. I had no idea of the impending dangers that were awaiting me.
It wasn’t long until I came upon a long stretch of brush and weeds that were waist high. As I hacked my way through as best I could—stubborn and defiant as ever—I was greeted by an unmistakable sound: a rattle. I look up to see a large rattlesnake laying across the trail. Thankfully, my friends were standing-by; they had stayed back in order to guide me past the pain I would have otherwise suffered.
Unfortunately, there are many who are ignorant of the danger that they’ve placed themselves in by trying to make their heavenly pilgrimage apart from the local church. We face a far greater threat than a rattlesnake; we stand against the smooth-talking serpent of Genesis 3, one who “prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Pet. 5:8).[1] Surely Satan lies in wait for those Christians who think they can go through this life on their own resolve. As George Swinnock once said, “Satan watches for those vessels that sail without a convoy.”
There’s a reason that the writer to the Hebrews sounds the alarm to warn those who are struggling not to forsake “assembling together, as is the habit of some…” (Heb. 10:25).  Why? Because neglect of the gathering is a step down the slippery slope to apostasy. A Christian who is purposefully isolated from the context of a local church is foreign concept to the New Testament.
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Written by Thomas R. Schreiner |
Friday, December 16, 2022
All that is evil and defiling in this world will vanish. There will be discontinuity and continuity with the world we live in now. We will still reside in a physical universe, but it will be a world cleansed and purified from all sin. Some have interpreted 2 Peter 3:10–13 as teaching that the present world will be annihilated and burned up and then God will create a new universe out of nothing. This interpretation is certainly possible, but it is more likely that we should understand the burning to denote purification instead of annihilation so that the present world is purified and cleansed and renovated.

What will our heavenly existence be like? Some have envisioned believers as having an ethereal disembodied existence in which we float on clouds and strum on harps, but this picture does not fit with the biblical witness. The Scriptures teach that believers will be raised from the dead (1 Cor. 15:12–19; 1 Thess. 4:13–18) and that we will have physical bodies forever. Resurrected bodies can’t exist without a place, however, and thus there must be a new world that we will inhabit. We are not surprised, then, to discover the promise that there will be a new creation (Isa. 65:17; 66:22; Rev. 21:1), a new world that is free from sin. “The first heaven and the first earth” will pass away, and “the sea [will be] no more” (Rev. 21:1), and then the new creation will come.

The removal of the sea doesn’t mean that there won’t be waters or seas in the new creation. The sea stands symbolically for chaos, for evil, for all that deforms and defaces the present world. The cleansing of the world from evil accords with Romans 8:18–25, where we find that in the present time the created world groans and is full of futility. We see such futility and groaning with tornadoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and other natural evils. The world that God created is good (Gen. 1:1–31), but Romans 8:18–25 teaches that when Adam sinned, both the human race and the created world were marred by sin. Of course, creation itself didn’t sin, but the sin of Adam was not restricted to him. It also affected the world that he had been commissioned to care for and steward. When Adam fell, the world fell with him, and thorns and thistles sprang up (Gen. 3:18).

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