Audio Transcript

Today we find our way back to a familiar theme on the podcast, popular in emails that you send to us. It’s a topic that’s generated probably more questions to us than any other topic that I can think of — questions about Satan. You have sent in over three thousand emails now asking about him. Is he real? How and why did he first sin? Why is he not snuffed out but instead allowed to roam around? There are questions about his chief strategies for killing our joy and making us want to give up on life. And can a Christian get handed over to Satan? Can the devil devour us? And there are questions about why Satan has so much authority in this world. Questions like these have been addressed in the past in several different episodes that I’ve attempted to draw together in one place so that you can see the ground we’ve covered. I did that in the new APJ book on pages 331–353.

Today, a listener named Taylor writes in with a specific question for you, Pastor John. He asks this: “Hello, Pastor John! Thank you for your ministry! I know that Satan and demons have tremendous physical power and influence over the world, the material world. My question is about his power over the spiritual world. Why did God give Satan such immense power to blind people to the glory of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:4) and to snatch from hearts the very saving gospel so that people are left without any hope of salvation (Luke 8:12)? Why was he given such immense spiritual power to abort the gospel in the lives of sinners?”

When the Bible opens, it doesn’t even pause for a moment to give an account for why Satan is there. Later on, there are hints that he’s a fallen angel and that there was rebellion in heaven. But that’s not a full explanation for where he comes from, because it’s very difficult to explain why a personal, rational being — an angel — who is created perfect, would ever find a motive to rebel in a perfect universe. That’s not easy to explain. I don’t think we have a sufficient explanation for that. That’s one of those things that’s cloaked in mystery for now, I think.

Why the Long Leash?

Nevertheless, even though we may not be able to fully explain why Satan came into being, we know he does exist, and he was there from the beginning of mankind, because he tempts Adam and Eve in the third chapter of Genesis. We also know that Jesus commanded “the unclean spirits, and they obey him” (Mark 1:27). That’s an amazing statement. He said to Satan in the wilderness, “Be gone!” and he was gone (Matthew 4:10). And we know at the end of history, God will throw Satan into the lake of fire so that he can’t influence God’s people anymore or harm us anymore (Revelation 20:10).

So, from all this, we know God could have bound Satan completely the moment he fell or at any point in history in between. We know he doesn’t, because in the end the whole New Testament is telling the story of Satan’s activity in this world and how he deceives, how he tempts, how we need to do warfare against the principalities and powers.

“Seeing and savoring the superior beauty of Christ is the way we defeat the evil one.”

And Taylor, who’s asking us this question, points out that he’s blinding people. He’s blinding people. And he wants to know what is God’s reason — for God does all things in wisdom and for reasons; he doesn’t act whimsically — for not destroying Satan until the end and giving him such a long leash, especially, Taylor says, with regard to his free hand in blinding people, it seems, to the glory of Christ, and stealing the word, snatching it like a bird taking seed off a path.

So, he’s referring to 2 Corinthians 4:4: “In their case [the case of unbelievers] the god of this world [Satan] has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” And he’s referring to Luke 8:12, the parable of the four soils, where that first soil is the seed along the path, representing those to whom Satan comes along and snatches the word right out of their hearts so that they don’t believe and are saved.

Taylor wants to know, Why does God allow that blinding, that word-stealing power?

Double Blindness

I think the key lies in the fact that if God had eliminated Satan so that the only enemy to be defeated is our own human depravity, part of the glory of the triumph of salvation would be missing. I’m going to deal with only one aspect of that glory. We could make three or four episodes on this, one with each aspect of glory. I’m only going to deal with one. I’m not going to talk about the glory of the cross in this (Colossians 2:15), or the glory of our ongoing warfare with the principalities and powers (Ephesians 6:11–12). I’m only going to focus for the next couple of minutes on the glory of God’s victory in the moment of conversion itself. What happens at that moment of unblinding?

If there were no Satan to deceive us, we would still be blind to the glory of God in Christ. We would not see Christ as more beautiful, more desirable than anything else. We wouldn’t. Why? Because we are deeply depraved people. Paul describes us like this in Ephesians 4:17–18: “The Gentiles,” which is us before Christ, live “in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.”

So, not a word about Satan — not a word. He’s not our main problem; we are our main problem. At root, the blindness is our hardness of heart against God, producing ignorance, producing alienation, producing darkness of understanding. We don’t need Satan to be blind. We are blind by our own depraved nature.

Then the question is this: Why speak of Satan as blinding unbelievers the way 2 Corinthians 4:4 does? Because God is showing us the double prison we are in. We are doubly dark: the darkness of our own shackles around our wrists and ankles, and the darkness of Satan’s locked doors — like Peter in prison, who had to have the hands freed, then he had to have the gates freed and the doors freed. There are layers of bondage: the darkness of our own delusions about God — that’s one level of bondage and blindness — and then the added darkness of Satan’s lies and deceptions all around us.

Double Glory

Therefore, when Christ converts us by the power of the Spirit, he gets double glory because of this double blindness. He conquers Satan’s deceptions, and he conquers human depravity. And here’s the key that I believe is so crucial for why he saves us like this rather than obliterating Satan earlier. If he obliterated Satan earlier, his power would be glorified. But if Satan remains, and we are able to defeat his deceptions by seeing the superior beauties of Christ, then not only is the superior power of Christ glorified, but also the superior beauty of Christ is glorified.

“Let’s take up arms and be glad in the Son of God. Gladness in Christ over sin, over Satan, is the victory.”

We can see this more clearly — if that doesn’t make full sense, let me try to say it again — if we realize that the nature of the blindness of our depravity is that we find other things besides Christ more desirable than Christ, more attractive than Christ, more to be preferred than Christ himself. That’s the essence of our blindness. We are so corrupt, we cannot see that Christ is a superior beauty, a superior worth, a superior greatness, and therefore a superior satisfaction over everything else. In our depravity, we are blind to all of that.

But that’s exactly the same way that Satan blinds us with his deceptions. He’s a liar, and the essence of his lie is that the pleasures of sin that he offers are more to be desired than Christ. Therefore, to be saved, to be converted, to experience the victory, the glorious victory of Christ and the Spirit in our lives, is to have both these blindnesses removed. And that’s described in 2 Corinthians 4:6.

And the way they are removed is that we are granted to see, in one great miracle, both the delusions of depravity and the deceptions of Satan, because they’re the same. We are granted to see Christ, the glory of Christ, as superior to everything that our rebellious hearts ever dreamed of and superior to everything Satan ever offered. That double glorification of Christ triumphing over both of those blindnesses would not have happened if Satan had been snuffed out at the beginning.

So, one huge implication — I close with this — of this for us right now, today, is that seeing and savoring, desiring, preferring the superior beauty of Christ is the way we defeat the evil one. So, I’ve said more than once, let’s take up arms and be glad. Let’s take up arms and be glad in the Son of God. Gladness in Christ over sin, over Satan, is the victory.

Death is our mortal enemy — an enemy that Jesus defanged (Hebrews 2:14–15), and one day will utterly destroy (Revelation 21:4). He revealed his omnipotent power over death by raising people from the dead (Mark 5:41–42; Luke 7:11–17; John 11:33–34). Through his own resurrection, he revealed that all authority in heaven and earth is his (Matthew 28:16). D-Day over death for all who believe has arrived (2 Timothy 1:10), and V-Day’s future has been secured (1 Corinthians 15:25–26).

How then should we pray for God to heal our dying loved ones? On the one hand, until Jesus returns, death is an inescapable reality for everyone (Hebrews 9:27). So praying for healing isn’t always God’s will. In the case of a dying great-grandmother, for example, we may be more in line with God’s will not by praying for healing, but by praying for her to finish well (Philippians 1:23), trusting that because her Savior has conquered death for her, she will never see it, not even for a second (John 8:51).

On the other hand, because Jesus robbed death of its life-stealing power by bearing the full wrath of God for our sins (2 Corinthians 5:21), we sometimes should pray that he would snatch our loved ones from the grasp of death. We can pray for miracles, asking him to spare us the sorrow upon sorrow that comes from seemingly untimely deaths (Philippians 2:27), even as we trust him for his answer, whatever it might be.

‘She Can’t Breathe’

In a recent article, I shared how God humbled me and taught me to trust him through my daughter’s battle with cancer when she was 8 years old. Despite our prayers for God to spare her life, she drifted closer and closer to death’s door. The new “promising” experimental treatment we authorized further robbed us of hope when it gave her a life-threatening side effect called VOD of the liver.

The worst part was how she was laboring to breathe. That’s the final line to cross before death, isn’t it — no longer being able to breathe the breath of life (Genesis 2:7; 3:19)? Our doctor told us that if she continued to struggle, they would have to put her on a ventilator. They would sedate her and strap her down before intubation so that she could not pull out the ventilator. Taking that step could mean that my wife and I would never speak with our daughter again.

Then it happened. It was two o’clock in the morning when the pediatrics ICU doctor woke me up. “We have to put your daughter on a ventilator right now. She can’t breathe, and her carbon-dioxide level is past the emergency benchmark.” Everyone had been dreading this moment, but here it was. Desperate, I called my wife so she could rush to the hospital, perhaps in time to speak one last time with her baby, but she didn’t pick up the phone. My daughter was dying, and the person she loved more than anyone on earth wouldn’t be there to hold her and say goodbye. I was broken.

Waiting and Praying

Then, like the voice of an angel, the nurse whispered to me, “Dad, if you are not comfortable, they can’t make you do this.” And so, when our doctor returned with the ventilator, I told her I wanted to wait and pray. The doctor’s countenance morphed. Her voice steeled. She said that if they didn’t intubate my daughter right then, she could go into cardiac arrest. The doctor warned me repeatedly, but each time I firmly told her I wanted to pray and wait. I’m no doctor, and as a rule, I hear and receive doctors’ recommendations. But in this moment, I couldn’t shake the sense that God wanted me to pray and wait.

“God calls us to pray, believing that there is nothing too difficult for him.”

Eventually, everyone left the room, and I dropped to my knees. “God, you said if we ask you for a fish, you won’t give us a serpent. If we ask you for bread, you won’t give us a stone. God, I am asking you to give me my daughter’s life.” I prayed through the night. Each hour I prayed, my daughter’s carbon-dioxide levels dramatically improved, and her breathing grew stronger. In the morning, her doctor came into the room and removed the order for the ventilator, and the following week, he let her come home for a weeklong visit before her second round of chemotherapy.

Our daughter, who had been at death’s door only a few days before, was home with no detectable cancer to be found in her body. God and God alone did that.

Amazing Providence

My daughter was cancer-free, but she was far from being out of danger. Because the first round of chemotherapy had almost killed her, her bone-marrow specialist wanted her to skip the final two rounds and go straight to receiving a bone-marrow transplant. Our oncologist disagreed and told us he believed bone-marrow transplants work best when even the imperceptible levels of cancer are reduced by the final rounds of chemotherapy.

Because they couldn’t agree, they left the decision with us, giving us the weekend to decide whether to continue with two more rounds of chemo or go straight to a transplant. So my wife and I went away for a night to pray and seek wisdom from a multitude of counselors. We called friends with medical backgrounds, although we hadn’t spoken to some of them in over twenty years. And how God providentially answered our prayers seemed even more amazing than how he miraculously strengthened my daughter’s breathing.

Oncology Expert

We called Judy, who used to attend a UCLA Bible study with me. I had heard that she worked as an oncology nurse at a children’s hospital in Los Angeles. She told me that the doctor who trained our oncologist was actually at her hospital. Then she said, “You won’t believe this, but the doctor who wrote the national experimental protocol that your daughter is on just walked past me, and I’ll check with her!” Both doctors agreed that under our circumstances, we could go straight to the bone-marrow transplant and skip the final two rounds of chemotherapy.

Bone-Marrow Expert

Then my wife, who years ago had spent a year in medical school, called a former classmate, Larry, who suggested that we reach out to the UCLA bone-marrow transplant department. When we pulled up their webpage, my wife recognized a high-school classmate, LaVette, and I recognized one of the doctors, Ted Moore, with whom I had attended a UCLA Bible study. We called the number listed, and my wife’s high-school friend picked up. She said she had never answered that phone but had just so happened to be walking past it when it rang. Dr. Moore was in a meeting, but she would have him call us back as soon as he was free. Within the hour, I answered the phone to “Hey, Bobby. It’s Ted.” The unassuming UCLA student I knew from sixteen years ago had become Dr. Theodore Moore, a renowned expert in bone-marrow transplants. With complete confidence, he counseled us to go straight to the transplant.

VOD Expert

Finally, we called Dr. John Vierling, a liver specialist. My wife and I had met him years ago when her cousin asked my wife to sing at the funeral for Dr. Vierling’s son. Our concern was whether having a history of VOD would make the risk of undergoing a bone-marrow transplant too great for our daughter, because a major risk from these transplants is contracting VOD. As God would have it, Dr. Vierling was an expert on VOD, and he counseled us that we could safely proceed with the transplant.

Through the unveiling of his amazing providence, God had answered our prayer. We authorized our daughter to undergo a bone-marrow transplant at City of Hope eighteen years ago. Eighteen years later, she is a walking cancer-free miracle of God.

He Holds Every Breath

I know my daughter’s story is just one among many stories that end so differently. We journeyed through our trial with four other families — three children my daughter’s age and one adult, all of whom had similar types of cancer. We prayed for each of them, but none of them survived. God does not answer every prayer for healing. So, how might he have us pray when our loved ones need a miracle?

“Our primary prayer is always that God would prepare the hearts of our dying loved ones to see Jesus.”

First, armed with the trust that God sovereignly ordains our prayers as a means to accomplish his ends, we freely pray for miracles, as Elijah did (James 5:17–18). Honestly, before God healed my daughter, I would pray for God to heal others, but I didn’t necessarily expect to see a miracle. For that, I repent. God calls us to pray, believing that there is nothing too difficult for him, including healing our loved ones on their deathbeds.

At the same time, however, we pray with the kind of faith that does not rest on God saying yes to our prayers (2 Corinthians 12:8–9). By his grace, we can accept his answer when it’s no, as David did (2 Samuel 12:16–23), and we can submit to his will and worship him when we can’t understand his answer, as Job did (Job 1:21; 42:1–3).

Christians also embrace the reality that, until Jesus returns, everyone we love will die, and our lives are but a vapor in light of eternity, whether we die at age 10 or 100. So our primary prayer is always that God would prepare the hearts of our dying loved ones to see Jesus, and that he would grant our unbelieving loved ones repentance and faith toward Jesus. Our first prayer for our daughter was for her soul’s salvation.

A wise friend reminded me, when we were enduring our trial, that God holds the pen that is writing our story. Everything God writes is good: in the end, we will see his story as good, and in the present, we believe it to be for our good. So yes, pray for a miracle, and trust that God holds your loved one’s next and last breaths.

Words alone could never fully capture the meaning and wonder of Christmas — but we can sure do a whole lot better than the card aisles in stores today. “Many blessings and wishes to you.” “May your life be filled with warmth and good cheer this holiday season.” “Sending lots of peace and joy to you and your family this Christmas.” “It’s people like you who make this season so magical and bright.”

No, it’s not people like you (or me) that make this season merry, magical, or bright. In fact, by increasingly thinking we’re what makes Christmas so merry, we’re slowly siphoning off its true power. The Son of the living God was born human in a small town in the Middle East, sent to bear the awful weight of sin and shame, overpower Satan’s terrifying forces of evil, place death itself in the grave, and clear the narrow path to paradise, and yet how many settle for something superficial and fleeting instead — for greeting cards, newly released electronics, and a few LED lights?

Read enough cards and watch enough movies, and you begin to wonder if the actual “magic” of our modern Christmas is avoiding the real Christmas altogether.

Unfeigned Magic

The world can have its makeshift magic over these next couple days; we’re praying for a spiritual miracle — in us, freshly and more deeply, and then in everyone we love:

Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory. (1 Peter 1:8)

Do you still love the King lying in the manger? Does your heart still rise to see him serve his friends, heal the sick, deliver the possessed, and then die for the world? Do you recognize yourself in the verse above, rejoicing “with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory”? If not, come and look again at the deeper, earth-shaking, heaven-filling magic of Christmas, all from just one paragraph in Colossians 1.

1. This Christ shows us God.

He is the image of the invisible God. (Colossians 1:15)

Those eight words really ought to be enough to drive the banality right out of our homes and pews. The man who was born to a real woman, with a real womb, in a real city, during a real time in history has made the infinite and invisible God seeable. Recognizable. Huggable. Human. This Christ was in the beginning, and all things were made through him. And then he took on the flesh that he had made, and ate the food that he had made, and walked over hills that he had made, and loved the people that he had made — all so that we might see God.

And not only did God make himself seeable in the child born in Bethlehem, but he’s opened our eyes to see his glory — in the manger, at the cross, on the throne. Before we believed, “the god of this world” kept us from seeing what we now see. And then, whether suddenly or slowly, we saw him differently. We came to see “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4). In this Jesus, we’ve seen God.

2. This Christ created and upholds all things.

By him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Colossians 1:16–17)

The man at the center of Christmas changes how we see God — we actually see him — and he changes how we see every other thing we see (and everything we don’t). Christmas isn’t only an opportunity to place Christ above all else, but to see him in and behind all else. “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3). The one who came to live on earth invented earth and life. This makes everything around us, everything in the universe, everything beyond our universe its own Christmas devotion about Christ.

He assembled the trees in our yards, wrapping their rings, stretching their branches, carefully placing leaves and fruit — billions and billions of trees, and yet each of them their own. And over all those trees, he painted a sky, that cosmic canopy of blue. And over that canopy, he taught the sun how to rise each morning and dance, in all its colors, each evening. And beneath that dance, he wove together the people we love, all the people we love, for all the reasons that we love them. Everything that is or will be, he made. He was and is the great Carpenter of creation.

This carpenter was in the beginning, but he wasn’t only in the beginning. He made all things, but he didn’t only make all things; he also holds them together — right now, as you read, and eat, and unwrap presents, and sing. “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3).

3. This Christ came to receive the wrath of God.

And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him. (Colossians 1:21–22)

As genuinely miraculous as his coming was, we celebrate what happened that night in Bethlehem because of why he was born. This Christ came and lived to die. The Son of Man did not come merely to be born, “but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). He received the wrath of God so that we might enjoy his presence and favor.

In the end, it’s the death of this human Son that sets a Christian Christmas apart from all its pagan and commercial imitations.

We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1:23–24)

Some may join us in celebrating the cute baby in a domesticated manger, but only Christians find peace and joy beneath the bloody cross. Their stumbling block is our cornerstone. We were once alienated from God and hostile to him — not neutral or indifferent, but venomous — and yet Jesus laid down his life, paying for all our hideous hissing and defanging our mutiny against him. Christmas is about the canceling and dethroning of sin.

And he died not merely to forgive an enemy, but to have his bride — “he is the head of the body, the church” (Colossians 1:18). He’s not a mercenary Savior, but an adoring and devoted husband. He entered the filthiness of a stable, the indignity of human life, “that he might sanctify [the church], having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing” (Ephesians 5:26–27).

4. This Christ holds the keys of Death.

He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. (Colossians 1:18)

You could of course argue that we celebrate what happened on Christmas morning less because of how he died and more because of how he rose. The man who was born in Bethlehem did in fact die, but then he was “born” a second time when he shook off his grave clothes and walked out of the tomb. He didn’t merely come to die, but to put death itself in a grave.

“Fear not,” this Christ says again this Christmas, “I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Revelation 1:17–18). He’s not the cuddly, defenseless baby the world would prefer. No, his resurrection announced his awesome power and authority over all rivals. None can withstand this Christ, and none will avoid his judgment.

And all who take refuge in him will never die (John 11:25–26). Because of Christmas, death will now kneel to serve you, one day lifting you into the life you’ve always wanted and never deserved. In fact, God has already “raised us up with [Christ] and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6–7).

5. This Christ will inherit and transform everything.

In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. (Colossians 1:19–20)

He may have been raised in the humility of a remote and obscure town, but he came to capture the world, to unite every throne on earth under his rule. And not just the cities and governments, but everything that is — mountains and oceans, grizzly bears and goldfish, evergreen trees, snow fall, and reindeer. And not just everything that’s here on earth, but everything in every realm, all the spiritual realities and forces that invade human life without being seen. “All things,” verse 16 says, “were created through him and for him.”

Christmas is as good a moment as any to stop and remember that God has already made known his “plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:9–10). When this world comes to an end, we’ll look back at it all and see him. We’ll see how the wildness of creation and the even greater wildness of history all ties together into one stunning tapestry of the glory of Christ. Christmas, then, is the beginning of the end of history — the inbreaking of the one who both makes sense of it all and owns it all.

So, from all the depths and riches of all this Christ is and means for us, merry Christmas! As you prepare your heart and family to remember him, resist the safe and comfortable seduction of worldliness, and press into the Christ-exalting, world-offending, heart-stirring words God himself has given us for this wonderful day.