The Devil at Work?

Fellow Christians, be sober, be vigilant. Your adversary the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. (1 Pet.5:8) Impressive words! They come at the beginning of the late-night service of Compline - and it is easy to imagine worshippers in former times, without cars, street lighting or television, having a very real sense of the devil lurking in wait among the perils and dangers of the night!

While the devil lurked, the psalms read during Compline offered reassurance. Keep us as the apple of an eye, hide us under the shadow of your wings, (Ps.17:8). God promises that we will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday. (Ps.91: one of the most comforting of psalms on a dark, dark night! And night does not just mean the time when the buses are not running. Our lives too have their sunny times and their dark times!)

Lent starts on March 8^th. Its forty days recall Jesus' forty days in the desert "being tempted by the devil." Matthew and Luke give us some striking pictures of the devil at work: the offer of turning stones into bread, of infinite power, of jumping from the pinnacle of the temple and not getting hurt. And in this temptation (the second, according to Matthew, the last according to Luke), the devil quotes back at Jesus the words of that same psalm - Psalm 91 - God's angels "will have charge over you to guard you."

So is the devil at work today? And do we need to seek protection, at "night", or at any other time? Yes, and yes.

No, the devil is not a horned monster with cloven hooves. No, the devil is not able to take over people's entire personalities, turning them into "the devil incarnate". No, despite the imagery in the book of Revelation, the devil does not have weapons against which we are powerless - indeed, we do not even need to fight, for if you read carefully, you will see that the battle - if there ever really was one - has been won. Christ has given us the victory (1 Cor 15:57). The reason the Son of God came was to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8).

We can picture the devil as a twisted, fallen and deviant angel. Or, as in the book of Job, as a messenger sent by God to test our faith. Or as the force within ourselves that leads to cynicism, to questioning or to disregard of what is right or wrong. But we must be clear about one thing - God reigns over all. And the devil is not in any way God's equal. The devil is in no way an independent force. To take the idea of "reigning" one step further, the devil is not the leader of a foreign country, but the leader of a gang of lawbreakers.

If we look around, we can see things that have "gone wrong" - war, cruelty, dishonesty, deceit, disregard for others. We may perhaps call them works of the devil. But we should remember that God is the source of everything, and that all that we have comes from God - and paradoxically, this means that our sorrows, our problems, our miseries, our suffering also come from God.

Calling these things works of the devil distracts us from the truth - these things are our actions, our deeds. The come from within us. It is we who chose to do them. We cannot blame them on the devil.

But we do not have to continue doing them. The past is gone, and will never return. We are free from it - and free to start again. If we remember this, the devil's power is broken - we can be "safe under God's wing."