The Tempter in the Wilderness: What Scripture Says About Satan, and What It Does Not

The Picture We Inherited

Ask most Christians who Satan is, and the answer comes without hesitation. Satan was an angel, perhaps an archangel or one of the cherubim, created good and placed high in the courts of heaven. Before the creation of the world, or at least before the fall of Adam, he grew proud and wanted the throne of God for himself. He rebelled, took a third of the angels with him, and was thrown down. The angels who followed him became demons, and Satan became their prince, so that ever since he has made war on God by making war on us. The traditional answer rests on a handful of passages. Isaiah 14 supplies the fall from heaven: “How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn,” followed by the boast, “I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high,” and “I will make myself like the Most High” (Isa 14:12–14). Ezekiel 28 supplies his original glory, for it addresses someone who was “in Eden, the garden of God,” who was “an anointed guardian cherub,” and who was “blameless” in his ways until unrighteousness was found in him (Ezek 28:13–15). Revelation 12 supplies the war and the third, since the dragon’s tail “swept down a third of the stars of heaven,” and Michael and his angels fought the dragon and his angels until “that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan,” was thrown down to the earth (Rev 12:4, 7–9). Luke 10:18 appears to confirm the scene from Jesus’ own lips: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” Jude and 2 Peter speak of angels who sinned and did not keep their proper domain (Jude 6; 2 Pet 2:4), and Paul warns that a new convert might “become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil” (1 Tim 3:6), which many read as evidence that pride was the devil’s first sin. Wayne Grudem, whose Systematic Theology is used in evangelical seminaries across the country, grounds the existence of fallen angels in Jude and 2 Peter. He then writes that “it is also possible that there is a reference to the fall of Satan, the prince of demons, in Isaiah 14,” because Isaiah, while “describing the judgment of God on the king of Babylon (an earthly, human king),” arrives at “language that seems too strong to refer to any merely human king.”¹ Grudem’s own words concede two things: the king of Babylon is an earthly, human king, and the reference to Satan is only possible. He also rejects the oldest form of the fallen-angel story, the claim that the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 were angels who took human wives, because angels “do not marry” and “nothing in the context of Genesis 6 indicates” that angels are meant.²

The church’s confessional statements go further than Grudem does. The Fourth Lateran Council, in 1215, confessed that “the devil and other demons were created by God naturally good, but they became evil by their own doing,” and that “man, however, sinned at the prompting of the devil.”³ That confession stands on Augustine. In the eleventh book of The City of God, Augustine takes up Jesus’ statement that the devil “was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth” (John 8:44). He considers the reading that the devil never stood in the truth at all but refused his Creator “from the time of his own creation.”⁴ He grants that such a reading avoids the Manichaean error of making evil a nature in its own right. He rejects it anyway, on the ground that Isaiah calls the devil Lucifer fallen from heaven and Ezekiel places him in Eden, the garden of God.⁵ Augustine also reasons from the certainty of the good angels, insisting that “no new devil will ever arise among the good angels.”⁶ Thomas Aquinas, some eight and a half centuries later, names the view that the devil was wicked from the first instant of his creation and dismisses it as “in contradiction with the authority of Scripture,” citing Isaiah 14:12 and Ezekiel 28:13.⁷ John Milton gave the doctrine its popular form in 1667. The proud archangel leading his rebel host out of heaven, the figure most of us carry in our heads, owes as much to the opening book of Paradise Lost as to any verse of the Bible.⁸ The men who built this doctrine were serious readers of Scripture, and many of them were holy men. Augustine and Aquinas both saw that John 8:44 could be read to describe a devil who was never in the truth. Both set that reading aside. Both did so on the authority of two prophetic poems addressed to two human kings.

A Hermeneutic We Would Not Accept Anywhere Else

Evangelical seminaries teach a short list of interpretive rules, and they teach them so that students will not make the text say what they already believe. A passage is read in its context. Its genre governs how it is read, because a lament is not a law code and an apocalypse is not a chronicle. The interpreter asks whom the author addressed and what he meant them to understand. Clear passages interpret obscure ones, and doctrine is not built on poetry and vision alone. The same rules govern every serious debate over baptism, the millennium, and the roles of men and women in the church. The doctrine of Satan’s primeval fall breaks every one of them. A taunt song is read as biography. A funeral lament is read as cosmology. Apocalyptic imagery is read as history. The texts that speak directly about the devil, such as John 8:44 and 1 John 3:8, are made to yield to texts that are poetic and obscure. That is eisegesis: the interpreter brings the conclusion to the text and then finds it there. A professor who watched a student build a doctrine of the church by this method would fail the paper. The same method has produced a doctrine of the devil that most of the church accepts without question. Of the traditional proof texts, Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 are poems, Revelation 12 is a vision, and Luke 10:18 reports what Jesus saw during his disciples’ mission, while the two prose texts about fallen angels, Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4, never mention Satan.

Isaiah names his subject before the poem begins: וְנָשָׂ֜אתָ הַמָּשָׁ֥ל הַזֶּ֛ה עַל־מֶ֥לֶךְ בָּבֶ֖ל, “and you shall take up this taunt against the king of Babylon” (Isa 14:4).⁹ The word מָּשָׁ֥ל means a proverb or a mocking song, and its subject is a man. Before the famous verse, the poem has already sent him down to Sheol, where the shades of dead kings rise from their thrones to greet him: “You too have become as weak as we! You have become like us!” (14:9–10). After it, his corpse is thrown out unburied while the other kings of the earth lie in honor in their tombs (14:18–20). The famous line calls him הֵילֵ֣ל בֶּן־שָׁ֑חַר, “shining one, son of the dawn” (14:12). John Oswalt explains that the phrase “refers to the planet Venus, which never reaches the zenith before the sun rises and apparently extinguishes it,” and that in Canaanite mythology the god Athtar, whom the gods attempt to put in Baal’s place, “may also be the morning star.”¹⁰ Oswalt adds that the “mount of assembly” in verse 13 is Mount Zaphon in northern Syria, where the gods were said to meet, and that the word for God in that verse is the short form El, the name of the high god of the Canaanite pantheon.¹¹ His conclusion is that the prophet “was not dependent upon any one story, but used a number of current motifs to fit his own point.”¹² Isaiah borrowed the imagery of pagan myth, the morning star and the mountain of the gods, and turned it into a taunt against a king who thought himself divine. The name Lucifer does not appear in the Hebrew. It entered the Latin Bible through Jerome, for whom lucifer was the ordinary word for the morning star, and the King James translators carried it into English as a proper name.¹³ The Hebrew word for adversary was available to Isaiah, and it had been in use for centuries. The angel of the LORD stands in Balaam’s road as a satan (Num 22:22), the Philistines fear David will become a satan to them in battle (1 Sam 29:4), and God raises up Hadad the Edomite as a satan against Solomon (1 Kgs 11:14). The word occurs twenty-seven times in the Hebrew Bible, and none of those occurrences is in Isaiah or Ezekiel. Neither prophet used it.

Ezekiel’s oracle turns on a single sentence addressed to the ruler of Tyre: וְאַתָּ֤ה אָדָם֙ וְֽלֹא־אֵ֔ל, “but you are a man, and not God” (Ezek 28:2). The prince’s sin is that he has said in his heart, “I am a god, I sit in the seat of the gods, in the heart of the seas.” The lament that follows is introduced as קִינָ֖ה עַל־מֶ֣לֶךְ צֹ֑ור, “a lament over the king of Tyre” (28:12). A קִינָ֖ה is a funeral song, and its subject is a human ruler. The Eden imagery, the precious stones, and the guardian cherub measure how high he imagined himself and how far he will fall. Tertullian, around AD 207, is the earliest Christian writer I have found who reads the passage as the devil’s history. He calls the figure “the highest of the angels, the archangel, the wisest of all,” and he argues that “none among human beings was either born in the paradise of God, not even Adam himself.”¹⁴ His argument assumes that poetic imagery must be read as literal biography, which is the very point in dispute. Origen, a generation later, did not follow him; he read Ezekiel 28 as describing “a certain angel who had received the office of governing the nation of the Tyrians,” not the devil himself.¹⁵ Tertullian and Origen did not agree on whom the passage describes. Satan is not absent from Ezekiel 28 or Isaiah 14. The kings of Tyre and Babylon are types of the adversary: they show the satanic spirit on a throne, with the pride that says “I will ascend,” the self-deification that says “I am a god,” and the end that comes to both. Christ is present in the same way in David and in Melchizedek. Psalm 22 does not teach that Jesus was once a man named David, and Ezekiel 28 does not teach that Satan was once a cherub in Eden. The traditional reading turns a type into a history and then builds a doctrine on the history.

Revelation 12 is the source of the third of the angels that most Christians have heard about. The Greek reads καὶ ἡ οὐρὰ αὐτοῦ σύρει τὸ τρίτον τῶν ἀστέρων τοῦ οὐρανοῦ καὶ ἔβαλεν αὐτοὺς εἰς τὴν γῆν, “and his tail sweeps down a third of the stars of heaven, and he cast them to the earth” (Rev 12:4). The text says stars. Calling them fallen angels is an interpretation. The imagery comes from Daniel 8:10, where a little horn grows up to the host of heaven, casts some of the stars to the ground, and tramples them; in Daniel the horn is an earthly king, Antiochus Epiphanes, and the stars are the faithful people of God whom he persecuted. G. K. Beale grants that stars can stand for angels in Revelation, as in 1:20, where they symbolize “angels who represent earthly churches.”¹⁶ He concludes all the same: “In the light of the Daniel 8 background, the falling of stars in Rev. 12:4 does not portray a fall of Satan or of his angels in the distant past or at some primordial time. Therefore, the stars of v 4 are not to be identified with the dragon’s angels in vv 7–8.”¹⁷ Beale also places the persecution of verse 4 “immediately before the birth of the Messiah.”¹⁸ The chapter’s own sequence agrees with him. The dragon stands before the woman to devour her child, the child is born, and then ἡρπάσθη τὸ τέκνον αὐτῆς πρὸς τὸν θεὸν, “her child was caught up to God” (12:5). The war in heaven comes after the ascension. When the dragon is thrown down, the voice in heaven says that “now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come,” because the accuser is cast out, and the saints conquer him “by the blood of the Lamb” (12:10–11). The vision describes the cross and its results, not events before Genesis 1. Luke 10:18 has the same setting in the ministry of Jesus. When the seventy return rejoicing that the demons submit to them, Jesus answers, ἐθεώρουν τὸν σατανᾶν ὡς ἀστραπὴν ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ πεσόντα, “I was watching Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” The verb is imperfect, and the occasion is the disciples’ mission: Jesus describes what he saw while they were preaching.

Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 are the strongest texts on the other side. Jude speaks of “the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling,” whom God has kept in eternal chains for judgment, and Peter speaks of angels whom God “did not spare” when they sinned. Some angels may well have fallen, and I do not dismiss these verses. Neither of them, however, says that Satan was one of these angels, and neither mentions the devil at all. Both describe the fallen angels as already bound in chains and gloomy darkness until the judgment, while the devil of the New Testament “prowls around like a roaring lion” (1 Pet 5:8). Peter lists the sinning angels beside the flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (2 Pet 2:5–6), which places their sin in the days before the flood. Jude quotes 1 Enoch by name a few verses later (Jude 14–15, quoting 1 Enoch 1:9), and in 1 Enoch the angels fall through lust for human women before the flood, not through pride before creation.¹⁹ Jude 9 draws on another story from outside the canon, the dispute between Michael and the devil over the body of Moses, which Origen attributed to a book called the Ascension of Moses.²⁰ Jude’s fallen angels are the Watchers of Enoch’s story. Grudem rejects that story as an account of Genesis 6. The clearest New Testament texts about fallen angels draw on a tradition that the doctrine’s own defenders reject, and they still say nothing about Satan. The doctrine of Satan’s fall needs Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 because Jude and Peter cannot supply it. My claim is narrower than “no angel ever fell.” Scripture, asked where Satan came from, does not give the answer we have been taught. The answer we have been taught came from outside Scripture.

Where the Story Came From

The fallen-archangel story developed over several centuries, and it developed first outside the Bible. In the Hebrew Bible the satan stands in God’s council: in Job he comes and goes among the sons of God (Job 1:6; 2:1), and in Zechariah he stands at the high priest’s right hand to accuse him (Zech 3:1–2). No Old Testament text says he was cast out of heaven. When the Septuagint translated those passages, it rendered the word with διάβολος, which Joseph Fitzmyer says “basically means in Greek, ‘calumniator,’” the slanderer, and Fitzmyer adds that “by this time in Palestinian Judaism, Satan has become the name for the arch-demon in contemporary angelology.”²¹ Davies and Allison trace one stage of that change: Jewish writers increasingly assigned to Satan acts that the older texts assigned to God. The census that God incites in 2 Samuel 24:1 is incited by Satan in 1 Chronicles 21:1, and Jubilees makes the prince of evil spirits the one who proposes the testing of Abraham and attacks Moses on the road (compare Gen 22:1 with Jub. 17:16, and Exod 4:24 with Jub. 48:2).²² The Book of the Watchers, now the first part of 1 Enoch and usually dated to the third century before Christ, tells of two hundred angels who descended on Mount Hermon, took human wives, and fathered giants, and it explains evil spirits as the spirits of those giants.²³ Jubilees, from the second century before Christ, gives the captain of these spirits a name, Mastema, and has God allow him to keep a tenth of them to test humanity.²⁴ The Wisdom of Solomon, probably from the first century before Christ, says that “through the devil’s envy death entered the world” (Wis 2:24). The Life of Adam and Eve, usually placed around the first century after Christ, gives the devil a fall of his own. He tells Adam that he was cast out of heaven for refusing to worship Adam at his creation: “I will not worship an inferior and younger being.”²⁵ Warned of God’s anger, he answers in the words of Isaiah 14: “I will set my seat above the stars of heaven and will be like the Highest.”²⁶ 2 Enoch, from about the same period, tells of “one from out the order of angels” who “conceived an impossible thought, to place his throne higher than the clouds above the earth,” and was thrown down.²⁷ The sequence runs from angels who sinned with women, to a captain for their spirits, to a fall for the captain, told in words borrowed from a prophet’s taunt against a Babylonian king. The first writers to put Isaiah 14 in the devil’s mouth were the authors of Jewish legends written centuries after Isaiah, outside the canon of Scripture.

The apostles never say where Satan came from. The earliest Christian writers after them, the Apostolic Fathers, writing from about AD 96 to the middle of the second century, mention the devil often and never give an account of his origin. Clement of Rome speaks of the envy “by which death itself entered into the world,” echoing the Wisdom of Solomon, without naming the devil or explaining his beginning.²⁸ Ignatius calls him “the prince of this world,” Barnabas calls him “the Black One” and says that “Satan possesses the power of this world,” Polycarp calls the heretic “the first-born of Satan,” and Hermas tells his readers, “fear not the devil; for there is no power in him.”²⁹ Hermas also describes an “angel of iniquity” who works on human desires, and he too says nothing of where that angel came from.³⁰ When an origin story does appear, in the apologists of the later second century, it comes in competing forms. Justin Martyr, around 155, says that the angels God appointed over humanity “transgressed this appointment, and were captivated by love of women, and begot children who are those that are called demons.”³¹ Athenagoras, around 177, describes the devil as “the spirit which is about matter,” an angel “entrusted with the control of matter,” who became “negligent and wicked in the management of the things entrusted to him,” and he treats the angels who lusted after women as a separate fall.³² Irenaeus, around 180, says the devil “was rendered an apostate from the divine law” because he became “envious of man.”³³ In another place Irenaeus calls him “the apostate angel and the enemy” because “he was envious of God’s workmanship.”³⁴ Irenaeus’s devil falls because of humanity, after humanity was made, which is a different story from a fall before creation. Justin, Athenagoras, and Irenaeus tell three different stories, and none of them, in these passages, appeals to Isaiah 14. Tertullian applied Ezekiel 28 to the devil around 207, and Origen applied Isaiah 14 to him between about 220 and 230, reading the prophet’s Lucifer as a power “who formerly was Lucifer” and confirming it from Luke 10:18.³⁵ The line then runs through Augustine in the fifth century, Gregory the Great in the sixth, the Fourth Lateran Council in the thirteenth, and Milton in the seventeenth. The doctrine was assembled over more than a thousand years, and its central text entered Christian theology more than a century after the last apostle died.

The extra-biblical material has real value. 1 Enoch and the Life of Adam and Eve show how Jews in the time of Jesus thought, and Jude quoted 1 Enoch as worth hearing. The fathers of the church were serious readers of Scripture, and on the Trinity and the person of Christ the church owes them more than it can repay. Value is not inspiration, and tradition is not Scripture. 1 Enoch was received as Scripture in the Ethiopian church, but the wider church set it aside, and both Jerome and Augustine regarded it with suspicion.³⁶ The church judged that these stories were not Scripture, while its theology went on borrowing their plot. The Reformers taught the church to test even its oldest teachings against the written word, and they did not exempt the teachings they liked. Tested that way, the parts of this doctrine that carry the most weight, the original glory, the primeval rebellion, the third of the angels, and the name Lucifer, are read into the Bible from outside it. That does not prove the tradition wrong. It does mean that the age and popularity of a teaching are not reasons to hold it. Calvin, discussing whether Christ was carried bodily to the temple, gave a rule that fits this case: “In a matter that is doubtful, and where ignorance brings no risk, I choose rather to suspend my judgment, than to furnish contentious people with an occasion of debate.”³⁷ Where the Bible is silent about Satan’s origin, the right answer is “I do not know.” What Scripture does not say about him matters as much as what it does. Deuteronomy draws the same line: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever” (Deut 29:29). Christians who hold Scripture as their final authority can say that much and stop there.

Why the Enemy Would Prefer It

Jesus calls the devil a liar and the father of lies (John 8:44). Paul says that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Cor 11:14) and that the god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers (2 Cor 4:4). A deceiver of that skill would want to shape what people believe about him. Any enemy who hates you and intends to destroy you wants to control how you see him before he attacks. He wants you looking for him in the wrong place. The picture of Satan most Christians carry puts him far away: a fallen archangel ruling a distant kingdom, a dragon in the sky, a figure with horns and a pitchfork. That Satan is not in your living room, not in your mind, and not in you. The Satan of the Gospels speaks inside a starving man’s mind in the desert and through the mouth of Peter, and he enters Judas (Luke 22:3). Paul tells the Ephesians not to let the sun go down on their anger and so “give no opportunity to the devil” (Eph 4:26–27), which places the devil’s opening in a human emotion. He is the voice behind a man’s eyes at four o’clock in the morning, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, screaming because his wife has been unfaithful, with a gun in his hand. He speaks in that man’s own voice, uses that man’s own pain, and tells him the only way out is through the barrel. A man taught to look for the enemy in the sky will never look for him there. I do not claim that the traditional picture was invented by the devil. I do claim that it serves him. A liar with influence across history has every reason to prefer a picture that keeps him out of view.

Led Up in Order to Be Tempted

Matthew 4 is the one passage in which Jesus meets the adversary face to face. It opens: Τότε ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἀνήχθη εἰς τὴν ἔρημον ὑπὸ τοῦ πνεύματος πειρασθῆναι ὑπὸ τοῦ διαβόλου, “Then Jesus was led up into the wilderness by the Spirit to be tempted by the devil” (Matt 4:1). Two prepositional phrases built on ὑπὸ mark two agents: the Spirit leads, and the devil tempts. Between them stands πειρασθῆναι, an infinitive of purpose. The Spirit led Jesus into the desert in order that he be tempted. Mark’s version is blunter: τὸ πνεῦμα αὐτὸν ἐκβάλλει εἰς τὴν ἔρημον, “the Spirit drives him out into the wilderness” (Mark 1:12), with the verb Mark uses for driving out demons. Davies and Allison observe that the Spirit’s leading and the devil’s presence give πειράζω “a double connotation: Jesus is at the same time being ‘tested’ by God and ‘tempted’ by the devil.”³⁸ They also note that in the New Testament God typically only “tries” or “tests,” and that with hope for a good outcome, while the devil “tempts” (πειράζω, never δοκιμάζω) “with nothing but an evil end in view.”³⁹ The same event is credited both to God and to the satan in David’s census (2 Sam 24:1; 1 Chr 21:1), and in Job the satan acts only within limits God sets (Job 1:12; 2:6). The devil of Matthew 4 works inside God’s purpose. Luke adds that Jesus was ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ ἡμέρας τεσσεράκοντα πειραζόμενος ὑπὸ τοῦ διαβόλου, “in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by the devil” (Luke 4:1–2). Fitzmyer notes that the present participle indicates “the simultaneity of the temptations and the Spirit’s escort.”⁴⁰ The temptation lasted the whole forty days. The three scenes the Gospels record come at the end of it. Luke uses διάβολος throughout this episode, though he uses “Satan” freely elsewhere (Luke 10:18; 11:18; 13:16; 22:3, 31), so that a title meaning “slanderer,” not a proper name, identifies the tempter in the desert.⁴¹

A long fast is a mental battle as well as a physical one. By the second week the one fasting is arguing with himself, and the arguments improve as the body weakens. The mind supplies reasons, then better reasons, then Scripture, then reasons the Scripture does not apply. Matthew says that at the end of the forty days ὕστερον ἐπείνασεν, “afterward he was hungry” (4:2). The tempter comes to that man: καὶ προσελθὼν ὁ πειράζων εἶπεν αὐτῷ, “and the tempter came and said to him” (4:3). Matthew does not call him Satan or the devil in this verse. He calls him ὁ πειράζων, a present participle with the article, “the one who tempts.” Davies and Allison observe that the title “names the devil’s chief characteristic,” that it appears elsewhere in the New Testament only in 1 Thessalonians 3:5, and that it “is not found in the LXX.”⁴² The satan of Job and Zechariah is likewise a title, “the adversary,” and not a personal name. Matthew 4 gives the tempter a role, the one who tempts; a character, the slanderer; and a method, which is speech. It gives him no wings, no rank, no history in heaven, and no fall. The text never describes his appearance or gives him a form. Each of his three moves is a sentence addressed to a hungry man’s mind. Each of Jesus’ three answers is a sentence from Deuteronomy (Deut 8:3; 6:16; 6:13). The contest is fought entirely in words.

The first temptation is εἰ υἱὸς εἶ τοῦ θεοῦ, εἰπὲ ἵνα οἱ λίθοι οὗτοι ἄρτοι γένωνται, “if you are the Son of God, say that these stones should become bread” (4:3). The clause is a first-class condition, εἰ with the indicative. Preachers sometimes translate it “since you are the Son of God,” which says too much. Daniel Wallace defines the first-class condition as “the assumption of truth for the sake of argument,” and notes that it occurs about three hundred times in the New Testament.⁴³ The tempter neither denies that Jesus is the Son nor confesses it. He assumes it in order to use it. A few verses earlier the Father’s voice had said from heaven, “This is my beloved Son” (3:17). The tempter takes what God said and builds a temptation on it. He asks Jesus to act on a true thing in his own way, for his own sake, and on his own schedule. Temptation in us follows the same pattern. It seldom proposes something obviously evil; it says, “You are a child of God, so surely you have this coming.” The second temptation uses Scripture the same way: γέγραπται γὰρ ὅτι τοῖς ἀγγέλοις αὐτοῦ ἐντελεῖται περὶ σοῦ, “for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you’” (4:6, citing Ps 91:11). The tempter quotes the promise of Psalm 91 and drops its condition, which concerns the one who “dwells in the shelter of the Most High” (Ps 91:1). Jesus answers with πάλιν γέγραπται, “again it is written” (4:7), and quotes Deuteronomy 6:16. He offers no new revelation and no argument.

In the third temptation Matthew says the devil took Jesus εἰς ὄρος ὑψηλὸν λίαν, “to a very high mountain,” and showed him πάσας τὰς βασιλείας τοῦ κόσμου, “all the kingdoms of the world” (4:8). Luke says he showed them ἐν στιγμῇ χρόνου, “in a moment of time” (4:5). No mountain on earth gives a view of all the kingdoms of the world, and no bodily journey happens in a moment of time. Darrell Bock observes that “most commentators, going back as far as Calvin, note that no mountain gives a view of the entire world,” and that “most posit some type of vision here.”⁴⁴ Bock records the minority view as well: Heinz Schürmann argued that the language is too spatial for a vision and spoke of a “diabolical rapture.”⁴⁵ Calvin, asked whether Christ was bodily carried to the pinnacle of the temple, answered that the kingdoms set before him, together with Luke’s single moment, agree “better with the idea of a vision, than with any other supposition.”⁴⁶ He added that there is “no absurdity” in Christ submitting to this, provided that “in his mind and soul” he “suffered no delusion.”⁴⁷ A vision is seen, but not by the body’s eyes from a high place. It takes place in the mind, in what Genesis calls “the imagination of the thoughts of his heart” (Gen 6:5 KJV). What happened in the wilderness happened where a person pictures what could be. A rider who has not been on a motorcycle in years swings a leg over, and before the engine is warm his mind is showing him the tree he might hit, vividly and in a moment of time. Nobody put that picture there from outside. The tempter worked with that faculty, and in the wilderness it showed a starving man every crown on earth. Paul names the same faculty when he speaks of taking “every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor 10:5).

Luke records a sentence Matthew omits: σοὶ δώσω τὴν ἐξουσίαν ταύτην ἅπασαν καὶ τὴν δόξαν αὐτῶν, ὅτι ἐμοὶ παραδέδοται καὶ ᾧ ἐὰν θέλω δίδωμι αὐτήν, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, because it has been handed over to me, and I give it to whomever I wish” (Luke 4:6). The verb παραδέδοται is a perfect passive. The devil does not claim to have seized this authority or to have made it. He says it was handed over to him and remains in his hands. The text does not say who handed it over, and Jesus does not dispute the claim. Scripture says dominion over the earth was given to humanity (Gen 1:28; Ps 8:6). If the adversary holds it now, he holds it because humanity handed it to him. Calvin saw in the offer “the daring insolence of the devil . . . in robbing God of the government of the world, and claiming it for himself.”⁴⁸ Gregory the Great saw that the three temptations retrace the temptation of Adam: the belly, ambition, and the covetousness of “lofty condition.” “By the same method in which he had overcome the first Adam,” Gregory writes, “in that same was he overcome when he tempted the second Adam.”⁴⁹ The temptations match because the tempter is the same: the voice of fallen human desire, speaking now to the one man in whom it would find no answer. The offers themselves are human. Bread for a hungry man, a public proof of God’s care, and power for a man who has none are not temptations an angel would feel. They are the temptations of flesh and blood. They came to Jesus because he had shared in flesh and blood (Heb 2:14).

When the tempter offers the kingdoms, Jesus answers, ὕπαγε, σατανᾶ, “Go away, Satan” (4:10). Twelve chapters later, Peter confesses Jesus as the Christ, and when Jesus begins to speak of his suffering and death, Peter takes him aside and rebukes him: “This shall never happen to you.” Jesus turns and says to him, ὕπαγε ὀπίσω μου, σατανᾶ· σκάνδαλον εἶ ἐμοῦ, ὅτι οὐ φρονεῖς τὰ τοῦ θεοῦ ἀλλὰ τὰ τῶν ἀνθρώπων, “Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me, because you are not thinking the things of God but the things of men” (Matt 16:23). The imperative, the vocative, and the Gospel are the same. Jesus speaks to the leader of his own disciples the words he spoke to the tempter in the wilderness. He does not say that Satan has entered Peter. He says that Peter is thinking τὰ τῶν ἀνθρώπων, “the things of men.” The content of the satanic voice is defined as human thinking: self-preservation, the crown without the cross. It is the offer the tempter made on the mountain, and it comes from a man who loved Jesus and meant him well. Luke ends his temptation account with συντελέσας πάντα πειρασμὸν ὁ διάβολος ἀπέστη ἀπʼ αὐτοῦ ἄχρι καιροῦ, “when the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time” (4:13). The devil returns in Luke 22:3: “Then Satan entered into Judas.” He comes back through a human heart. John says the devil had already put the betrayal into Judas’s heart before Satan entered him (John 13:2, 27). Jesus calls the tempter “Satan,” calls Peter “Satan,” and says of Judas, “one of you is a devil” (John 6:70), without changing the meaning of the words. The adversary of the Gospels works at the center of the human ego and speaks in a human voice.

A Murderer from the Beginning

Jesus describes the devil in John 8:44: ὑμεῖς ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς τοῦ διαβόλου ἐστὲ καὶ τὰς ἐπιθυμίας τοῦ πατρὸς ὑμῶν θέλετε ποιεῖν. ἐκεῖνος ἀνθρωποκτόνος ἦν ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς καὶ ἐν τῇ ἀληθείᾳ οὐκ ἔστηκεν, ὅτι οὐκ ἔστιν ἀλήθεια ἐν αὐτῷ. ὅταν λαλῇ τὸ ψεῦδος, ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων λαλεῖ, ὅτι ψεύστης ἐστὶν καὶ ὁ πατὴρ αὐτοῦ, “You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a man-killer from the beginning, and he does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks the lie, he speaks from what is his own, because he is a liar and the father of it.” The word ἀνθρωποκτόνος means “man-killer,” not murderer in the abstract. The devil is defined from the start by what he does to human beings, and before Adam there was no human being to kill. D. A. Carson takes “from the beginning” as “probably a reference to the fall of Adam and Eve,” and he says the devil’s lies “are evident from the Garden of Eden on,” since God said, “You will surely die,” and the devil answered, “You will not surely die.”⁵⁰ On this reading the beginning is the first sin in the world, not a rebellion in heaven before it. The second clause, οὐκ ἔστηκεν, turns on a textual variant. The editors of the Greek New Testament print ἔστηκεν, which Bruce Metzger identifies as the “imperfect of στήκω,” supported by 𝔓66, Sinaiticus, the original hand of Vaticanus, and others, against the perfect ἕστηκεν found in 𝔓75 and a later corrector of Vaticanus.⁵¹ A perfect could mean “he has not stood,” leaving room for a time when he did. The imperfect of στήκω means that he does not stand in the truth, a settled condition and not a fall. Augustine’s Latin read in ueritate non stetit, “he did not stand in the truth,” and his argument that the devil was once in the truth leans on that past tense.⁵² The Greek text of the best early manuscripts does not require it. Jesus gives the reason in the next clause: ὅτι οὐκ ἔστιν ἀλήθεια ἐν αὐτῷ, “because there is no truth in him,” not because he left the truth. When he lies, ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων λαλεῖ, he speaks “from what is his own.” Carson renders the idiom “he speaks his native language,” literally “out of his own [nature or essential characteristics].”⁵³ Carson sets the lie against Hebrews 6:18, where it is impossible for God to lie: the lie is native to the devil as truth is native to God.⁵⁴

A creature made good, standing in the truth in God’s presence, would have to become one in whom there is no truth, whose native speech is the lie, and who has killed men from the beginning. The verse does not describe that change, and the tradition supplied it from Isaiah and Ezekiel. If Jesus described a creature that God made a liar and a murderer, God would be the author of evil, which no Christian can accept. The other possibility is that Jesus describes something that did not exist until there was a lie to tell and a man to kill. I lean toward the second. Augustine himself granted that the reading “at least disagrees with those heretics the Manichees,” who gave the devil an evil nature from an evil first principle.⁵⁵ The verse also speaks of τὰς ἐπιθυμίας τοῦ πατρὸς ὑμῶν, “the desires of your father.” James uses the same noun to explain how temptation works: ἕκαστος δὲ πειράζεται ὑπὸ τῆς ἰδίας ἐπιθυμίας ἐξελκόμενος καὶ δελεαζόμενος· εἶτα ἡ ἐπιθυμία συλλαβοῦσα τίκτει ἁμαρτίαν, ἡ δὲ ἁμαρτία ἀποτελεσθεῖσα ἀποκύει θάνατον, “but each one is tempted by his own desire, dragged away and enticed; then desire, having conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death” (James 1:14–15). In John, the devil’s desires are what his children want to do, and he is the killer. In James, a person’s own desire tempts him, and what it finally gives birth to is death. Jesus calls the desire the devil’s, and James calls it ours. I do not think they describe two different things. John’s first letter says ὅτι ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς ὁ διάβολος ἁμαρτάνει, “because the devil sins from the beginning” (1 John 3:8), with a present-tense verb: he has been sinning continually from the beginning. Two verses later John writes, ἐν τούτῳ φανερά ἐστιν τὰ τέκνα τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ τὰ τέκνα τοῦ διαβόλου, “by this the children of God and the children of the devil are made plain” (3:10). The mark of the second family is that a person does not do righteousness and does not love his brother. John says nothing there about a demon living inside anyone.

What Scripture Lets Us Say

I hold firmly that Scripture does not show us Satan was an angel, and that the texts offered as proof, read in their own contexts, do not say what they are claimed to say. Scripture also does not reduce him to a metaphor. Jesus spoke to him in the wilderness, and Jesus called him a father with children who resemble him. I believe the Bible presents Satan as a real person, a being with a will and a voice who schemes and speaks. The Bible does not tell us what kind of being he is, and legend should not fill that silence. Paul supplies a category in Romans 5, where two men are more than individuals: Adam, through whom sin entered the world and death spread to all, and Christ, through whom the many are made righteous. Each is a corporate person who carries a whole humanity within himself. Satan may be the dark counterpart: not the head of a new humanity but the sum of a fallen one, the personal embodiment of every lie told, every hatred nursed, every murder and every war. If so, he is the father of lies because he is made of them. A person who gives in to temptation is then not only obeying Satan. He is exhibiting him, bringing him into the world in his own body and choices, and in a real sense the two become one. The Lord’s Prayer asks ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ (Matt 6:13), and translations divide between “deliver us from evil” and “deliver us from the evil one,” because the genitive can be neuter or masculine. The Didache, among the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, keeps the same ambiguity in its form of the prayer.⁵⁶ I suspect the ambiguity should be kept. In this case the evil and the evil one may not be separable.

The serpent in the garden is the strongest argument for a devil who existed before humanity, because Scripture places the tempter in Eden before the first human sin. I have no confident answer to it. Adam and Eve lived in the life of God, not yet under death, and time in that place may not have been the straight line we know. The tempter may be present before the sin because, from God’s side of time, the whole weight of human sin already stood over the story, before the first human choice rather than before humanity. I cannot prove that, and I will not build doctrine on it. It is one way of holding together the serpent’s presence in the garden and Jesus’ statement that the devil was a man-killer from the beginning. Genesis itself never calls the serpent Satan; it calls him more crafty than any other “beast of the field which the LORD God had made” (Gen 3:1). Within Scripture, the identification of the serpent with the devil comes first in Revelation 12:9 and 20:2, in the language of vision. Demons raise a second question, large enough for its own treatment. Scripture speaks of demons often, especially in the Gospels, and says very little about where they come from. That silence will be the subject of the next article in this series. If human beings are in some sense the fathers of the adversary, they may also be the makers of their own demons. Jesus, explaining the parable of the weeds, calls the weeds “the sons of the evil one” and the enemy who sowed them “the devil” (Matt 13:38–39). Paul says the coming of the lawless one is “by the activity of Satan” (2 Thess 2:9). In both texts the adversary’s work appears in human beings.

Without Sin

If Satan is the voice of fallen human desire, and Jesus heard that voice in the wilderness, it does not follow that there was sin in Jesus. Hebrews says he was πεπειρασμένον δὲ κατὰ πάντα καθʼ ὁμοιότητα χωρὶς ἁμαρτίας, “tempted in every respect according to likeness, yet without sin” (Heb 4:15). On the night before he died, Jesus said, ἔρχεται γὰρ ὁ τοῦ κόσμου ἄρχων· καὶ ἐν ἐμοὶ οὐκ ἔχει οὐδέν, “for the ruler of the world is coming; and in me he has nothing” (John 14:30). The ruler of this world comes to every human being, because every human being lives in the world he rules, and he came to Jesus. He found nothing in him: no foothold, no desire to take hold of, no ἐπιθυμία ready to conceive. In us, James says, desire conceives and gives birth to sin. In Jesus the suggestion found nothing to conceive with. Gregory the Great taught that temptation comes in three modes, suggestion, delight, and consent, and that we fall into delight and consent because we carry the sin of the flesh within us, while Christ “carried within Him nothing of a contrary nature.” He could be tempted by suggestion, “but the delight of sin never gnawed His soul, and therefore all that temptation of the Devil was without not within Him.”⁵⁷ Gregory is right about the delight and wrong about the location. He places the temptation outside Christ to protect his holiness. Hebrews says Jesus was tempted καθʼ ὁμοιότητα, according to likeness, the way we are tempted, and we are tempted in the mind, not by a voice standing beside us on a mountain. Calvin says that Christ’s “senses were moved and powerfully affected by the glory of the kingdoms,” and yet “no inward desire arose in his mind,” for “Christ had the same feelings with ourselves, but he had no irregular appetites.”⁵⁸ The hunger was real, the picture of the kingdoms reached his mind, and the voice that bent the Psalm was heard. The answer the voice wanted never came.

Four in the Morning

The inherited picture puts the enemy far away: a dragon in the sky, with Christians watching a war between heaven and hell from safe seats. It lets a person say, “The devil made me do it,” as though the devil were someone else. It directs the search for the enemy away from the human heart, which is where Jesus, James, and John locate him. In the wilderness the enemy is close. He is the voice that wakes a man at four in the morning with something done to him twenty years ago, until he lies there furious at someone he has not seen in decades. He is the voice that takes a true thing, “you are a child of God,” and turns it into permission. He quotes Scripture to get what he wants. He is the voice in front of the mirror saying there is no way out. He is pride, and he speaks in the first person. A battle in the heart is one a Christian can fight, and Jesus showed how. He did not debate the voice or reason his way out; three times he said γέγραπται, “it is written.” When the same voice came back through Peter, he gave the same command he gave in the desert. James promises that the devil will flee from those who resist him (James 4:7), and Peter tells believers to resist him “firm in your faith” (1 Pet 5:9). John says the Son of God appeared ἵνα λύσῃ τὰ ἔργα τοῦ διαβόλου, “in order to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). He did it by being tempted as we are, where we are, by answering every suggestion with obedience, and then by carrying the whole weight of human sin, everything the adversary is made of, to the cross (1 Pet 2:24). The ruler of this world came to him and found nothing in him (John 14:30).

Notes

1. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2020), 534. ↩
2. Grudem, Systematic Theology, 535. ↩
3. Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Constitution 1, “Confession of Faith,” in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. ↩
4. Augustine, The City of God 11.13, trans. Marcus Dods (NPNF¹ 2). ↩
5. Augustine, City of God 11.15. ↩
6. Augustine, City of God 11.13. ↩
7. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 63, a. 5. ↩
8. John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), bk. 1, lines 34–49. ↩
9. Hebrew text throughout is from Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia; Greek text is from Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012). Translations are my own. ↩
10. John N. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 1–39, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 321–22. ↩
11. Oswalt, Isaiah 1–39, 322. ↩
12. Oswalt, Isaiah 1–39, 322. ↩
13. Isaiah 14:12 in the Vulgate reads quomodo cecidisti de caelo lucifer qui mane oriebaris; lucifer, “light-bearer,” is the ordinary Latin name for the morning star. ↩
14. Tertullian, Against Marcion 2.10. ↩
15. Origen, On First Principles 1.5.4. ↩
16. G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 637. ↩
17. Beale, Revelation, 636. ↩
18. Beale, Revelation, 637. ↩
19. 1 Enoch 6–11. ↩
20. Origen, On First Principles 3.2.1. ↩
21. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel according to Luke I–IX, AB 28 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 514. ↩
22. W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison Jr., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, vol. 1, ICC (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 360. ↩
23. 1 Enoch 6:1–8; 15:8–12. ↩
24. Jubilees 10:7–11. ↩
25. Life of Adam and Eve (Vita) 14:3, trans. R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913). ↩
26. Life of Adam and Eve (Vita) 15:3. ↩
27. 2 Enoch 29:3–4; 31:4, trans. W. R. Morfill and R. H. Charles, The Book of the Secrets of Enoch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1896). ↩
28. 1 Clement 3. ↩
29. Ignatius, To the Ephesians 17, 19; Epistle of Barnabas 2.1, 4; Polycarp, To the Philippians 7; Shepherd of Hermas, Mandate 12. ↩
30. Shepherd of Hermas, Mandate 6. ↩
31. Justin Martyr, Second Apology 5. ↩
32. Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 24. ↩
33. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.24.4. ↩
34. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.40.3. ↩
35. Origen, On First Principles 1.5.5. ↩
36. Augustine, City of God 15.23; Jerome, Lives of Illustrious Men 4. ↩
37. John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke, trans. William Pringle, vol. 1 (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010), 217. ↩
38. Davies and Allison, Matthew, 1:360. ↩
39. Davies and Allison, Matthew, 1:360. ↩
40. Fitzmyer, Luke I–IX, 514. ↩
41. Fitzmyer, Luke I–IX, 514. ↩
42. Davies and Allison, Matthew, 1:360. ↩
43. Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 690. ↩
44. Darrell L. Bock, Luke 1:1–9:50, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994), 374. ↩
45. Bock, Luke 1:1–9:50, 374. ↩
46. Calvin, Harmony of the Evangelists, 1:217. ↩
47. Calvin, Harmony of the Evangelists, 1:217. ↩
48. Calvin, Harmony of the Evangelists, 1:219–20. ↩
49. Gregory the Great, in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers: St. Matthew, ed. John Henry Newman, vol. 1 (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1841), 121. ↩
50. D. A. Carson, The Gospel according to John, PNTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 353. ↩
51. Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (London: United Bible Societies, 1994), 193. ↩
52. Augustine, De civitate Dei 11.13. ↩
53. Carson, John, 353. ↩
54. Carson, John, 353. ↩
55. Augustine, City of God 11.13. ↩
56. Didache 8.2. ↩
57. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 16, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea: St. Matthew, 1:118. ↩
58. Calvin, Harmony of the Evangelists, 1:219–20. ↩