by Roland Wrinkle
Early Origins. We’re Christians. We know there is good and evil. We know the bible talks a lot about evil—430 times to be exact. Our original ancestors got themselves into an existential caldron of woe by turning their backs on their Creator and violating his direct command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They first listened to what their Father had to say… and then they listened to a scaled, slithering, forked-tongued reptile. They went with the reptile. People often ask (incredulously), “Do you really believe there was a talking snake?” My answer always is, “I don’t care.” All I care about is what the snake said.
Satan and the Old Testament. In the story of the Fall in Genesis 3, God curses the
serpent and declares that one day in the future he will pit the viper against what is
often seen as the Christ figure in a prototype of the gospel. That is, we have Christ on
one hand and Satan on the other. In various apocalyptic stories throughout the bible,
and particularly in Revelation, we are regaled with visions of cosmic warfare waged
between the Lord God and the slimy dirtball. The Hebrew word used for the serpent
represents a creature of chaos opposed to God. Similarly, the word “Satan” first
comes up historically in 1 Chronicles when it is said that, “Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census.” Taking such a census was a precursor to war and was specifically prohibited by God. It wound up getting 70,000 good and faithful Israelites killed. Our hero next comes on stage in the parable of Job, pitting the creator of the universe with ha–Satan. He is also the lucifer of Isaiah.
Satan and the New Testament. Of course, it is Satan who is pitted against and tests Jesus in the desert and who the gospelists say “entered Judas” at the Last Supper. We get introduced to a different moniker in the Gospel of John. Jesus, while rebuking some Pharisees, turned to “the Jews who had believed him” (but who had also thought he was a demon-possessed Samaritan) and chastised them when they called themselves “children of Abraham” with, “You belong to your father, the devil.” The Greek word is diabolos and it’s used over thirty times in the New Testament. Then there’s beelzebob, used in 2 Kings to refer to a Philistine god and in Matthew’s gospel to “the prince of demons.” Finally, Jesus got really ticked off with Peter once and called him “Satan.”
The Character and Person of Satan. The father of lies. A slanderer. The accuser. The adversary. The author of sin. The personification of evil. The Opposer and great enemy of God. But is he/it a “person?” An entity? A force? A metaphor? I don’t know. And I don’t think it matters much. Satan is REAL!
Satan’s Greatest Weapon. Tradition and popular culture (I am a fan of neither) loves to depict Satan as a grotesque monster with a serious sunburn, horns, engulfed in fire and flame, with a forked tail and a malignant grin. This is a myth. But it is a myth authored and perpetuated by Satan himself. A really smart guy, two hundred years ago, said, “One of the artifices of Satan is, to induce men to believe that he does not exist: another, perhaps equally fatal, is to make them fancy that he is obliged to stand quietly by, and not to meddle with them, if they get into true silence.” If we let ourselves believe, or allow the wider culture to think we believe, that Satan is this comic book caricature, then he wins. He has convinced us he doesn’t exist and then becomes empowered to run amok, unmolested and unchallenged.
“Putin” Figures in Scripture. Both testaments reek of characters greatly reminiscent of dirtbags like Vladimir Putin (there aren’t enough of whatever you call these things: ********** to smear the estimable Russian President). Here’s a mere abbreviated sampling of Putin’s ancestors:
Pharaoh of Exodus—Murdered thousands of Israelite children, without blinking an eye.
Nebuchadnezzar II, King of Babylonia—sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, killed thousands of civilians and deported tens of thousands of innocent families to Babylon. Not soon enough, he wound up getting “driven away from people and ate grass like the ox. His body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair grew like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird.”
Belshazzar, Neb’s grandkid, who orchestrated a bloody coup to gain the throne, persecuted the Jewish captives and ended his glorious reign by wandering around in a cave, after losing his mind, and seeing his ignominious demise as the “writing on the wall.”
Haman, of the Book of Esther, who came close to committing the genocide of the Jewish captives in Persia. Was eventually hanged on the gallows of the Jewish leader he tried to assassinate.
Jezebel, Queen of Israel. You know you’re evil when you have a World War II missile named after you. Abimelech, slaughtered all 70 of his own brothers to be crowned king. As Abimelech murdered his brothers upon
a stone, so Abimelech himself met his death through a millstone.
King Herod. Paranoid, cruel, and barbaric, this king was so jealous of Jesus’ birth that he ordered all babies under the age of two to be slaughtered.
My Prediction: Putin gets poisoned by those comrades at the other end of that football field-length conference table.
Why Putin Is Not Satan (not that he didn’t try). God gave us free will. And it was and is such a big deal to him that he invariably allows us to accept him or reject him. Bow the knee or turn the back. Accordingly, we live a strange, divine economy where the one thing that Jesus and Satan share in common is that neither will enter an unwelcoming heart. We are free to make the decision to let Jesus into us and/or to let evil in. It’s up to us. The idea that Satan can overwhelm and dominate us—or that Jesus will do likewise—is simply not
biblical. When we let Satan in, God merely “gives us over to our own sinful desires.” That is, he turns to the malignancy in our heart and says, “Thy will be done.” No one gets dragged kicking and screaming into the Kingdom of God. And no one is locked inside the Gates of Eternity. God does not punish his imagers/ikons. Psalm 81: “But my people would not listen to me; Israel would not submit to me. So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts to follow their own devices.” Rom 1.21: “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him… Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.” In other words, he allowed them to allow evil into their hearts.
Similarly, we can decide to let Jesus enter us. Paul repeatedly refers to something known as the mystical union with Christ, “en christo.” The terms “In Him” and “In Christ” are found 180 times in the New Testament and Paul uses them 143 times in his Epistles. We die in Christ…and we are resurrected in Christ. The believer is baptized “into Christ,” becoming “one” with him (Galatians 3:27–28).
And It’s Not All or Nothing. Circling back now to oppression by Russian dictators, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist and one of the most famous Soviet dissidents. He was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union (USSR), in particular the Gulag system. So, he wound up being sent to the Gulag himself. A reporter once asked him what it was like to be in the presence of, and to be the victim of, pure brutal evil. His reply has echoed throughout humanity ever since:
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
I am humbled. And, as the Jews celebrate the death of Haman each year in the holiday of Purim, I will rejoice when Vladimir the Human Stain, joins his inglorious forefathers who have decided to push Solzhenitsyn’s dividing line to 100% unadulterated malice and evil. No, Putin is not Satan. Yet he has made the decision to let Satan turn his entire disintegrated humanness into an Airbnb and completely take over. You are seeing the Great Occupier living and thriving within the crumbled and mutilated shell of what once was a human being and imager of God.