Whatever happened to satan?

After the service, a woman visiting the church told me it was the first time in forever that she’d heard any pastor anywhere mention hell. She thanked me for saying it out loud. She almost whispered the word, as if it had lost its power due to overuse as a curse word but still remained something of a secret, a reality the faithful know is part of orthodox Christianity yet that remains a destination of which we must not speak.

All this made me wonder, How can anyone preach Jesus without mentioning judgment? How do you deal with his parables? With his constant and consistent warnings about perdition? With his either-ors and contrasts? Even if you fashion yourself a “red-letter Christian” who waves off Paul and the other apostles, you can’t miss the red letters that warn about destruction and losing your soul, images of a worm that won’t die and a fire that never goes out.

Goodbye, Satan

Closely related to the absence of hell is the disappearance of Satan. In many circles, it’s rare to hear a word about the Devil or demons or powers and principalities that wage war against God and his people. Satan has gone missing. Yes, he shows up in charismatic or Pentecostal churches, but in evangelical denominations whose ranks are increasingly affluent and educated, we squirm when we encounter what Jesus and the apostles say about the Accuser.

I know there are pastors who want to avoid the exaggerations prevalent in other faith traditions, where demons peek out behind every problem, where Satan’s influence gets overstated in ways that warp the biblical witness. Better to go the way of understatement, right? The only obstacle to this approach is the Bible. Well, not just the Bible, but also church history. And, well, our brothers and sisters in the global South. So basically, the Bible . . . and all believers before us and most believers around us.

We’re the outliers, our silence supposedly sophisticated.

Ripple Effects of Satan’s Disappearance

Here’s the problem. If you’re not talking about Satan, you’re probably not talking about sin and salvation in ways that go beyond therapeutic, secular categories of doing whatever’s good for you versus what’s bad for you.

If you never mention hell, you’re probably not sharing the gospel with any sense of urgency but just calling people to a better and more fulfilled way of life, which is basically what everyone everywhere is doing too, from the Instagram influencer to the Buddhist down the street.

If you never talk about demons, you probably don’t think often about angels either, which signals an impoverished imagination, a disenchanted view of the universe that rarely considers the spiritual and unseen realm that the Bible says is real, the ancient church affirmed, and the global church insists still matters.

What’s more, an anemic view of angels, demons, Satan, and hell puts us at a disadvantage when we fight sin, when we seek to worship God aright, and when we pursue the purity of heart by which we come to know and love God more. The loss of Satan means a change in the context of the Christian life, a transfiguration of the spiritual battlefield into a place of peacetime comfort and fulfillment.

Diminishing of Eternal Stakes

The problem with lowering the eternal stakes of Christianity is that we wind up raising the stakes on lesser matters. If we don’t accept the life-or-death urgency that Jesus and the apostles convey in their teaching, we’ll insert life-or-death urgency into other challenges, making earthly problems appear bigger than they are.

And that’s just what we see in the church in the West. When we lose a cosmic perspective, and when we stress only those aspects of life that involve “this world” and downplay the reality of future judgment, we lose the hope of eternal justice, which means earthly justice is all that’s left. Unless we achieve total justice here and now, we’ll never see it, which makes every pursuit of justice in this world a life-or-death struggle. In search of something to care deeply about, we’re enthralled by a myriad of lesser battles rather than the main war that rages on. Once we lose sight of the great drama, the earthly stakes of little dramas are raised.

Do We Sound Like Jesus?

I don’t recommend we speak about Satan, hell, angels, and demons with no self-awareness, giving little thought to how these realities might come across to people today. Contextualization matters. That’s why God gave us preachers to expound on his Word rather than just read it out loud. What’s needed is a careful explanation of what the Bible teaches, acknowledging the cultural distance while inviting people into a different way of seeing the world.

But even when we show great care and consideration, we will not remove the weirdness of it all. Nor should we try. The strangeness is what stands out.

If we’re to be heralds of Jesus who imitate and proclaim him, then we must grapple with everything he said, even the parts that make us uncomfortable today—his double offensiveness toward anyone whose self-righteousness fails to extend the grace and mercy of God or anyone whose sophistication sneers at warnings about judgment.

It’s possible for a church to be orthodox and adhere to a sound confession of faith yet fail to give weight to what the Bible emphasizes. It’s possible to check off the right doctrines yet fail to treat them with the gravity they deserve.

One of the easiest ways for the Enemy to dull the senses of believers today is for pastors to preach true things about Jesus while failing to ever sound like him.

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Trevin Wax/ Whatever Happened to Satan? (thegospelcoalition.org)