Why Doesn't God Just Destroy Satan?

[00:00:00]If God is all powerful, if God is good, if God hates evil more than anyone who has ever suffered because of it, then why is Satan still here, not defeated, not gone, still somehow active in the world thousands of years after his rebellion began? This is one of the oldest questions in Christianity and [music] honestly one of the most human.

[00:00:27]Not just theologians ask it. Anyone who has ever watched something terrible happen and thought, "If God can stop [music] this, why doesn't he?" is asking a version of the same question. A parent standing beside a hospital bed, a soldier watching a friend fall, someone lying awake after losing everything to a choice that wasn't even their own. In that moment, nobody is thinking about theology. [music] They're thinking one thing. If you're really there and you're really good, why don't you just end [music] this? And I want to tell you up front, the answer has almost nothing to do with God's power. It has everything to do with what Satan actually is and what destroying him would actually require.

[00:01:15]The strangest part of his story [music] is that he wasn't created as God's enemy.

[00:01:20]In fact, if you had seen him before the rebellion, you probably would have mistaken him for one of heaven's greatest servants.

[00:01:28]Because here's the part almost nobody tells you. Satan didn't lose because God was stronger. That was never the question. His greatest weapon was never power.

[00:01:39]>> [music] >> It was freedom.

[00:01:42]Imagine standing in the presence of God, seeing his glory face to face, entrusted with more beauty than human words can describe, and still, somewhere inside that glory, believing I deserve his throne. Before Satan was Satan, he was one of the highest ranking angels God ever made. The earliest Christians describe something remarkable. This being was given real authority, real responsibility, a share in administering God's own creation, glory, [music] trust, a place near the very throne of God. And somewhere inside that glory, [music] something turned.

[00:02:24]The early fathers don't describe a fall caused by weakness or by God making a mistake. They describe a choice, a being with real freedom freely deciding that the authority entrusted to him wasn't enough, that he wanted more, that he would rather rule than serve. So, he rebelled.

[00:02:47]And here's [music] what I think most people miss about that moment. It didn't end there. The early church didn't picture Satan's rebellion as a single event that happened once long ago and now just sits in the past like a completed crime.

[00:03:04]>> [music] >> A second-century writer named Athenagoras, defending the faith to a hostile Roman world, put it in language that still lands hard today. He called Satan, {quote} the prince of [music] matter, someone who abuses the very government entrusted to him, exercising a control contrary to the good that is in God. Contrary to. Not absent from.

[00:03:30]Actively working against. That's the detail that changes everything. Whatever in this world looks cruel or senseless or contrary to a good creator, the earliest Christians didn't blame it on God at all. They saw it as the fingerprints of a rebellion still in progress, >> [music] >> a stolen authority still being misused right now, not a myth from long ago.

[00:03:56]Orthodox teaching is careful here in a way I actually find important. Satan isn't described as some kind of impersonal darkness, a mere absence of light drifting through the world. He is a real will, a real freedom, still active, still choosing over and over to reject [music] the good he was made for.

[00:04:20]Which brings us to a question underneath the question. [music] And I think honestly, we've been asking the wrong one all along. The real mystery isn't why God doesn't destroy Satan. The real mystery is why God still gives the rest of us that same dangerous freedom. Christians who take this seriously have answered it in different ways over the centuries. Here's where it gets [music] even stranger.

[00:04:50]The first answer comes from Augustine, one of the most important theologians in Christian history writing in the 4th century. Augustine asked what evil actually is, not what it does, what it is as a thing. And his answer changes everything. Evil, he said, has no existence of its own. It's not a substance [music] sitting somewhere that God could reach out and crush. Evil is a privation, an absence, a wound in something that was originally good, the way rot isn't a substance added to wood, but the good wood itself hollowed out.

[00:05:29]If that's true, destroying evil isn't like destroying an object. You can't smash an absence. The only way to remove it would be to remove the very freedom that made the corruption possible [music] from everyone, not just Satan.

[00:05:45]But that raises another problem. Even if evil isn't [music] a thing, why would God let anyone choose it in the first place?

[00:05:54]That's where the second answer comes in, and it's older than Augustine's.

[00:05:59]It comes from Irenaeus, writing in the 2nd century, >> [music] >> a man who learned the faith from Polycarp, who himself had learned it directly from the Apostle John. Which means what Irenaeus taught wasn't invented in isolation. It came down through a direct living chain from the apostles themselves. Irenaeus offered something almost tender. He suggested that humanity wasn't created already finished the way a statue is finished the moment it leaves the sculptor's hands. We were created able to grow, meant to mature toward God through real struggle, real choice, real resistance [music] to real temptation.

[00:06:42]And here's the uncomfortable part of his answer.

[00:06:45]A world with no possibility of evil would also be a world with no possibility of real virtue. Courage only means something if there's something to be afraid of. Faithfulness only means something if unfaithfulness was actually possible.

[00:07:03]Take away the danger and you don't get a safer world. You get a world where nothing anyone does actually means anything.

[00:07:13]There's even a strange, almost practical purpose the Apostle Paul hints at.

[00:07:18]He writes that God allowed the devil to continue in part to reveal his true principles, to let his own nature expose itself for what it is, rather than leaving people to wonder. And here's the detail almost nobody talks about.

[00:07:35]There's a third answer, and I [music] think it gets closest to the heart of it. It comes from a single line I read while researching this, one that stopped me completely.

[00:07:45]>> [music] >> God cannot destroy the devil in one blow without destroying us, too.

[00:07:50]>> [music] >> Here's what that means. The very same freedom that let one angel choose rebellion over service is the same freedom every human being uses every single day to choose God or not to.

[00:08:04]It's not a different kind of freedom.

[00:08:07]It's the same gift, which means God cannot revoke it by force from Satan without threatening the logic of the whole gift itself, the same freedom that lets any of us freely choose to love him back.

[00:08:21]Orthodox Christians hold one more piece alongside all of this, and it changes the whole picture.

[00:08:28]Satan's power was not left untouched. It was already broken decisively at the cross and the resurrection of Christ.

[00:08:37]Already, but not yet completely finished. His authority is real, but it is a defeated authority, still permitted to act for a time, but no longer ultimate. The war has already been decided.

[00:08:54]What remains is the mopping up.

[00:08:56]>> [music] >> And that's not just poetry. Christ himself spent his entire ministry casting out demons in village after village, publicly, [music] undeniably.

[00:09:07]And before he left, he handed that same authority to his followers, >> [music] >> not as a symbolic gesture, but as real, ongoing work. In the name of Christ, the early church taught, one is able to cast out demons and to destroy the evil powers, not someday, now.

[00:09:28]That's why, [music] from the very beginning, the church never treated this as something to simply wait out. It's an active war, already won in principle being finished in practice one soul one moment of resistance at a time.

[00:09:44]So if we gather all of this together, God doesn't destroy Satan immediately because evil isn't a thing to be smashed because freedom [music] cannot be revoked by force without changing creation itself and because Christ has already won the decisive victory at the [music] cross. What remains isn't uncertainty. It's history moving toward its final judgment. Here's what I actually think this question is really about. It was never really about Satan's fate at all. It's about ours. The same freedom that let one glorious angel choose rebellion over service is the freedom you and I use in smaller ways every single day. Every time we choose resentment instead of forgiveness. Every time we choose pride instead of humility. [music] Every time we choose ourselves over God.

[00:10:43]That's the uncomfortable gift underneath this whole question.

[00:10:47]>> [music] >> God could make all of it simpler. He could remove the freedom to fail and with it every failure that has ever happened including yours >> [music] >> including mine. But he hasn't not because he is indifferent to what that freedom costs because a love that couldn't be refused was never going to be love at all.

[00:11:09]One day Satan's rebellion will reach its final end and so will our own choosing.

[00:11:16]Not because God forces anyone but because love has never existed without freedom.

[00:11:23]Perhaps that is why God has waited all along. Glory to God for everything.