At Reality Check on Wednesday evenings we have been looking at doubt. One of the biggest doubts people have is how a loving and all powerful God can allow bad things to continue to happen. This is a great question. This question led the youth group to talk about who Satan is and where he came from. We will continue to talk about this on Wednesday, but there are a few important things that each of us should remember.
First, the Bible does not go into great detail about Satan and his band of followers we call demons. The reason we do not have great detail about when Satan fell and how all of the details worked out is because the Bible is telling the story of how God is redeeming humanity or calling us all back to a relationship with Him. The main goal of the Bible is not to understand what Satan is up too. When we read the story of the Bible we see a God that loves us and does not want bad things to happen to us and that is why Jesus is the main part of the Bible. We have a lot of details about Jesus and what He did because that is what God is doing. God has made it possible for us to have a relationship with God through Jesus.
Second, I think it is important that we remember that Satan is opposed to all things that are of God. The word for Satan literally means “the adversary”. Without knowing any details about Satan’s fall, we still understand that Satan is opposed to who God is. This reminds us that God is not happy with evil and suffering that results from Satan. These things are all opposed to God.
Last, we might ask why God does not just take care of the problems. The quick and easy answer is that God already has. Our short life on this earth will have difficulties and problems, but we already have victory in Jesus. If we pray and ask God why bad things are in this world we are asking a question He has already answered. God is going to fully wipe away evil one day but He is giving us a chance to turn to Him. That is the biggest lesson we can learn when we think about evil. Evil is the opposite of God and the only reason it has not been wiped away is because God is giving me, my family, my friends, my enemies, the whole world, a chance to chose Him. Have you turned from evil and turned to God?
We might not have the full details about the fall of Satan, but we do have the details about what God is doing about evil and we know that one day God will get rid of all evil and then we will be free of the results of Satan and his followers.
