The Devil's Malice
Why's he so evil?
I had an epiphany the other day about the devil. Seriously… why is he such a jerk?
First, keep in mind one extremely important fact. Love is the best thing in the universe. It is the stuff of God Himself. It holds all things in being and is the source of all joy, beauty, truth, peace, and goodness.
The devil rejected love. He cut himself off from love completely, and can’t have this ultimate good for himself anymore. He hates it. It fills him with unquenchable envy. When he encounters it, he tries everything in his power to destroy it.
The Green-Eyed Monster.
When I normally think of envy, I think about the feeling I get when I’m idling at a stoplight next to a big, brand-new Ford F-150. “Gosh, I’d really like to have that.”
The devil’s envy goes way beyond this kind of mild coveting (which I really do have to work on). His envy fills him with despair because he has been cast out of the heart of love. He can never enjoy or participate in love again.
“Through the envy of the devil, death entered into the world.” (Wisdom 2:24) Despair transforms envy into a destructive whirlwind. “If I can’t have it, then I don’t want anybody to have it!” The devil works furiously to destroy whatever love he can find. The fruit of this kind of envy is pure malice.
Malice – the antithesis of love.
Even as love seeks the good of the other, malice seeks to harm the other. This stark difference can be seen at the very beginning. In the Garden of Eden, God gave Adam everything. A sweet place to live, a fun job, and a beautiful lady. Even more than that, God planned to give Adam and his bride the ultimate prize: eternal life. The tree of life grew in the middle of the garden, and God ordained that Adam could eat its fruit.
The devil saw all this good stuff happening in the garden, and he hated it. He wanted to destroy the peace between God and mankind, the love between man and woman.
Envy blossomed and hardened into malice. He saw his opportunity in the (healthy) boundary that God had put around that other tree at the center of the garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Surely, God had some good plan for this tree and its fruit, but God had not yet revealed it. He told Adam and Eve not to eat or even touch it.
The serpent lied to Eve, she believed him, ate the forbidden fruit, and BOOM! Sin and death enter the world.
Fun but not good – the hallmark of the devil.
The only shadow of love that the devil still possesses is desire. Desire is not evil in itself. I can desire something good. I can desire something good for someone else, which is the seed of love. The danger comes from disordered desires, when I desire something that is not good for myself or for someone else.
The devil lit the match of Eve’s disordered desire with his lies and led her to do the one act that would destroy her life. He still uses the same trick. I call it “fun but not good.”
Certain activities are fun but not good. Getting hammered. Getting naked (with the wrong person). Taking revenge. The list goes on and on. The devil knows that these things satisfy a disordered desire of our flesh but aren’t good for our souls. So, he works to enkindle these kinds of desires as much as possible.
His marketing team appears to have taken up residence in Hollywood, because it seems that they have completely replaced the idea of love as a self-sacrifice for the benefit of the other with a desire to do something fun but not good with another person.
Just like in the beginning, the fruit of these disordered desires is death. The desire for drugs and alcohol becomes a life-destroying addiction. The desire for commitment-free sex begets divorce, adultery, and abortion. A desire for vengeance becomes a cycle of mutual destruction.
In all of these deaths, love has no place.
Amor Vincit Omnia. (Love Conquers All)
The fruit of sin is a bit of a downer, but there’s good news. Love wins. It conquers sin and death. We just have the challenge of living through the battle to the foregone conclusion. We have to pick a side.
The book of Revelation tells us that the devil rages because he knows that he has but a little time. (Rev. 12:12) Malice is weaker than love. The devil breaks all of his pawns as he uses them. God, on the other hand, takes the lowly and makes them His children. The devil just can’t compete with that kind of generosity.
One goal drives all of the devil’s actions. He wants as many people as possible to share in his misery. He knows that the stakes are eternal, even if we don’t. At some point, God is going to take him and toss him in the lake of fire for eternity in punishment for his refusal to love. Everyone who followed his lead will join him.
Our job in all of this is to share the love. We win, and the devil loses, when love abounds. Our greatest victory over the evil one is to love God above all things, love one another as He loves us, love our neighbors as ourselves, and even love our enemies. In doing so, we become more than conquerors… we become like God Himself.
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If you want to hear more about my conversion story, check out my book Demoniac, now available on Amazon.