Satan and Demons: Jesus Freed Us from Fear

Introduction

On Sunday, October 18, Antonio Di Passa, a pastor, concludes at the Baptist Evangelical Church of Florence (Chiesa Battista di Firenze) a series of four messages titled “Satan, demons and various spirits: let's bring some clarity.” This message is the fourth and last part.

His method is simple: do not take things “as they are said,” but go back and understand where the ideas come from. “These things that I say, or that others claim, are they really in the Bible? Did Jesus really say that? Does the Old Testament really say that? That is where we find the surprises.”

His destination is pastoral: Jesus took away the devil's power to accuse. Evil exists, but a Christian does not have to live in fear of what he does not know. The real fight takes place inside you.

Message Outline

1. Evil, a Question for Everyone

Evil is a problem for every religion and for every person. “Even atheists have to face this question.”
Most religions answered with dualism: a good god and an evil god in permanent struggle, the yin and the yang. The Old Testament rejected from the start the idea of a rival god: “There is only God.”
The question remained: why this misfortune? Why was this child born this way? The answer of the first centuries was: it is your fault, you sinned. Some rabbis even thought that one could sin in the womb. Hence the question put to Jesus: “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” (John 9:2). And Jesus demolishes that way of thinking.
The pastor compares this logic to a form of karma, which in Eastern religions is a mechanical law, without moral judgment. Here, a just God was added who punishes “for your own good”: “I give you the slap because you deserve it.”
The book of Job puts this mentality into crisis. His three friends keep telling him: admit that you sinned somewhere. Job answers that he has done nothing. When you are innocent and you receive evil, the explanation no longer holds. Job receives no answer from God, but he understands, and he remains even more faithful to him. Evil remains a mystery.

2. How Demons Entered the Picture

In the sixth century before Jesus Christ, with the destruction of Jerusalem and the deportation to Babylon, the people discover the religions of Asia, in particular Zoroastrianism, which is a dualism. The Judaism that follows absorbs many of these ideas.
The world then fills with demons, a kind of lesser deities. People did not know the origin of diseases: “It is not a fever, a demon has taken hold of you.” Are you drunk? That is the demon of drunkenness. They did not speak of possession, but of a force that overpowered the human being.
These ideas multiply without measure by the time Jesus arrives. And Jesus sweeps everything away: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18). For the preacher, this means: the rule of the accuser is over, he has no more power over the one who believes in God.
“God has won, he has always been the winner.” But we remain free to choose evil or to do it.

3. The Devil, a Very Convenient Alibi

The pastor reads a sentence from Brother Alberto Maggi: “The devil was without doubt an exceptional stroke of genius, an alibi for the misdeeds of human beings. It is the devil who tempted me.”
As early as the second century before Jesus Christ, the author of Sirach warned that it was pointless to shift one's own responsibilities onto the devil: when the ungodly curses Satan, he curses himself (Sirach 21:27, a deuterocanonical book found in Catholic Bibles). He also cites Origen, a Church Father, who said: “If the devil did not exist, no man would sin.”
A “childish legend” made the devil a success: that of Lucifer, the most beautiful angel, punished for his pride and changed into a devil, the enemy of humanity. It comes from the book of the secrets of Enoch, an apocryphal work never received as the Word of God, which nevertheless took root in the Christianity of the first centuries.
“To translate is to betray.” In the Latin Vulgate, the star of light in Isaiah 14:12 becomes “Lucifer,” and people thought of a fallen angel. Yet Lucifer means “light-bearer,” and in Revelation Jesus himself presents himself as the bright morning star (Revelation 22:16).

4. Satan, the Adversary Who Stands in the Way

In Hebrew, satan means adversary, enemy. Greek translates it as diabolos. The word designates symbolic figures but also real people: the Philistines fear that David will become a satan to them and will side with Israel (1 Samuel 29:4).
In Job, the satan is a symbolic character, in the image of an official of the king of Persia whose task is to accuse the officials unfaithful to the king (see also Zechariah 3:1). He serves to set up the drama that Job must go through.
This function of accusing human beings before God ends with Jesus, who presents a God different from the God of religion. “Jesus puts an end to religion.” It is not true that God rewards the good and punishes the wicked: he offers his love to all, without condition, “for he is kind toward the unthankful and evil” (Luke 6:35).
A God who does not punish but who loves sinners no longer needs an accuser: “the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them before our God day and night” (Revelation 12:10). The pastor regrets that the Church did not know how to keep this revolution and brought back laws, rules and excuses.
The Gospels do not seek to prove the existence of the devil, but to show who he is: God is the love that puts itself at the service of human beings to set them free, the devil is the figure of the power that dominates and subjugates. That is why Jesus tells the religious leaders that they have the devil as their father (John 8:44): they sacrifice people to their own interest, hidden behind doctrine. “What interests you is the rule, not the good of the person.”
Jesus also calls two of his disciples “Satan.” To Peter, who wants to stop him from going to the cross and dreams of driving out the Romans: “Get behind me, Satan” (Matthew 16:23), that is, “get behind me, you are the one who must follow me.” “He does not say that Peter is a bad person, he tells him: here, you are on the wrong path.” And about Judas: “One of you is a devil” (John 6:70).

5. Where the Belief in Demons Comes From

Satan and devil refer to the same thing, one translating the other. Demons belong to another world of ideas. They enter when, between the third and second centuries before Jesus Christ, the Bible is translated from Hebrew into Greek: the translators encounter remnants of Babylonian mythology and call demons everything they could not explain, lightning, thunder.
The beings between the divine and the human become demons. The image of the devil as a goat comes from the satyrs and the god Pan: it “came in through the window” into the Christian mentality. For these people, everything they did not understand was a demon, a fear, a threat.
People looked for the origin of demons in Genesis 6:4, an obscure passage about the sons of God and the daughters of men. The apocryphal writings of the third and second centuries before Jesus Christ used it to explain the birth of demons. “Here, the text does not say that.” The pastor cites in passing Mauro Biglino, who makes the Nephilim into extraterrestrials, whereas all of this has a “very normal” historical and philological explanation.
The apocrypha were set aside from the start, precisely because they exaggerate. He mentions Fabrizio De André, a great connoisseur of the New Testament, who draws on these mythologies and then reproaches Christians for not believing in them.
According to the preacher, the Hebrew Bible knows no case of a possessed person, and the New Testament never speaks of possession by the devil, only by demons, in the sense of an instinct, an evil inner impulse.
The “Do you renounce Satan?” of baptism is a relic from two thousand years ago. It meant: “Do you renounce a life far from God?”, because a life without God meant a life under the power of evil.

6. When the Obsession with the Devil Does More Harm Than the Devil

The figure of the devil, “insignificant in Scripture” compared to everything else, has taken up an outsized place in the lives of believers. “Many Christians seem to believe more in the omnipresence of the tempter than in that of the Savior.”
“We do not need Satan or the devil to believe in God. We believe much better that way.”
The price of this obsession is heavy: tens of thousands of women tortured and burned alive, accused of dealings with the devil, and even today women who are victims of so-called exorcists who, under the pretext of freeing them, subject them to psychological and physical violence.
The pastor loves the Poschiavo Valley in Switzerland. Yet in the seventeenth century, this valley was one of the European centers of witch hunting. With his students, he read the trials kept in the archives. The students asked him: “Pastor, what makes that one a witch?” Often it was a pretext to seize land. Under torture, people ended up confessing, and were burned. “That is what happened with those superstitions from which Jesus had freed us.”

7. The Real Fight Takes Place Within

“Evil, we cannot deny it. The question is what we call it and how we interpret it.” We can speak of a “demon of alcohol” for this destructive force: you know it is hurting you, but you cannot manage, because the reward mechanism in the brain is out of order, and you need help to get out of it.
Jesus says that what comes out of us is the real problem (Mark 7:15). If we do not oppose stimuli with the Word of God and the love that forgives and conquers all, we will get nowhere.
Evil has no power against God. But if you inflate this “deflated balloon,” it gains strength, and these forces can join together until they produce wars and destruction. The fight against our thirst for violence, revenge and destruction must begin inside.
The pastor has always loved Francis of Assisi, because he challenges him: “Who is crazy, him or me?” Francis had overcome this destructive force that comes from within.
Evil also takes the form of structures: those that maintain poverty when there would be food for everyone. How do we dismantle them? By love, that is, welcome, acceptance and openness, which is what Jesus did.
He concludes with this reading: “To the extent that Satan is identified with imperfection, wickedness and human selfishness, the fight against evil can be closer and surer. If he is identified otherwise, it risks becoming a fight against windmills.” And he adds: these forces have no power against God, and the Lord, through our faith, gives us the ability and the strength to overcome them. “Everything else is our excuses.”

Key Takeaways

In the Bible, satan means adversary: the one who stands in the way, even when it is a disciple like Peter.
With Jesus, the accuser has fallen. With a God who does not punish but who also loves sinners, the function of accusing human beings disappears.
Many images of the devil and demons come from mythologies and apocryphal writings, not from Scripture.
Blaming the devil is a convenient alibi. What comes out of your heart is the real place of the fight.
Evil has no power against God. Through faith, the Lord gives you the strength to overcome it with love.

Personal Application

Is there a fear of the devil or of demons that weighs on your faith more than trust in your Savior?
In what recent situation were you tempted to say “it's the devil” rather than acknowledge your own responsibility?
Like Peter, is there an area where you put yourself in front of Jesus instead of walking behind him?
What inner impulse (anger, revenge, dependence) do you need to face with the Word of God, and perhaps with someone's help?
How can you, this week, respond to the evil around you with welcome, acceptance and openness?

Verses Cited

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the word Satan mean in the Bible?

In Hebrew, satan means adversary, the one who stands in the way. Greek translates it as diabolos, which is where the word devil comes from. Antonio Di Passa points out that the term sometimes refers to a very real person: the Philistines fear that David will become a satan to them, an adversary (1 Samuel 29:4).

Why does Jesus call Peter Satan?

Peter wants to stop Jesus from going to the cross. Jesus tells him: “Get behind me, Satan” (Matthew 16:23). For the preacher, this means: get behind me, you are the one who must follow me. Jesus is not saying that Peter is a bad person, he is telling him that he is on the wrong path and that he is standing in the way of his mission.

Should a Christian be afraid of the devil?

No. Jesus saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning (Luke 10:18) and the accuser has been thrown down (Revelation 12:10). Evil exists, but it has no power against God. The fight takes place inside us, with God's love and his Word, and through faith the Lord gives us the strength to overcome.