If you are a true believer, Satan hates you. He hates you because you bear the image of Christ, because you are the peculiar workmanship of God created in Christ Jesus unto good works, and because you were snatched from his power.

By grace, you deserted Satan, and you fled his ter­ritory. You acknowledged Christ as your Lord and Mas­ter. You testify with Peter, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16). Satan hates you because Christ is within you and because you love Christ.

Satan wants you back. As Jesus said to His disciples, “Behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat” (Luke 22:31), so Satan wants to sift you like wheat.

Do not overestimate or underestimate Satan. He is not a fallen deity; he is not God. He is only a fallen angel. He is not almighty. Yet Satan is a powerful enemy. John Blanchard writes,

We are opposed by a living, intelligent, resourceful and cunning enemy who can outlive the oldest Christian, outwork the busiest, outfight the strongest and outwit the wisest.

Every true believer is engaged in what the Bible describes as spiritual warfare (Gen. 3:15; Rev. 12:7). John Bunyan called it a holy war. This spiritual war­fare or holy war involves a perpetual battle against three great enemies: the devil, the world, and the flesh.

A Fierce Battle⤒🔗

The battle against Satan and the devils is fierce. Life and death are at stake, involving forces of light and dark­ness. Dark principalities and powers are under Satan’s dominion and subject to his orders. Satan’s lieutenants are devils who delight to carry out his orders. Satan’s army is aggressive, malignant, and cruel, and its power is in high places above us and around us. This army is too powerful for us to fight in our own strength, yet we cannot compromise with Satan or surrender to him. Rather, we must resist the devil (James 4:7) by conscientiously following the Bible’s directions for vic­tory over Satan.

A Spiritual Battle←⤒🔗

The battle against Satan and his devils is spiritual. We do not fight this enemy with guns, tanks, or atomic weapons. Nor do we fight merely against flesh and blood. As Paul wrote to the Ephesians, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph. 6:12). This battle is not for worldly power, pos­sessions, or honor, Paul says. It aims higher, at the spiritual realities of truth, righteousness, and the glory of the living God and His Son. Behind our visible ene­mies of flesh and blood is an army of spiritual, invis­ible adversaries. Spiritual warfare is a battle against invisible enemies with invisible weapons who oppose the cause and kingdom of Jesus Christ.

We wrestle against Satan’s invisible, innumerable, powerful army. Wrestling is close, spiritual conflict. It is intense and strenuous. In wrestling, opponents do not maintain distance from each other; they seize each other. Whether as the prince of darkness or as an angel of light, Satan engages us hand-to-hand and foot-to-­foot in life and death spiritual warfare.

A Necessary Battle←⤒🔗

The battle against Satan and his devils is necessary. Much as our world today cannot escape the war against terrorism, so we cannot escape war with Satan. Like it or not, we are at war. We cannot plead pacifism or medical deferment, nor can we avoid the bullets and the bombs. To be in the midst of war, and not realize it, is most dangerous. If we ignore the enemy, we set ourselves up for defeat. Paul commands us to “put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil” (Eph. 6:11).

Too many Christians today pay little attention to Paul’s command. Too many churches speak more about disarmament than armament. And too many preach­ers promote a broadly ecumenical “universal brother­hood” that embraces a variety of religions rather than expose the antithesis between two opposing kingdoms in this world.

As unpleasant as the subject of Satan is, we need to study it. The Puritan Thomas Brooks wrote:

Christ, the Scripture, your own hearts, and Satan’s devices, are the four prime things that should be first and most studied and searched. Precious Remedies, p. 15

If we have poorly formed ideas about Satan’s goals, strengths, and limitations, we become careless. We underestimate the power of our enemy.

In his book, Power Encounters, David Powlison, edi­tor of the Journal of Biblical Counseling and lecturer in practical theology at Westminster Theological Semi­nary, rightly argues that we urgently need to fight Satan by reclaiming biblical, traditional, spiritual warfare as set forth by Paul in Ephesians 6:10-20. We live in a society that has become increasingly pagan and has brought itself into a pervasive array and bondage of addictions. Troubled or bizarre behavior has become commonplace; many people are experiencing a height­ened sense of the presence of evil. Missionaries and anthropologists alert us to animistic cultures and demon possessions. Satanism is flourishing in Western nations. Since the 1970s, numbers of charismatics, dispensationalists, and theologians of the so-called “third wave of the Holy Spirit” have been teaching and practicing various forms of “deliverance ministries” to cast out inhabiting demons. Frank Peretti’s books have only added to the confusion, influencing thousands to see demons lurking everywhere.

On the other hand, millions in modern civilization don’t believe the devil exists, or at least have exorcised him from their working vocabulary, even though the devil is a primary explanation for the plight of mod­ern civilization. This attitude has even permeated the church. The nineteenth-century preacher, Charles Spurgeon, could already say in his day, “Certain the­ologians, nowadays, do not believe in the existence of Satan. It is singular when children do not believe in the existence of their own father.”

Biblical, clear-headed thinking about Satan and spiritual warfare is sorely needed today. Particularly as believers we need to be cognizant that the battle against Satan and his forces of evil is fierce, spiritual, and necessary. We must know our adversary. We must know Satan’s personality and history. We must know his strategies, his power, and his weaknesses. We must know how to withstand him and what spir­itual weapons to take up against him. We must defeat him by faith, through lives that bear fruit and spread the truth.

In a series of articles, titled “Striving Against Satan,” I wish to address this need from a practical perspective. Following this introductory article, we will examine the personality and history of Satan. Then we will study how believers are to exploit Satan’s weaknesses by fighting defensively and offensively. Third, relying heavily on old classics, I want to expose Satan’s devices and expound our remedies for them. The concluding articles, the Lord willing, will address how we can defeat Satan in our personal lives and in our churches and nations.