1 Peter 5:8 Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.
The first thing to say is that the interpretation “the devil as a lion is Nero” is a big improvement on the popular (at least in earlier days) idea that this verse refers to a [...]
Answers about devil
See also What is the difference between “unclean spirit” and “demon”?
Why does OT and NT teaching on demons appear to differ?
It is undeniable that there is a difference between the way the OT and NT describe illness and disability:
Exodus 4:11 Then the Lord said to [Moses], “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, [...]
Jesus has already used similar language in saying that the Pharisees are children of their father the devil (John 8:44)
Matt.25:41 is partly just apocalyptic language (no different from Rev.12:9) but there may be a literal edge to it as well, and the “angels” in this case are the same as the “goats”. Of course the [...]
Early Christians after the 1st century AD typically understood the devil/satan as a supernatural evil being, either a fallen angel or a demon. However, some early Jewish interpreters held a very different view.
The famous 18th century Baptist commentator John Gill acknowledged that early Jewish teachers interpreted ’satan’ as a reference to the natural inclination [...]
If the devil were an enormously powerful supernatural being which tormented the wicked in hell, then it would be very difficult indeed to explain why God would create such a being. However the Bible does not teach that the devil is a supernatural being, or that it torments the wicked in hell. The Bible [...]
This description only appears in Ephesians 2:2:
Eph 2:1-2 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.
So Paul equates the ‘prince of [...]
1 John 3:8. Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.
The word ‘devil’ does not occur in the Old Testament, so this is not a direct quotation from [...]
The devil is an allegory, the personification of temptation.
The following details support the suggestion that the ‘temptation’ in the wilderness in Matthew 4 and Luke 4 is an allegory probably told to the disciples by Jesus himself, not a literal event with a literal tempter figure (angelic or human) following Jesus.
Some of the events are [...]
Despite the popular mythology about a wicked angel called Lucifer, the word only occurs once in the Bible and it has nothing to do with angels. The name Lucifer comes from Isaiah 14:12 which says (in the KJV)
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning…
This is the only place in the [...]
