The first question, before answering why Satan and the angel were fighting over the high priest, is to ask, what is a vision? Is a vision a view into real events happening in heaven? Or is a vision a kind of symbolic parable told by a prophet to illustrate a point. Of course the answer [...]
Answers about Satan
And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. (2 Corinthians 11:14) This appears to be one of two references in 2 Corinthians to a Jewish myth circulating in the 1st Century. The original primary source “The Life of Adam and Eve” appears to have been written in Aramaic in the 1st Century [...]
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 nowhere [...]
No, satan is not a fallen angel. God tells us in the Bible that angels do not sin, so they cannot “fall”: angels only do what God wants them to do: Ps. 103:20 Bless the Lord, O you his angels, you mighty ones who do his word, obeying the voice of his word! Angles obey [...]
Nothing happens to us without God permitting it, so whoever is in our lives is there because God has allowed it. But there is no evidence that anyone has to explicitly ask God’s permission to come into our lives. The Hebrew word Satan simply means opponent or adversary. It is applied to many different people [...]
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 [...]
2 Corinthians 2:10-11. Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive. What I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ, so that we would not be outwitted by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his designs. Satan is a Hebrew word that has been taken straight [...]
“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you,4 that he might sift you like wheat, 32 but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.” (Luke 22:31-32) As usual, Satan means adversary and we have to determine who the adversary is. If we [...]
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 [...]
