Close your eyes and picture the Devil.
Most people land on a red figure with horns, hooves, and a pitchfork. Or a smooth, articulate rebel in expensive clothing who offers deals and quotes poetry.
Neither image came from the Bible. Not one feature of either picture is found in Scripture. The first was assembled over centuries from Greek mythology, medieval art, and folk tradition. The second was invented by a seventeenth-century English poet in
Paradise Lost.
Both have been so widely distributed for so long that most people cannot picture the Devil without reaching for one or the other. And both picture something that does not exist.
That is the problem this book takes up. When you fill the space where a real Adversary belongs with a picture that does not match him, you are not safer. You are more exposed. The person afraid of a cartoon is not afraid of anything real. The person fascinated by a romantic rebel has already been moved by the thing he thought he was only observing. Scripture names this vulnerability in 2 Corinthians 2:11 -
"lest Satan should get an advantage of us: for we are not ignorant of his devices." Ignorance of his actual methods is an advantage given to him.
Unmasking the Devil is a thirteen-chapter study of what Scripture actually establishes about the Adversary. His origin in the heavenly realm. His fall. His names. His methods. His limits. His defeat at the cross. And what the believer is given to stand against him with.
Each chapter takes one truth and hands it forward to the next:
- The heavenly realm before the fall, and why this chapter had to come first
- Satan's origin in Scripture - and the line between what the text states and what tradition has added
- The names and titles of Satan, and what each one reveals about him
- The Devil we invented - horns, hooves, pitchforks, Dante, and Milton
- The cultural Devil of the modern world, and the disguise as his primary mode
- The serpent's strategy - the three moves that have not changed since Eden
- The accuser of the brethren, and the closed court of Romans 8
- Principalities and powers, with a word about modern speculation
- Demons in Scripture, and what Scripture does not teach about them
- What Satan cannot do - the limits the text draws around him
- The defeat already accomplished at the cross
- The armor of God, piece by piece
- Victory in Jesus, and how a believer walks in it
Every factual claim is backed by Scripture or a cited source. All quotations are drawn from the King James Version. Hebrew and Greek terms are given and explained plainly. Each chapter closes with review questions for personal study, Bible class, or small-group use. Three appendices close the volume - a Scripture reference sheet, a glossary of key terms, and a recommended reading list.
This book is not designed to frighten you. It is not written to produce obsession or paranoia about the demonic. It is written because the person who does not understand the Adversary is not safer for the ignorance.
It is written for high school and college-aged readers who are ready to do adult work with the Bible. It is equally suited to adult Bible classes and to any believer who wants the Adversary treated from the text itself - without the cartoon, without the romance, and without the speculation.
Know the Adversary the way Scripture presents him. Then stand in the armor God has already provided, on ground Christ has already won.
"Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: Whom resist stedfast in the faith." - 1 Peter 5:8-9
