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THE FATHER OF LIES

As feisty as he was tender, Jesus once told the Pharisees about who their “father” was: “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).

Notice three things from Jesus’s teaching about this enigmatic creature he called the devil. 

Let’s start with the obvious: for Jesus, there is a devil. 

The only way to make sense of evil in all its malevolence—from large, global systems of evil, such as systemic racism or economic colonialism, to much smaller, human-scale evil, such as our inability to stop our self-destructive drinking or hold backbiting comments toward our friends—is to see a force behind it.

Second, for Jesus, the devil’s end goal is to spread death. 

The devil's anti-life, pro-death, pro-chaos agenda is an insatiable fire. 

Jesus, on the other hand, is the author of life itself and an advocate for all that is good, beautiful, and true—specifically, for love. God is love, and the devil is in rebellion against all that is God. Ergo, his intent is to wreck love—one relationship, one community, one nation, one generation at a time. 

And this is why following Jesus often feels like a war. It is. It's not easy to advance daily into the kingdom of God because there's opposition from the devil himself. We feel this opposition every day—in that nagging inner tension as we're torn between the opposing desires of love and lust, honesty and saving face, self-control, and indulgence. We feel this opposition in the struggle for faith in a secular age where so many cultural elites seem to have left faith behind. We feel this opposition in the breakdown of a society losing its center and spinning out of control

Finally, for Jesus, the devil's means are lies. 

Ironically, in Jesus’s most in-depth teaching on the devil in all four Gospels, he speaks not of exorcisms, illness, or terrifying nightmares. Instead, he engages in intellectual debate with the thought leaders of his day about truth and lies.

Jesus sees our primary war against the devil as a fight to believe truth over lies. How do we fight that war? That’s what we’re going to look at next.

Why is it so important to the devil that you believe lies about God?