After Jesus' baptism by John, "the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him." So Mark, with his typical terseness, summarizes what must have been a potentially exhausting stage of Jesus' ministry.
The Old Testament does not have much to say about the Devil, and it is important to remember this. We have got used to the picture painted by the mediæval church of green imps with forked tails toasting clergy, politicians and bankers in a mighty bonfire. In this picture, the Devil is in charge of a particularly unpleasant piece of real estate, leading a conflict against God, who rewards the humble and saintly with harps, clouds and pearly gates. It is a battle of near-equals, with God having a permanent advantage, but the Devil giving a good performance nevertheless.
This picture is seriously misleading. The Devil does not have an independent existence as a sort of anti-God. In the Old Testament, the Devil is not even God's opponent, for how could God have any opponents other than human ones who reject God's plans?
The word satan is the Hebrew for opponent, and is mostly used in this sense (for example, in Ps 109, the psalmist asks for his adversaries to be repaid (v.20) and clothed with shame (v.29)). When God sends an angel to hinder Balaam's donkey-ride, the angel claims to be "satan": Balaam's adversary.
On a few occasions, however, the Old Testament mentions ha-satan, The Opponent. The best-known place is at the beginning of the book of Job, where The Opponent is portrayed like a courtier, casts doubt on Job's goodness, and gets God's agreement to test this theory out.
But in the Old Testament Satan is not God's opponent. Satan's work is to point out human weaknesses (for an example, look at Zech 3:1). Satan is our opponent: what we would call "a Devil's advocate."
The Greek equivalent of satan is diabolos, an accuser, from which we get our word Devil. (The "devils" that Jesus cast out were something quite different - daimones, demons.) In the New Testament, Satan is seen in a more active rôle, not only showing up our evil deeds but encouraging us to perform them. The snake who tempted Eve, the King of Babylon who sought to rise like the morning star (Is 14:12-15) are seen as personifications of the Devil.
So Jesus refers to the power of "the Devil and his angels" (Matt 25:41), of "the prince of this world" (John 14:30), and the Ephesians learn of "the ruler of the power of the air", whose "spirit is now at work among those who are disobedient." (2:2). This idea matured in later writings: especially in 1 John, which asserts: "Everyone who commits sin is a child of the Devil; for the Devil has been sinning from the beginning", and in the Apocalypse, which depicts a final conflict between the archangel Michael and "the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan."
Theologians have been unable to resist the Devil as a topic for discussion. Christians have always believed that the Devil was created by God, but somehow "went bad". It is dangerous to think otherwise. We are not dualists - we do not believe that there is a separate force called "evil", and we do not believe that "the world, the flesh and the Devil" are inherently evil. But the world, the flesh and the Devil have the potential to lead us to perform evil deeds. Lent should be an occasion when we recall how Jesus transformed the world by coming to live in it, how Jesus transformed the flesh by becoming a real human being, and how Jesus met the Devil's quotations from the Bible with counter-quotations. Let us, too, put the Devil in a suitable place!
HD