‘Since Jesus has won the victory, is it possible that we can still be at risk of Satan’s destructive power and activities?’
First of all, let me start by saying exactly what C.S. Lewis said, ‘There are two equal dangers, both dangerous and rooted in ignorance’. The first is being obsessed with the enemy, and we have quite many examples in this category that I think are just unhealthy and lead to unfortunate decisions that people make, like the example of the parent who did not attend to the needs of their autistic child but only took them for prayers. In this case, I think what some people do is that they view the world strictly through spiritual lens. If you view the world and things that happen in the world, strictly and exclusively through a spiritual lens, believe me, you will be erroneous in most of your interpretations of things that are going on in the world. In fact, you would actually fall into spiritual error, and then, the other things that God has revealed will elude you. You know, some people say that God has two books; the book of revelation and the book of creation, right? The book of creation are those kinds of things we learn that are simply true, you know, that’s why we go to school. For example, with autism, we can see that there is psychological issue there and so, if we are obsessed with the spiritual world, we end up falling into spiritual errors, and then take unfortunately very bad and sometimes, harmful decisions.
So that is one of the dangers, and I would say, in some way, it is the error that we find mostly in what people call the global South, that is places like Africa, South America etc. That is our main error.
The second danger is the error of being unnecessarily and completely ignorant about the enemy. As someone who has stayed in the global West before, I’ll say this is the error that the West falls into. This happens when we take a particular scripture that says something that is true but we overblow what it says and then become ignorant of other scriptures that help us balance our views. Let’s take an example from scriptures, I think there are fewer people who would know that Satan has been defeated than Paul right? In Colossians 2:13-15, it was Paul that said Jesus made a public spectacle of the devil and has nailed our sins to the cross, yet he was the one who was telling the Thessalonian Christians that I have wanted to come to visit you but Satan blocked me. Paul also said something had been happening to him; a messenger of Satan was given to me and ‘I prayed three times and it did not go’ (2 Corinthians 12:8) then Paul said in Romans 16:20 that the God of peace will soon (not that he has already) but that he will soon crush Satan under our feet. Hey, can I give you a quote that you should never forget?
“Jesus has conquered Satan, but he hasn’t cancelled Satan”
That is, Jesus has defeated Satan, the war is over, but the battles are not. Like what happened in the World War II, there was a difference between the ‘D-day’ and ‘VE day’. So the ‘D-day’ was the day we knew effectively that the war was over. It was the landing of the allies at Normandy, the largest movement of any kind of group of forces ever in world history. At that time, you could just say the war was over but even though the ‘D-day’ had happened, there was the ‘VE day’ (Victory in Europe day) that happened months after the ‘D-day’
You see, after the ‘D-day’, there were still battles, even though the Nazis had been effectively defeated, there were still skirmishes happening all around, real skirmishes, and that’s why we have to be careful with how we interpret that Satan has been defeated. Yes, Satan has been defeated for us but we battle Satan every time, he is against the church. Revelation 12 shows us that there was a woman in the sky who had a crown of 12 stars on her head and she gave birth to a man child which is Jesus, who was caught up to the throne. This tells us first about the incarnation and then the ascension of Jesus, it then says the dragon that wanted to devour the child consistently pursued the woman; in other words, Satan is constantly against the church, constantly! And that’s why we read stuff about people being taught by doctrines of devils in the church right? Paul was talking about that happening in the church (1 Timothy 4:1) So, that’s my point. We can either be obsessed with Satan and then end up interpreting things erroneously, and at the same time, we can just completely ignore and say we are totally victorious. But, in truth, the full outworking of our victory comes when Jesus returns, and in that regard, Paul then says we should not be ignorant of the wiles of the enemy (2 Corinthians 2:1)
*C.S Lewis was a British writer, literary scholar, and Anglican lay theologian.
Answered by Femi Osunnuyi is lead pastor of City Church, a gospel-centred urban church in the city of Lagos. Because of his passion for church planting and leadership development he also serves on the Lead Team of Acts29 and the Advisory Team of City to City Africa. He is happily married to Tosin and is father to Tofunmi and Timilehin.