I remember asking my old pastor about the devil, saying “What the hell did God create him (the devil) for?” He thought about it for a minute, then just shrugged, and replied, “Oh, he’s got a job to do I suppose.” And it seemed to me that what he was saying was correct.
So in that sense Satan does serve God. To my way of thinking he’s a catalyst, in that he forces us to make moral choices more often by constantly bringing temptations to mind.
To Satan, Satan serves no one but himself. Satan’s purpose is not merely the disinterested pursuit of what we call “evil”, he wants more than that. He wants to be god in place of God. Except Satan’s desire is not God’s desire and his way of “love” is not God’s way of love.
Whereas love in reality as God made it results in our perfect freedom and individuality, Satan’s “love” is rather seen as “hunger”(look at those examples of people who are consumed with lust and how they almost literally desire to consume others). And his ultimate goal is to enslave and feast on a world where he has absorbed all of the human race, all of creation, and all of the universe is absorbed into him and can only do anything in and through him.
I also agree with Calvin in that the devil is in some way the “minister of God’s wrath.” I can’t imagine God enjoying torturing souls for eternity in hell, so He lets the devil do it, and he enjoys it.
I don’t agree at all. The only way that Satan, or any of the devils, are servants of God is that in whatever evil that they contrive to commit only results in the ultimate goodness that God brings from it and in that only adds to God’s glory.
“God’s wrath” is not the evil that the devil commits but rather the love that God’s bestows on all, even those who choose sinfulness over God. Sin naturally is its own punishment, God doesn’t need to compound His “wrath” onto sin, it already exists in the sin itself. Sin is un-reality; empty, void of meaning and of life.
Picture a parent and a child in a store. The child wants a toy and the parent refuses to allow them to get it for whatever reason. This results in the child beginning to rebel against the parent’s decision, even to the point of it becoming a temper tantrum in the store: screaming and crying and rolling on the floor.
The parent won’t budge in the decision about the toy(he/she doesn’t need it), but has pity on the child in their tantrum. So when the parent tries to pick the child up in love, the child reacts even more emotionally and maybe even more violently.
The love of the parent, for the child, is the most “intolerable wrath” for that child who isn’t getting their way.
Expand that small example to a soul who has utterly enslaved themselves to their favorite sin, who are in effect the sin that they love so much to the effect that their is no difference between them. And you have a God who tells them that they cannot have that sin and at the same time be with Him.
A God who says, “you cannot have that sin”, and yet when He tries to love that person, that person insists upon it, even violently.
God’s “wrath” is simply to let that person have it their way.
