Satan Used to Work for God with Dr. Ryan Stokes

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today we have Dr. Ryan Stokes. Dr. Stokes, thanks so much for joining us today.

Dr. Ryan Stokes: Hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to this. I expect this to be fun.

Johnny Ova: We have a topic today that I know our audience is going to be very interested in. I can almost hear the questions coming in the back of my head as you and I talk about some things.

Dr. Ryan Stokes: There normally are questions. Lots of people have questions about this topic, I think.

Johnny Ova: Absolutely. So let's jump right in. When most people today picture Satan, what image comes to mind, and how far is that from what the earliest biblical writers actually meant?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: That is an excellent question. A lot of people, when they hear the word or name Satan, or they hear devil, the first thing they think of is a little cartoon figure with a pointed tail and horns and a pitchfork. He's normally red. That may be the first image. If they think a little more seriously about it, maybe they think of a well-dressed man in a three-piece suit who has all kinds of devious schemes going on. The Bible is quite a bit different from that. I don't want to give everything away right away, because I think we'll work through this little by little, but I will say this: the Bible is significantly different from popular conceptions of Satan.

Johnny Ova: All right, let's go. I know your work argues the word satan points to an attacker or executioner rather than an accuser. Walk us through what the Hebrew actually says.

Dr. Ryan Stokes: Sure. The English word Satan, and I'm sure you're aware, though maybe your listeners are or aren't, is from the Hebrew word satan. So when you say Satan you're actually saying a Hebrew word, just pronounced a little differently from how they would have pronounced it in the Old Testament. If you read an academic book on Satan, the conversation will probably begin with the meaning of that word, and that makes a lot of sense. If you're talking about a particular word or idea in the Bible, starting with what the basic word means is a great place to start. The problem is that most of what you'd read, if you went to a library and checked out an academic book, and I'm not talking about the popular-level books, which are all over the place, but even the best scholarship on Satan, starts with the meaning of the word and misunderstands it. The problem with what scholars have said about the meaning of the word is that they're reading later theology into it. They're defining the word in a way that fits better with later Christian theology, which may be great theology, but it's different from what's going on in some of the earlier passages of the Old Testament. Do you want a chance to ask a question, or should I keep talking about the word?

Johnny Ova: No, go ahead. But first you've got to show everybody your shirt. Not today, Satan.

Dr. Ryan Stokes: I wish I had one. Not on this podcast, Satan. But I don't have that shirt. So, first of all, and scholars agree about this, so what I'm about to say is not controversial at all among scholars: the word satan in Hebrew is actually not a name. We use Satan as a name, and a little later on, by the time you get to the New Testament literature, and I assume your listeners know the New Testament comes along later than the Old Testament.

Johnny Ova: I hope so. I hope they know that.

Dr. Ryan Stokes: If not, you need to preach a little better, Pastor. It may be a name once you get to the New Testament. Your English translations can be a little misleading here, because translators aren't always perfect, and sometimes they translate in the way readers want, the way that will get readers to buy their translations. But in the Old Testament it's just a noun, a word, and it means something, I argue, like attacker or executioner. If you look at all the passages in the Old Testament with the Hebrew word satan, at least all the ones where the context is clear enough to make a determination, the figure called a satan is trying to harm someone or even kill another person. That's why I use the word attacker. In some cases the satan is trying to harm someone who has committed a crime, a criminal who deserves to die, and in that case something like executioner is a better translation. Scholars typically translate this word as accuser or adversary. Adversary is not a bad translation, but I think we can be more specific, and attacker works better. The translation accuser or prosecutor is the one that's really reading later theology into it. We don't have a clear example of a satan in the Old Testament serving as a prosecuting attorney or an accuser or anything like that.

Johnny Ova: Now, in the earliest texts, this will be a double question. This figure, the satan, works for God, not against God, which is very interesting because it goes against what most people think today. I want to layer this out: Satan and the devil. The devil, I don't believe, is mentioned at all in the Old Testament. So if you could describe the differences between the two, or correct me if I'm wrong. And then, what does it mean to call Satan an agent of Yahweh, somebody who works for him and not against him?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: You're asking some really good questions. Where do I begin? First of all, what a lot of people don't realize is that the word satan in the Old Testament can refer to an angelic figure, the person we would call Satan, but it can also refer to a human. Someone is attacking David, and Abishai says, hey, I'm going to go kill Shimei, your enemy, for you, David. And in that passage in 2 Samuel, David calls Abishai a satan. So this is someone attacking someone else. It can be a human or an angel. In some places the word refers to an angelic figure, and in some places to a particular angelic figure. I'm thinking of Job and Zechariah. In those passages, although your English translations probably render it as the name Satan with a capital S, the Hebrew actually says the satan. So this person is the attacker or the executioner. The one who stirs up all kinds of trouble for Job is called the attacker or the executioner. And the implication of that title, and of the context of these passages, is that this person actually serves God as someone who attacks or even puts to death sinners. If someone deserves it, the satan is the one God sends to punish that person.

Johnny Ova: I just had a guest on where we broke down Job in some unbelievable ways, and this is what came out of those conversations. You open Job 1 and 2 and you have Satan and God having this unbelievable dialogue back and forth, which dumbfounds many people. Why is God having a conversation like this with the satan figure? Satan is almost questioning God: he'll break. God says, no, he won't. Yes, he'll break, just watch what happens if you do this. It's almost like he provokes God to do the attacking on Job, rather than being the one doing the attacking himself.

Dr. Ryan Stokes: That's right. Job is such a fascinating story, and I bet we'll talk about it a little today. But back to your questions. You mentioned the devil as well. The word devil is from the Greek word diabolos, which translates satan. So devil and satan mean roughly the same thing. You'll only encounter devil in the New Testament because it's a Greek word. It's a Greek approximation of what the Hebrew satan means. And your final question was whether the person we read about in the Old Testament, in Job and Zechariah, the satan, is the same person we think of as Satan today. I would articulate the relationship a little differently from the way you did. I would say the Old Testament is probably talking about the same person. When Paul mentions the devil or Satan, or when John in Revelation mentions Satan, in their minds they're referring to the same person Job and Zechariah are talking about. However, they're thinking of him in a very different way from how Job and Zechariah speak of him. So I don't say it's a different person, but they're conceiving of this figure in quite different ways.

Johnny Ova: Gotcha. We're going to get into that, because I've got more questions. My mind will be all over the place with this topic, so I'm trying to give myself some guardrails.

Dr. Ryan Stokes: Feel free to bring me back. If I veer off the path, just pull me back.

Johnny Ova: All good. Let's talk about the angel who stands in Balaam's way in Numbers 22, because he gets described with the same kind of language. Can you describe what's happening in this scene?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: That's a great example, because the word satan is used there, although no English translation I've come across translates it as Satan. They translate it as adversary or something like that. In Numbers 22, I believe verse 22 and again in verse 32, you have the sorcerer-prophet Balaam riding on a donkey, presumably to curse Israel, and God doesn't want him to curse Israel. So the angel of the Lord, none other than the angel of the Lord, comes out and stands in Balaam's way. Balaam can't see him, but the donkey can. So the donkey, speaking of veering off the path, veers off the path and averts Balaam's demise, and saves her own life, or at least the donkey thinks so. Eventually Balaam sees this angel standing there with a sword, ready to kill him for setting out to curse Israel. And the angel says, I've come out against you as a satan, and I would have killed you had your donkey not veered off the path and saved your life. So it's a really interesting example of an angelic figure serving as an executioner, called a satan. What's really interesting is that it's the angel of the Lord. It's not the satan here. It's the angel of the Lord who's clearly out on God's behalf, ready to punish a sinner, to kill someone in rebellion against God, and this person is called a satan.

Johnny Ova: Very interesting. There are a couple of instances like that bouncing around my brain in the Old Testament, things sent by God to become a satan to someone. The language is just interesting. Zechariah 3 gives us this courtroom moment that everyone points to as proof the satan is a prosecutor. Why do you read it differently?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: For a number of reasons. Zechariah 3 says that Joshua the high priest is standing before the angel of the Lord, wearing filthy clothes. And it says the satan is there, standing at Joshua's right. The Hebrew is a little ambiguous, but it seems to be at Joshua's right, in order to satan him. So it uses the word twice, once as a noun and once as a verb. If you translate satan as accuse, then you have the satan serving as an accuser. If you don't translate it that way, that's not what it means. It's kind of a circular argument. If you believe satan means accuser, then you have a satan accusing someone, and it's circular because your assumption is what you're using to establish the thing you're using to translate the passage. If you don't assume satan means accuser, what seems to be the case is that you have the satan there ready to execute Joshua. And I think what you have in Zechariah with Joshua the high priest is very similar to Isaiah 6. I talk about this a little in the book, and I have an essay elsewhere.

Dr. Ryan Stokes: In Isaiah 6, Isaiah has a vision of God seated high and lofty on the throne, the train of his robe filling the temple, and the seraphim saying, holy, holy, holy. Isaiah says, woe is me, I am undone. I'm in danger of dying, because I'm a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the Lord of hosts. In Zechariah you have not a prophet but Joshua the priest standing before God, not with unclean lips but in filthy clothes, and he's about to be killed, just as Isaiah was about to be killed. In Isaiah, a seraph comes and touches Isaiah's mouth with a coal from the altar and says, your iniquity is taken away. In Zechariah, one of the attendants takes off Joshua's filthy clothes, puts clean clothes on him, and says, I have taken away your iniquity, just like Isaiah. So he's able to survive the encounter. What you very likely have there is Joshua in danger of being put to death because he entered God's presence in filthy clothes. In Exodus it says that if a priest goes into the holy place in God's presence wearing the wrong clothes, he's in danger of being killed. That's what I think you have in Zechariah 3, and the satan is the one who would do the killing if the angel of the Lord didn't intervene and take away his iniquity.

Johnny Ova: So when you use definitions like executioner, are you being descriptive rather than literal? Because the definition is adversary, or accuser. What you're saying is that this adversary is more specifically an executioner. Is that what you're explaining?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: I guess what I'm doing, Johnny, is looking at all the places in the Old Testament where you have the word satan. I have an article that does this in more detail, and in my book I just summarize it, because the entire argument would be too much to include. I start with the passages where the context is especially clear, and what I see is that in all of them the satan is someone attacking or killing someone else physically, not someone prosecuting them. We do have Hebrew dictionaries, and if you look it up, it might say satan means accuser or adversary. What I'm doing is asking why the dictionary says that. It's almost like I'm writing my own dictionary article. The people who write these dictionaries do what I did: they look at all the places a word occurs in the Old Testament and ask what it means in all of them. So I'm not taking the dictionary's word for it. I'm trying to go deeper and do a more fundamental study, and that's how I come to the conclusion that satan means attacker or executioner.

Johnny Ova: Gotcha. All right, let's get into Job. This is an argument I have not heard, and I'd love to hear the explanation. You argue that the satan material there is a later addition to the book. What's the evidence, and why does it matter?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: I'm not the first person to say this. To summarize, Job begins with an introduction that says Job is the wealthiest and the most righteous man in that part of the world at that time. It lists everything he has, how many donkeys and camels and sheep, how many sons and daughters. Around verse five or six it says that every year Job's children would get together, maybe to celebrate a birthday or something, and have a feast at one of the siblings' houses. Then there's a new scene. God is in heaven, and it's a day when all the sons of God, these divine beings who work for God, we might call them angels, are presenting themselves to God and reporting to him. Among those sons of God is the satan. God and the satan have a conversation about what the satan has been up to, and the satan says, I've been patrolling the earth. God says, have you taken note of Job? There's no one like him. He fears God and turns away from evil. And the satan says, yes, I've noticed Job. He's great, but how do you know he's great because he loves you, rather than because he's doing what you want since you bless him so much for it?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: So they arrange to test Job, and Job loses everything. He loses his sons and his daughters. Tragic. He loses his animals and his servants, all the things that were listed. At that point Job remains faithful to God. Then you have a repeat of the whole scenario, where the satan says, God, in theory I'm still correct, we just have to apply a bit more pressure. That's when Job begins to suffer a physical affliction, and Job remains faithful even then. That's a summary. What I suggest, and I'm not the first, since a number of scholars beginning about a hundred years ago, especially in Germany, began to notice these things, is that there are differences between the portions of that introduction. The parts about Job's righteousness, his wealth, and his losing it seem different from the sections about the satan speaking with God. What they propose, and what I propose, though I do it a little differently, is that the story of Job was written in a couple of phases. Initially there was a story about Job that didn't mention the satan. A little later one of the authors or editors came along and said, this story would make a bit more sense if I explained that there's a satan involved, and the satan sections entered the story at that point. There are a lot of arguments for this. I think I list eight or nine. Let me think if I can remember some of them.

Johnny Ova: Let me jump in real quick. Are there copies of Job we have that don't have those first two chapters?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: Great question. No. There are no copies of Job like that. I'm trying to remember if there's a later interpretation of Job that has just one part of the story. There may be. But there's no external evidence, as scholars would say. We don't have any hard copies of Job without these sections. This argument is based purely on internal evidence: not contradictions, but tensions in the text that suggest there was a story of Job without the satan in it that read more smoothly before the satan material was added. One example: at the end of that first introductory section it says Job's children had a custom of getting together for dinner. Then you have the material about the satan. Then you have a verse that says, one day when his sons and daughters were gathered for dinner, and then the wind blows down the house and they all die. That verse follows on the earlier verse before the satan material. With the satan material in place it's odd, because it has just mentioned the satan and then says, when his sons and daughters gathered for dinner, which seems to suggest the satan has sons and daughters gathering for dinner. That can't be what it means. There are a number of things like that suggesting there was a Job story, before the biblical book as we have it, without a satan figure.

Johnny Ova: Gotcha. One of your really striking clues is that Job's friends never mention the satan or blame any figure for what happened to him. What do you think that silence from the friends tells us?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: Great question. I don't know this for certain, but what I suggest is that the conversation between Job and his friends may have been part of the story before the satan material was added. They don't seem to be aware of a satan. Now, you could say they didn't know what was going on in heaven. They didn't know the satan and God had this conversation and disagreed about Job and were testing him. That's true. But what's interesting is that they're not only unaware of the particulars of Job's situation, they're not even aware of a satan at all. They don't consider that a satan might be involved, which would be strange if the satan were the one behind the whole thing. For his existence not even to be mentioned in the conversation is really strange if he was part of the story from the beginning.

Johnny Ova: You're right. If we're getting attacked by Satan, we could make comments like, man, Satan's got it in for me, not knowing he had a conversation with God and they set this whole thing off to test our faithfulness. There would still be some kind of awareness that Satan is doing this.

Dr. Ryan Stokes: That's absolutely right. It's really interesting: Job and his friends agree that Job is suffering because God is causing him to suffer. They don't disagree about that. What they disagree about is whether God is causing Job to suffer because he deserves it, or despite the fact that he doesn't. In either case a satan could be involved. Job could say, the satan is attacking me even though I didn't sin. Job's friends could say, no, God wouldn't let the satan attack someone who hadn't sinned. It's odd that neither Job nor his friends ever mention that the satan would be involved, because they wouldn't disagree about that. What they disagree about is why God is causing him to suffer.

Johnny Ova: Right, the focus is more on why God is doing this to me. Job cries out that he's righteous: show me what I'm doing wrong. So if the satan in Job is attacking an innocent man with God's permission, how does that change the way we read the whole story?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: I guess it depends on how you're reading it to start with. What I think is interesting is, as we said a moment ago, the satan in these earliest texts works for God. You have this satan figure who will punish Balaam for going to curse Israel, and the satan who's getting ready to kill Joshua for coming before God in filthy clothes. And in Job, and I think Job, or at least the satan material in Job, is later than those texts, for the first time in history we have the satan attacking an innocent person. God is allowing this figure who is supposed to punish evildoers to cause trouble for a righteous person. And the rest is history. If we want to know how Satan went from working for God to being God's enemy, that's one big step right there, because at some point people started thinking of him not simply as someone who punishes the wicked, but also as someone who causes trouble for the righteous.

Johnny Ova: Go right into it, because that's legitimately my next question. At some point he stops being God's agent and starts becoming God's enemy. When and why does that shift happen?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: This one confuses a lot of people. I had a colleague I used to teach with who was always trying to figure out when Satan fell. He read my book and said, I think Satan fell here. What's interesting is that my book isn't really about when Satan went from being God's servant to God's enemy. It's not a history of Satan so much as a history of what people thought about Satan. So what I can tell you is when people began to think of Satan more as God's enemy than as God's agent. When did Satan actually become God's enemy, if we're speaking about the real Satan, when he fell and why and how? My book doesn't really answer that, because I don't think the Bible tells us. But in the biblical literature, somewhat in the Old Testament, and also in the literature after the Old Testament, in early Judaism and then the New Testament, you can see people's thinking about Satan shift little by little over time.

Dr. Ryan Stokes: One of the first big shifts is in Job, where the satan for the first time troubles an innocent person. So we can lay out the history like this. Initially, the satan answered the question, why do wicked people suffer, or how does God punish sinners? The answer is the satan. A little later, around the time the book of Job was written, people asked, why do righteous people, innocent people, people faithful to God, sometimes suffer? And at some point someone said, maybe the satan does that as well. So we end up with a book like Job. A little later, after the Old Testament period, someone asked, why do people sin in the first place? We know how God punishes sinners, but why do they sin to begin with? There's a book written in the second century BC called the Book of Jubilees. It's not in the Bible, unless you're a member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. It calls Satan the Prince of Mastema, and it says the Prince of Mastema leads the Gentiles to worship false gods and leads them into wars against each other. That's why they sin. So why do bad people sin? Satan is the answer to that question too. A little later still, they ask, why do good people sometimes sin? Why do even Jews, even people following God, sin? And they say Satan must be involved in that as well. Once you have a Satan who harms righteous people and even tries to get God's faithful people to sin, people say Satan isn't really working for God, or there's more to the story. By that point Satan can properly be considered God's enemy, not just God's agent.

Johnny Ova: Gotcha. From some of what I've read, Second Temple Judaism and the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to be at least the time frame where this mentality develops. What do you think the Jewish writers were doing with this figure during that period?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: This is a period when they're thinking a whole lot about angels and demons, and it's really interesting. There's a statistic I tell my students. I have a graphic where I put up all the Old Testament books on a PowerPoint. I'm Protestant, I'm Baptist, so it's all 39 books of the Old Testament. I ask, how many of these actually mention Satan? Out of 39, I think two do. Some scholars might argue three. Some theologians might say more, but Old Testament scholars would say two or three of these 39, max, mention Satan. Then I put up the New Testament books. There are only 27, fewer books. How many mention Satan? Nineteen. So two of 39 Old Testament books mention Satan, and 19 of 27 New Testament books do. What happened between the Old and New Testaments to make that difference? People became fascinated with Satan in this period. In early Judaism people are thinking about angels and demons and what they do. There are different categories of angels and different kinds of demons, up to different things. They're also dealing with the problem of evil. Why are people worshiping idols? How do we explain prophecy, or miracles done by people who don't worship Yahweh? They say there must be demons or supernatural forces involved. So Satan serves as a nice answer to a lot of the theological questions they're asking. That's why, when you come to the New Testament, there's a lot more said about Satan than in the Old Testament.

Johnny Ova: This may be a controversial question. You're right, there's pretty much a lot of silence about Satan in the Old Testament in general. What do you think about the possibility that during this time you're describing, people were just curious and started blaming Satan for everything, and it isn't actually that?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: That's a good question, and I don't know that I can answer it as a historian. It's kind of a theological question.

Johnny Ova: This is just a conversation, you and me shooting the breeze. What do you think?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: As I mentioned, I'm Baptist, I'm a believer myself, and I tend to trust the Bible. I don't turn my mind off when I read it. I try to use my mind as best I can to interpret it, understand it and explain it. But at the end of the day, when it comes to the question of whether I believe it, the answer is yes, I believe it. So when I'm talking about the biblical literature, I'm fascinated by the processes, the thinking and the ways people arrived at their conclusions. But for my own theology, I ultimately believe they got it right when they answered those questions. Others disagree with me. Now, when I read literature outside the Bible, I do have a double standard. I don't think literature outside the Bible is inside the Bible. So when I read Jubilees or Enoch, I say, that's fascinating, maybe they're right, maybe they're not. But for me the Bible is special. That's how I answer that question. There are other very intelligent and good people who disagree with me, but that's how I answer it.

Johnny Ova: Gotcha. One of your arguments is that the familiar accuser portrait may be a later development, possibly even shaped by Greek-speaking interpreters. How did that reading take over?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: I'm not sure. My study goes from the earliest passages that talk about Satan in the Old Testament, and by the way, Satan is an Israelite idea. We can't find Satan in Egyptian, Babylonian or Canaanite literature. We may uncover a manuscript or tablet one day that mentions a figure like him, but this really is a biblical idea. So my book starts with the oldest passages in the Old Testament and goes through the Jewish literature to the New Testament, and that's where the study ends, for a number of reasons. One is that it's where my expertise ends, and where my expertise ends, my mouth, or my keyboard, needs to stop. So I'm not as qualified to speak about what happens after that. Now, to your question about the prosecuting-attorney interpretation, where Satan runs around saying, look at Johnny sinning. He was preaching the other day and got prideful for a moment. He had a really good turn of phrase, a lot of people made a decision, and for a moment he considered taking credit for it. And Satan goes to God and says, you need to zap Johnny.

Johnny Ova: I've been zapped enough in my life, Dr. Stokes.

Dr. Ryan Stokes: That's right. I'm just kidding, of course. But I don't see that in the Bible. The accusation in Revelation 12, and again I think around chapter 20, is where it very clearly refers to Satan as the accuser, the accuser of the brothers. That's the clearest place in the Bible that describes Satan as an accuser. But what I believe Revelation means by that is not so much a prosecuting attorney who sees you sinning and tries to prosecute you. It's more like the book of Job, where Satan goes before God, and Job hasn't done anything wrong yet, but Satan alleges or suggests that Job needs to be tested to find out whether he's really faithful. You do have a reference early in Revelation where Satan is going to throw some of a church into prison to test them, and they need to remain faithful. I think that's what Revelation means by calling Satan the accuser. The prosecuting-attorney idea, I'm not sure when it came along, but if my interpretations are correct, it would have been later than the New Testament.

Johnny Ova: Gotcha. By the time we reach the New Testament, and you mentioned this earlier, the writers are thinking about Satan differently from the Old Testament writers. What concept of Satan are they actually working with, and what's missing compared to what we automatically assume?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: My guess is that if you asked the New Testament authors, or let's just say first-century Christians, what they thought about Satan, you'd get a lot of different answers. Some would sound a whole lot like the Old Testament passages we've read. The idea of a satan who punishes people on God's behalf, or even harms people physically, was alive and well in the New Testament era. I think the apostle Paul refers to it in a couple of passages. In 1 Corinthians 5 he's writing to the church in Corinth, where a man is apparently sleeping with his father's wife, and Paul says, that's bad. Even Gentiles know that's bad. You can't let this go unaddressed. You need to hand this man over to Satan so that the flesh will be destroyed but his spirit saved. So let Satan get hold of this guy, cause problems for his body, and perhaps he'll turn around. It's not clear exactly what Paul envisions, but it seems to be Satan physically harming a sinner. You get something similar in 2 Corinthians 12, another letter to the Corinthians, where Paul is talking about having these revelations and the potential that he would become prideful. Paul struggled with pride too, Johnny. He says, to keep me from becoming puffed up, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to torment me. Your listeners probably know that the word messenger is angel: an angel of Satan to torment me, so Paul wouldn't become puffed up.

Dr. Ryan Stokes: So you do have that idea in the New Testament. But you also have passages where Satan leads people to sin. That seems to be what Satan is doing a lot of in the New Testament. He's harming sinners, but he's also causing people to sin. Satan tempts Jesus to sin. Jesus doesn't give in, of course, but Satan tempts him. In both the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Luke, Satan is the one who puts it in Judas's heart to betray Christ. Paul talks in 2 Corinthians about a church being deceived by Satan, just as the first woman was deceived by the serpent. That's a big one. Another thing Satan does in the New Testament is simply oppose Christ and oppose God's work. He causes trouble for Paul. He causes trouble for the church. He is in charge of the armies of the nations in Revelation that attack God's people. So a lot of what we've mentioned from the Old Testament and early Jewish literature, you see all of it in the New Testament. If you asked them what Satan is like, they might give different answers, but the takeaway is that Satan is a very complex figure. In a sense he works for God, punishing sinners, but he's also trying to lead people to sin, and he's attacking the righteous. He's doing a little of all of it. So if you want a biblical perspective on Satan, it's going to be a complex one, not a simplistic, two-dimensional picture of what Satan does.

Johnny Ova: After tracing all this, and you've obviously put tons of time and work into this area, what do we lose when we flatten this figure into a simple medieval cartoon character?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: What do we lose? I think we lose realism. If you go see a movie where the bad guy is all bad and the good guy is all good, it's probably going to be a pretty boring movie. Even in mass-consumed media we like a little complexity. We like to say the bad guy kind of has a good argument there, because we know real life is not simple. Except for Jesus Christ, there's never been anyone who lived who was pure good, and I doubt there's ever been anyone who was pure evil. And I would include Satan. He's bad, he's evil, he's God's enemy, and I should be clear about that. He really is God's enemy in the Bible. But that's not all he is. He also serves God's purposes at times. That's the way real life is. Things are more complex than a cartoonish portrayal of reality, and that includes a more realistic picture of Satan than a cartoon.

Johnny Ova: Revelation 12. I've got two more for you, and one I have to ask. Revelation 12 describes this accuser of the brethren being thrown down. How do you understand what's being described in this scene?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: That's a really neat passage. There's a war in heaven. You have Michael and his angels on one side. On the other side you have this great red dragon, identified as Satan, the devil, the accuser, also called the ancient serpent, leading a group of angels. They do battle, and ultimately Satan is defeated and cast out of heaven. What's interesting is that it tells us how he's defeated. It's not because Michael is better with a sword than Satan, or at least that's not what it says. It's not because Michael has more angels on his side. It says Satan is defeated by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of the Christians' testimony. So first of all, this battle in heaven that results in Satan's defeat and eviction is not an origin story for Satan. It's more Satan's destination than his origin. It's his defeat, not where he came from. And the way he's defeated is by the blood of Christ, the blood of the Lamb, and by the testimony of the Christians, who it says are also willing to lay down their lives.

Dr. Ryan Stokes: So what this passage is about, I believe, is telling the church that the way you win the battle with Satan is not by being stronger and overcoming your enemies on worldly terms. It's not by winning Supreme Court cases. It's not by your candidate being elected president or senator or whatever. The way you defeat Satan is by losing. If you're willing to be faithful to God and to suffer for being faithful, even to the point of death, it may look like you're losing by the world's standards, but in actuality that's how you win. You defeat Satan that way. That's how Christ defeated him, and we do the same thing.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. Last question from me, with Dr. Ryan Stokes here on the Dig In. What do you hope people walk away understanding about how the Bible portrays evil and opposition?

Dr. Ryan Stokes: Wow. How the Bible portrays evil and opposition. In a sense, all my classes are kind of the same class. They're all about how to read the Bible well. I'm getting ready to start teaching a class on angels and demons in a couple of weeks, and we'll talk about angels and demons, but ultimately I want students to take away how to read the Bible well. And I hope readers of this book come away thinking, wow, the Bible is more complex than I realized, and I really need to be attentive to its historical context and its diversity. I thought these passages were talking about the same thing, but they're talking about different things, or saying different things about the same topic. I would love for people to take that away.

Dr. Ryan Stokes: Another thing, theologically, goes back to who I am as a Christian. If I were to draw one theological implication from my research, it's this. The idea of Satan as God's enemy, which again I believe is true, Satan in rebellion against God, that Satan does not scare me. The Satan that frightens me is the Satan who punishes me on God's behalf because I've sinned. In one scenario, if Satan is God's enemy and he's after me, I know God's on my side and God's got me. But if Satan is sent to me as a punisher, that means I've made God my enemy. I've betrayed God or been unfaithful to him. That's the Satan that would frighten me, the Satan authorized by God to punish me, as in the case of Joshua in Zechariah 3. That's perhaps a takeaway for folks who share my theological inclinations, at least.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Ryan Stokes, this has been great. Thank you for your time. I truly appreciate all your wisdom and knowledge today.

Dr. Ryan Stokes: Thanks for having me. This was a blast.