Is There Really a Devil?

By Galen C. Dalrymple

I believe the devil is real for two major reasons.

First, Jesus spoke of Satan as real. As a Christian, I believe that Jesus Christ is God the Son. Since Jesus is the only one in history who has fully and comprehensively seen and experienced all that exists in the spiritual realm, he is uniquely qualified to reveal the realities of the unseen world. If Jesus said such things are real, who am I to disagree?

Second, everything except for God (who is a necessary being) must have an origin. Evil springs not from a vacuum, but from somewhere or someone. The depth of pure evil that leads terrorists to eviscerate an entire crowd of women and children with an explosive device, or that led to the horrors of the Holocaust or the gulags or Stalin's purges, is too great to have sprung from merely human origins. Depraved as we are, I would like to believe that people, if not for Satanic influence in history, would never even imagine doing such inexplicably evil things to one another. Christian scripture clearly lays the blame for evil and suffering at the doorstep of a being named Satan who enters the human heart as he did with Judas (John 13:27), and who one day will have to answer for his evil.

If mankind is that evil all on his own, heaven help us all!

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Galen Dalrymple is the pastor of Vineyard Hills Christian Church in Cloverdale, California. He writes a daily devotional called Daybreaks; click here to subscribe.