The following excerpt is taken from What Every Christian Should Know About Satan. Order your copy in print, Kindle, or Audible versions here.

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[Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, or Part 4 of this brief series on Satan: The Destroyer. This is the final installment.]

Satan seeks not only to destroy our spiritual lives – our confidence in the Lord, our testimonies, our spiritual disciplines – but our physical lives as well. In The Strategy of Satan, Warren Wiersbe points out that Satan targets our bodies for a number of reasons. 

First, our bodies are temples where God resides (1 Cor. 6:19-20; Phil. 1:20; 1 Pet. 2:9). “This means when Satan attacks your body, he is attacking the one means God has for revealing his grace and love to a lost world. Creation reveals the power, wisdom, and glory of God; but Christians reveal the grace and love of God.”

Second, our bodies are God’s tools (Rom. 6:12-13). Just as he employed the natural abilities of Noah to build an ark, and the skills of Bezalel and Oholiab to construct the tabernacle, the Lord uses our bodies as his hands and feet to carry out the Great Commission. 

“Just as God the Son had to take on a body to accomplish his work on earth, so the Holy Spirit needs our bodies,” writes Wiersbe. The members of your bodies are tools in the Spirit’s hands to help build the church here on earth. We should never minimize the stewardship of our bodies. “The Christian who is careless about his health or safety is playing right into the hands of the destroyer.”

Third, our bodies are God’s treasury (2 Cor. 4:7; 1 Tim. 6:20; 2 Tim. 1:14; 2:2). When God saved us, he put the treasure of eternal life within our bodies. We have the very life of God in us. “God did not give you this great treasure simply to protect it – an earthen vessel is not the safest place for a treasure! He gave you this treasure that he might invest it through you in the lives of others.”

Finally, our bodies are God’s testing ground (Rom. 12:1; 1 Cor. 9:27). Satan can rob us of our rewards by attacking our bodies and getting us to break the rules of conduct God has set for us. The athletic imagery Paul uses in writing to the Corinthians serves as a backdrop for Christian living. 

In the Isthmian Games in Corinth, athletes not only had to be talented and fit; they had to keep the rules or be disqualified. “It is not a matter of salvation, but of rewards for faithful service,” writes Wiersbe. “The athlete did not lose his citizenship if he broke the rules; he only forfeited his reward, a shameful experience indeed.” 

While our souls and spirits are of everlasting value to God, so are our bodies. We must be sober-minded and alert to the destroyer’s attacks on our physical beings as well as our spiritual lives. That’s one reason Peter challenges believers, who are “living as exiles dispersed abroad” (1 Pet. 1:1), to resist the evil one and remain “firm in the faith” (1 Pet. 5:9). 

Resist is a strong term. The Greek anthistemi means “to set one’s self against,” “to withstand” or “oppose.” Luke uses this word to describe Elymas’ resistance to the gospel that Paul and Barnabus preached; he opposedthem (Acts 13:8). Paul uses anthistemi to relay his face-to-face opposition to Peter at Antioch (Gal. 2:11). He also applies this term to the resistance of Jannes and Jambres against Moses (2 Tim. 3:8), and to Alexander the coppersmith’s response to Paul – “he strongly opposed our words” (2 Tim. 4:15). James tells Christians to “submit to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (Jas. 4:7, emphasis added). So, our resistance to the devil should not be passive. Instead, Peter urges us to engage actively against our most dangerous foe. 

Peter’s encouragement to stand “firm in the faith” (1 Pet. 5:9) reminds us that we do not wage war against the evil one on our own. Rather, our feet are planted on holy ground, for the Spirit of God who dwells in us goes wherever we go. Further, we are given powerful spiritual weapons for battle, enabling us to demolish arguments raised against the knowledge of God (2 Cor. 10:3-5). The Lord also equips us for spiritual warfare with Christian armor (Eph. 6:11-18). Last, as we engage the evil one in the colosseum of spiritual warfare, we should be encouraged that our audience is “a large cloud of witnesses surrounding us” (Heb. 12:1) – heroes who, by faith:

conquered  kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the raging of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, gained strength in weakness, became mighty in battle, and put foreign armies to flight. Women received their dead, raised to life again. Other people were tortured, not accepting release, so that they might gain a better resurrection. Others experienced mockings and scourgings, as well as bonds and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawed in two, they died by the sword, they wandered about in sheepskins, in goatskins, destitute, afflicted, and mistreated. The world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and on mountains, hiding in caves and holes in the ground. All these were approved through their faith, but they did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, so that they would not be made perfect without us (Heb. 11:33-40).

Marvin Vincent notes that the Greek word rendered “firm” is stereos and might better be translated “steadfast.” This conveys the sense of “compactness, compact solidarity, and is appropriate, since a number of individuals are addressed and exhorted to withstand the onset of Satan as one compacted body.” 

This may help strengthen our understanding of what it means to stand firm. God has chosen us according to the foreknowledge of God the Father (1 Pet. 1:2); sanctified us through the Holy Spirit (1:2); sprinkled us with the blood of Jesus Christ (1:2); given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus (1:3); provided us with an imperishable inheritance (1:4); guarded us by his power (1:5); is building individual believers into a corporate spiritual house, a holy priesthood (2:5); has declared us a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and a people for his possession (2:9); has called us out of darkness into his marvelous light (2:9); and so much more. 

The consummate destroyer

Saddam Hussein knew the war was over. The Iraqi dictator had failed in his effort to occupy Kuwait. And if he couldn’t have the country, he wasn’t about to let anyone else benefit from its riches. As a U.S.-led coalition of forces drove out the last of Hussein’s troops, he sent mercenaries to blow up more than six hundred producing oil wells in Kuwait. The result: towering infernos that took fire-fighting specialists seven months to extinguish. 

Long after the 1991 Persian Gulf War ended, the Gulf was awash in poisonous smoke, ash, and soot. Literal lakes of oil formed. Black rain fell. Livestock breathing misty, dark air died from blackened lungs. 

Hussein’s scorched-earth policy ultimately failed. After U.S. troops invaded Iraq in 2003, soldiers found the defeated dictator hiding in a “spider hole.” An Iraqi court convicted Hussein of crimes against humanity and unceremoniously hanged him late in 2006. 

Hussein was a chronic destroyer. He had engaged in a bloody stalemate with Iran, tried foolishly to take Kuwait, brutalized his own people, and purged his leadership team. He eliminated anyone he could not trust, or any person he even suspected. He exalted himself at the expense of all others. 

This tyrant was perhaps the last of the twentieth century’s most brutal dictators, carrying his deeds into a new millennium. Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao who preceded him, Hussein lived and died defiantly – and destructively. But none of these men holds a proverbial candle to the ultimate destroyer.

From the beginning, Satan has fought for sovereignty over a world he did not create. And if he can’t have it, he plans to destroy it – to poison it through deception, hatred, hostility, arrogance, and death. Of all the names for the evil one, the destroyer perhaps best captures his purpose in the ongoing rebellion against God. He simply wages a no-holds-barred, battle-to-the-death campaign against God, and against those made in God’s image.

There is no doubt that the evil one is the consummate destroyer. From the garden of Eden to the day he is cast into the lake of fire, Satan plows a wide and indiscriminate path of discord, pain, sorrow, violence, hatred, distrust, arrogance, bitterness, division, doubt, and idolatry everywhere he goes. While it’s true that Scripture nowhere explicitly calls Satan the destroyer, it is an apt descriptor of the one who takes everything good and ruins it. 

We are called to resist the evil one, standing firm in God, who created us and redeemed us. As the world’s tyrants pass from the scene, they have a court date before the great white throne. And like the unseen destroyer, their sentence is in the lake of fire and sulfur (Rev. 20:10). 

For Christians facing persecution, like so many first-century followers of Jesus, we are called to persevere. Justice for oppressors is guaranteed – if not now, then at the return of Christ. And reward for faithful believers is certain – perhaps not in this life, but most certainly at the bema, where Christ places imperishable crowns on our heads. Even better, he repeats the seven most blessed words every Christian longs to hear: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” (Matt. 25:21 KJV). 

Next: The One for Whom Hell Is Prepared