Does God Plan to Save Satan?

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

Scripture is clear that Satan’s eternal destiny is the unrelenting lake of fire. It is the place into which the antichrist, the false prophet, and all unbelievers are cast as well. It does not appear there is any reversal of fortune for those in hell. Nevertheless, some in the early church took a different view. 

Clement of Alexandria, for example, thought there was hope for the devil based on God’s limitless mercy. Clement’s pupil, Origen, took it a step further. He argued for apocatastasis, or the idea that all things made by God return to him. He once wrote, “We believe that the goodness of God through Christ will restore his entire creation to one end, even his enemies being conquered and subdued.”

 In Origen’s view, everyone – including Satan, evil spirits, and the most wicked humans – ultimately submit to God’s sovereignty and are saved. Thus, Satan ceases to be evil and has his angelic nature restored. 

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The Goodness of Hell

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

Hell is an awful prospect for anyone. C. S. Lewis once shuddered at the concept of hell: “There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power.”

But let’s consider for a moment that the notion of a loving God and the doctrine of hell are perfectly compatible. There is nothing of one that cancels out the other. Jesus speaks frequently on hell and alludes to it in parables. He tells some religious leaders they are headed for hell. He warns his listeners against this place where the worm does not die and the fires are not quenched. He refers to hell as “outer darkness.” And he says hell was prepared for Satan and evil spirits, yet he makes it clear that many people are going to spend eternity there.

So, in what possible way is hell good?

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Two Questions about Hell

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

When we consider the final destiny of Satan, demons, and the unrepentant wicked, at least two questions often arise. In this post, we briefly address both of them: Is hellfire literal? And, Is hell forever?

Is hellfire literal? 

We might ask: When Jesus and the New Testament writers depict hell, are we to take the lake of fire literally or figuratively? Godly scholars stand on both sides of the debate. Charles Spurgeon, for example, spoke of hell’s fire as real:

Now, do not begin telling me that that is metaphorical fire: who cares for that? If a man were to threaten to give me a metaphorical blow on the head, I should care very little about it; he would be welcome to give me as many as he pleased. And what say the wicked? “We do not care about metaphorical fires.” But they are real, sir – yes, as real as yourself. There is a real fire in hell, as truly as you have now a real body – a fire exactly like that which we have on earth in everything except this – that it will not consume, though it will torture you. You have seen the asbestos lying in the fire red hot, but when you take it out it is unconsumed. So your body will be prepared by God in such a way that it will burn forever without being consumed; it will lie, not as you consider, in metaphorical fire, but in actual flame.

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The Lake of Fire and Sulfur

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

Revelation 20:10 reads: “The devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet are, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.”

In this verse, John describes Satan’s ultimate destination as “the lake of fire and sulfur.” In Matthew 25:41, Jesus calls it “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Jesus and the New Testament writers also describe this place as “outer darkness,” “eternal punishment,” and “the second death.” But there is an even more descriptive term for this place: gehenna, or hell. 

While the Hebrew sheol and the Greek hades generally depict the temporary abode of the dead, gehenna and its associated terms describe a place of everlasting future punishment, not only for Satan and evil spirits, but also for those whose names are not written in the book of life (Rev. 20:15).

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Glory in Resurrection

This is another in a series of excerpts from What Every Christian Should Know About the Return of Jesus, released by High Street Press and available at Amazon.com. 

The glory we experience now as Christ lives in us, and the glory we experience in death as our souls and spirits ascend into heaven, are partial works of glorification. But full glorification for followers of Jesus takes place when he calls our bodies from the grave and gives us incorruptible bodies like the body he bore when he rose from the dead. 

Physical resurrection is the pinnacle of personal glorification, for in it we shrug off the last vestiges of sin, which have clung to our mortal bodies. In glorification, the effects of the Fall are fully and finally reversed. 

At the return of Christ, all who have died in the Lord are resurrected. Their souls and spirits, which are in heaven with Jesus, are reunited with their bodies, resulting in complete personal glorification; the body, soul, and spirit are fully conformed to the image of Christ and thus free of any effects of the Fall. 

Christians alive on the earth at the return of Christ are instantly transformed as they are given glorified bodies; their souls and spirits are perfected at the same time.

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