Verbal Kint, during his interrogation in the movie The Usual Suspects, comments, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Apparently, that quote is traced back to a 19th-century French poet, Charles Baudelaire.

This past week, I looked at Genesis 3:15 as the protoevangelium, the first good news. It points us ahead to Christ’s defeat of Satan on the cross, where he is wounded but crushes the serpent’s head. I did not have time to address the existence of an ancient personal evil, i.e., does Satan really exist?

CS Lewis warns against two opposite errors in The Screwtape Letters. He writes, “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”

The Satanic panic of the 80s or the fascination with the demonic is not the error I run into much in my circles. But many, even in the church, think talk of Satan, of the devil, of a personal evil, seems quaint or superstitious. I I think it’s actually pretty important for the following reasons.

First, its explanatory power. Andrew Delbanco, secular scholar at Columbia University, says, “a great gulf has opened up between the visibility of evil and our intellectual resources available to cope with it.” In his words, secular liberals, including himself, have lost the ability to conceive of “radical evil.” Tim Keller, citing Delbanco, contends that most secular explanations of evil offer only psychological or social conditioning explanations, and “in so doing, trivialize the terrible wrongs people are capable of.”

Delbanco recounts a story from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s struggles to understand the horrors of the Holocaust. Most of the upper echelon of American society, the elites, put little importance on the rescue of Nazi victims. Early in the war, the stories seemed to horrific and were chalked up to hyperbole. Later, as the evidence mounted, they were simply inconceivable. FDR was given the Danish philosopher/theologian Kierkegaard to read and found, for the first time, “an understanding of what it is in man that makes it possible to be so evil.”

Lose the devil from the story and we lose a key part of the Christian’s ability to explain evil.

Second, Jesus spoke of the devil. On at least six different occasions, Jesus spoke of Satan as a personal entity that was tempting him in the wilderness (Matthew 4:10), could be opposed (Mark 3:26), is active in stealing the word (Mark 4:15), fell from heaven (Luke 10:18), kept a woman bound for eighteen years (Luke 13:16), asked to “sift” Simon (Luke 22:31). “The devil”, with the definite article, shows up in red letters five times across the gospels. The gospel writers, the one’s who tell us about Jesus’ life, refer to devil, devils, demons or more than 150 times.

Saying the devil, Satan, is a mere personification of evil or a premodern explanation for evil is very problematic. If that’s the case, who was Jesus talking to in the wilderness? Is it just a fable? If that story, presented as factual history, is merely fable, what else is fable? If demons aren’t real, who was Jesus talking to when he cast Legion out? If they aren’t real, did Jesus know that, but put on a performance? If he didn’t know that, what does that say about his knowledge, wisdom, and divinity?

Third, the long-established belief of the church. I like standing in the stream of church history and break from only after serious deliberation (i.e., how the church spoke of women or slavery). The long and consistent testimony of the church has been that we face an adversary, the devil, Satan, who is a personal entity, opposed to God, and hellbent on destroying. He is a part of God’s original, good creation, and subsequently rebelled. He remains a part of the created order, not eternal, powerful, but not omnipotent, spiritual, but not omnipresent. He has been overcome, yet in his death throes, continues to harass humanity. He will one day soon be confined eternally and irrevocably. While there were occasional dissenters on finer points (i.e., Origen thought Satan himself would one day be redeemed), a belief in the existence of demons and Satan was held by the vast majority of Christians through the ages and around the world.

We must be alert to all forms of chronological snobbery (C.S Lewis’ famous term). It’s easy to fall into the ‘snobbery’ of thinking that ancient peoples “just didn’t know better.” Arthur Lindsley reminds us of Lewis’s conclusion that “our own age was merely a period which, like past periods, has its own characteristic illusions. We can unthinkingly take for granted certain cultural assumptions, unless they are questioned.” The disbelief in the devil betrays an anti-supernatural bent rooted in a modern materialistic worldview. This materialistic worldview is not self-evident nor compatible with the story of the Bible.

For these reasons, I believe it is important to affirm the existence of the devil. But this shouldn’t frighten or cow us. Martin Luther is right, as powerful as the devil may be, he is “the Lord’s devil,” meaning, he cannot exceed the sovereignty of his Creator.