Is the Devil Real?

Is there a real, personal devil? Or is Satan merely a myth invented to give evil a face? Today, R.C. Sproul explains why the devil must be more than an impersonal force.

I’m very much aware of the fact that in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, with the advent of liberal Christianity—which denied everything supernatural, even the supernatural character of Christ—that everything that the Bible said about Satan as a supernatural individual being was rejected as pure mythology. And the best thing you could get was that Satan is a symbol for an evil force. How many of you heard that? There’s a force of evil. Now, let me ask you this: How many times have you heard that in your life? There’s evil forces, but they’re not personal.

How could an impersonal anything be called evil? How can that which has no personality, no consciousness, no will, no faculty of thought or moral activity, have any kind of moral evaluation placed upon it? You don’t look at rocks and say: “That’s a moral rock, and that’s an immoral rock. That’s a wicked rock, and that’s a good rock.”

Do you see that if you think about it for less than five minutes, you see that the idea of an impersonal evil force is a self-contradictory idea? But it’s abstract enough for people to accept it uncritically as a neat little substitute for the idea of a personal devil: “I don’t believe in the personal devil because that insults my intelligence, but I believe that there is such a thing as an impersonal force of evil.” Well, that insults my intelligence.