Satan hurts God by hurting us.
The Bible tells us that Satan’s goal is to oppose God and everything he stands for. The problem is that Satan can’t hurt God, but he can hurt the closest and most precious thing to him: us.
To hurt me, you might hit me, shoot me, or poison me, but as a parent I know that if you really want to devastate me, just hurt one of my children. Satan’s strategy is similar—he can’t hurt God, so he tries to hurt the closest thing to God, the creatures made in God’s image—you and me.
Satan continues to hurt us by keeping us trapped. In Satan’s eyes, the only thing better than fostering an environment where people hurt one another is coaxing people who have been hurt to spend the rest of their lives consumed with bitterness and resentment, poisoning everyone and everything they touch.
In his classic fourteenth-century poem The Inferno, Dante Alighieri paints a dramatic portrait of the soul’s journey through hell. Near the end of his journey, Dante stumbles upon a man named Count Ugolino, cannibalizing the body of Archbishop Ruggieri. The two had been political allies while alive, but at some point Archbishop Ruggieri betrayed Count Ugolino and locked him and his four sons in a tower where they all starved to death.
Dante discovers these rivals both in hell, Ugolino gnawing on the archbishop’s skull in a picture of eternal bitteness. Upon discovering the gruesome scene, Dante says, “That sinner raised his mouth from his fierce meal, then used the head that he had ripped apart in back: he wiped his lips upon its hair.”
That’s Satan’s plan—crafting an environment where people spend their entire lives trapped, consumed, and filled with vengeful thoughts and feelings of hatred.
Do you really want to live like that?
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