Does God Love Satan?

If Jesus tells us to love our enemies, does that extend all the way to Satan? This week, Kaitlyn and Mike take a surprisingly thoughtful kids’ question and use it to explore what Christians mean when we talk about the devil, and what Scripture is actually asking of us when it commands enemy-love.

They also revisit the much-maligned phrase “love the sinner, hate the sin,”  and ask whether it still has value, and consider why the hardest “enemies” to love usually aren’t cosmic villains, but the people who cut us off in traffic, frustrate us in the checkout line, or vote differently than we do.

0:00 - Theme Song

2:23 - Does God Love Satan?

6:00 - Who/what is Satan

10:14 - Satan and Evil

14:00 - Sponsor - SelectQuote - Go to https://www.selectquote.com/kaitlyn to get started on your new life insurance policy

15:02 - Sponsor - World Relief - Let’s Talk About It! World Relief has conversation cards about displacement and immigration, downloadable at https://worldrelief.com/KAITLYN

18:05 - What is Love?

31:42 - Enemy Love and God’s Love

34:23 - End Credits

Clip: We Need to Rethink "Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin"

Mike: To the question, “Does God love Satan?” If God created Satan, we have to say yes. And essentially you're saying, “God loves the sinner, hates the sin.”

Kaitlyn: Yes. My hot take is that that's actually a really good, true way of saying things. People have misused this phrase, sure — “love the sinner, hate the sin.” Often, and most egregiously, we’ve misused it in that we said that, but we really did hate the person.

Like, “love the sinner, hate the sin” was my justification for mistreating this person.

Right. I think that's a pretty good — it's a cliche, and I don't love cliches because they tend to be something we rely upon without thinking critically about it. But I think if you really examine this one, “love the sinner, hate the sin,” which is another way of also describing our orientation to the world, right?

Christians have fallen into some bad camps when it came to our orientation to the world. We've either said, “Let’s just take it all as it is, let’s assimilate to how the world is. Let's assume that in our politics or in our culture, whatever's out there is good and not be critical about it.” Or we've said, “Oh, it's all bad. It's different from us. It's out to get us.”

A better way would be saying, “Love the creation; hate the way it’s been distorted.” Love God's creation in nature. Hate the way that it's been distorted in terms of natural disasters. Right? Yes. Love what God created in human creativity and the things that we make — beautiful… this is the beginning of Genesis, like this list of all these ways that humans created amazing things — and also immediately misused those things. So hate that.

Mike: Okay, I got it. So then: we are called to love Satan if we're called to love our enemies. But now, Kaitlyn, I think we need to define love. Because now it's making me think — totally — “All right, do I need to invite Satan to my birthday party? To my summer barbecue? Do I have to say hi to him every day?

Kaitlyn: Right, like, do I have to approve of everything he does?

Mike: Like, isn't the most loving thing to actually tell him how wrong he is? Which, you know — we do think Satan is wrong. So I think the hard part of this conversation is, well, what does it mean to love? Because I think what comes to mind for most of us is not actually what Scripture is describing.

Kaitlyn: Yes, totally. This is an important part of the question — like you said, not just when it comes to Satan, but when it comes to everyone. Right? This is a lot of our difficulty, and a lot of our disagreement, is about what does it mean to love someone. Even “love the sinner, hate the sin.” The fact that that's a cliche is partially because what some people meant by that was: love someone who is sinning, and be clear to them, in appropriate ways, about how you think their sin is hurting other people and hurting themselves.

For some people, it was a justification for just really annoyingly, and without any concern or care for their well-being, constantly telling them how wrong they are and how bad the things they're doing are. Those are different ways of thinking about what love is. Love both comes in different forms and means different things to different people. So we should be clear about what we mean by love.

Our coworker Skye earlier said that he got this from Dallas Willard, but this is not Dallas Willard’s definition — this is Aquinas’ definition of love, which I really like — and which is similar to Augustine’s in some ways — is: to will the good of the other.

And that, I think, is unsurprisingly a really Christian idea that falls in line with everything we've just said. So to love something created by God — all humans, all of creation — to love that thing God created is to will that they flourish, to will that they experience the greatest good for them.

Which can — I mean, this is the critique of Aquinas's view of love — it can be sort of paternalistic, because we live in a world that says, “You decide what's good for you, and I decide what's good for me. And so to love me means to just appreciate how I desire to be.” And Aquinas had a much older view that most humans used to have, which is that there is some universal idea for any kind of creature of what good is, what a good life is.

We get that now when it comes to animals. We'll say, “You were mistreating this dog by keeping it in a cage,” because a dog was not meant to live in a cage the size of its own body. It was meant to run. It was meant to bark and play and interact with other creatures. And we want to say, as Christians, the same thing of other humans: that God has revealed to us what a good human life is.

And it both has this sense of flourishing — and also, in a fallen world, sometimes involves great suffering and sacrifice and difficulty. And so to love someone, to love a creature, especially a creature made in God's image, is to will the good of that creature.