Keep Watch Or Be Lunch - 1 Peter 5:8-9 Series

1 Peter 5:8 Be sober and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. 9 Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers in the world is undergoing the same sufferings. 10 And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.

Introduction

There is an old country song titled, "Devil Went Down to Georgia." In that song the devil travels to Georgia to capture a soul, and he ends up trying to win a guy's soul through a fiddle-playing competition. The guy ends up out-fiddling the devil, and Satan loses. In case you don't already know, that is actually not really the method we are given in Scripture for spiritual warfare. But what a lot of people do not know is that some of the most common ideas in the church about how to fight against Satan and demons are just as fictional as that song. There are numerous passages in Scripture that instruct us on how to carry out spiritual warfare, and today's text in 1 Peter is one of them. We have been studying verse by verse through the book of 1 Peter and we have arrived at the final two paragraphs of the letter.

The Enemy

Before signing off, Peter wants to give us a very important warning about a very real threat. That threat is described right there in verse 8 - your enemy the devil. We need to be on our guard against him because he is like a lion. So there are a few things we need to know. First, in what way is he like a lion? What, exactly, is the threat? What is Satan capable of doing to us?

And second, what does it look like to be on guard against him and to resist him? What is our method for fighting against an invisible, non-physical enemy? These are very important questions, because there is a great deal of confusion about what Satan is capable of, and how we go about doing battle with him. So let’s start with the first question - who is the devil, and what kinds of things does he do that threaten us?

Who Is the Devil?

A Person

First, understand that the devil is a person, not just some vague force out there or an abstract principle of evil. He has thoughts, he makes decisions, he has emotions. He develops strategies. He communicates with God. He uses logic and reason. He quotes Scripture. He tells lies. And someday he will be punished for his evil.

Powerful

So the devil is a person - but he is not human. He is a spirit. And he is immensely powerful, and extremely active in your life. I have heard preachers say that it is silly to think that you are being attacked by the devil, because he is not omnipresent so he cannot get around to everyone. But Peter says you do need to fight against the devil. It is true that Satan is not omnipresent. However he does command an army of demons who carry out his wishes. When the Allied forces fought against Hitler, how did they do it? By fighting against Hitler’s entire army. It is the same with fighting Satan - you have to deal with his army of demons. But he is the commander of those demons, so when we resist the demons we are fighting against Satan's purposes.

So it is not silly to think you are being attacked by the devil – it is biblical. According to Ephesians 4:27, every time you continue in unrepentant sin you are giving the devil a place in your life. According to 1 Corinthians 7:5, whenever a man or woman is tempted with lust because of a lack of fulfillment within the marriage, it is the devil who is at work. According to 2 Corinthians 11:2, when someone in a church will not forgive or holds a grudge, it is because the devil outwitted that person. And almost an entire chapter in Ephesians 6 is devoted to teaching every single Christian how to engage in war against the devil every day. Through his army of demons, the devil has his tentacles everywhere. Scripture calls him the ruler of the authority of the air (Eph.2:2), the god of this age (2 Co.4:4) and the ruler of this world (Jn.12:31).

1 John 5:19 the whole world is under the control of the evil one.

You can go into kings’ palaces, and you will find him there. You will find him in the workplace, the playground, the battlefield, the classroom - even in your home. Even in your prayer closet, he is there and he is on the attack. When a missionary penetrates to the interior jungles of some unknown people group, he finds that the devil arrived there long before him. There is no geographical way to escape him. His armies are everywhere.