“Why doesn’t God just zap the devil?”

Steve Brown:
Why doesn’t God just zap the devil? The answer to that and other questions, on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
Welcome to Key Life, our host and teacher is Steve Brown. He’s no guru, but he does have honest answers to honest questions about the Bible. God’s grace changes everything, how we love, work, live, lead, marry, parent, evangelize, purchase, and worship. So, here’s Steve and Pete Alwinson from ForgeBibleStudy.com with street-smart Bible teaching for real life.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey man. How you doing?

Steve Brown:
I’m doing really good.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
I really am and better now that you’re here.

Pete Alwinson:
Share the blame.

Steve Brown:
Well yeah that, but there are other things. You know, there’s some people when they show it gets worse. And you dread seeing them, but you’re not in that list.

Pete Alwinson:
And you’re not going to name any names today.

Steve Brown:
No, I’m not. Some churches get revival when certain people leave.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s true, yeah.

Steve Brown:
And I always said there wasn’t anything wrong with my church I couldn’t fix with a good funeral. And everybody laughed because they thought I was joking.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, right, right.

Steve Brown:
That’s Pete and Pete and I both kid about being a pastor because we are no longer pastors. And for a number of reasons, one is we don’t ever have to go to an elder’s meeting again, and a number of others. We’re kind of glad. It’s why we’re so joyous. By the way, you’ve got to check out ForgeTruth.com that is a great website. A lot of video, a lot of audio, a lot of written material. And you can get the podcast that is weekly there. And if you’re a guy, man, this is life changing stuff. Pete’s ministry is called ForgeTruth and God is doing some amazing things in that. So, check it out and then you will rise up and call me blessed when you do. ForgeTruth.com as you know, Pete comes in on Fridays, and we spend the entire broadcast answering questions. And we love Fridays. It’s a fun time, and we’re wrong about 50 percent of our answers. We just don’t know which 50%. So, you’re going to have to get out your Bible and check for yourself. And we love your questions. You can call 1-800-KEY-LIFE, 24 7, follow instructions, record your question, and sometimes we put that on the air. Or you can write to

Key Life Network
P.O. Box 5000
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in Canada, it’s

Key Life Canada
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or you can e-mail your question to [email protected] and if you can help us financially, please do. I promise we’ll be as faithful with your financial gift as you were in giving it, and we’ll squeeze every dime for the glory of God. If you can’t, we understand. If you can, we’ll be so pleased. Pete, why don’t you lead us in prayer and then we’ll get to some of these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
You got it. Let’s pray together. Father, what a great thing it is that we can stop right now as your children and just come into your presence. And so, we worship you, our Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We worship you, we pause, and we remember that you are, you were, and you always will be. You’re eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God. And you have come after us and drawn us into a relationship with you. And so, we thank you for doing that, for stopping us in our tracks, for making us see that we were not making it by doing life on our own, that we needed forgiveness, we needed a Lord, we needed a Father. And so, we come to you now, we praise you and Lord, we give you all that’s happened this week. We ask that you continue to lead us and guide us in the way we should go. Counsel us with your eye upon us. Open your word to us. And even this week-end, as we look forward to being in worship, we pray that you would use those pastors, teachers, priests, worship directors, those who are leading us into your presence, that we would glorify you, that we would hear you at a deeper level, that we would love you even more than we do today. Thanks for Key Life and this opportunity to do Q&A. Lord, you know our questions. And we ask that you would give us wisdom and guide us for your honor and glory. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Steve Brown:
Amen. Pete, let’s go to our phone lines first.

Caller 1:
When Lucifer fell, why didn’t God just zap him, destroy him, and the fallen angels?

Steve Brown:
Good question.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, right.

Steve Brown:
He did, sort of. I mean, given that God is outside of time and space, Satan’s already dead, outside of time and space. You don’t like that very much, I can see it on your face. You know, it really is helpful if you just think about it Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
I do, and I have, and I come back to it. There’s no doubt that you’re absolutely right that God is outside of time and space and history, that everything is the eternal present to God. Okay. Wrap your head around that.

Steve Brown:
Oh man. I am impressed.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. No, I’m interacting with it. It’s just, I don’t grasp it. It is above my pay grade but

Steve Brown:
I don’t either, but it’s nice to say cause it’s helpful when you’re answering a question like this.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
Are we dualist? And what’s a dualist?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, no, we’re not dualist, right? This idea that there are two opposite powers, opposite and equal. And, you know, there’s good and there’s bad, ying and yang. No, that’s not Biblical at all.

Steve Brown:
Not a bit, there’s only one power.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, that’s right. So, what’s your take? How do you answer that question?

Steve Brown:
You deal with the question by saying there must be a reason that he doesn’t just zap him. And the reason is His glory. The reason is that in Satan’s defeat, God is glorified. In the defeat of evil, God is glorified. And that’s what’s going on even when it doesn’t feel like it. And it’s what’s going on to you personally, even when it doesn’t feel like it. We, you know, C.S.. Lewis, and that’s a great little book called Screwtape Letters, as you know.

Pete Alwinson:
Love it.

Steve Brown:
And Lewis says.

There are two great mistakes, the first is to think that the devil doesn’t exist. And the other is to give him more power than he has.

And I agree with that. So, I think, doesn’t zap him, because Satan is God’s lackey. And he’s using him to make you better, dummy. And he’s using him, eventually, to make the world better.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And for his glory.

Pete Alwinson:
And for his glory. Yeah. And so, there’s that, there is that sense in which all of what we see going on is to bring glory to God, but he is making a statement to the principalities and powers as well.

Steve Brown:
That’s true. I forgot about that. And that is so true.

Pete Alwinson:
And that goes beyond us that. the unseen realm, there’s a lot going on in the unseen realm. And so, we think everything’s about us, but it’s not just about us. It’s about the unseen realm too. And what God is doing in his counsel to bring power and glory.

Steve Brown:
That’s so good. And so true. You know, if we had been on Calvary when Jesus died and our blindness had been removed, we would have seen a wow thing going on.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
That unseen that you’re talking about. This is an e-mail. If Jesus possesses all of the attributes of the Father, why in the world does the Son say in Scripture, only the Father knows? If the Son were truly God, why wouldn’t he know as well?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, that’s one, that’s a very good question, a very important one. It really has to do with this whole idea of God’s immutability, that God cannot change. He cannot cease to be God, so there’s a very real sense in which Jesus, even though Philippians 2 talks about the kenosis of Christ, the emptying. It cannot mean in any way that Jesus ceases in any way, shape, or form with any attribute to be less than completely 100 percent God.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, that’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
So, it means that he has to have intentionally decided not to use the attribute of omniscience at times.

Steve Brown:
So good, that’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s how I look at it.

Steve Brown:
No, it’s the only way you can understand it because Jesus is God, but he chose to be human. And that meant that he chose to be afraid. He chose to suffer. He chose to be lonely. And he chose not to know everything. Man, that’s what the temptation was about, by the way.

Pete Alwinson:
It was a very real temptation, Matthew 4. People downplay it, they say, well, he was God, and they downplay it. No, he was very, very real, real human. However, we have to say, as a footnote here that there are times when the Gospels show that Jesus did use his divine powers.

Steve Brown:
Yes. Agreed.

Pete Alwinson:
He knew what was in man, so he didn’t entrust himself to man.

Steve Brown:
That’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
You know, things like that.

Steve Brown:
And it gets complicated when you, and you shouldn’t be doing too much separation of those.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
You should take what we just said, which is true and Biblical. And not worry with it so much because it’ll drive you crazy. But in this particular question and the particular answer, that’s good. Who was Melchizedek?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, he was.

Steve Brown:
I’m proud of myself for pronouncing it right.

Pete Alwinson:
Even being able to pronounce it. We see him in Genesis, right? And he comes and he meets Abraham after Abraham rescues his nephew Lot in that battle, and you know, his name means King. He’s the King of Salem, which was probably Jerusalem, right? Way back.

Steve Brown:
Do you think it’s a Christophany?

Pete Alwinson:
You know, I’m not convinced that it was, but I’m not convinced it wasn’t either. How about you?

Steve Brown:
It could have been.

Pete Alwinson:
It could have been.

Steve Brown:
Because I don’t speak beyond where Scripture speaks.

Pete Alwinson:
Right, right.

Steve Brown:
There’s no clear statement, this is Jesus, get out of the way. But it’s intriguing to think, because Jesus said, I am, that means I was, I am and I will be. He used the covenant name of God, that means that he didn’t just start existing when Mary gave birth to Jesus.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
He had existed from all of eternity, so maybe.

Pete Alwinson:
Maybe, and the writer of the Hebrew says, calls him without father, without mother, you know, all of that. So, there is mystery surrounding Melchizedek as perhaps the pre-incarnate Christ.

Steve Brown:
And that would be, I like the word Christophany because it makes people think you’re smart.

Pete Alwinson:
I think you’re smart, Steve.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. Yeah, it’s because I just said Christophany.

Pete Alwinson:
You did, that’s right.

Steve Brown:
That’s right, I am smart.

Pete Alwinson:
Proves the point.

Steve Brown:
It proves the point. If you believe that, you’ll believe anything. Pete, you going to come back next week?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah man, we’ve got more to talk about.

Steve Brown:
Oh, we really do. And guys, it’s so good that you join us, and we appreciate that and you much. And Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Light Network.