My text is from 1 John 3:8:
The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil.
Western culture, well most of it, is pretty good at laughing off the mythology of the devil as a superstition. The strategy is, make a cartoon character out of him (you know, horns, red suit, pitch fork), and then say, 'well of course he doesn't exist'. Well, fine: I don't believe in cartoon characters either... Which is why I need you now to make that little cartoon character that pops up in your head as soon as you hear the word 'devil' disappear. If you need to have an image, then the Bible portrays him in the form of a serpent, which, as a person who comes from the continent with 9 of the 10 most poisonous snakes in the world, will do admirably.
What we do believe in -what we trust in more than anything - is our that our rationalism has triumphed over this devil and his works. We believe that our technology and our ingenuity, our political skill and our social management, have banished the devil from the face of the earth and liberated humanity to be live unhindered. The devil was always previously a code for those evils in the world and in us that we can't understand or overcome: but as we progress, as we peel back the boundaries of knowledge, as we begin to understand human psychology better and better, such primitive explanations appear to have become redundant. Sheer knowledge - of our world and of ourselves - is surely enough to make the devil disappear.
We believe that we are part of a great exodus from captivity to ignorance into the glorious freedom that comes from knowing better. Since the 19th century education - especially secular education - has been seen as the great alternative to religion in helping people to be better people. Our faith in the capacity of education to make us better people and to produce a better society is virtually unchallenged. That's our response to any moral crisis, isn't it? We know people are basically well intentioned, and that they would make good choices given the right information. Knowing better is surely being better.
But that's where we are deeply ignorant. We Westerners have self-delusionary belief in our own capacity to overcome everything including our own natures. We prize our freedom above everything as the mark of our human-ness - our will to do and be what we desire; but we are dull to our own incapacity to do even that we would do - and our nagging tendency to do that we wouldn't do. The loss of temper, the moments of rage, the way we fail to tell the truth, the way we use words manipulatively or destrutively, our betrayals of our friends, the creeping envy, the impatience, the sudden surprise of lust just when you thought you had mastered it, the ingratitude, the way we rationalise greed, the wilfull blindness to the needs of the other: despite knowing the destructive consequences of these things, not least for ourselves, we find ourselves doing them anyway.
This twisting of our spiritual spines is why the Bible speaks us of us being enslaved by sin, or children of the devil. Despite ourselves, we do the works of our Father, the evil one.
And what are the devil's works? They are three, though they spawn many more:
1. Lies
2. Murder
3. Death
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