# What God’s Treatment of His Worst Enemy Reveals About His Character

- Link: https://lordjesuschristreigns.blog/2026/04/01/what-gods-treatment-of-his-worst-enemy-reveals-about-his-character/
- Published: 2026-04-01T10:45:00-07:00
- Author: LordJesusChristReigns

There is a question so unsettling that most Christians have never thought to ask
it, and so beautiful that once you see the answer, you will never read your Bible
the same way again.

The question is this: what does God owe Satan?

The instinctive answer is nothing. Less than nothing. Satan is God’s enemy, the 
deceiver of nations, the murderer from the beginning. He deserves destruction, and
he will receive it. End of discussion.

But that answer, while true, moves too quickly. It skips something the Scriptures
take great pains to establish — something that, when you slow down and look at it
carefully, turns out to be one of the most staggering testimonies to the character
of God in the entire Bible.

To get there, we need to start at the beginning. The real beginning.

---

## God Did Not Create Hell

This is not a controversial statement. It is simply what the Bible says, and it 
has enormous implications that most teaching never unpacks.

When God completed the work of creation, He surveyed everything He had made and 
declared it _very good_ (Genesis 1:31). Not good with reservations. Not good pending
further development. Very good — wholly, entirely, without exception. There was 
no death. There were no toxins, no diseases, no predators, no graves. The book of
Wisdom, which the Catholic and Orthodox traditions include in their canonical scriptures,
states this with stark precision: _“God did not make death, and he does not delight
in the death of the living. For he created all things that they might exist”_ (Wisdom
1:13–14).

Read that again. _He created all things that they might exist._ Not some things.
All things. Every creature that breathes — human, animal, angelic — was made with
one telos in mind: continued life in the presence of its Creator.

If God did not make death, he did not make the second death either. If he created
nothing to die, he created no place for the dead to go. There was no Hades at the
beginning, no lake of fire, no Gehenna. These things do not belong to the original
creation. They entered the story later, as a consequence — and the Bible is precise
about when.

Matthew 25:41 contains one of the most quietly explosive verses in all of Scripture.
In the judgment scene, Christ says to those on his left: _“Depart from me, you cursed,
into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels.”_ Note
the past tense. The fire was _prepared._ It did not exist from eternity. It was 
fashioned at a specific moment, for a specific reason, for specific creatures — 
after those creatures had made themselves into the thing they became.

This matters enormously. Hell is not part of God’s original design for creation.
It is not proof that God is a God of wrath who created some beings for destruction.
It is the opposite: it is proof that God created every rational creature — including
the one who would become Satan — for life, for fellowship, for glory. Hell exists
because some of those creatures made a choice so catastrophic, so irreversible, 
that a new category of existence had to be fashioned to contain what they had become.

---

## The Potentiality of Evil

But how does this work? If God is omniscient and knew Satan would fall, why create
him at all?

The answer the Scriptures give — and it is a philosophically sophisticated one —
is that God created all things with potentialities that did not have to be actualized.
Good potentialities and their opposites. The ability to love and the ability to 
refuse love. The capacity for life and, latent within freedom, the possibility of
its catastrophic misuse.

Think of it this way. Every human cell contains, within its DNA, the raw biological
preconditions that, under the wrong conditions, could become cancerous. The potential
is there in the very architecture of life itself. But potential is not destiny. 
Those preconditions remain inert unless something activates them — a mutation, a
toxin, a cascade of failures in the body’s own repair mechanisms. God created the
universe teeming with good potentiality — life, beauty, worship, communion — but
within the gift of freedom lay the dormant possibility of its opposite. God did 
not create evil. He created freedom. Evil is what freedom looks like when it turns
against the source of its own existence.

When Satan rebelled, and when Adam and Eve followed him into that rebellion, those
dormant potentialities were activated. Death entered the world. Hades came into 
being as the place where disembodied souls await the resurrection. And hell — the
lake of fire, the second death — was fashioned from things that already existed,
prepared as the place appointed for those who had made themselves fit for nothing
else.

God did not create hell. He created the conditions of freedom that made hell a logical
necessity given the choices that were freely made. These are not the same thing.

---

## The Indestructible Soul and the Resurrection Body

Before we get to the cosmic scope of the atonement, we need to understand what the
Bible actually teaches about death — because the popular understanding is almost
entirely wrong.

When you die, your body goes to the dust. This is what the curse promised: _“You
are dust, and to dust you shall return”_ (Genesis 3:19). But your spirit does not
go to the dust, because your spirit did not come from the dust. It came from God.

Genesis 2:7 tells us that God formed man from the dust of the ground and then _breathed
into his nostrils the breath of life._ The body came from the earth. The animating
principle — the spirit, the breath of life — came directly from God. Ecclesiastes
12:7 draws the logical conclusion: _“The dust returns to the earth as it was, and
the spirit returns to God who gave it.”_ The body goes where it came from. So does
the spirit.

The breath of life is not a metaphor for oxygen. When Christ appeared to his disciples
after the resurrection and breathed on them, saying _“Receive the Holy Spirit”_ (
John 20:22), he was enacting the same pattern in the new creation that was enacted
in the original creation. The breath of God is the Spirit of God. When God breathed
into Adam, he was sending forth his Spirit to animate and sustain a new creature.
Job understood this perfectly: _“The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the
Almighty gives me life”_ (Job 33:4). These are not two things but one — a Hebrew
parallelism in which breath and Spirit are identified.

This is why there is no soul sleep in the Bible. When you die, your body returns
to the dust and your soul and spirit return to God who gave them, to be assigned
their place of waiting. The souls of the righteous are with Christ (Philippians 
1:23). They are alive, conscious, and present with the Lord.

At the final resurrection, Christ will raise all the dead — the righteous and the
wicked alike (John 5:28–29, Acts 24:15). The souls that have been in Hades will 
re-enter their resurrected bodies. Unified body and soul will stand before the judgment
seat. The wicked will be cast into the lake of fire as whole persons — body and 
soul together — which is precisely why Revelation 20:14 can say that death and Hades
are thrown into the lake of fire: the grave and the realm of disembodied souls will
simply no longer be needed once all the dead are raised and judged.

---

## The Blood That Reaches Heaven Itself

Now we arrive at the theological heart of the matter, and it is here that the Scriptures
become almost unbearably majestic.

Paul’s letter to the Colossians contains what scholars believe is an early Christian
hymn, and its architecture is breathtaking. In verses 16 and 17, Paul establishes
that Christ created _all things_ — everything _in heaven and on earth, visible and
invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities._ Everything. The
entire created order, angelic and physical, was made through him and for him, and
is held in existence by him moment by moment.

Then, in verse 20, the hymn pivots to the work of redemption — and uses the identical
language: _“through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or 
in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”_

The same scope. The same categories. Everything that was created through him is 
included in the reconciling reach of his death. The cross casts its shadow over 
the entire cosmos — over everything that Christ made and everything that Christ 
sustains. His sacrifice is not a local event with limited jurisdiction. It is cosmically
sufficient. The blood of the God-Man is of infinite value, and its reconciling power
extends to every corner of creation.

The letter to the Hebrews adds a startling dimension to this. After describing how
the earthly tabernacle required purification with the blood of animals, the author
writes: _“But the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these”_(
Hebrews 9:23). The heavenly sanctuary — the reality of which the earthly tabernacle
was only a copy — also required purification. Christ entered heaven itself, not 
with the blood of bulls and goats, but with his own blood, to present that perfect
sacrifice before the Father and to purify what the earthly ritual could only shadow.

Why would the heavenly sanctuary need purification? The author does not say explicitly,
and Christian theologians have proposed several answers across the centuries. The
most ancient and widespread reading — found in Chrysostom, Peter Lombard, and Cornelius
a Lapide — understands _the heavenly things_ as the people of God, the living stones
of the heavenly temple, who must be cleansed by Christ’s blood to be presented holy
before the Father. Another reading, suggested by the fact that Satan had access 
to God’s heavenly presence until a definitive moment of expulsion (Revelation 12:
7–12, Job 1–2), is that heaven required cleansing from the contamination introduced
by that access.

And then there is Revelation 5:9. When the Lamb takes the scroll, the four living
creatures and the twenty-four elders fall before him and sing: _“Worthy are you 
to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain and purchased for God
with your blood.”_ The majority of Greek manuscripts — along with the Sinaiticus
codex, Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, the Syriac Peshitta, and multiple other ancient versions—
include a pronoun at this point: _“you have redeemed us to God by your blood.”_

The singers are not only humans. The four living creatures are the cherubim of Ezekiel
1 and Isaiah 6 — heavenly spirit beings, not men. And yet they are included in the
_us._ Whether this means that Christ’s blood has a confirming and preserving function
for the holy angels — securing them in blessedness so that no second rebellion occurs—
or whether it points to something even more mysterious, the text at minimum insists
that the blood of Christ has a significance for the heavenly realm that goes beyond
anything most Christian preaching has ever explored.

---

## God in Hell. God Over Hell.

One more piece of the picture, and perhaps the most disorienting.

The psalmist writes: _“If I ascend to heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in
Sheol, you are there”_ (Psalm 139:8). God is not absent from the realm of the dead.
He is not sealed off from hell by his own holiness. He is present there — not as
a material body that spatially extends into the location, but as the sustaining,
overseeing power without whom nothing could exist anywhere, including in the darkness
below.

Revelation 14:10–11 makes this explicit in a way that should stop every reader cold:
those who receive the mark of the beast _“will be tormented with fire and brimstone
in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.”_ The Lamb is
present in the lake of fire. Not absent, not indifferent, not sealed behind a cosmic
partition. Present. This is not a comfortable thought. It is a staggering one, and
it demands to be held alongside everything else Scripture says about the love of
God and the severity of God.

---

## What God Owes Satan — and What He Gives Him Anyway

Now we can return to our opening question.

Satan will not be saved. He cannot repent. Our Lord himself said of him that _“there
is no truth in him”_ and that _“when he lies, he speaks out of his own character”_(
John 8:44) — not out of choice but out of what he has made himself. The Catechism
of the Catholic Church states plainly: _“It is the irrevocable character of their
choice, and not a defect in the infinite divine mercy, that makes the angels’ sin
unforgivable.”_ Aquinas, John of Damascus, and the entire Catholic and Orthodox 
tradition agree: the angelic will, unlike the human will which is mediated by time,
sensation, and the possibility of change, is fixed in its choice by its own metaphysical
nature. The fall is to the angels as death is to men. There is no second chance —
not because God withholds it, but because the door of the angelic will swings only
once.

And yet.

God sustains Satan in existence. God preserves him. God endows him with the abilities
and powers he now uses against God. God sends rain on the unjust as well as the 
just (Matthew 5:45) — and this principle extends to the most unjust being in creation.
God permits Satan to enter his heavenly presence in Job 1 and 2, engages him in 
conversation, and does not consume him. When the demoniacs cried out in Matthew 
8:29 — _“Have you come here to torment us before the time?”_ — they revealed something
remarkable: they knew there was an appointed time, and they trusted God’s character
enough to know that he would not act before it. God’s sworn word of judgment, even
to his enemies, is a word they can rely on.

What does this mean? It means that Satan himself — the father of lies, the enemy
of God and man — is a walking witness to the faithfulness, patience, and love of
God. He knows God cannot lie. He knows God will keep his word. He knows that the
God who created him created him in love, that the God who sustains him sustains 
him with a patience that has no human analogue, and that when the day of his destruction
finally comes, he will not be able to say that God did not give him every moment
up until that day as an opportunity to be what he was made to be.

He will not take that opportunity. He cannot. He has made himself incapable of it.
But the opportunity was there — woven into every moment of his continued existence
by the God who created him out of love and who, to this day, has not stopped being
that God.

This is the character of our God. Not the character of a tyrant who created some
beings for destruction to demonstrate his power. Not the character of a God who 
takes pleasure in the death of any living thing. The character of a Father who made
everything for life, who watched some of his creatures destroy themselves, who fashioned
a place of just punishment only after that destruction became irrevocable, and who
sent his Son to offer reconciliation to the entire cosmos — including, objectively
and cosmically, to the one who hated him most.

Satan will go to the lake of fire. He will go there with the full knowledge that
the God who sends him there created him for glory, sustained him in patience, and
paid the price of cosmic reconciliation through the blood of his Son — a price Satan
refused to claim, and, in the end, could no longer claim, because he had finished
the work of making himself into something that could not receive love.

> _“Yahweh is good to all, and his compassions are over all his works”_ (Psalm 145:
> 9).

All his works. Including that one.

That is not a soft God. That is not a sentimental God. That is the most terrifying
and most beautiful God imaginable — a God so perfectly loving that even his greatest
enemy cannot, in the end, accuse him of anything.

---

_All primary source references in this article draw on the Hebrew and Greek texts,
the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, and
the patristic tradition including John Chrysostom, John of Damascus, and Gregory
of Nyssa._

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