Wars of the Demons
holy zeal for the sake of the Kingdom!
He is an intelligent demon…
Indeed, he is very intelligent. When he entered the serpent, it was said that it was “more cunning than all the beasts of the field” (Gen 3). In his intelligence, the first step a person takes does not matter to him; what matters is the final step to which he leads him.
Therefore, he may begin with a step that appears virtuous, but it is a virtue out of season, or extreme, or without understanding, or inappropriate. Or it is a good virtue, but he introduces all these qualities into it in order to distort it.
As when he calls a person to holy zeal, and within that zeal he makes him curse, quarrel, fight, become harsh, judge, spread defamation, waste all his time in negativities, and imagine that he is better than all and wiser than all…
Thus he ruins him in the name of holy zeal!!
So the starting point does not matter to the devil; what matters to him is where it ends—even if it is from a holy starting point!
Therefore, you may begin in service, and the devil does not prevent you but rather encourages you in it. Then he joins you in it and offers you his advice in service so that it may be successful!
Through these pieces of advice—without you realizing they are from him—he ruins you in the service!
He may encourage you to take on more service, in the name of faithfulness, the attempt to reach perfection, and the needs of others, until finally you find no time for yourself or for your spiritual life. Your life dries up and becomes lukewarm. You find no time for all your services, so you lose preparation for them. Service becomes without depth, and your life becomes without prayer, without meditation, without fervor.
You become harsh in service, get angry, and offend others in defense of the service.
And the devil has reached what he wanted from a holy starting point.
The devil is also an opportunist…
He lets no opportunity pass without benefiting from it or attempting to benefit from it…
He saw that the Lord Christ had become hungry after a long fast, so he came to Him saying, “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread” (Matt 4).
He exploits poverty or illness to make people doubt the love of God!
He exploits a student’s failure in an exam to convince him that his failure is the result of God’s abandonment of him and God’s lack of help for him, and that he should respond to God in kind by leaving the Church and the meetings and abandoning prayer, since God did not answer his prayers.
He exploits periods of fatigue, exhaustion, and nervous weakness to wage war with the sin of anger…
He exploits periods of relaxation to wage war with lust. He exploits others’ mistakes to wage war with condemnation. He exploits a person’s lack of understanding of a certain verse to fight him with doubt, or to offer him a false interpretation that leads him astray from doctrine!
Time would fail us if we were to speak about how the devil exploits opportunities.
Even with the saints…
He exploited our father Abraham’s feeling about God’s delay regarding the promise of offspring, and drove him to human ways.
He exploited the fear of the Apostle Peter and drove him to deny Christ, to curse and swear, and to say, “I do not know the man!”
He exploited our father Jacob’s love for the birthright and the blessing, and led him to deceive his father Isaac…
The devil is also persistent…
He never grows weary of warring against man. If he fails to bring him down a thousand times, he begins on the one-thousand-and-first time with long patience, full activity, and without shame from failure…
He fought one monk in a single sin for fifty years, until he finally brought him down. He rejoiced in his fall after this long time more than in bringing down the easy cases that respond to him quickly!
He is bold in his persistence. He fought Christ for forty days in continuous failure. After his final defeat by Christ, Scripture says, “he left Him until an opportune time.” He did not grow weary, but continued even to the Cross, saying through some people, “If You are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”
The devil is also of many abilities. For example, he can come forward as a philosopher…
Indeed, he is the very one who invented the many atheistic philosophies that deny the existence of God, or fight Him, or blaspheme Him, or stir doubts about everything sacred!
In this he presses upon the mind with exhausting insistence and presents successive, complex ideas that attempt to shatter faith.
He tried to turn Christianity into a philosophy but could not…
Yet the devil, fond of argument, still stirs discussion in theological matters…
He is the one who stirred up all heresies and false doctrines, and presented ideas of doubt by which he turns the simplicity of faith into labyrinths of the intellect.
Saint Athanasius spoke truly when, in his struggle against the heresy of Arius, he said that our first enemy is not Arius, but the devil…
Often the devil tries to turn spirituality itself into philosophy, by an intellectual method, in order to occupy people with argument about spiritual matters instead of being occupied with practicing them.
He offers harmful knowledge and incites people toward this knowledge…
As he did in ancient times, he still does today: he offers people every day new fruits from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Through this knowledge, a person loses his simplicity, innocence, and purity, and opens his eyes to know what harms him—if not in lusts, then in knowing people’s secrets and the hidden aspects of their lives.
In all this knowledge he occupies people away from the basic knowledge beneficial to them—namely, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of themselves…
The devil’s first game is to waste a person’s time…
He keeps him occupied in any way so that he will not care for his spiritual life. What matters is that he does not sit with God and does not sit with himself. For this purpose, the devil offers him countless concerns, amusements, hobbies, and pleasures of every kind.
He wants to divert the course of his thinking to a direction other than God. If he stands to pray, he disturbs his prayers and meditations and presents him with other thoughts to scatter his mind…
Just as the devil is a philosopher and a thinker,
he is also a poet and an artist…
He can compose poetry, and indeed many great writers used to speak about the “demon of poetry.” Therefore, it is not strange that a spirit may present poetry, and there is no objection to attributing it to a poet…
The devil is an artist. He can present various kinds of images that serve goals he desires, or statues that also serve his purposes. He can present music that stirs certain emotions he wants…
Art is beautiful in itself—whether poetry, drawing, music, or sculpture—but if the devil enters into it, he turns it from its noble purpose to his own purposes, in the demonic way that destroys spirituality and turns thought, feeling, and sensation toward bodily or material directions…
Among his arts, the devil offers various forms of dance, jesting, and folklore. He enters everything as an expert!
When the devil engages in acting, he can assume any character…
He can appear in the form of “an angel of light” to deceive a person. There is no objection for him to say, for example, “I am the angel Gabriel; I came to announce something to you!”
Sometimes he claimed to be Christ. In the last days he will send many false christs to deceive the believers.
He may appear in false visions or false dreams and assume any spiritual personality! He is a skillful and deceptive actor…
Among those fascinated with spiritism, the devil can appear in the name of any person, imitate his voice and appearance, and recount his secrets. He is a liar…
Unfortunately, many believe him, are deceived by him and his acting, and think that what he says is true. He appeared to Abba Galion the Wanderer in the form of three holy wanderers… and appeared to Abba Moses the Black in the form of a venerable elder absorbed in contemplation!
And there is a “compassionate” demon!
He justifies your mistakes, or offers you excuses, or pities your health because of excessive service, or advises you to reduce spiritual work so that you do not fall into extremism, and prevents you from grieving over your sins out of pity for your psychological state…
Perhaps in the next issue I will be able to speak to you about how to fight demons and overcome them.
¹ An article by His Holiness Pope Shenouda III, published in Watani newspaper on 15-2-1981.
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