He is called in Greek “diabolos” and means the separator; he is the one that separates between people. Against him is the only God that unites people through love that he gives them so they become one body even if they were independent from each other. The other person is independent from me but not separate. When I say that you are my enemy, this means that I don’t consider you “with me” or “in me”. If you are my enemy, then you are thrown away from me and out of my heart.
I can consider you united with me even if I thought you were different. And if I loved you, that would not be to attract you to me but to God. When you are moving towards God, I will love you because this is what matters for me. For if I was moving towards God too, God himself will become a meeting for us. Because of this meeting that we are both invited to, we become one although each one of us would still have his own different things. God is the one that unites. We would still have some contrast, as every one has his privacy, but the common thing between us is the divine momentum that makes us eager to the Lord.
Whereas, if I leave you away from me, we would both be living in our solitudes and this way I’d be destroying both of us. When I love, I wouldn’t think about having control over you, because I’d be putting you under my authority and desires. This means that I want to pass to you my lusts and make you corrupt. When this happens, I won’t be “with you”; I would be with myself as it is with its sins. I am not able to love you unless I got rid from my sin so that it doesn’t affect you, so that it doesn’t finish you. Enmity, therefore, is death.
All of this goes into Satan’s benefit, he who wants spiritual death for you and me. This death is the Kingdom of the devil. He throws each one of us in a place and prevails over us. However, if we didn’t separate, God will unite us because his job is to make us one.
We can become united with God when we understand that “God embraces the worthy to his entity. All the saints embrace with all their entity God’s whole entity and they have no reward except him” (Saint Gregory Palamas). God doesn’t leave any part of him not embraced with man. Saints leave everything that is not divine while embracing God as they don’t ask for themselves and for others anything except God.
When God becomes everything in you and in the other person, unity happens as you would have ended your moodiness and you became light and saw light in others.
On the other side, the job of the devil is to prevent you from seeing others as light. He makes you see their defects in order to hate them so the light in you fades and you despise others to support your opinion about them; however, it is not your self that gave this opinion but your own defects.
Christ doesn’t reign over the scattered community (parish); Satan is its ruler. If these people prayed, they wouldn’t be praying for God because the spiteful worships himself. You see people coming towards the Lord’s body (Holy Communion) with the Lord not being between them; here, communion isn’t able to offer the Lord to them. They do not take anything, as Apostle Paul said that they took their condemnation and also the prayers that prepare us for communion say that they took “fire” and this means that they ate hell inside them.
The question here is: Who is your ruler? Is it Satan or Christ?
Translated by Mark Najjar
Original Text: “الشيطان” – 1.7.2001
