Articles

The excuse “the devil made me do it” is never true. The devil can’t control us.

Demons are fallen angels, and as angels, they are personal and rational beings, with their own free will.

But by spirit, we don’t just mean a being without a body. We also mean the principles that guide that being.

This is the way John means the word spirit, when he says test the spirits. Not that we should test angels or demons, or test a person’s soul, but that we should examine the principles to see whether it is borne of God or the devil.

So angels and demons relate to us in this main way, that they are able to influence us by suggestion. With angels, we call this inspiration, and with demons, we call it temptation.

They do this by suggesting to our minds that their principles are best, giving us reasons and rationale to agree with them, and often by pressing upon our souls some noticeable influence toward those principles.

For example, demons will suggest the principle that there is no hope for a happy life, and they will bring up memories of things going wrong, and press our hearts with strong negative and sad emotions.

At the same time, angels will suggest the fact that there is always hope, since God loves us and has never abandoned us. They will remind us that our punishments have been less than we have deserved, that our current situation is full of blessings and good things that we haven’t thought of, and that God is clearly being patient with us. Sometimes we will experience a brief flicker of positive emotions during the storm of negative ones, like a ray of sunshine breaking through the clouds.

At this point, our soul examines all these factors, and a mysterious dynamic between the current character of our soul, and our soul’s inviolable and complete freedom, ultimately determines which path we will choose. Our decision can even flicker back and forth for a brief moment before we have chosen to act.

So all the devil can do is try to convince us that good is not worthwhile, and inflict us with negative emotions and even bodily injuries and pains to build up his case. He also lies constantly, and plentiful life experience of ourselves and others should convince us of this truth.

Which means, if a person does wrong, they agreed with the devil’s lies, and the illusory cage he built around them, and the conclusion that directly defies truth.

The secular world, who knows almost nothing about God, recognizes this fact, and describes it as various forms of mental disorder, which in fact it rightly could be called, since the mind is just one aspect of the soul. However, their understanding of the mind is so deeply flawed that their remedies are merely superficial, like a bandaid fix, and we don’t really see the world becoming better, but only less obviously bad.

This is in direct contrast to the saints who suffered the exact same forms of insanity and mental disorders, but who recovered completely by the grace of God finally allowed to flow plentifully into the soul to heal the brokenness of the mind, heart, and other inward faculties, and to strengthen them against the illusions of the devil. St. Augustine might be the most famous example, but he’s certainly not the only one.