It’s rare outside of Catholicism to find any Christian actually talk about the active evil of Satan. I was raised Catholic, and the sort of final reason I still respect that institution is due to their academic and practical approach to Satan.
The documentation of possession, the availability of intervention for exorcism, the executive review, documentation, and disposition of each case - it’s important.
I completely agree, and would extend your remarks to include an ignorance of the origin of the conflict here - that God created Man. He then commanded the angels to worship it like any other of God’s creation. Lucifer declared ‘non-serviam’, and a third of the angels with him.
Lucifer knows the glory of living in the constant presence of God and has lost it. What we are living is the Test.
It’s Lucifer’s position that we are an ungrateful, evil bunch and are not worthy of the salvation of Christ much less any attention at all from God. We’ve taken free will and more than literally crapped in it.
Lucifer’s campaign is driven by anger and jealousy, and the goal is to keep us from what God has set up for us.
It’s why choosing salvation is so difficult - the layers and layers upon layers of deception.
It’s why many rich and famous people commit suicide - they gain the world and in a moment find that none of it is either real, or valuable, and in that moment they have nothing and had nothing and are shatteringly alone. Ineffably alone.
Then they hit the reset button.
Nothing crazy about evangelism. Just caution around the hazard of creating cults of personality around a pastor.
If understanding the wiles of the devil could be sanely integrated more widely into a worship worldview, we’d have a wiser and readier Christendom. However that would also take them well out of the realm of almost-passive participants and into the realm of scrappers for the Lord.
But, the Lord has to cut every maverick out of the herd and brand him. Here I am and it’s happening to me. A clumsy bum, sometimes even oafish duffer.