Is Satan real an actual person with ideas and motivations and some kind of

celestial power, the ability to interfere with God's plan?

Or is Satan a metaphor for the evil that exists within a fallen broken world

and the potential for evil that exists inside all people or is Satan entirely a literary

invention that came after the fact and was inflicted upon the Old

Testament in the early age of Christianity.

Those are kind of the three leading theories as to what the deal is with Satan.

And the historical Orthodox position, one that, well, literally Orthodox Christians, Catholics,

and most Protestants hold to is that there's actually a character named Satan.

It looks like the Bible holds this out as being an actual

character and Matthew 4 which we're working on right now is no exception.

It says then Jesus was led by the spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.

And then it goes on to talk about an actual exchange between Jesus and the devil.

Now look, there are other parts of the Bible.

I say other parts.

I can only think of one off the top of my head.

There's at least one other part of the Bible where we talk about someone who is the embodiment or the epitome of a set of values

and I'm thinking of proverbs maybe you already beat me there but the idea of

lady wisdom I mean there's not actually some lady named wisdom.

She's a characterization. She's wisdom incarnate or given imagined dialogue powers and imagined flesh. And so maybe it could be argued

that what we see here with the devil, and that is the specific language used in this passage in Matthew

chapter 4 maybe it could be argued that what we're seeing here is a

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