The book of Revelation describes a war in heaven. Michael and his angels fight against a dragon, a great red one with seven heads and ten horns, and the dragon is thrown down to the earth. It is one of the most vivid scenes in the Bible, and it has been painted on church walls and in stained glass for centuries.
I do not read it as a physical battle that took place somewhere above the clouds. I read it as a picture of something spiritual, and something that happens much closer to home.
On this point I am not out on a limb. Revelation belongs to a kind of writing called apocalyptic, which works in symbols by design. Nobody reads the seven heads as a zoological description. The question is only what the symbols are pointing at, and my answer is the human heart, mind and will. Paul talks about taking every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ. That is a battlefield I recognise, and I am on it most days.
The same way of reading has shaped how I understand some of the other hard material in the gospels.
Demons. In the gospels, Jesus drives out spirits from people who are suffering. Read some of those accounts today and the symptoms are recognisable. In Matthew, a father brings his son to Jesus and says the boy has seizures and keeps falling into the fire. To me, some of what the gospel writers called demons looks like illness that nobody at the time had a name for. That does not make the healing any less. Jesus still went towards the people everyone else was afraid of and made them whole. If anything, it takes a weight off anyone living with a condition today. Their illness is not a sign of something evil in them.
The temptations. Before His ministry begins, Jesus goes into the wilderness and fasts for forty days, and then He is tempted three times. Turn stones into bread. Throw Yourself from the temple and let the angels catch You. Take all the kingdoms of the world. I have written here recently about fasting, and it struck me that the first temptation comes at the point of hunger. I read all three as lessons in humility. Each one is an offer to use power for Himself, to prove something, to take a shortcut. Each time, He stays small and trusts His Father. Paul describes the same movement later: Jesus did not treat equality with God as something to use for His own advantage, and He humbled Himself.
The devil. Put those together and I come to the figure of the devil himself. I understand him as the darkest desires of the human psyche. Greed, pride, the wish to control, the part of us that would rather be God than serve Him. The letter of James says that each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire. That describes something I know from the inside, and I have more of a life before faith to draw on than most.
I want to be careful here, because this is where I part company with a lot of Christians.
The historic mainstream of the church has read the devil and demons as real, personal evil, and a good number of Christians still do. The Bible gives them ground to stand on. The same letter to the Ephesians that tells us to put on the armour of God says our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against spiritual forces of evil. I do not think the people who read that literally are foolish, and I am not trying to talk anybody out of their faith.
What I would say is that the reading I hold does not make evil smaller. If anything, it makes it harder to escape. A dragon in the sky is somebody else’s problem. A darkness in the human heart is mine.
And it does not make Jesus smaller. The wilderness, the healings and the cross are still the story of God meeting that darkness head on, and winning. I just think the ground where that victory has to be claimed, day by day, is inside us.
If you read these passages differently, I would like to know how, and why. I am new enough to all this to know I have a great deal still to learn.