I watched the 1997 movie, The Devil’s Advocate, on Saturday
night. In this movie, Keanu Reeves plays a hot-shot lawyer, Kevin
Lomax, who moves from Florida with his wife to work at a New York City
law firm. The head of the firm is John Milton, played by Al Pacino, and
Milton turns out to be Satan, and also Kevin’s father. What’s more,
the law firm is connected with all sorts of iniquity in the world: arms
deals, drugs, and the list goes on and on.
I first watched the movie several years ago. I was an undergraduate
in college at the time, and what surprised me was that Satan and the
demonic figures appeared to have no fear of the Christian religion.
Kevin’s mother was religious, and she was reading the Bible aloud to
Kevin’s wife, who was in a mental hospital. One of the ladies from the
firm was also there, and this lady was simply standing there and calmly
listening to Kevin’s mother reading from the Bible. This lady didn’t
look bothered or disturbed at all. This lady turned out to be a demon,
yet, there she was, unafraid to listen to the words of the Bible!
There were other things in the film that were similar to that.
Kevin’s mother was telling Kevin about the time that she met John Milton
when she was younger. She was attending a Christian crusade, and she
was impressed because Milton knew the Bible backwards and forwards.
Near the end of the movie, when Kevin tells Satan that the Bible says
that Satan will lose in the end, Satan responds that Kevin has to
remember who wrote the book!
Should I have been surprised by these scenes? Probably not. I
listened to a preacher when I was younger, and this preacher said that
Satan probably knows the Bible backwards and forwards, and that Satan
would most likely enjoy discussing religion with people. And, in the
biblical stories of Jesus’ temptation in the Gospels of Matthew and
Luke, Satan did quote Scripture to Jesus.
But there was a part of me that did regard the Bible as a sort of
talisman against evil, or that viewed the reading of the Bible as a
place to find peace and refuge. Were not the demons in the synoptic
Gospel stories afraid of Jesus? And yet, they were not always afraid of
Jesus’ name. When some would-be exorcists in Acts 19 sought to cast
out a demon from a person in the name of Jesus, the demon replied,
“Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who are you?” (NRSV)? The
demon-possessed man then attacked these men, and they fled from the
house, naked and wounded.
There is another story, though. In Matthew 12 and Luke 11, Jesus
tells a parable about a man who had been released from a demon. The
expelled demon gathers some other demons to possess the man, and they
find his “house” (perhaps a symbol of his inner being) empty, swept, and
put in order. They then possess the man, and he is now worse off than
he was before. In a Bible study group that I attended in college, and
also in some commentaries that I read, I encountered the interpretation
that the man got repossessed because he did not replace the demons with
good things. We should not just get rid of the evil within us, the
spiel ran, but we should also fill our minds with good things, like
Bible study, prayer, and church. That will protect us.
I don’t want to make this post about exorcism or demon possession. I
don’t really know why demons bother some people and not others. I
remember talking with some Christians about the movie The Exorcist,
and I wondered why the demon possessed that little girl, since she was a
person of faith and had a cross (there I go again, believing in
talismans!). A Christian reminded me of the scene in which the girl and
her mother were using a ouija board, and the Christian was saying that
the girl opened herself up to demons by so doing. I don’t dismiss
that. But there are plenty of people in the world—-non-Christians,
occultists—-who do not get possessed. I still stay away from ouija
boards, though!
I will say this, and here I am not talking so much about possession,
as I am about resisting the devil and his schemes. The devil is not
afraid of the words of the Bible. But the devil cannot do much in
persuading a person who is committed to doing the words of the
Bible. That brings me back to Jesus’ parable about the unswept house:
the words of the Bible may not scare Satan, but can Satan really do much
to convince someone who internalizes those words and allows them to
strengthen her?
Even in the Devil’s Advocate, Satan said that he cannot make
people do something. Rather, what people do is their choice. It is
our poor character that often makes us susceptible to Satan’s
temptations.