Alpha and Evil

I've lost count which video this one was but it's the Alpha talk about evil. As regular readers might be suspecting I struggle to believe in the "the devil" (see this post for some background). Particularly "the Devil" as many Xns present him and Nicky Gumbel's starting explanation that God is behind good and therefore there must be someone or something behind evil wasn't a convincing start for me either.

Some of the notes I took during the video were...

• Spiritual Forces of evil can be an excuse for human evil.
• The existence of evil doesn't necessarily equate to the existence of demons or a devil. (NG suggested other wise)
• Inner battles and temptations can exist without a devil. (NG suggested other wise)
• A couple of times (John 10:10 being one example) Nicky to quotes about evil and read the devil into them making it sound like the devil is mentioned way more in the NT than it actually is.
• I'm not sure if I've heard an adequate explanation for how Satan came into being.
  

So what do I think? I don't know I'm trying to work this one out. I'm stuck on the idea that the devil is the personification of evil rather than an actual thing. In Dear Kim this is what I believe Bill Loader says...

For me, to say Jesus is human means I believe that he was not a walking encyclopedia, knowing everything from his birth onwards. He was a human being of his time, living under usual human limitations of knowledge and education. He doubtless believed in a world populated by demons like his contemporaries and probably believed the world was more or less flat, with the sky as a dome in which the stars and moon shone by night and the sun by day, the common Old Testament picture. His expectations about history were those of his time. He lived in a community which thought history was soon coming to an end. His healing practices reflect the methods of his world.

At the moment this is a summary of what I'm thinking, a work in progress if you will...

I don't think that Satan really exists in the OT certainly not the kind of Satan most Xns think of. I think most of the OT is about worshiping the one God Yahweh rather than chasing after other gods like Baal for example. Like Bill Loader, I don't have a problem with devil's and demons being mentioned in the NT. Some of them take up the OT motif of other gods like Beelzebub (or Baalzebub) from the god Baal, others are not. Often when when Paul talks about powers and principalities or when Jesus talks about "the thief" in John 10:10 we tend to read devils and demons into this when it is not necessarily there in the first place. This is not to say that the world is all sweetness and light. To the contrary the world is full of evil and I think it is humans and not some supernatural force that is the cause of that. To me (at the moment) Satan I think is a personification of that evil, rather than a character.

Again, during the discussion part of the night I didn't have the courage to stick up my hand and say "errr... I'm not sure I believe in the devil" especially when everyone else was happy with what Nicky had said. Maybe I'm a wuss or maybe Alpha makes it harder for boat rockers to have a say, not sure. Both could be true.