The Orthodoxy of Devils

Is Believing in God Enough to Get Into Heaven?

“You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!”

—James 2:19

James sets this sentence in the middle of a question. Two verses earlier he has asked his readers, “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?” (James 2:14). The question is whether a faith that is only spoken has any power to save, and the verses that follow answer it by placing a believer’s creed beside a demon’s and letting the two be compared. The believer is told that he does well to hold that God is one. The demons are then said to hold the same thing, and to shudder. It is a short sentence, and most of us read it quickly and move on to Abraham, but it asks us to stay a little longer than that.

The verse could be taken as a passing remark about the fear of evil spirits. It says something more definite than that, and what it says concerns knowledge. The demons believe, and what they believe is true, and James lets their belief stand as belief with no word added to make it smaller. If that is so, then accuracy of doctrine, taken by itself, does not separate a saved man from a lost spirit, and the rest of Scripture has a good deal to say about what does. We shall follow the texts and see where they lead.

What Does the Devil Actually Know?

Many of us carry a quiet assumption about salvation, and it runs something like this: a person comes to know the right things about God, and when the knowledge is sound enough he is a Christian. Hold the assumption against the Gospels and it begins to give way, because some of the plainest statements about Jesus in those books come from unclean spirits. They name Him correctly, they name His Father correctly, and the texts give no sign that their accuracy brings them any rescue. The tension is plain enough. If correct belief is what saves, the demons are in as good a case as any of us, and if it is not, we owe the reader an account of what is.

The right way to settle it is the Berean way. Luke says of the Bereans that “they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11). We shall do likewise, and gather first what Scripture records the devil and his demons saying about God, and then ask what James is saying by it.

The Devil’s Creed

Begin with the record. In the synagogue at Capernaum a man with an unclean spirit cries out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:23–24). Luke records the same words from the same synagogue (Luke 4:33–34), and Mark adds that Jesus “would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him” (Mark 1:34). The spirit has the name right, and the title right, and the person right, and he says all three aloud in front of the congregation. Jesus answers with a command, “Be silent, and come out of him!”, and the spirit comes out (Mark 1:25–26), so that the record shows the spirit’s knowledge of Jesus’ authority as well as his knowledge of His name.

Elsewhere the record widens. On the far shore of the lake, demon-possessed men meet Jesus (Matthew 8:28), and the demons cry out, “What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?” (Matthew 8:29). The words “before the time” speak of an appointed hour, and they speak of it as something Jesus has come to bring. Mark’s account of that meeting gives the spirit’s words as “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me” (Mark 5:7), and to adjure is to bind someone by an oath, so that the spirit swears by the very God whose Son he is addressing.

At Ephesus an evil spirit answers some travelling exorcists with “Jesus I know, and Paul I recognize, but who are you?” (Acts 19:15). The devil himself speaks in the wilderness with the same opening twice, “If you are the Son of God” (Matthew 4:3, 6). And Revelation says of him that “the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short” (Revelation 12:12). Set the entries side by side and the creed of these spirits is longer than most of us would guess. God is one. Jesus is the Holy One of God and the Son of the Most High. He commands them and they obey. An hour of reckoning is appointed. A statement of faith drawn up from what the demons say and what James says they believe would meet many elements of a doctrinal exam.

Where does such knowledge come from? Scripture gives a partial answer. Satan was not a stranger to God’s presence, for in Job “the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them” (Job 1:6), and Jude speaks of angels “who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling” (Jude 6). A being of that kind has stood in places where no man now stands, and that may be why his statements about God are so accurate. The record does not list what he has seen, and it does set bounds to the knowledge of angels: “concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven” (Mark 13:32), and the salvation announced in the gospel is among “things into which angels long to look” (1 Peter 1:12). So we may say that his knowledge is real and large, yet we need not say that it is complete. What the texts make plain is that he acts against what he says is true: he believes, and he shudders, but he does not submit. His trouble lies in the will, and the remedy for a will set against God is not more information.

One Verb, Two Subjects

James says of these beings that they believe, and the word he uses repays attention. The English word believe—pisteuō (πιστεύω)—is the ordinary Greek verb for believing or trusting, and the same verb is used of Abraham a few lines later: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness” (James 2:23). The demons and the patriarch receive one verb, the same verb. The text describes the demons’ belief with no qualifier that would make it lesser belief, and we have no warrant to supply one. It is belief in the sense that it assents to what is true, and the sentence says so.

What follows the belief is where the difference begins, and James gives it in a single word: they shudder. The English word shudder—phrissō (φρίσσω)—is a rare one, found only here in the New Testament, and it carries the picture of a surface roughening or bristling, as a field of grain does under a cold wind. So the demons believe that God is one, and the shuddering suggests that the knowledge works on them as fear.

The first half of the verse, “you believe that God is one,” sounds like the opening of Israel’s oldest confession, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4). James writes to “the twelve tribes in the Dispersion” (James 1:1), and they were likely to know that confession. But it does not stop at its first sentence. The next verse says, “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5), and when Jesus is asked which commandment is the most important, He gives both sentences together (Mark 12:28–30). The demons keep the first sentence. The second asks for something that belief or knowledge alone cannot supply.

What Is It to Know God?

The demons say more than that they believe. They say that they know. The English word know in the spirit’s cry at Capernaum—oida (οἶδα)—is the ordinary Greek verb for knowing something as one knows a fact, with the matter settled and in hand. The spirit says, “I know who you are,” and the spirit at Ephesus claims to know Jesus and to recognise Paul. Whatever else may be said of their knowledge, the Gospels treat it as knowledge, and we gain nothing by calling it guesswork.

Scripture also allows a person to say “I know God” and be told that the saying is false. Paul writes of certain men on Crete, “They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works” (Titus 1:16), and the Greek for “to know” there—eidenai (εἰδέναι)—is a form of the verb the demon uses in Mark. The verb is the same in both places, and in Crete the claim is judged by what the claimants do. A man might hold the demon’s information and the demon’s vocabulary and still be described by Paul as denying the God he professes.

John supplies the test, and he supplies it with a different verb. “And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says ‘I know him’ but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him” (1 John 2:3–4). The English phrase come to know—ginōskō (γινώσκω)—is often the verb of knowing by acquaintance, of learning a person through dealing with him. It is the verb Jesus uses when He says to those who prophesied and cast out demons in His name, “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness” (Matthew 7:22–23). The two Greek verbs overlap in common use, and no argument here rests on a hard line between them. The point lies in what each passage says about the knowing, and in these passages the knowing is of a person, and its mark in John is obedience.

Jesus ties that kind of knowing to life itself. “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3). Set that beside the demons’ question in Matthew 8:29, “Have you come here to torment us before the time?”, and the two knowings come apart. The demons know Him as the One who has authority over them, and they ask what He means to do with them. Jesus Himself speaks later of “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41). The demons know Him as their judge, and the one who has eternal life knows the Father and the Son whom the Father has sent.

Satan Quotes the Psalms

There is one more line in the devil’s record, and it concerns the Scriptures. When the tempter takes Jesus to the pinnacle, the highest point, of the temple, he says, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone’” (Matthew 4:6). Those words come from Psalm 91:11–12, and they are quoted accurately as far as they go. The tempter has the Psalter, the book of Psalms, at hand.

Psalm 91:11 says in full, “For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.” The quotation in the wilderness stops before the last clause, and the promise is applied to a leap from the temple. Jesus does not answer by disputing the psalm. He says, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test’” (Matthew 4:7), which is Deuteronomy 6:16, and He sets one text beside the other. The devil’s command of Scripture extends to its wording, and Jesus’ answer sets that wording against the rest of what God has said.

Abraham’s Believing

James gives us the man who stands opposite the demon in his argument. “Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works” (James 2:21–22). The belief James credits to Abraham is the belief of Genesis 15:6, which was set down chapters before Isaac was born, and it was a belief in a promise. God had brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them,” and then, “So shall your offspring be” (Genesis 15:5). Abraham “believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6).

Paul uses the same verse of Genesis for a different question. He asks on what ground God accepts a sinner, and answers that “one is justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Romans 3:28), with Abraham as his witness: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness” (Romans 4:3). The two apostles are speaking of one salvation. Paul writes of the ground on which a sinner is accepted, and James writes of the faith that receives that acceptance, as it looks when it is alive. Paul says as much in another letter: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works” (Ephesians 2:8–9). He goes on, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10).

Set Abraham beside the spirit in the synagogue and the difference shows in what each says to God. The spirit asks what Jesus has to do with him, and his next question is “Have you come to destroy us?” His words ask for distance. When God calls Abraham by name at the opening of Genesis 22, Abraham says, “Here am I” (Genesis 22:1). The demon believes that God is one and asks what He has to do with him; Abraham believes the LORD and answers when he is called. That answering is what James means by faith that is active.

It also tells us what James means when he says that faith without works is dead. “For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead” (James 2:26). A faith that answers to nothing is a statement about God, held in the head and left on the shelf, and that is the kind of faith the demons’ belief resembles.

The Throne of Grace

The sentence we began with now reads differently. James 2:19 is a measurement, and it measures the distance between holding the doctrine of God and being held by Him. A man may stand beside the demons in what he can recite, in what he can prove from Scripture, and in how firmly he can hold the facts, and, as far as this verse measures, he has then gone as far as they have gone. The letter to the Hebrews addresses those who believe in different terms. “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). The invitation rests on the fact that we have a high priest who “in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15), and it asks for confidence, which a shudder does not supply. It is an invitation to come and ask and receive, and it is made to people who have nothing to bring.

Paul puts the matter in one phrase when he writes to the Galatians of those who have “come to know God, or rather to be known by God” (Galatians 4:9). Nothing in the demons’ words reaches to that second half. The believer holds the same doctrine they hold, that God is one, and he holds it with the love that the first commandment asks for, and with confidence in the Priest who stands between him and the throne. It is well to hold that God is one, and it is better to love Him, and the right answer to the God who is both is the one Paul gives:

“To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen.”

—1 Timothy 1:17

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