Yesterday evening I enjoyed a mid-week prayer service at a little Presbyterian church down here on the coast of Scotland. Before prayer the minister spent a few minutes leading a study on Revelation 12, and as is so often the case when I listen to the teaching of God’s Word, there was one idea above all the others that arrested my attention and got me thinking.

Every Christian is told to pursue a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. We have all seen the consequences of dead religion, of people who claim to worship Jesus, but who do not seem to know him. They relate to Jesus like they relate to the king or president or to a fictional character. There is nothing real about it.

But we are told time and again that we have the joy and the responsibility of relating to Jesus in a personal way. He is real. He is alive. He is a genuine person. We can and should and must relate to him personally.

However, as much as we emphasize a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, we tend to view Satan and his evil forces as an abstraction. We believe that we need to relate personally to the Savior but that we can relate impersonally to the enemy as if Jesus is a person while Satan is merely an idea. What the minister said yesterday was simply this: You need to have a personal relationship with Satan as well.

We need to be careful here, obviously. We do not equate Jesus and Satan in some yin and yang kind of relationship. They are by no means equal. Jesus is creator and Satan is created; Jesus is the conquerer and Satan the conquered; Jesus is alive forever while Satan knows his time is short and that he must soon be thrown into the pit.

But until then, Satan is alive and on the prowl. He despises those who have that personal relationship with Jesus Christ and both desires and seeks their destruction. So until the time Christ returns and casts Satan into that pit forever, we need to relate to him as well. This does not mean that we pray to Satan or even speak to him, but it had better mean that we pray to Christ about him and pray to Christ against him.

We need to believe that Satan exists, that he is powerful and that he will stop at nothing to hurt, hinder and destroy us. He is not an idea. He is not a theory or hypothesis or explanation. He is real, and it is crucial that we remember and believe it.