The name Satan comes from Hebrew, meaning “accuser.” The Book of Job (1:6-12) captures this aspect of the devil’s work, when Satan is presented as accusing Job. God extols Job’s goodness and virtue, to which Satan replies, “Well, why not? You’ve given him everything! But watch: take it away, and he’ll curse you to your face!”
We know what happens. Job loses all his goods: his wealth, his animals, his family, his health. But Job maintains his faith in God, not man. And God ultimately restores it all and more to Job, because God keeps faith with the man who keeps faith with him.
Why am I recalling this? Because I notice two kinds of accusation that people encounter when they examine their consciences and prepare for confession. One is Satan’s. The other is their conscience’s. And they’re very different.
Conscience’s primary function is to address moral choices before they happen. A well-formed conscience considers whether or not to do “X” on the basis of whether that action is good or evil, doing it if the former and refraining from it if the latter.
But conscience also has a post-action function. Conscience accuses us when, having known we should not do something, we nevertheless did it. Conscience makes us feel guilty.
Our modern world doesn’t like guilt. It tries to dismiss it as a fiction, a “hang-up,” something for the psychologist to talk us out of, something unhealthy.
The truth is that guilt is often healthy; its lack, rather, is unhealthy. Sure, there are cases of scrupulous people who erroneously feel that sin is lurking behind everything they do, but let’s put those cases aside for a minute. The far greater problem of our times is not that people have overly sensitive consciences, but rather that their consciences are often deadened.
Moral norms do not come from us. We do not create them. We receive them, ultimately from God. So if morality is not our creation, neither is the guilt that comes from its violation.
A healthy, normal conscience will accuse a person of wrongdoing. It will do that not to haunt or persecute the person, but to call the person back to moral accountability. When conscience is functioning correctly, the guilt it inflames in us should make us do two things: stop and consider what I’ve done, and ask for forgiveness, correcting the wrong in the degree I can.
Conscience wants us to stop and smell the stinkweed we’ve planted, because our actions not only have external effects, but also shape us internally. What we do accomplishes things in the world—for example, steals somebody’s things and makes me a certain kind of person (a thief). Because my acts not only did something, but also shaped me, yes, it’s a healthy thing that conscience makes me stop and smell the stinkweed.
But conscience accuses us not to offend our moral olfactory senses permanently. Rather, conscience wants us to weed that garden and plant some spiritual roses. Conscience accuses us not just to make us feel guilty, but to move us to getting right again, with God and with neighbor. The accusation is not the end. It’s a means to dealing with that guilt—by apology, by restitution, by a good confession.
That is true accusation.
That’s not what Satan does.
For Satan, accusation is the end, not the means. Satan’s accusation is meant not to call us to our moral senses, but to paralyze us. Satan doesn’t want us to apologize, to restore, or to make a good confession. All he wants is for us to stew in our guilt.
Why? Because guilt that is not addressed in the right way typically gets addressed in the wrong way. It gets “addressed” by depression, lethargy, despair, and resignation. True accusation makes me aware that God made me better than what I have made myself. False accusation—Satan’s M.O.—is to make me feel that I am worse. Useless. Giving up.
But since God made man for good, the paradox is that a person who dwells in such depression and despair eventually gets so used to it that he begins to see it as “normal.” That’s why we often hear people living in an objectively evil moral state insist that they “don’t see anything wrong with it.” Either they are rationalizing, or they have so deadened or choked off their conscience as not to hear its protests.
That’s Satan’s work.
Satan’s M.O. is also to magnify those accusations. In the process of examining his conscience, a person is overwhelmed by the weight of his guilt—guilt the devil piles on. They say that the devil minimizes the wrong you do before you commit it and maximizes it when you want to escape it. The shame that didn’t stop you from doing something now stops you from spitting the poison out.
That’s false guilt, false accusation. That’s Satan’s game plan to keep you in your sins rather than free from them.
So let’s fix our sights. The whole reason Jesus came and the whole reason he gave us a Church was to deal with sin. He knows we are sinners. He knows those sins may be “as scarlet” or “crimson” (Isa. 1:18). He wants them to be “white as snow.”
Satan doesn’t.
Don’t succumb to a false accusation, one that focuses on sin in a way that, instead of leading you out of it, embeds you ever more deeply in it. That’s not God’s design. That’s not healthy conscience. That’s Satan’s false accusation.
Focus, instead, on the voice of true conscience, given to you by God. True accusation is intended not to leave you in peace as an end state, but as a spur to encountering God’s peace. Guilt that doesn’t want to be resolved is Satanic; guilt that turns from sin is God’s gift.
So distinguish true from false accusation.