Q: Does the Devil have creative powers? Does the enemy Satan have no powers to cause infirmities and the like? Yet in the Book of Job it seems like Satan has the power to cause storms or cause armies to go out and kill people, can you help me on this?

A: I think, first of all, that it is Satan inciting God. “Though you incited me against him,” against Job, “to ruin him without any reason” (Job 2:3)* is the retort of God when Satan appears again in chapter 2. This is by the power of God.

Certainly Satan can take the Sabeans or the Chaldeans and tempt them. We are well aware that Satan has the power to sit on our shoulders, whisper into our ears and tempt us to do all kinds of things. It is not the physical ear, but the ear of the mind. There is mind to mind communication that takes place. We do not know how that works anymore that we can explain how the mind can cause the physical synapses of the brain to fire; however, it is biblically incontrovertible that temptation through mind to mind communication takes place.

What’s going on here in the Book of Job is that God is permitting Satan to do what he’s doing.

Only God has creative power, and that’s why when the resurrection of Jesus Christ took place, the Lord was able to say, “a spirit does not have flesh and bone as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39). If Satan had creative power, he could have masqueraded as a flesh and bone substitute for the resurrected Christ. (If that is true about Satan, we would lose epistemic warrant for the central truth of Christianity.)

God can use Satan as His agent, but God is always the author. As I said so often, Satan is a lion on a leash the length of which is always determined by our Lord

— Hank Hanegraaff

For further related study, please see the following:

 Does Satan Have Access to Our Minds? (Hank Hanegraaff)

Is Satan Always the Cause of Sickness? (Hank Hanegraaff)

The Armor (Hank Hanegraaff)

Spiritual Warfare—God’s Way (Elliot Miller)

The Covering by Hank Hanegraaff

Spiritual Warfare in a Believer’s Life by Charles Haddon Spurgeon

* All Scripture cited from The Holy Bible: New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1984), unless noted.

This blog adapted from “How much power did Satan have in the book of Job?”