Shame as the Devil

There are lots of different perspectives on what form evil takes in our day and age. In the book of Revelation there is all kinds of metaphorical language. Reading through the book is a bit like watching Game of Thrones with dragons and wild beasts burning up the earth. But when it comes to this one passage, there’s something almost intuitive about how that book describes evil in our world:

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah. For the accuser of our siblings, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down. - Revelation 12:10

On Sunday Brenna Rubio shared this keen insight from Rachel Held Evans about this passage (and some related ones). As you read it over, see if you can identify the voice of ‘the accuser’ in your own mind and then bring it before Jesus.

Sometimes in the Hebrew Bible, the devil is known as ‘ha Satan,’ which translates in English to “the Accuser.” No matter what you believe about the devil or about Satan, whether you believe it to be an actual being, a fallen angel, the human forces of evil, or the shadow side of our own selves, we all know the voice of the Accuser. The voice of shame that mutters in our ears, the voice that somehow finds the express lane into our hearts and heads, the voice that identifies that deeply hidden, deeply rooted insecurity and toys with it, amplifies it, multiplies it—that is the voice of the Accuser. The voice of attribution directed at me, which tells me that I am the worst thing that I have done—that is the voice of the Accuser.

When I speak about the voice of the Accuser, I’m talking about the devastating, deceptive messages that play on repeat within us. They fixate not on what we might have done but on how awful we are. That’s something profoundly different from a rightly guilty conscience. It’s shame.

- Rachel Held Evans and Jeff Chu, Wholehearted Faith