Did God create the devil? And if so, why does He not just get rid of him?

Scripture teaches that God is holy, good, and just, and that everything He made was good. So the question presses hard: if God made everything, did He make the devil? And if He did, why has He not destroyed him?

The first thing to see is that God never created a devil. What God created was an angel — good, as all His works are good — who afterwards made himself into the devil by his own rebellion. Satan is not a creature God designed evil; he is a creature who became evil. Evil was not in him when God made him. It entered by his own choice.

Scripture is clear that his fall was his own doing and not a defect in his making. What went wrong in Satan did not come from God's hand but from Satan's heart — from pride, and the craving to be exalted to a place that belongs to God alone. Paul warns that a new convert should not be made an overseer too quickly, “lest being puffed up with pride he fall into the same condemnation as the devil” (1 Timothy 3:6) — naming pride as the very thing that ruined Satan.

That leaves the sharper question. If Satan is God's enemy, and God has the power to destroy him, why has He not done it? Scripture tells us plainly that He one day will: “The devil, who deceived them, was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone… and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever” (Revelation 20:10). The devil's end is already fixed. So the question is not whether God will act, but why He waits.

Scripture does not give a full explanation, but it does show us the shape of the answer, and it is the same answer that runs through everything God permits: He allows evil to continue only where His conquest of it will display His glory more fully. Satan is permitted to exist, but on a leash God Himself holds — able to go only as far as God allows, and no further.

Over the years, God's people have struggled long against the works of the enemy — tempted, tried, and yet held fast by grace. And in that struggle, something about God is revealed that a world without any enemy would never have shown. A faith that overcomes the devil shows the strength of God's grace more clearly than an innocence that was never tested. The pastor and author John Piper has made this same point: that Christ's defeat of Satan, won through the steady faith of His people, is a greater triumph than it would have been had the devil simply never existed.

Paul's own life shows this exactly. He was given, in his words, “a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me” (2 Corinthians 12:7) — an affliction Satan meant for harm. But God had a purpose in allowing it: to keep Paul humble, and to teach him where real strength is found. When Paul begged for it to be taken away, the answer he received was not rescue but grace: “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). The very thing Satan meant as an attack became one of the clearest displays of God's grace in all of Scripture. That is what God does with the devil's malice. He does not only hold it back; He turns it to serve the very people it was meant to destroy.

So God has not yet removed Satan, but neither has He left His people defenceless before him. Until the day the enemy is thrown down for good, believers stand in the forgiveness bought by Christ, armed with the Word of God and kept by the Spirit who lives in them. Satan remains, for now, within the bounds God has set — and not one inch beyond them.