If we are to love our enemies, should not God also love satan?

Jesus commands His people to love their enemies: “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). If that is the standard God holds us to, a fair question follows. Satan is God's great enemy — so is God bound by His own command? Ought He to love the devil, and ought we?

The answer is no, and the reason is not that God falls short of His own standard. It is that the command was never about a being like Satan in the first place. To see why, we have to be clear about what God's love actually is. His love is not a blanket approval of everything that exists, a feeling that embraces good and evil alike. God's love flows in perfect harmony with His holiness and justice; He cannot look upon wickedness with favour, and to imagine Him loving evil itself would be to imagine a God at war with His own nature. Satan is not a flawed creature with some good left in him to be loved. Scripture presents him as evil without remainder — “a murderer from the beginning,” who “does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him,” and who “is a liar and the father of it” (John 8:44). There is nothing in him for holy love to reach.

When Jesus tells us to love our enemies, He is speaking of human enemies — the neighbour who wrongs us, the persecutor who hates us. And every human enemy, however hostile, shares one thing with us that changes everything: he is made in the image of God. That is why he can be loved and prayed for. However far he has fallen, he remains a creature God made to bear His likeness, and a creature for whom Christ's offer of mercy still stands. Our love for our enemies is really a reflection of God's own — the same patience that held back judgment while we ourselves were still His enemies.

Satan stands entirely outside that circle. He is not a fallen human but a fallen angel, and Scripture never once holds out the possibility of his redemption. His end is not restoration but judgment: “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). To love a being God has appointed to final destruction, with no offer of mercy extended to him, would not be Christlikeness. It would be a confusion about good and evil that Christ never asks of us.

This is why the command to love our enemies never blurs the Christian's stance toward the devil himself. We are told to love the human beings Satan uses; we are never told to love Satan. Toward him the posture is resistance, not affection — “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Resist him, steadfast in the faith” (1 Peter 5:8–9). Paul draws the line in the same place: our real struggle “is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers… against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). We fight the enemy; we love the people. Keeping those two apart is not a failure of love but the shape of it. Love reaches as far as God's mercy reaches — to every image-bearer, however hostile — and no further.