Q&R – Can Satan counterfeit spiritual fruit? Brad Jersak

Please follow and like us:
fb-share-icon
Tweet

Question

Being an angel of light, can Satan mimic joy and other fruit of the Spirit to try and deceive us when we try to judge something or someone by its fruit? Can a non-Christian produce the fruit of the Spirit?

Response

First, I think it’s helpful to remember the context of that phrase from 2 Corinthians 4. Here are some of the critical passages there:

  • 3 But I am afraid that just as the serpent’s cunning deceived Eve, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ. 4 For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the Spirit you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough. 5 I do not think I am in the least inferior to those “super-apostles.”… 
  • 13 For such people are false apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ. 14 And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. 15 It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve.

In this context, Paul is drawing an analogy between the Serpent or Satan and the slick ‘super-apostles’ in their ability to deceive us with false fruit. And for a time, that may work. But given that neither Satan nor the false teachers bear the true fruit of the Spirit, the counterfeit will eventually be exposed as such. 

I’m interested in the criteria Paul is using. He measures the fruit according to how it aligns with the good news of Jesus preached by Paul and ultimately through Jesus. And this reminds me of the wisdom of Silouan, a Christian monk from the 20th century who lived on Mount Athos. He said that as an ‘angel of light,’ the deceiver has the limited ability to counterfeit the fruit of the Spirit (e.g., nice-ness instead of kindness, joviality instead of joy, moralism instead of self-control, etc.). BUT there is a particular fruit of the Spirit that Satan cannot truly counterfeit for any length of time: loving our enemies. According to Silouan, ‘enemy-love’ is the most reliable litmus test of authenticity.

Enemy-love or radical forgiveness is the very heart of the message of the Cross of Christ, as preached by Paul. It’s a scandal to the Greek idea of wisdom or the Jewish idea of a Messiah (see 1 Corinthians 1), but to us, it is the saving power of God that we are experiencing.

But you also asked,  

  • Can a non-Christian produce the fruit of the Spirit?

​I believe so. I believe I’ve seen it. Many times. On the most basic level, in our common humanity, we all “live and move and have our being” in God and we all experience the grace of the Spirit, so anyone who participates in (yields to) that grace (even prior to formally identifying as a Christ-follower) will show evidence of the Spirit’s work. As 1 John 4:7 says, “Anyone who loves, knows God.”

Further, when the Spirit of God is drawing people to the ‘Father’s house,’ we will often see clear evidence of the Spirit at work healing, freeing, and transforming them… and this inexplicable transformation is the Spirit’s witness to the good news of Jesus. Grace always precedes our response (“We love because he first loved us” – 1 John 4:19), so it is in tasting and seeing that the Lord is good in our lives (including the fruit of peace or patience or joy) that many of us come to faith.