Forget about the scary movies you’ve seen regarding demons and the devil. That’s fiction. From “Ghostbusters” to “The Exorcist” and all the horror movies in between, these accounts of what Satan wants from humans aren’t accurate. What do demons really want from you? What is the worst thing the devil can make you do?
In fact, the devil cannot make you do anything. So, let’s put the question a different way. What is the worst thing that the devil can tempt you to do? What DOES a demon want from you that will please the devil and drive you away from God?
Your mind likely imagines a list of the worst moral evils – murder, blasphemy, stealing, or sexual perversion. Those things are bad, and if the devil could get you to do one or more of them, he certainly would try. He would fill your mind with thoughts of lust, hate, greed, anger, and revenge. But that’s not the worst thing the devil could get you to do.
The worst temptation of the devil has nothing to do with moral failure or intellectual suicide. Those things are bad, but they do not represent the ultimate intention of evil. To get the answer to this question, we can simply consider the garden of Eden and the book of Genesis for the answer. Genesis 3:1 tells us what happened: “Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?”
There you have it. The fall of mankind took place because the devil tempted Eve to question what God had said. The worst thing the devil can get you to do is to doubt God. To doubt his love. To doubt his warnings about sin. That is what the devil really wants from you. In short, to doubt the Word of God. Every other kind of sin starts with questioning God, His existence, and His moral law.
If God does not exist, or if what He says about moral disobedience is not true, then nothing else matters. If you deliberately choose to rebel and refute the warnings of God about sin and Satan, you have committed the worst evil. Once you question what God says, you have no answer for the existence of the world and the reality of human beings as unique creations of God. It all just happened, and therefore what we do with creation is a matter of presumed decency and collective moral order. But the Bible says our actions will be judged eternally based upon what God has said in His word. The worst thing the devil can get you to do is to deny the existence of God and the spiritual authority of the Bible. Do that and you are lost for all eternity. That is what demons really want from you.
