How Does Forgiveness Defeat Satan?

What Colossians 2:13–15 Says

Paul wrote to a church that was being told it needed more than Christ: special observances, angelic mediators, and rules about food and days. His answer was that in Christ they already had everything. Then he described how they had been made alive:

And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses; blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross; and having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.

Colossians 2:13–15

The passage has three steps. God forgave all their trespasses. He blotted out a written record that stood against them and nailed it to the cross. And he stripped the principalities and powers and led them in triumph. Forgiveness comes first, before Paul mentions the powers at all.

The verb translated “forgiven” is built on the Greek word for grace. It means to give freely, and Luke uses it of the creditor in Jesus’ parable: “And when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both” (Luke 7:42). “Blotting out” is the word the Greek Old Testament uses for God’s own forgiving:

I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins.

Isaiah 43:25

David prays with the same word, “blot out my transgressions” (Psalm 51:1). To blot out a record is to make it as if it had never been written.

The Handwriting That Was Against Us

The Greek word behind “handwriting” is cheirographon, a handwritten document. In the business papyri of Paul’s day it was the usual word for a note of debt, written out and signed by the debtor as an acknowledgment of what he owed. The New American Standard Bible renders it “certificate of debt.” Readers have understood it in three main ways:

• The law of Moses. Paul speaks in Ephesians of “the law of commandments contained in ordinances” (Ephesians 2:15), with the same word for ordinances. Calvin read the handwriting as the ceremonies of the law.
• Our signed debt. Following the papyri, many take it as our own acknowledgment of the obligation our sins placed us under.
• A record of charges. Others take it as a written list of our sins kept against us. A Jewish apocalypse from roughly the same period pictures an angel holding a cheirographon on which a man’s sins are written.

On the question of Satan’s power, the three readings agree. Whatever the document was, it was a true record of guilt that stood against us, and God blotted it out when he forgave.

Chris White takes the third reading: the handwriting is the record of our sins, the charge sheet. His reason is that Scripture names the devil as the accuser. In the book’s words, “An accuser needs a case, and a case against a sinner is a record of what the sinner did.” Paul describes the record as a debt to God, and God is the one who forgave it. The book reads it as the record the accuser used against us, and treats that as an interpretation of the passage, one that other readers dispute.

Paul places the cancellation at the cross. Christ “bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24), and the record of those sins was nailed there with him.

Satan the Accuser

The Hebrew word satan means an adversary. In Job and Zechariah, where he appears before God, the setting is a court. In Job his first act is an accusation: “Doth Job fear God for nought?” (Job 1:9). Zechariah describes the same court:

And he shewed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to resist him. And the LORD said unto Satan, The LORD rebuke thee, O Satan; even the LORD that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee: is not this a brand plucked out of the fire? Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments, and stood before the angel.

Zechariah 3:1–3

Joshua is in filthy garments, so the charge is true. The high priest of a people just returned from exile has real sin on him, and Satan stands at his right hand with it. Revelation gives the devil his title: “the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night” (Revelation 12:10).

Accusation follows temptation. Matthew calls the devil “the tempter” (Matthew 4:3). Having led a person into sin, he then charges the person with it. Because the sins are real, the charge cannot simply be dismissed. The book puts the problem in one line: “The problem the atonement had to solve was how to answer a true charge.”

The Devil’s Power of Death

Hebrews says that Christ took flesh and blood “that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). Scripture ties sin and death together again and again: “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23); “the soul that sinneth, it shall die” (Ezekiel 18:4); “the sting of death is sin” (1 Corinthians 15:56).

Chris White draws these texts into one account. The devil tempts people into sin. He then accuses them before God, and the true charge carries the sentence of death. His power of death, on this account, is an authority conditioned on sin, exercised by accusation, and permitted by God for as long as the charge stands. No single verse states the whole chain. It is the book’s synthesis of what Scripture says about the tempter, the accuser, sin and death, and the book offers it as the plainest way to connect them.

The power has limits. Satan could not take Job’s life (Job 2:6), and he had to ask to sift Peter, while Jesus prayed for him (Luke 22:31–32). Nothing is owed to the devil, and God is neither his debtor nor his partner. If his power rests on sin, there is one way to take it from him: the sins he holds against us have to be removed.

How Forgiveness Answers the Accuser

Zechariah’s vision shows the answer. The LORD leaves the filthy garments undisputed and has them taken off:

And he answered and spake unto those that stood before him, saying, Take away the filthy garments from him. And unto him he said, Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment.

Zechariah 3:4

The accusation is answered by removing the sin it rests on. Revelation describes the same outcome: the accuser is thrown down, and the brethren he accused “overcame him by the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 12:11).

Colossians gives the order. God forgave all trespasses and blotted out the record, and the principalities and powers were stripped. The verb translated “spoiled” means to strip off, and the King James translators used the older English word for stripping a defeated enemy of his arms. The powers were put on public display and led in triumph, as a Roman general led his captives through the city. Calvin read the handwriting differently, yet he took the powers to be devils, disarmed so that they had nothing to bring against us.

Elsewhere the New Testament joins deliverance from Satan and forgiveness in the same way. Jesus sent Paul to the Gentiles with this commission:

To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me.

Acts 26:18

Paul tells the Colossians that the Father “hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son: in whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:13–14). In both passages, deliverance from Satan’s power and the forgiveness of sins come together.

The book’s account explains why. The sins of those Christ represents were laid on him: “the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6). In the book’s reading he carried them out of the gate and down to the dead, as the live goat of the Day of Atonement carried Israel’s sins out of the camp. God forgave them and blotted out the record. With the sins gone, the charge has no ground, the sentence has nothing to rest on, and the one who had the power of death loses his hold on those whose sins were taken away. That is how Hebrews can say Christ defeated the devil “through death.”

This question sits at the center of a larger account. How Atonement Works traces the whole Day of Atonement through the work of Christ: the blood, the high priest in heaven, the scapegoat that carried sins away, and the defeat of the devil.

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How Other Christians Have Explained the Victory

Christians have long agreed that Christ defeated the devil. Many early writers proclaimed his victory over death and the devil, and in the twentieth century Gustaf Aulén named this view Christus Victor. The early writers explained the victory in different ways. Some spoke of Christ’s death as a ransom paid to the devil, and others objected that a ransom seems to make the devil a party with a rightful claim.

In the West, Anselm set the devil aside in his account of the cross, since he held that the problem the cross solved lay between God and humanity. Penal substitution, the explanation most evangelical Christians are taught, follows that line. On that view the handwriting is the demand of the law, or the debt our sins owe to God’s justice. Christ paid it by bearing the punishment in our place, and the powers are defeated because the debt has been satisfied. Teachers of this view hold that Christ died for us and in our place, that he bore our sins, that sin is serious and brings death, and that God provided the atonement out of love. Chris White shares all of those convictions.

The book differs on two points. Colossians describes the record as blotted out in forgiveness, which is the language of a debt forgiven rather than a debt paid off. And the book argues that the victory needs a mechanism. Christus Victor proclaims that Christ won; the forgiveness of a true charge explains how the win took the devil’s hold away.

Nothing Was Paid to the Devil

If the devil held people, was he paid to let them go? The book answers no, and the law of the Jubilee shows how a release can happen with no payment to the holder. Every fiftieth year, with a trumpet sounded “in the day of atonement” (Leviticus 25:9), land went back to its families and Israelites who had sold themselves into service went free:

And if he be not redeemed in these years, then he shall go out in the year of jubile, both he, and his children with him.

Leviticus 25:54

The one who held him received nothing. His claim ended because God had declared the year, and the reason given is that the people were God’s servants, whom he brought out of Egypt (Leviticus 25:55). Isaiah says the same of the exiles: “Ye have sold yourselves for nought; and ye shall be redeemed without money” (Isaiah 52:3).

The Greek translators called the Jubilee the year of aphesis, release, the same word the New Testament uses for the forgiveness of sins. At Nazareth Jesus read Isaiah’s Jubilee promise of “deliverance to the captives” and said that it was fulfilled that day (Luke 4:18, 21). The accuser’s claim ended over his head, by the God to whom the captives belonged, and he received nothing for them.

If Satan Is Defeated, Why Is He Still Active?

Every New Testament letter that mentions the devil after the resurrection treats him as active. He walks about “as a roaring lion . . . seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8), and believers are told to resist him (James 4:7). The word Hebrews uses for “destroy” means to render inoperative. What was rendered inoperative was his power over those whose sins were taken away. Over those still under the charge his activity goes on, until he is thrown into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:10).

Believers are still tempted, because the tempter is still permitted to test, and the testing still counts. What they no longer face is an accuser with a true charge and a sentence of death behind it. Believers also still die. Chris White calls this the hardest question for his account and offers his best guess: our bodies still die because we still sin, while the charge against us has been forgiven, and death itself, “the last enemy,” will be destroyed at the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:26).

Those who are in Christ are forgiven, and the accuser has no charge to bring against them.

Where This Understanding Comes From

Much of this account is older than the book. Calvin identified the principalities and powers of Colossians 2:15 as devils disarmed so that they could bring nothing against us. In the third century Origen connected the same passage with the scapegoat of Leviticus 16. Irenaeus, Eusebius and Gregory of Nazianzus wrote of Christ’s descent to the dead as a victory that brought the captives out, and Gustaf Aulén gave the victory tradition its modern name. Peter T. O’Brien, Roy Yates and Kyu Seop Kim set out the range of readings of cheirographon. Katie Marcar and David M. Moffitt have written on the defeat of the devil in Hebrews 2, and Samuel Renihan and Richard Barry have connected the scapegoat with Christ’s descent. Jacob Milgrom’s work on Leviticus stands behind the book’s reading of the Day of Atonement.

What How Atonement Works adds is an explanation of how these pieces fit: the devil’s power of death rested on sin and the true accusation sin supports, Christ bore our sins, and God forgave them, so the accusation lost its ground. The other half of the Day of Atonement, the risen high priest in heaven, is explained in the companion article on the resurrection and forgiveness.