Why Did Satan Want Jesus Crucified?

The Devil Worked for the Death That Defeated Him

Hebrews says that Christ took on flesh and blood “that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). The Greek verb translated “destroy” means to put out of action. Christ’s death disabled the devil’s power of death.

The Gospels also show the devil at work in the events that led to that death. Luke writes:

Then entered Satan into Judas surnamed Iscariot, being of the number of the twelve. And he went his way, and communed with the chief priests and captains, how he might betray him unto them.

Luke 22:3–4

John places the entering at the last supper: “after the sop Satan entered into him” (John 13:27). When the arresting party reached the garden, Jesus told them, “this is your hour, and the power of darkness” (Luke 22:53).

So the devil helped bring about the death that took his power from him. He had spent three years looking for a charge against Jesus, and his hold on the human race depended on the outcome. An adversary in that position does not knowingly do the one thing that ends his hold.

What 1 Corinthians 2:8 Says

Paul writes that the wisdom of God shown in the cross was hidden from “the princes of this world,” “for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8). The Greek phrase behind “princes of this world” means “rulers of this age.”

Christians read these rulers in three ways. Some interpreters take them as the human authorities who condemned Jesus: Pilate, Herod, and the chief priests. On that reading the verse describes the ignorance of the men in Jerusalem, and the devil’s part in the cross is taken from other passages. Others point out that Paul speaks elsewhere of “principalities and powers” (Colossians 2:15) and read the rulers as spiritual powers. A third group holds that Paul means both, the human rulers and the powers behind them.

On any of these readings, Paul says that the crucifixion was carried out by those who did not understand what it would accomplish. If the spiritual powers are included, the verse speaks directly to the devil’s mistake.

Did Satan Know the Crucifixion Would Defeat Him?

The spirits knew who Jesus was. In the synagogue at Capernaum one of them cried out, “I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:24), and the devil opened the wilderness temptation with the words “If thou be the Son of God” (Matthew 4:3). The devil knew whom he faced. Paul’s words point to what he failed to grasp, which was what the death would do.

Christians have answered this question in more than one way. Some hold that Satan knew, or half knew, and was driven on by hatred he could not restrain. Some early Christian writers pictured him as deceived: he saw a man, failed to see the divine nature hidden in him, and took the bait like a fish on a hook. Samuel Renihan, writing on Christ’s descent to the dead, argues that Satan knew Christ was righteous and expected to keep him among the dead, as he had kept other righteous men.

Chris White answers that the devil did not know. His reasons are Paul’s sentence in 1 Corinthians 2:8 and the devil’s own conduct. A tempter who spent years trying to find sin in Jesus was working toward a charge he could press, and he pressed for the death when he believed he had one.

Chris White’s Proposal: The Devil Needed a Sin

Chris White’s account of the devil’s motive is a proposal, set out in chapter 17 of How Atonement Works. The book’s explanation of how the atonement works stands without it.

The proposal builds on what the book argues about the devil’s power. He tempts people to sin, then accuses them before God. Zechariah saw “Satan standing at his right hand to resist him” as Joshua the high priest stood before the angel of the LORD (Zechariah 3:1), and Revelation calls him “the accuser of our brethren” (Revelation 12:10). His accusation has force because the sin is real, and a person who has sinned is a person he can claim in death. If that is how his power works, then with Jesus he needed what he needed with everyone: a sin.

The wilderness temptation was the attempt. Each of the three temptations offered Jesus a way to act for himself apart from his Father’s word, and Jesus refused each one. Luke closes the account this way:

And when the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from him for a season.

Luke 4:13

Hebrews says that Jesus “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). For three years no one could lay hands on him. At Nazareth he passed through the crowd that meant to throw him from the hill (Luke 4:30). In Jerusalem the authorities “sought to take him: but no man laid hands on him, because his hour was not yet come” (John 7:30). The devil could bring death on a sinner, and Jesus had not sinned.

Satan and Judas

Luke says that Jesus spent a night in prayer before he chose the twelve (Luke 6:12–13), and Jesus said repeatedly that he did nothing of himself: “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do” (John 5:19). Judas was among those chosen. John says he was a thief who kept the bag (John 12:6). In the last week he went to the chief priests, took the thirty pieces of silver, and looked for a chance to betray Jesus (Matthew 26:14–16).

Chris White calls the next step the Judas gambit. Having failed to make Jesus sin, the devil worked on one of the twelve, meaning to charge that man’s betrayal to the master who chose him. If Jesus had chosen Judas on his own judgment, the betrayal would have shown that judgment to be bad, and a disciple’s treachery could be counted as his teacher’s failure.

The premise was wrong, and John’s Gospel shows it again and again. Jesus “knew from the beginning who they were that believed not, and who should betray him” (John 6:64). He asked, “Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?” (John 6:70). At the supper he said:

I speak not of you all: I know whom I have chosen: but that the scripture may be fulfilled, He that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me.

John 13:18

Jesus chose Judas knowingly, in obedience, and according to what was written. The guilt of the betrayal belonged to Judas alone. On its own, the gambit gave the devil nothing.

John adds a detail about timing. Judas “went immediately out: and it was night” (John 13:30). The next time any Gospel mentions him, he is in the garden with the soldiers. Between his going out and his return lies the agony in Gethsemane.

Our Sins Laid on Jesus in Gethsemane

Scripture says that sins which were not his own were laid on Christ. God “hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Isaiah says of the servant that “he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many” (Isaiah 53:12), and Peter that Christ “his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). At the supper, hours before the arrest, Jesus applied Isaiah’s words to himself:

For I say unto you, that this that is written must yet be accomplished in me, And he was reckoned among the transgressors: for the things concerning me have an end.

Luke 22:37

Most teaching places the laying of our sins on Christ at the cross. Chris White proposes that the bearing began earlier, in the garden, in the hours after Judas went out, and continued at the cross where Peter places it. His agony began before anyone arrested or struck him:

My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me.

Matthew 26:38

White reads this saying alongside Isaiah 53, where the servant pours out his soul unto death and is numbered with the transgressors, and alongside Psalm 88, where the sufferer’s soul is “full of troubles” and he is “counted with them that go down into the pit.”

On this reconstruction, when Judas came back with the soldiers, the devil found sin on Jesus for the first time in three years of looking. He took it as proof that his gambit had worked. He may have seen the burden directly, as Zechariah’s vision shows iniquity worn as filthy garments in the presence of the accuser (Zechariah 3:3–4). Or he may have inferred it as the hour came and the arrest, the trial, and the execution went forward step by step. In the book’s words, “He mistook the sins Jesus carried for sins Jesus had committed.” White’s illustration is the Trojan horse: the devil brought inside his own walls the thing that undid him, because he thought it was his victory.

Jesus had said at the supper:

Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me.

John 14:30

The sins on Jesus were ours. They were really on him, and none of them was his own, so they gave the devil no rightful claim on Jesus himself.

This question is one part of a larger account. How Atonement Works explains the devil’s power of death, how Christ carried our sins away like the scapegoat of Leviticus 16, and how forgiveness disarmed the accuser.

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Why That Death Broke His Power

The proposal explains why the devil acted. The book’s main argument explains why the act cost him his power, and it rests on forgiveness. Chris White argues that the devil’s power of death was conditioned on sin and on the true accusation sin supports. Christ bore our sins, carried them out of the camp as the live goat carried Israel’s, and God forgave them. Paul writes:

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

White reads the handwriting against us as the record of the charges the accuser held. God blotted it out by forgiving us, so the accusation lost its ground and the powers were disarmed. The devil was paid nothing. The book puts the two parts together this way: “The mistaken charge explains why the devil acted; the forgiveness explains why the act cost him his power.”

White adds one further suggestion. The devil’s power of death was a power over sinners, and in bringing about the death of a man with no sin of his own he used it where it did not reach. The rulers of Psalm 82 judged unjustly and were told they would die like men (Psalm 82:2, 6–7). The overreach may be part of why the devil lost his standing, and forgiveness is the larger cause. Forgiveness in the book’s account also depends on the risen Christ, as the page on the resurrection and forgiveness explains.

The Hour Was Given by God

The devil worked to bring about the cross, and God was in charge of it. Jesus said of his life, “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself” (John 10:18). To Pilate he said, “Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (John 19:11). Peter preached that Jesus was “delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God” and that his hearers “by wicked hands have crucified and slain” him (Acts 2:23).

Scripture shows the same pattern elsewhere. Second Samuel says the LORD moved David to number Israel, and First Chronicles says Satan provoked him (2 Samuel 24:1; 1 Chronicles 21:1). Two purposes ran through one event. At the cross the devil’s hour was an hour given to him. He was never the Father’s agent, and the Father made no agreement with him. He did what his rebellion had always done, tempting, accusing, and killing, and this time he carried the sins of the world to the place he wanted them and lost the hold they had given him.

Where This Understanding Comes From

Christians have asked about the devil’s part in the cross since the early church. Many early writers proclaimed Christ’s victory over death and the devil, used pictures such as the ransom and the fishhook, and disagreed about how the victory was won. Michael B. Evanson’s review of current research on 1 Corinthians 2:6–8 surveys the human, spiritual, and combined readings of the rulers. Samuel D. Renihan’s primer on Christ’s descent argues that Satan expected to hold Christ among the dead, and White agrees with him on that point. Charles Spurgeon, expounding Psalm 88, connected its anguish with Jesus in Gethsemane. David M. Moffitt and Katie Marcar have written on the defeat of the devil in Hebrews 2. The reconstruction on this page, with the Judas gambit, the timing in Gethsemane, and the devil’s misreading of the sins Jesus carried, is Chris White’s own contribution, and How Atonement Works credits the others.