I was surprised at first understanding the preaching of Jesus recorded in John 8 (and reiterated by John in his epistles) that a person who keeps commiting serious sins like lying is, according to the truth that is in Jesus, still really a child of Satan and not a child of God. OK, now some are shocked and are starting to write vitriolic responses and anathemise me but just read it and see. Anyway, here is the thing: this is what Jesus was addressing not to unbelievers but to those who it says believed His preaching about Himself - those who believed He is the Son of Man and believed He existed from ancient times before He became flesh. Yet to these, who some today would say were “saved” (because they believed), to these Jesus said they were haters of Him intent on killing Him (which proved true not much later after He said it) and were liars and so were effectively not children of Abraham or of God but children of Satan. So were they “saved”? Or does being saved require that they change their ways? The unbelievers had already been told by Jesus that they would die in their sins because they did not believe Him about being the Christ, the Son of Man, existing before Abraham was born. So they were unlikely to be saved. Yet to be saved did not Jesus tell the believers that they had first to hold to His teachings in order to be set free from sin. It was more than belief in His words but faithfully holding to His words and being set free by truth that is what would save them from dying in their sins and facing the Judgement still sinners.
Reading the rest of the teachings of Jesus in John’s gospel the sonship thing is linked to rebirth and so it means less about what you are like and more about WHO made you that way. So the people who lie (many of us from childhood until we perhaps are changed) are that way because, Jesus says, they are made that way by the father of lies and liars, Satan. Satan’s influence, Jesus teaches, is the main cause of people becoming liars (and haters and murderers). So the way Jesus describes sonship is something a father causes to be in someone’s nature to do. So to be a child of God takes a work of God, which Jesus says can be through Him, through Jesus the true Son of God.
And who is this Satan? We just have to accept that Jesus knows who Satan is and what he does. If you want to know more what Jesus’ audience understood which clarifies this message of Jesus we know from Dead Sea Scrolls the very influential sacred writings related to Satan were the Book of Jubilees and Book of Enoch which mention an angel who matches the Satan picture and were the two most prevalent books in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jubilees calls the antagonist angel Mastema. Enoch calls Satan by that name (although probably in the passages not represented in the Dead Sea Scroll fragments). The other best source is the Book of Job. To summarise all these sources about Satan they all describe an antagonistic angel - antagonistic towards God Himself. This angel is important enough to meet with God alongside the topmost angels - archangel ‘sons of God’. The uses God makes of angels are not always suitable for faithful righteous archangels and sometimes God uses the antagonistic angels for certain purposes such as testing people for either wickedness and righteousness and sometimes for punishing those proven to be wicked. Later in Revelation as well as in a parallel passage in Enoch the top antagonist angel Satan is put to use to mislead the world leaders after the reign of Christ into waging war on God. The very fact they follow this antagonist against God proves their wickedness such that they are punished by their defeat in this final war.
