What I take from this is, God has given up on Satan BECAUSE he can not be benefited. God’s ability to bless is infinite, but it still requires a little of us and Satan has put himself in a position that no blessing from God can help him. He really is a lost cause. He is a several thousand (million?) year trainwreck happening in slow motion.

Two of the most picturesque images in the Scriptures, concerning The Father of Lies, are where he stands accusing his brethren day and night, (Rev 12:10) and where his very hands palsy and tremble at the deeds he has committed (or set in motion). (D&C 123:10)

Satan might portray himself in any of a thousand guises as an angel of light/hero, but underneath, he is pitiful rambling trainwreck, gradually losing even the ‘good’ traits that make him good at his job.

Plus he really knows how to party.

1. Every good thing comes from Christ.
2. The qualities that Satan has that make him an effective tempter (intelligence, patience, even self-love, even existence) are good things.
3. In his continued rebellion against Christ, Satan will eventually lose these things and/or have them removed.

That would be one argument. It would fit pretty well with the doctrine taught by some in the 19th C. that Satan’s eventual fate is extinction.

I also like the argument that judgment is a question not of determining who you are but of determing what your trajectory is: calculus, not arithmetic. So you could say that at the first judgment when Satan and his kind were cast out, Satan and his kind were not necessarily bad but had determined on a course that would make them bad in time. That course being what we would call decline or descent.

IMO, its an open question.

Postscript:
Satan is also declining every time a soul dies without having become of perdition, since it appears the infernal hosts have power over mortality that they lose afterwards. But I take it that the decline we are referring to is internal, not external. Some might say that you can’t separate the two, but I probably disagree.

Sgarff:

Woland is an interesting case. I’m not sure that he’s that attractive — there are all sorts of little details that show that he really isn’t (the limp, for one). But he is clever and subversive. Of course, that comes from a very different doctrinal understanding of the devil, and in the end a devil that is still rather pathetic and can really only operate because of and even somewhat on the errand of Christ.

“Oh, duh, Dante’s Satan. ”

Duh. Heh.

WM, doctrinally I don’t think its clear that the devil is static instead of declining. Its possible that he’s getting worse and worse off. That said, I’ve read some modern lit fic that struck me as pretty darn insistently static.

Insane works for me.