I’m pretty convinced the scriptures support universalism more strongly than annihilation and vastly more powerfully than eternal torment. But I have just one question: Satan knows scriptures better than we do and he certainly knows that everybody is going to be redeemed in the end. So why is he wasting his time trying to drag people down when God is eventually going to bring everyone into the kingdom anyways? Doesn’t make any sense to me.
Who says he understands the scriptures better than we do?! The scriptures themselves say that Christians should be in a position to teach things to angels, which they peer into trying to understand.
I expect Satan (and any rebel angel) doesn’t think it’s a waste of his time to rebel. He would only need to lose the understanding that self-sacrificing love is the greatest power, not the power to merely cause effects (which depends upon foundational self-existent love to exist at all). After that, it’s all downhill.
To a mind which regards the causing of mere effects to be the greatest power, God ought to never allow free will to begin with, and ought never to allow rebels to continuing existing at all (much less to do so in a position to cause inconvenient effects). Satan’s existence as Satan probably looks to him like evidence God can be beaten eventually.
This is exactly the route taken by Rogue Agents in my novels, not coincidentally. 
Also, I juice it up by having them receive prophecies by means of their continuing connection to the Holy Spirit, which they perceive only as an ocean of fire, depersonalizing it willfully. The prophecies always come true, which they exploit so far as they can, but the prophecy that naturally matters the most to them is that of their future victory: which they can barely stand to look at, because they don’t want to see the details, and they insist on imagining “the greatest victory” being the usurpation of the place of God. (This naturally also leads them to compete against each other because of course none of them can seriously imagine they’d share the greatest victory with each other! 
Insofar as they hear other Rogues talking about foreseeing themselves achieving the greatest victory, they each think this is only delusion and misunderstanding for the others.)
Evil leads to insanity and rational incompetence, not least because it involves rooted self-delusion, a principle denial of truth. At best, hardcore evildoers respect the truth as a dangerous enemy; preferably they would make truth a tool for their own ends (thus abusing the grace of God).
That’s what each of us does when we sin. We aren’t any better than the devils, in principle: each of us might as well be the chief of sinners. (The chiefs of sinners just happen to be more gung-ho about it, and somewhat better in applying power to cause effects along that line.)
Anyway, I only have to look self-critically at myself when I sin, to extrapolate on a larger scale just what kind of willfully rebellious self-delusion the devils must be engaging in.
You might as well ask as an annihilationist or a believer in ect why Satan, who knows the scriptures better than any of us, wastes his time if he knows his ultimate fate. A lot of us have a popular “vision” of hell in which the devil presides as the “evil master” of the underworld. I think maybe Catholicism at one point somewhat endorsed this idea, but I’m not a Catholic historian. At any rate, it isn’t scriptural. In scripture, literally read, Satan is the chief inmate of hell, not its ruler. Victims are not tormented by demons, but only by flames. Any demons who might be present are presumably too busy weeping and wailing and gnashing teeth just like everyone else, to take time off to torment their fellow prisoners.
In this literal interpretational view, Satan’s only logical response would be to spend every available millisecond at the gates of heaven pleading and begging and crying out loud for mercy and forgiveness on the off chance that God, as He has done so often for humans, would show him pity.
The only logical thing to say of this, assuming that you do believe in a personal devil (as I do), is that Satan himself is also deceived. He is so caught up in his own pride, fear, hatred, madness, that he cannot see the end from the beginning. He didn’t foresee the death of Christ as His most magnificent victory, despite the prophecies of scripture – else he would never have crucified the Lord of Glory. Satan may know the words of the scriptures (as did the priests and Pharisees), but he does not know – he does not understand them. He has yet to understand the magnificent author.
So why would Satan bother? That is a very good question, but it isn’t confined to a universal salvation outcome. Satan’s fate, according to a literal interpretation of the popular translations of the bible, is not going to be improved by his tally of souls. He and the beast will burn forever, the smoke of their torment rising up unto the ages of the ages. It will do him precisely no good at all to have brought with him ten-thousands of ten-thousands of the damned. If he is as all-knowing as you suppose him to be (in his understanding of scripture at least) he should know that, and just give up right now. If he brings them to annihilation, he will be annihilated and not enjoy his “victory.” If he brings them to ect, he will be tormented more than any and not enjoy his “victory.” If he cannot bring one soul with him because of God’s never-ending faithfulness, he should logically realize that he also will ultimately be brought into mercy himself and should repent this moment to save himself the anguish of millenia of torment which will end, inevitably, in his own repentance. But he can’t come to a logical conclusion – because he is absolutely barking mad with hatred and fear and pride and he cannot trust the Father’s love. Not yet.
Satan is a tricky one for me, who exactly is he? Is he totally free from the will of God?
There are a few scriptures that indicate he is bound to Gods will, examples of this is apparent with the story of Job, and the lying spirit (possibly Satan??) sent forth from God to Ahab’s prophets as well as testing Jesus in the desert.
"And the LORD said, ‘Who will entice Ahab into attacking Ramoth Gilead and going to his death there?’ "One suggested this, and another that. Finally, a spirit came forward, stood before the LORD and said, ‘I will entice him.’ By what means?’ the LORD asked. "‘I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouths of all his prophets,’ he said. "‘You will succeed in enticing him,’ said the LORD. ‘Go and do it.’’ 1 Kings 22:21-22
It is clear also concerning Jesus’s cross that Satan is not omniscient, otherwise he would have known that by entering Judas he was actually helping to fulfill Gods will concerning the cross.
I too believe Satan is deceived, and he is actually more incorporated into Gods ultimate will then he thinks. God being omniscient knows Satan’s every move, Satan may think he can thwart God’s plans, but everything he does, God is already two steps ahead and therefore already incorporated in to the big scheme of things.
He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. John 8:44
^Who made him this way, knowing he would become the “father of lies”… ?
I have an unfair advantage in discussing hell. I’ve been to the local branch.
The called it an English boarding school, but it was run on truly evil lines.
There was one kid, let’s call him Eric, who was really intersted in zoology. He’s managed to catch a few of the local, non-poisonous, snakes and set up a vivarium to keep them. He was very, very good at it, and he taught me how to handle snakes, a skill which has stayed with me for life.
Then one day one of the school’s star sports players took a knife and killed the lot. The school did nothing, because to the headmaster sports mattered, snakes didn’t.
Eric was devastated, never replaced the collection and went into a decline that began with him starting smoking (very much under age) and went on from there.
Now why did the culprit do it? Why did he waste his time on something that did him no good?
The simple answer is “Thats what evil does”. From Satan’s point of view destroying the beautiful, causing misery, and turning people against God are worthwhile objectives in their own right, even if they achieve nothing.
Satan’s not very bright.
Heh, I see what you did there, Allan.
Lots of good common sense replies, thank you.
Yes, I can see, Cindy, that satan may be able to quote the entire bible at the drop of a hat, but obviously his comprehension of it is nil or else he would never have set up Christ’s crucifixion thus insuring salvation for all of us to his detriment.
And wormwood you’re right. Evil does evil–that’s just the nature of the beast.
Now God may be influencing satan’s thought process in the same way He did it to Pharoh and He says as much in Exodus 7:3 “And I will harden Pharoh’s heart…” indicating that Pharoh had little or no choice in the matter so that God could carry out His plan.
Now this leads me to another question that sounds off-topic but is somewhat related:
If God’s intention in causing the flood was to wipe out the Nephilim who were polluting the bloodline of men in an attempt to prevent Jesus from coming from a pure bloodline, then why did God allow the fallen angels to mate once again with women, because obviously there were Nephilim who either survived the flood or who were born after it (Genesis 6:4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that…"
Doesn’t it seem like He took an action to put an end to something, but that His plan was thwarted in some way? Of course it is impossible for God to be thwarted but then why allow them to repopulate and just start the process of polluting the bloodline all over again? Put another way, why didn’t God just put their spirits in chains in Tartarus immediately after the flood destroyed their earthly bodies.
Well, humans continued to sin after the time of Noah (even if we assume the face-value reading of the passage and he and his sons and their wives were the final humans alive); I don’t know why angels wouldn’t start up again eventually–though apparently not anywhere near to the same degree! Also, just become some were slain and imprisoned as spirits doesn’t mean others couldn’t have done somewhat the same thing later.
(I’ve also half-joked occasionally that one or more of Noah’s sons, or Noah himself, married one of the Nephilim daughters!)
Anyway, Jesus was never going to come from a “pure bloodline”–Mary was the daughter of our first sinning ancestors, as much as any of us–so God wouldn’t have killed the Nephilim to secure that.