Question
Gramps,
I recall hearing once from a friend that Satan and his followers can’t read what you write. Not even sure where to look up such a topic. Thought maybe you ran across something, if that’s even real. Can Satan read?
Annie
Answer
Annie,
Thanks for the question, Annie.
I think we often conceptualize Satan using a kind of generic “bad guy” template, as though he were just an especially wicked mortal with better strategies. But Satan is not a mortal man. He is a spirit, a profoundly corrupt and malicious one, and his mode of existence isn’t the same as ours.
Our weaknesses, by contrast, are overwhelmingly weaknesses of the flesh. Yes, our spirits are immature, and yes, we have spiritual blind spots. But nine times out of ten, what trips us up are biological drives: uncontrolled appetites, chemical impulses, emotional reactivity, the entire machinery of animal life. Satan understands this because he has watched humanity operate under these constraints for millennia.
But he himself has no such constraints. He has no body. He never will. He forfeited the developmental path that involves binding a premortal spirit to a physical organism. That means that while he has intelligence and personality, he does not experience mortal appetites, hormones, exhaustion, pain, addiction, biochemical reward loops, or any of the things that make mortality both dangerous and educational.
When we are born, our spirit binds to a body in some way we don’t understand, and from that point on, we become dual beings: one eternal, one biological. The biological “natural man” is enormously strong (in my opinion, actually ascendant most of the time). It inherits every survival instinct that evolution has ever instilled in living organisms. It wants what animals want: comfort, pleasure, food, sex, dominance, laziness, safety, routine, and predictability. And it wants those things now.
Our task in mortality is to reverse the hierarchy: to place the eternal spirit in command and force the animal to take a subordinate role. Monthly Fast Sunday is a perfect illustration of this principle. We deliberately deny the body’s demands, not to punish it, but to remind it who is actually in charge.
When the spirit truly governs, Satan loses almost all direct leverage. His tools are limited to whatever part of us he can hook onto. And those hooks are nearly always physical appetites, emotional volatility, and ungoverned passions. If the “natural man” is tamed, disciplined, and subordinated, we occupy a spiritual posture much closer to his: a spirit being directing itself without the animal running the show. And in that state, when we are truly governed by the spirit, Satan has very little purchase against us.
So, can Satan read? I don’t know. If I may say so, I don’t think the question even lands in the right conceptual territory. On one hand, reading is a neurological activity, and Satan has no neurology. On the other hand, record-keeping and communication clearly have spiritual dimensions. But the whole line of inquiry assumes that Satan’s danger lies in accessing our private notes or observing our written weaknesses.
In my view, that completely misses the point. Satan doesn’t need to “read” anything to understand human vulnerability. What matters is not what he sees on a page, but whether he finds an ungoverned appetite or an undisciplined natural self to work with. If that part is in order, it doesn’t matter what he can or cannot read.
In summary, we have no revealed doctrine saying whether Satan can read writing or recorded thoughts. But the scriptures make clear that his influence comes through tempting our mortal weaknesses, not through gathering intelligence from what we write.
Gramps
