Thank you my dear friend for your very deep question. First of all, I shrink from saying that “God killed His Son.” I don’t believe that we ever see such a phrase in Scripture, though in Isaiah 53:10, we do  read: ”Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise Him; He hath put Him to grief: when Thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in His hand.” In 1 Timothy 1:15, we read that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; He was our sin offering, and no one took His life, but He Himself gave His life for us as a sin offering (II Corinthians 5:21; 1 John 4:10). Now, in Acts 2:36 we read: “Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.” In this verse, the responsibility for the crucifixion of the Lord is given to mankind, and not to God.  In Acts 4:10, when Peter spoke before the Sanhedrin, the Jews again are charged with the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus. Now, this point that I am making may seem to be moot, but I believe it to be important since the responsibility clearly falls to man for sinning, as we all have done, and for rejecting Christ, and thus for His crucifixion. God, because of His great love for us all, sent His son into the world to be our sin offering (1 John 4:10), and in John 3:16, we read that He gave His Son that through faith, we might have everlasting life. So, the sin problem was and is our own, but God, because of His love and grace,  provided the solution, His Son, the Lord Jesus who was crucified and who rose again from the dead. Thus, man has full responsibility for his sins, and God through His Grace and mercy sent Jesus to save us from wrath, our just punishment before God’s law. Now, I believe that what follows truly impacts your question: I don’t know that we ever see in Scripture that Satan compelled mankind to sin. If that were so, then Satan would bear the full responsibility for sin. Satan was a created being, an angel, with much power, but he cannot “make us sin”. He can certainly tempt us, and he regularly does, but “the devil doesn’t make us do it,” as the old cliché seems to indicate. It is true that at some point, iniquity was found in Satan, and since his fall, we see Satan as the adversary, the enemy of God’s people, the tempter, the “accuser of the brethren”, and the great deceiver. But how is it then that mankind came to sin? God created mankind with a free will, and not as an automaton. God tested man’s obedience in the Garden of Eden by allowing the deceiver, Satan, to tempt Eve, lying to her about God’s directive not to eat of that certain tree. Satan did not have the power to force Eve to sin, but rather when tempted, she and Adam disobeyed God’s law out of their own desire as we read in Genesis 3:6: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. Thus, Adam and Eve sinned, and this of their own free will. Certainly, Satan acted as a catalyst, offering Adam and Eve the deception of becoming like God, but this failure in the garden simply demonstrated that man is sinful, and that as Romans 3:23 puts it, we all have sinned. We are sinners, both by nature and by choice, and though Satan is there to tempt and to deceive, we have no one to blame for our sins but ourselves.

“Killing” Satan would not remove our sinful nature, nor would this take away our guilt. It occurs to me also that Satan is a fallen angel, a spirit, and we do not read in Scripture of the fallen angels being “killed” as though they were of flesh, but rather, they are to be reserved for their final judgment, spending all eternity in the Lake of Fire as we see in Revelation 20:10: “And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.” And there is good purpose in Satan not being “eliminated” from activity on the earth prior to the end times as we will discuss in the remainder of this document. The chronology of events follows: during the millennium period, Satan will in fact be bound for a thousand years (Revelation 20:2-3), and the wicked of the earth will be removed. But even though Christ will reign in Jerusalem during this period, people will in fact be capable of sinning by their own free will. Then, Satan will be released at the end of that one Thousand years so that he might deceive the nations once again, leading to the final rebellion of mankind against God (Revelation 20:7-9). This last battle results in Satan and the people who have decided to follow him being defeated, and the devil cast into the Lake of Fire (Revelation 20:10).

Now, I must stress here that Romans 3:22-25 clearly shows that we are all accountable for our sins, and all are guilty before the law; faith in Christ Jesus is the only way for sinners to be saved. All mankind is guilty before the law, but Christ Jesus gave His own life for sinners that we might be delivered from judgment. We read in Romans 3:24-26: “Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time His righteousness: that He might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus,” (see also II Thessalonians 2: 13). And just consider if you will, had man remained in his innocent state in the garden, the garden and this earth would be all that man could ever know. But, our God has a way of taking tragedy and turning it into a great victory! Through the redemptive work of Christ Jesus on the cross of Calvary, God not only saved us from wrath, but has given us a heavenly destiny, and a personal relationship with Himself that takes us way beyond the state of innocence in Eden (Ephesians 1 and 2).

Now, Satan, as the adversary, is quite active today, but he does not have free reign over Christians. Job 1:12, and Job 2:6 show that Satan can only afflict believers with the permission of God, and then only under God’s stated limits. The book of Job in its entirety shows how God can even use Satan’s attacks to discipline His own, with an eye to doing His saints good (see Job 42:5,6). And, as to Satan’s deceptions and intimidation, God provides us with the suitable equipment for spiritual warfare that we may be able to “withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand” (Ephesians 6:10-18).

I pray that these thoughts are helpful to you in better understanding God’s purposes for His children. It really gets at the question of why God allows evil in the world. God’s ways are higher than our ways, and we may never be able to fully understand His ways and purposes while in this scene. but what we can know and understand about Him we find in the living Word of God, the Bible; and we do know that God is love, and that He has purposed His saints for glory.  (SF)  (549.5)