When talking about satan, his role as adversary a friend of mine said the following: Barbara, you cannot tell me there is no satan for I have stood toe to toe with him. You cannot tell me there is no hell for I have been there.”
I replied, "These things will appear externally as long as you need them to.”
In reality satan is a force within the circuitry of the human ego, within our consciousness that continually opposes the Christ nature. Satan is personified in scripture only for the purposes of perception... presenting a principle that the human eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would understand. Many more principles are personified in scripture to get us to see the metaphoric value beyond the words. We learn by symbols and types and eventually we leave behind the elementary principles, moving on to perfection.
Satan is not external from you. It is your ego, an aspect of every human being. If you pay close attention when this satan tempted Christ, what did he/it appeal to? The egoist mode of being.
When the adversary “stood” before the Lord, that word stood has its basis in stasis - a characteristic within our human physiology that permits the autonomic systems to allow the body to “stand” by the regulation of our blood pressure.
It is this adversary that we are to resist - our own human ego - the serpent nature that is intrinsic within the circuitry of our delicate human consciousness.
Evil however, we are told not to resist. And there is a reason for that - When Jesus gave the command to “resist not evil” he understood the principle that whatever we resist - persists.
“I have met the enemy and he is me.” A profound quote for those that can begin to see the internal dynamics of the human ego and how it works to control and scheme against the nature of the Christ within.