At every baptism in our church an old question is asked. It is a question used at countless baptisms all over the world. A question that is almost as old as the church itself. Just before water is splashed in the threefold name, I look at parents and sponsors and sometimes adult candidates across the pool and ask: Do you renounce all the forces of evil, the devil, and all his empty promises? 

To tell you the truth, I've been waiting for somebody to laugh at the question. Who really believes in the devil anymore? We've left him behind with the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, relegating "evil" to more manageable and explainable psychoses that can be named and catalogued within the human heart. There's nothing wrong with Hitler, Pol Pot, Timothy McVeigh, Che Guevara, Osama bin Laden that a little pharmacological therapy couldn't have fix, right? I remember approaching my systematic theology professor in seminary and asking, "Do I really have to say that line about the devil and all his empty promises?" I'll never forget his response. My professor smiled at me and said, "Spend twenty years in parish ministry and come back and ask me that question again." 

Malcolm Muggeridge, the late British journalist, converted to Christianity in mid-life after years of agnosticism. "Personally," he once wrote, "I have found the Devil easier to believe in than God; for one thing, alas, I have had more to do with him.

"Do you renounce all the forces of evil, the devil, and all his empty promises?