Does God Love Satan?

Great question!

We have to say that God loves Satan and also that God Hates Satan. In distinct ways.

As with all things supernatural, we speak always by analogy: God is similar to us within an infinite dissimilarity. So we always risk anthropomorphism: attributing to God our own human traits. We must insist that what we say of God, in our terms, is infinitely different from what we understand, even as it is similar. It is infinitely greater. So, if we say God is fatherly, we mean he is perfectly fatherly, and any fatherliness we know is, at its best, a small reflection of that splendor which is without any imperfection.

We will distinguish Lucifer (word meaning "Morning Star"), as the magnificent angel that God created, from Satan (meaning "accuser"), as the evil being that rejected God ("I will not serve!") and became diabolic ("that which tears apart") and the one who condemns us.

Lucifer was the greatest angel, most intelligent and powerful, inferior only to Mary, queen of angels and saints, and Jesus Christ himself. Clearly God loved Lucifer. Since love is eternal, God continues in some mysterious way to love this creature. 

God's love for him now, after his fall, must have something like a "grief." Analogy! Beware: God cannot grieve the way we do because he is Perfect Being and cannot lose, cannot be diminished. Yet, in his love for Lucifer he did lose something, not something essential to his Being, but something he loved. Surely he must suffer similar "grief" if any sinner goes to hell.

But using his God-given freedom, Lucifer and his comrades became something different from God's creature, he became an anti-creature, a god-unto-himself, a despiser of creation and the Creator, the one who tears things apart, the accuser of the brethren. Drawing of course from the goodness of God's creation, Lucifer perverted that into his own Kingdom of Darkness. God despises this kingdom and its king. How could he not?

Yet Satan is alive, he is a being, he is existent. Therefore, God must love him or else he would cease to exist. He has qualities which did not die: intelligence, a strong will, purposefulness. These are in themselves good gifts. So we might say that God loves Satan metaphysically, in that he is a being with goodness, but hates him morally in that he uses these gifts purely for evil. Clearly, this is all very Mysterious and yet is it intelligible, if obscurely.

Another sense in which we might imagine God loving Satan is in his role, as the Great Antagonist, in the Drama of Salvation. He is our enemy. But by resisting God, the Kingdom of Heaven, and each of us, he helps to elicit more love, mercy, and goodness...from God and heaven, from the saints and from us. You might say he does us a favor: torturing us, testing us, tempting us and thus giving us a chance to exercise our freedom and grow in holiness and goodness.

Does God Love Me As a Sinner?  As a Hit Man? Fornicator? Communist? Terrorist?  Addict? Porn Compulsive? Nihilist? Pedophile? Cutter? Sociopath? Narcissist? 

Short answer: God loves the sinner; God hates the sin. So he does NOT love you in those false identities. He hates those anti-identities because they destroy the true you, the you He created, the you he loves. Because he loves you totally and unconditionally, he hates the untruths that undermine you. So he hates "you as a hitman" or "you as a fornicator." As God hates the sin which attacks you, we can say that he hates the sinner in you, the anti-you, the delusional, deceived, false you.

So we are involved in a Great Drama, a cosmic battle between good and evil. This takes place in each human heart. God is the Protagonist, combating Satan the Great Antagonist and our own complicity with him. 

And our own love for God will resound with our hatred of sin.