Satan: His Personality, Power

and Overthrow
by E. M. Bounds

First published 1922 - Public Domain

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Foreword
In our mind’s eye we can see Dr. Bounds, in the early years of
the twentieth century, walking the streets of his own little
village, with his manuscripts tied up with a twine string, and
written upon the backs of old circulars, used envelopes,
looking for someone who would undertake to prepare the
manuscripts for publication and asking of his friends to pray
that God would raise him up a man that would bring out his
writings. Claudius Lysias Chilton, a scholarly friend of Dr.
Bounds, said, “There is no man on earth to-day except the
present editor who would have accepted this mass of matter
and devoted the time to give it to the world—a world that will
not begin to realize the magnitude and expanse of the work
until editor, compiler and reviewers have been in eternity many
ages.”

We take this occasion to offer our heartfelt thanks to the

friends who have helped to compile, revise, rewrite and edit the
printed and unprinted works of Dr. Bounds. We thank Rev.
Robert O. Smith, of Gainesville, Georgia, for introducing him to
us in 1905, and pressing the matter upon us that we needed
this apostolic man to teach us to pray and preach the Word. To
one friend in particular—Rev. Clement C. Gary, of Atlanta,
Georgia,—we owe the first expression of sincere gratitude for
his part in this work. To him I am indebted for a vast amount of
labour and study such as it can be the good fortune of few
editors to receive from one so saintly and competent, occupied
as he is by private and public duties. To Miss Ambrose, of
Baltimore, Maryland, I am deeply indebted for splendid and
correct stenographic work.

I here submit a few brief statements from Dr. Bounds’ letters to

me just before he died, which show his views of Satan ere he
went far out of his reach.

“Washington, Ga, Dec. 15, 1911: I am trying to give myself

more and more to prayer. Our only hope is in God. I do
sympathize with you and pray for you and hold you in loving
affection. Rejoice that you are well situated. God save you from
your buffeting devil. The devil is a great help heavenward. The
worse agents he has the better we will get on.”

“Washington, Ga, July 1, 1912: Pray more and more; keep at the
four a.m. hour. God will be for it; the devil against it. Press on,
you can’t pray too much, you may pray too little. The devil will
compromise with you to pray as the common standard, on
going to bed, and a little prayer in the monring. Hell will be full
if we don’t do better for God than that. Pray, pray, pray, pray
always, rejoice evermore, pray without ceasing, in everything
give thanks.”

It is barely possible that I have escaped making many errors

involving so many examinations and rewriting so many pages
in his published and unpublished works, but I still hope that
many souls will be edified and made holier and more devout by
the reading and that God will receive additional glory when
Bounds’ complete works have been given to a needy world.
HOMER W. HODGE

Brooklyn, N. Y.
CHAPTER I - The Devil: His Beginning
Satan hath here a mighty kingdom (Matt 12:26),
opposed to that of Christ in chapter 1:20, 21, consisting
of men and angels, inhabiters of earth and air; wherein
he had the start of Christ carrying the world before him,
four thousand years previous to the incarnation.
Zanchy, the most judicious of the protestant writes,
and Suarez, the best of school-men, suppose with some
probability, that the angels had notice of the setting up
a kingdom for Christ (predestinated to come by the
Second Person’s assumption of human nature) and his
therein being the head of all principality and power,
from whom men and angels should have their grace;
and that the sin of the fallen spirits was refusing
subjection to this king; and that thus they “kept not
their first estate but left their own habitation,”
voluntarily quitting that station God had set them in,
and leaving their dwelling in heaven to go and set up
an opposition kingdom here below. —Thomas Goodwin

We have no genesis of the devil in the Bible as a direct

statement. The Bible is not his full history. It gives no
intimation of his birth and no description of his creation. The
Bible is only concerned with the devil as he has part in the
great crises of man’s history, and only gives us occasional
glimpses of him in his work of ruin and death as explanatory, or
as putting his acts in striking contrast and opposition to the
works and aims of Christ. There are not lacking in these
intimations and inferences, sidelights which indicate an original
purity, a high relation to God, and a heavenly character and
conduct. It is not a fanciful conjecture that he was and is the
head of the angels who kept not their first estate. Peter in his
first Epistle gives the angel crises and fall as one of the signal
events which illustrate God’s justice, its certainty and
fearfulness. He says, “God spared not the angels that sinned,
but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of
darkness to be reserved unto judgment.” Jude speaks after the
same order of God’s inflexible wrath when he tells us that “the
angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own
habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under
darkness unto the judgment of the great day.”

The Revelation of John adds its testimony with addition to this

fact: “And there was war in heaven; Michael and his angels
fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his
angels, and prevailed not; neither was there place found any
more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old
serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole
world; he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast
out with him.”

To the Word of God we must go, assured that we will find the
traces of the devil’s steps and the unfolding of his conduct
whose bad schemes have eclipsed so much of earth’s
brightness and blasted so much of its promise and hope.

If we have the child-like spirit of docility and trust, if we will

“lay aside all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and
receive with meekness the engrafted word,” we will find
satisfaction and illumination, not satisfaction as to curiosity,
nor illumination in the niceties or subtleties of philosophy, but
satisfaction and illumination in all things which pertain to the
highest and weightiest truth for the thoughtful, trustful and
prayerful mind.

In the Bible we have the facts and history of man’s redemption.

Incidentally or essentially, other worlds and other beings are
brought prominently on the stage of redemption purposes and
plans. These revealed facts whether incidental or essential,
whether casual or regular, are to our faith what the facts of
nature are to the student of nature. They must shape theories
and settle opinions. They must not be set aside, for weighty
and final they must be. Reason must not ignore nor reject them,
but must lay them deep and solid as the foundation of an
investigation, the basis of every hypothesis. These Bible facts
demand our faith, though we may not be able to reach out
beyond into the unknown regions where harmony reigns.

The Word of God brings clearly to light the unseen world, its
persons, places, facts and history, not, we say, in minute detail,
but full enough to provoke thought and reflection, and to
create and inspire faith.

The Bible nowhere enters into an argument to prove the person

and being of God. It assumes His being and reveals His person
and character. Without preface or introduction, the Bible
brings God before us in all His majesty and omnipotence. God
is at the world’s beginning, and He it was who created the
beginning of all things. “In the beginning God created the
heavens and the earth.” How sublime and awe-inspiring our
first glimpse of God! God is revealed not by argument but by
work. We learn what He is from what He does.

In like manner is the revelation of the devil. He is before us in

full person without introduction or ceremony as the evil one, a
graduate in the work of guile and evil. The curtain is drawn and
the chief actor is in full dress. A world is at stake, man is to be
seduced, Eden is to be blasted. No light is shed upon his past
history, no knowledge of the school where he learned his dire
trade. He was before earthly life. Eden does not date his birth,
and is not the first chapter of his history, nor is it the first trial
of his hellish art. We have no access to the archives of the
past. Eden bounds our horizon, and the devil is there.
Henceforth his history is to run parallel with our race. Man is to
be the object of his schemes, his ruin, and his ambition. Earth is
to be the favourite scene of his exploits. He is at the cradle of
man, and has much to do in shaping his character and
determining his destiny.

The Bible is a revelation, not a philosophy nor a poem, not a

science. It reveals things and persons as they are, living and
acting outside the range of earthly vision or natural discovery.

Bible revelations are not against reason but above reason, for
the uses of faith, man’s highest faculty. The powers of reason
are not able to discover these Bible facts, and yet they are for
reason’s use, its light, strength and higher elevation, but more
essentially to form, to nourish and to perfect faith.

The Bible reveals the devil as a person, not a mere figure, not
an influence simply, not a personification only, but a real
person. In the eighth chapter of John, Christ is arraigning the
cruelty and murderous malignity, the falsehood, deceit and
hypocrisy of the Jews. Jesus says, “Ye are of your father the
devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.” He was a
murderer from the beginning and abode not in the truth,
because there is no truth in him.

Many myths may have gathered around the person of the devil
by the accretion of ages, much of poetry, sentiment and
tradition, and even our fears may have caricatured his person,
exaggerated his character, and coloured his conduct. But there
is truth in regard to him, naked and simple truth. There is much
truth that needs to be learned about the devil, and no age
needs the plain, unvarnished truth about the devil more than
this age. We need the light of that truth as a warning, as an
incentive to vigilance, and an inspiration to effort. We need the
knowledge of the enemy, his character, presence and power to
arouse men to action, for this is vital to victory.

It is wholly at variance with any Christian idea of the perfection

of truthfulness in Christ, who was truth itself, to suppose Him
to have used such plain and solemn words repeatedly before
His disciples and the Jews in encouragement and furtherance
of a lying superstition.

A denial of the reality of demonical possessions on the part of

any one who believes the Gospel narrative to be true and
inspired, may justly be regarded as simply and plainly
inconceivable.

When the devil fell, others fell with him. This is the lesson of
God’s Word.

Of the number of these fallen spirits we have no census. In

Ephesians, quoting from the Revised Version, in the summary
of these unseen foes we have “spiritual hosts,” an uncounted,
uncountable number.

How innumerable they are, we cannot tell. The demoniac of

Gadara was named “legion because many devils were entered
into him.” A legion if exact was somewhat less than six
thousand. That number must be great, enabling them to spare
so many to swarm into and possess one man, or even seven in
one woman, as Mary Magdalene.

The statement in Revelation that the great red dragon with “his
tail did draw the third part of the stars of heaven and did cast
them to the earth,” may be a reference to the fall of the angels
and their number.

The Bible is dear in many references and some direct

statements that the devil has a host of angelic followers who
are ready, eager in their efforts to hurt man and defeat God’s
Kingdom on earth.
CHAPTER II - The Devil: His Personality
Men don’t believe in a devil now,
As their fathers used to do;
They’ve forced the door of the broadest creed
To let his majesty through;
There isn’t a print of his cloven foot;
Or a fiery dart from his bow,
To be found in earth or air to-day,
For the world has voted so.
But who is mixing the fatal draft
That palsies heart and brain,
And loads the earth of each passing year
With ten hundred thousand slain?
Who blights the bloom of the land to-day
With the fiery breath of hell,
If the devil isn’t and never was?
Won’t somebody rise and tell?
–Alfred J. Hough.

The devil is a person of marked emphatic character. Character

gives dignity, place and value to the person, or character
degrades the person. Character is that which is inner, cut in
and graven. Character abides, forms action and shapes life.
Character is a fountain. It is the head and stream of conduct;
character often versus reputation. Character is what we are.
Reputation is what folks think we are. The real and the think so
are often two worlds. It would be well every way if reputation
were based on character, if the real and the reputed were one.
A bad reputation may be coupled with a good character. Then
the times are sadly out of joint or the environments, and the
folks are more sadly out of joint than the times. A good
reputation may be but the veneering of a bad character. The
devil has this characteristic with him. Reputation is based on
character. They are one. His reputation is bad, because his
character is worse.

The devil is a created being. He is therefore not self-existent

nor eternal, but limited and finite. There was a time when he
was not, when he began to be. His creation was after the order
of the angels. The angels were not the offspring of the family
relation. Cradlehood and all the tender ties, training, sweetness
and growth are unknown to them. The pains and joys of
childbirth are not theirs. Each angel is created, not born,
created directly, personally, by God. The devil was created
good, doubtless very good. His purity, as well as exaltation,
were sources of congratulation, wonderment and praise in
heaven.

The devil is a positive character. He wears disguises, but his

ends are single and lie in only one direction, double-faced but
never double-minded, never undecided, never vague nor feeble
in his purposes or ends. No irresolution, nor hesitant
depression nor aimless action spring from him. The devil has
character if not horns, for character is often harder and sharper
than horns. Character is felt. We feel the devil. He orders
things, controls things. He is a great manager. He manages bad
men, often good men and bad angels. Indirect, sinister, low and
worldly, is the devil as a manager.

Is Christ a person? He puts the devil in opposition and

contrast to Himself as a great mighty malignant person the
sower of all evil—as Christ is the sower of all good. “The field
is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom;
but the tares are the children of the wicked one; the enemy that
sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world;
and the reapers are the angels.”

Is Christ impersonal? Are the children of the kingdom

impersonal? Are the children of the wicked one impersonal?
Are not Christ and the children of the kingdom personal and
persons? Are not the children of the wicked one and the devil
personal and persons also?

In the Bible the personality of the devil is made emphatic. He is

not only the source of evil to others, but the embodiment of
evil in a person. The Revised Version makes this emphatic. The
petition in the Lord’s Prayer, “Deliver us from evil,” becomes
personal, “Deliver us from the evil one.” So we find Christ
praying not only that His disciples should be delivered from
evil, all evil, them from the evil one.” The statement by John
that “the whole world lieth in wickedness,” becomes personal,
for in the Revised Version, all wickedness concentrates in a
person. “ The whole world lieth in the evil one.” Here, too, the
devil is called the “wicked one.” Personality is attributed to
him. Fatherhood is attributed to him, the father of all evil, the
enemy of Jesus, malignant, active, crafty, cautious, cowardly.
The devil and his angels are of a higher order than the fallen
sons of Adam, by rank, order, and intelligence. The devil is
called in the Bible a prince, a world ruler, “prince of this world.”
He is designated as “ the devil and his angels,” He and they
are held accountable, are condemned for their sins and for
revolt in leaving their “first estate,” the sphere for which they
were created, and in which they were originally placed by God.
This fact of their fall, and all the other statements, direct and
incidental, emphasize them as persons, living, acting, free,
accountable. That they had a chief prince in all their
movements, prime in wisdom, prime in skill and in leadership, is
clear from all Scriptural statements concerning the devil and his
angels.

In 2 Corinthians 11:13, Paul says: “For such are false apostles,

deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of
Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an
angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also
be transformed as the ministers of righteousness, whose end
shall be according to their works.” ”Satan himself” is an
emphatic declaration of personality. He has ministers. An
influence does not have ministers. Paul is writing of persons,
wily, fraudulent and alluring, and he introduces the great
person, the pattern and inspirer of all their fraud, hypocrisy and
error, his apostles, false as he, the arch-impostor.

Jude has a statement which brings into view many persons:

“Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise
dominion, and speak evil of dignities. Yet Michael, the
archangel, when contending with the devil, he disputed about
the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing
accusation, but said. The Lord rebuke thee.”

The “filthy dreamers” were persons. Moses was a great

person. Michael an archangel was a person. The devil, what
was he, if not a person? Living in the Mosaic dispensation, the
devil was contending with the highest dignity under that
dispensation of angels. Did the mighty archangel have to
appeal for help against a mere influence, a shadowy, dreamy
personification? This statement in Jude declares the devil to be
a high dignity, whose person and presence are not to be
treated with indignity or by frivolity or raillery.

The statement in Peter is after the same order and to the same
end. The devil is a person of great dignity. “The Lord knoweth
how to deliver the godly out of temptation, and to reserve the
unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished. But chiefly
them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and
despise government. Presumptuous are they, self-willed, they
are not afraid to speak evil of dignities. Whereas angels, which
are greater in power and might, bring not railing accusation
against them before the Lord. But these, as natural brute beasts
made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that
they understand not, and shall utterly perish in their own
corruption.”

Note how James puts the mightiest persons in contrast and

opposition: “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the
devil and he will flee from you. Draw nigh to God and he will
draw nigh to you.” Why such a combination and contrast? Is
God not a person? How can we then reduce him who is so in
God’s way to a mere influence? The passage teaches a
personal devil as surely as a personal God.

Why are God and the devil in like manner conjoined in Peter’s
urgent exhortation? “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the
mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time; casting
all your care upon him, for he careth for you. Be sober, be
vigilant; because your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion,
walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” Why casting all
care on Him? Why be sober and vigilant?” Your adversary”
can be no less than a person against whom the Christian has to
be armed with God. “Your adversary!” Hate and ruin are in his
opposition. Can he be less than a person? The devil, “walking
about like a roaring lion,” strong, full of passions, and deadly
hate! Can anything less than a person of infernal passion and
infernal power answer this divine portraiture? To Peter the
existence and person of this powerful adversary had a sad
demonstration in his own experience. The words were still on
his conscience and heart and memory. “Simon, Satan hath
desired to have you that he may sift you as wheat.”

In the directions in the Sermon on the Mount about swearing,

affirmations and conversation, Jesus says, “Let your
communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more
than these is of the evil one.”

Under the powerful operations of the cross and the Spirit, as

well as the restraining influences of the Gospel, evil would
soon be driven from the earth, branded and banned, were it not
for the mighty personality and executive ability of the devil.

We find many references, hints and reminders of the power and

person of the devil, coming out in the ministry of Christ. The
name “devil” invests him with an infamous personality, and
clothes him with all the deceit, craft and cruelty attaching to
that name. By the name ” Satan,” Christ puts him as the
adversary of God and man. By designating him as “the prince
of this world,” Christ recognizes his royal power and ruling
authority for evil in this world. The devil’s agency in the ills
that affect the body is not merely hinted at, but comes out as
being taken for granted.

How strenuous and ever continuing the conflict between the

devil and Jesus, is learned by the Lord’s prayer, that perfect
and universal prayer which Jesus puts in the heart and lips of
His people in all ages, for as we have seen, according to the
Revised Version, that petition of conflict, peril, warning, and
safety is, “Deliver us from the Evil One.” Evil is comparatively
harmless, feeble and inert without the presence of its mighty
inspirer. Deliverance from the devil is deliverance from the
many evils of which he is the source and inspiration.

In the sixth chapter of Ephesians, the Christian soldier-hood,

its character, armour, conduct and courage are challenged, and
he is urged, because of the devil’s power, and because the
Christian’s warfare is mainly against him, to this effect: “ Put on
the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against
the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and
blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the
rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual
wickedness in high places.”

The Christian’s comfort as administered by Paul ia the

sixteenth chapter of Romans is not only the impartation of,
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you,” but also,
“And the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet
shortly.”

Peter’s vital exhortation has a double imperative in it, not only

the “casting all our care on God,” but a loud and urgent call to
watch and pray. “Be sober, be vigilant; because your
adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking
whom he may devour.” Peter recognized in the deadly crime of
Ananias and Sapphira the hand of Satan, and remonstrates
thus: “Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the
Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land?”

The warning and exhortation which Christ sends to the Church

at Smyrna to prepare and nerve to endurance involves the
person and power of the devil. “Fear none of those things
which thou shalt suffer; behold, the devil shall cast some of
you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have
tribulation ten days. Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give
thee a crown of life.” The explanation of the parable of the tares
puts the malignity, person, and power of the devil in contrast
with Christ. “The field is the world; the good seed are the
children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the
wicked one. The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the
harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels.”

The defense of Christ against the Pharisaic charge of violating

the Sabbath puts the devil conspicuous in his work of evil;
“And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham,
whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed
from this bond on the Sabbath day?”

The statement about Judas, “And supper being ended, the

devil having now put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s
son, to betray him;” is a statement not of an influence nor a
personification, but of a person outside of Judas, making
suggestions to him, and urging him on to his act of hypocrisy,
and the suggestion is strictly in keeping with the character of
the devil. “And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said
Jesus unto him. That thou doest, do quickly.” How much an
advance in fulness and power of action and influence is this
act compared with his work in paradise! There he used a
serpent as his instrument. Here a man, a chosen, trusted
apostle. “A messenger of Satan,” says Paul, “to buffet me.”
The exalted revelation and experience of the person and power
of Christ are closely followed by the revelation and experience
of the person and power of the devil.

The fearful doom of the wicked at the judgment is thus set

forth by Christ: “Then shall he say also unto them on the left
hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared
for the devil and his angels.” The final doom of Satan is
revealed in these words, “And the devil that deceived them
was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast
and the false prophets are, and shall be tormented day and
night for ever and ever.”

These extracts are not only arguments to prove the existence or

personality of the devil, but are logical conclusive references to
a person whose being is taken for granted, universally
accepted and thoroughly believed by them all.

A singular case would that mind be in its attitude to God’s

Word, who should profess to accept that Word and not
believe in the existence of the devil. This would be a great
breach both in the logic and faith of such a mind, as if the play
of “Macbeth” were accepted in utter failure to recognize the
person or existence of Lady Macbeth, whose character forms
the entire plan and colour of the whole.

The encounters with those who were possessed of devils

illustrate Christ’s constant recognition of them as personal
beings. He recognizes their distinct individuality. He talks to
them and commands them as persons. They know Christ,
confess His divinity, bow to His authority, obey, however
unwillingly, His commands. He makes the clear distinction
between the human personality possessed by the devil, and
the personality of the devil who holds possession. The two are
to his eye two persons.

That the exercising of these did give a severe blow to Satan’s

kingdom is declared by Christ’s exclamation at the return and
report of the seventy. “That even the devils are subject unto
us through thy name.” He exclaimed, “I beheld Satan as
lightning fall from heaven,” and then amid their ecstasy and
His joy He renewed their commission. “Behold, I give unto you
power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the
power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you.
Notwithstanding, in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject
unto you; but rather rejoice because your names are written in
heaven.” “Over all the power of the enemy.” The devil is the
enemy of Christ, of man. Power over all the devil’s power.

To Christ the devil was one of the most real persons. He

recognized his person, felt and acknowledged his power,
abhorred his character, and warred against his person and
kingdom.
CHAPTER III - The Prince of This World
Now we come to the second guide in men’s walk
through life; and we see, first, The misery of all nature,
in respect of subjection of Satan, who as a prince rules
over and governs “the children of disobedience.”
Secondly, That Satan, as well as the world, is a cause of
that sinfulness that is in the hearts and lives of men:
they the exemplary and he the impelling cause, both as
a prince and a spirit. Thirdly, A descriptive greatness of
Satan’s kingdom interwoven to shew man’s misery the
greater and the more; “the prince of the power of the
air,” the spirit that works in the children of
disobedience.” The scope of all these three particulars
was to stir up the Ephesians’ hearts to thanksgiving for
the great deliverance, which in their conversion had
brought them out of darkness into the light (out of the
kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of His dear Son)
(Col 1: 13). Now the kingdom of power, glory
experienced by the Church and Christ is the more
endeared and enriched to us by our rescue from the
empire of Satan and the world whose domain is the air
and will end with the air, whereas ours are in heavenly
places. —Thomas Goodwin.

To the Holy Spirit, the substitute, representative and successor

of Jesus Christ, was committed this work of breaking the
deadly power of the world by breaking the power of its prince.
There was the necessary and continuous reminder that the
devil occupied the royal position of the world’s prince, already
adjudged and condemned, and upon whom the sentence and
penalty were to be executed. “Nevertheless I tell you the truth:
It is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, the
Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send
him unto you. And when he is come, he will reprove the world
of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment; of sin because
they believe not on me; of righteousness, because I go to my
Father, and ye see me no more; of judgment, because the
prince of this world is judged.”

“The prince of this world” he is, though the awful doom

awaiting unbelief, sin and unrighteousness are his.

In these declarations of Jesus Christ, we have the clear

revelation of what the devil is in his relation to the world as a
prince and ruler. We understand why the world is so alien to
God, to God’s Son, to His cause, and how attachment to the
world is at once estrangement and bitter enmity to God,
because in the world’s beauty and charms there is the enmity
of the devil to God. The world is the beauteous harlot with her
snares of death and hell.

The devil is recognized by Jesus Christ to be the prince of this

world, not lawfully, but in its rebellion against God, not to be
submitted to, but to be renounced as a lawless one, dethroned
as a usurper and conquered as a rebel. To secure these ends,
to dethrone and conquer the devil, the mission of the Son of
God is charged. We see how readily Jesus Christ
acknowledges the position and power of the devil. It is of the
devil He speaks, and conjoins him with the world. The stroke of
the Son of God falls on both: “Now is the judgment of this
world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out And I, if I
be lifted up, will draw all men to me.” The world is condemned
by the power of the cross. The sweet attractive potencies of
the cross dissolve the fatal fascinations of the world. The
power of that same cross casts out from his world ruling throne
the prince of this world. Christ affirms the devil’s high position,
but signs and seals his destiny and doom. “God anointed
Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power; who
went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of
the devil, for God was with him.”

Again does the Son of God recognize the position which the
devil holds as crowned prince by the world’s franchises. How
his presence quiets the Son of God. Man’s words are not to be
victors in this conflict. God’s words in the temptation broke the
power of his assault and defeated his fell intents, but left him
still a sovereign with his kingly crown. The Son of God is awed
into silence at the devil’s approach. The cross, its agony and
shame, its deep humiliation, bitter agony and untold shame, its
defeat and despair, all these it would take to lift the crown from
Satan’s brow and bring his throne down to dust and ashes.
The adorable Son of God “saw the travail of His soul in that
hour and was satisfied.” He saw also what it would cost Him,
and what it would cost every son of heaven, to discrown that
prince, and He lapsed into a solemn silence, the prestige of His
victory. “Hereafter I will not talk much with you, for the prince
of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me.”
CHAPTER IV - The Devil a Busy Character
We are apt to think that Satan is most powerful in
crowded thoroughfares. It is a mistake. I believe the
temptations of life are always most dangerous in the
wilderness. I have been struck with that fact in Bible
history. It is not in their most public moments that the
great men of the past have fallen; it has been in their
quiet hours. Moses never stumbled when he stood
before Pharaoh, or while he was flying from Pharaoh; it
was when he got into the desert that his patience began
to fail. David never stumbled while he was fighting his
way through imposing armies; it was when the fight
was over, when he was resting quietly under his own
vine and fig tree that he put forth his hand to steal. The
sorest temptations are not those spoken but those
echoed. It is easier to lay aside your besetting sin amid
a cloud of witnesses than in the solitude of your own
room. The sin that besets you is never so besetting as
when you are alone. –George Matheson.

If there be any virtue in not being an infidel, the devil may claim
this virtue. If it be any praise to be always busy, the devil may
claim that praise, for he is always busy, and very busy. But his
character does not spring from his faith. His faith makes him
tremble, his character makes him a devil.

The devil is a very busy character. He does a big business, a

very mean business, but he does it well, that is, as well as a
mean business can be done. He has large experience, big
brains, a black heart, great force, and tireless industry, and is of
great influence and great character. All his immense resources
and powers are laid out for evil. Only evil inspires his activities
and energies. He never moves to relieve or bless, a stranger
alike to benevolent doing and kindly feeling.

Satan’s history antedates the history of man—the only beings,

he and his angels, who know by sad experience, Heaven, Earth
and Hell. These three words are familiar to him. He has walked
the streets of Heaven side by side with its purest and best. He
has felt the thrill of its purest joys. He knows the bitterest
anguish of hell, and has felt its keenest flames.

He does a big business on earth. He is a prince and a leader.

Men and devils are his agents, and the elements are often by
him debauched from their benignant purposes, and are made to
destroy. He is busy tempting men to evil. He has large
experience in this business, and is an adept at it. By him sin
loses its sinfulness, the world is clothed with double charms,
self is given a double force, faith is turned into fanaticism and
love into hate.

A spiritual character can work through agencies or directly on

the spirit. He infuses thoughts makes suggestions and does it
so deftly that we do not know their paternity. He tempted Eve
to take the forbidden fruit. He put it into David’s mind to
number Israel, thereby provoking the wrath of God. He
influenced Ananias and Sapphira to lie to God. Peter’s yielding
to presumption was at his instance. Judas’ betrayal was from
the same baneful source. The temptation of Christ was a typical
and masterpiece of his business in seeking to seduce our Lord
from God, showing his power to array agencies and pleas, and
to back these by all forms of sanctity and persuasiveness. He
is blasphemous, arrogant and presumptuous. He slanders God
to men and infuses into men hard thoughts of God. He
intensifies their enmity and inflames their prejudice against
Him. He leads them to deny His existence and to traduce His
character, thereby destroying the foundations of faith and all
true worship. He does all he can by insinuation and charges to
blacken saintly character and lower God’s estimate of the good.
He is the vilest of calumniators, the most malignant and artful
of slanderers. Goodness is the point of his constant attack. He
says nothing good about the good, nothing bad about the bad.
He is always at church before the preacher is in the pulpit or a
member in the pew, to hinder the sower, to impoverish the soil,
or to blast the seed, that is, when courage and faith are in the
pulpit, and zeal and prayer in the pew. But if dead orthodoxy or
live heterodoxy are in the pulpit, he then puts in his time
elsewhere at some point of danger.

Christ expressly declared that some sickness, at least, was the

direct infliction of Satan.

The devil goes about to do evil and oppress men, at every

point the antagonist of Him who went about to do good and
heal all that were oppressed of the devil. In some way he had
power over death and worked a fearful work of bondage and
fear and death. Through death, Christ works to destroy him
that had the power of death, that is, the devil. He puts a thorn
in Paul’s flesh and makes a special effort and requisition for
Peter. He directs the whirlwind, kindles the fire and orders the
disease which overwhelm and devastate Job and his property.
He arms the thieving Chaldeans and Sabines against him and
gets into his wife, and directs the divers agencies of his empire
to ruin this one saint He will wreck an empire at any time to
secure a soul. He sows the tares in the wheat, the bad among
the good, bad thoughts among the good thoughts. All kinds of
evil seed are sown by him in the harvest fields of earth. He is
always trying to make the good bad and the bad worse. He fills
the minds of a Judas and inflames and hurries him on to his
infamous purpose. He fills Peter with an arrogant pride which
tries to thwart the divine plans and to inject human views into
the purpose of Christ instead of God’s purpose.

The devil goes about as fierce, as resolute, and as strong as a

lion, intent only to destroy, restrained by no sentiments which
soften and move human or divine hearts. He has no pity and
no sympathy. He is great, but only great in evil. A great
intellect, he is driven and inspired by a malignant and cruel
heart.

At the threshold of Christ’s ministry there we meet with His

temptations by the devil,—one of those conflicts on which one
of the mightiest issues turn. The history of the case presents
the devil as a spiritual person, the head and embodiment of all
evil, making a fierce, most wily, and protracted assault on the
Son of God. We are not informed as to what shape he assumed
to veil the treachery and wickedness of his attack. The
temptation is noted as one of the preliminary and pivot facts of
Christ’s ministry, and can no more be resolved into the
visionary than can His baptism, the descent of the Spirit, His
wilderness trip, or His fasting. It was no influence tempting
Christ. The whole transaction forbids that. “He was led of the
Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.” The devil
came to Him and the devil left Him, and then “the angels came
and ministered to him.”

In this temptation the methods, hypocrisy and craft of the devil

are seen. How materially and benevolently he comes to the
weak, exhausted Son of God! How innocent is the suggestion
that Jesus use His power to relieve His hunger! What could be
more allowable than that? To use His spiritual power for
temporal ends! How often is it done? What a world of evil to
religion when it is used to subserve the natural. Man living for
bread alone. The temporal the first. The secular and worldly
prime. Religion not simply to serve money or business, but
religion secondary or subservient to business. The heavenly
used for the earthly, the spiritual for the natural, more intent on
daily food than on daily grace, eyeing the seen more than the
unseen. That is the devil’s main business—to materialize,
earthlyize religion, to get man to live for bread alone, to make
earth bigger than heaven. Time is more engaging than eternity.
What a fearful conflict is being carried on in that quiet
wilderness between the fainting Son of God and Satan,
between the earthly and the heavenly, between God’s religion
and the devil’s religion!
The conflict surges around three points. The fleshly, the
presumptuous and the worldly. But this little circle holds all the
shapes and forms of temptation, all the crafty devices, all the
hidden depths, all the glittering seductions which Satan has
devised to swerve men from the lofty allegiance which faith
demands. The devil’s assault on Christ is in striking contrast
with his temptation to beguile Eve, and in more striking
contrast with his fearful ordeal through which he tried Job’s
integrity. No suspicion cast on God’s goodness as with Eve,
no terrific, curdling sorrow as in Job’s case. All is friendly,
sympathetic and inviting.

The second temptation includes in it, not merely the fanatical

presumption of overheated zeal and brainless devotion, but all
the methods of sensational and abnormal piety by all those
short cut processes by which the severe and tedious principles
of a genuine faith are set aside, and spurious, superficial and
flesh-pleasing substitutes are brought in to make a more
attractive and popular guise of faith. It seeks to take man-
devised methods, easy, fragrant of sentiment, rank and
material, in the stead of God’s lowly way of godly sorrow, strict
self-denial, and prayerful surrender.

Then the last, the world, its kingdoms and its glory, these as
the reward of his devotion to Satan, worship the devil, that is,
the world’s god. How the devil massed all his forces! Religion
was invoked. The world and the flesh all conspired, under
Satan’s power, to tempt the Son of God. With what reluctance
the pure soul of the Son of God went into this close conflict
with Satan is seen in Mark’s statement: “And immediately the
Spirit driveth him into the wilderness.” No wrestling can warp
this statement into a mere influence. It is history, fact—plain,
simple, historical fact. Reread the record as to the devil. How
clearly, without a doubt or figure of speech, does it stamp the
whole transaction with personality. “Then was Jesus led up of
the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And he
was there in the wilderness forty days tempted of Satan; and
was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.
Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and
ministered unto him.” These are not figures of speech, but the
narrative of a transaction and of persons engaged in the
transaction. The wilderness and the fasting are literal. The
beings are all literal, the wild beasts, the angels, Jesus and the
devil.

The conflict of Jesus with Satan is not incidental, nor

accidental, nor casual, but essential and vital. Satan held man
and man’s world in thrall. They had fallen into his hands and
were held by him in bondage and ruled by him with desperate
power.

The record has been made, “And when the devil had ended all
the temptation, he departed from him for a season.”

The season has ended and he is back again as though he had

brought seven other spirits more wicked than himself.
Gethsemane is the sum of the devil’s most maddened and
desperate methods. The guises are off. He appears there as he
is. It is a rare thing to get a clear, true light on the devil. He
assumes so many roles, acts so many parts, wears so many
guises. Here we have him in life size and in perfect features.
The air is heavier by his breath, the night is darker by his
shadow, the ground is colder, and his chill is on it. Judas is
falser still, and Peter more cowardly and dastardly, because
Satan is there. On the threshold of Gethsemane he exclaims,
“My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death,” and he began to
be sore amazed and very heavy. Why? Because “this is your
hour and the power of darkness.” Why? Because “now is the
judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be
cast out.” Silence is there, dread and horror, and a great
darkness and a fearful conflict Why? “For the prince of this
world cometh and hath nothing in me.”

How different the devil’s method now with Christ than in the
wilderness. Then there was mildness, an assumed sympathy,
the spirit of an inquirer, one desirous to relieve. The most
pleasant and attractive and satisfying ministries to flesh did
Satan then offer, something of the gentleness of the lamb, the
interest and sympathy of a friend. But now how changed! The
lamb is transformed into the lion, a roaring lion, maddened and
desperate. Jesus could not be seduced by the flesh, nor self,
nor the world in the wilderness. He must be overwhelmed with
dread and horror, and be driven. His steadfastness must be
overcome by weakness and fear. So comes he to many a saint
in the fierceness and power of the lion when the gentle
inducements fail.
CHAPTER V - The Devil and the Church
The identification of Christ with men was as complete in
extent as it was real in nature. The first chapter of the
Epistle to the Hebrews sets forth seven proofs of
Divine Sonship, and the second chapter enumerates the
following seven points of His identification with man:
He descended to man’s level, took man’s nature,
endured man’s temptation, died in man’s place,
conquered the devil, man’s foe, achieved man’s victory,
and secured man’s salvation. —Samuel Chadwick.

THE devil is too wise, too large in mental grasp, too lordly in
ambition, to confine his aims to the individual. He seeks to
direct the policy and sway the scepter of nations. In his largest
freedom, and in his delirium of passion and success, “he goes
out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the
earth.” He is an adept in deception, an expert in all guileful arts.
An archangel in execution, he often succeeds in seducing the
nations most loyal to Christ, leading them into plans and
principles which pervert and render baneful all Christly
principles. The Church itself, the bride of Christ, when seduced
from her purity, degenerates into a worldly ecclesiasticism.

The “gates of hell shall not prevail” against the Church. This
promise of our Lord stands against every Satanic device and
assault: But this immutable word as to the glorious outcome
does not protect the Church from the devil’s stratagems which
may, and often do, pervert the aims of the Church and
postpone the day of its final triumph.

The devil is a hydra-headed monster, but he is hydra-headed in

plans and wisdom as well as in monstrosities. His master and
supreme effort is to get control of the Church, not to destroy
its organization, but to abate and pervert its Divine ends. This
he does in the most insidious way, seemingly innocent, no
startling change, nothing to shock nor to alarm. Sometimes the
revolutionizing and destructive change is introduced under the
disguise of a greater zeal for Christ’s glory. Introduced by
some one high in church honour, often it occurs that the
advocate of these measures is totally ignorant of the fact that
the tendency is subversive.

One of the schemes of Satan to debase and pervert is to

establish a wrong estimate of church strength. If he can raise
false measurements of church power; if he can press the
material to the front; if he can tabulate these forces so as to
make them imposing and aggregating in commands, influence,
and demand, he has secured his end.

In the Mosaic economy, the subversion of the ends of the

Church and the substitution of material forces was guarded
against. Their kings were warned against the accumulation,
parade, and reliance on material forces.

It was in the violation of this law that David sinned when he

yielded to the temptation of Satan to number the people.

It was to this end some suggest that the devil contended with
Michael, the archangel, about the body (or system) of Moses,
referred to in Peter and Jude and narrated by Zechariah, third
chapter. At which time there was given that redoubtable,
rallying text which asserts the eternal separation of spiritual
forces from and their antagonism to the material. “Not by might
nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord.”

To this, the third temptation of our Lord was directed. In

measure, such temptation by which the devil tried Jesus was
intended to subvert the ends of His kingdom by substituting
material elements of strength for the spiritual.

This is one of the devil’s most insidious and successful

methods to deceive, divert and deprave. He marshals and
parades the most engaging material results, lauds the power of
civilizing forces and makes its glories and power pass in review
till church leaders are dazzled, and ensnared, and the Church
becomes thoroughly worldly while boasting of her spirituality.
No deceiver is so artful in the diabolical trade of deception as
Satan. As an angel of light he leads a soul to death. To mistake
the elements of church strength, is to mistake the character of
the Church, and also to change its character all its efforts and
aims. The strength of the Church lies in its piety. All else is
incidental, and is not of the strength of things. But in worldly,
popular language of this day, a church is called strong when its
membership is large, when it has social position, financial
resources; when ability, learning, and eloquence fill the pulpit,
and when the pews are filled by fashion, intelligence, money
and influence. An estimate of this kind is worldly to the fullest
extent

The church that thus defines its strength is on the highway to

apostasy. The strength of the Church does not consist of any
or all of these things. The faith, holiness and zeal of the Church
are the elements of its power. Church strength does not consist
in its numbers and its money, but in the holiness of its
members. Church strength is not found in these worldly
attachments or endowments, but in the endowment of the Holy
Ghost on its members. No more fatal or deadly symptom can be
seen in a church than this transference of its strength from
spiritual to material forces, from the Holy Ghost to the world.
The power of God in the Church is the measure of its strength
and is the estimate which God puts on it, and not the estimate
the world puts on it. Here is the measure of its ability to meet
the ends of its being.

On the contrary, show us a church, poor, illiterate, obscure and

unknown, but composed of praying people. They may be men
of neither power nor wealth nor influence. They may be families
that do not know one week where they are to get their bread for
the next. But with them is “the hiding of God’s power,” and
their influence will be felt for eternity, and their light shines,
and they are watched, and wherever they go, there is a
fountain of light, and Christ in them is glorified and His
kingdom advanced. They are His chosen vessels of salvation
and His luminaries to reflect His light

There are signs everywhere unmistakable and of dire import

that Protestantism has been blinded and caught by Satan’s
dazzling glare.

We are being seriously affected by the material progress of the

age. We have heard so much of it, and gazed on it so long, that
spiritual estimates are tame to us. Spiritual views have no form
nor comeliness to us. Everything must take on the rich
colourings, luxuriant growth and magnificent appearance of the
material, or else it is beggarly. This is the most perilous
condition the Church has to meet, when the meek and lowly
fruits of piety are to be discounted by the showy and worldly
graces with which material success crowds the Church. We
must not yield to the flood. We must not for a moment, not the
hundredth part of an inch, give place to the world. Piety must
be stressed in every way and at every point The Church must
be made to see and feel this delusion and snare, this
transference of her strength from God to the world, this
rejection of the Holy Ghost by the endowment of “might and
power” and this yielding to Satan. The Church more and more
is inclined not only to disregard, but to despise, the elements
of spiritual strength and set them aside, for the more impressive
worldly ones.

We have been and are schooling ourselves into regarding as

elements of church prosperity only those items which make
showings in a statistical column, and which impress an age
given up to the materialization of secular facts and figures; and
as the most vital spiritual conditions and gains cannot be
reduced to figures, they are left out of the column and its
aggregates, and after a while they will neither be noted nor
estimated. If we do not call a halt and change our methods, the
whole estimate of the strength of a church will be supremely
worldly. However imposing our material results may be,
however magnificent and prosperous the secular arm of the
Church appears, we must go deeper than these for its strength.
We must proclaim it, and iterate and reiterate it with increased
emphasis, that the strength of the Church does not lie in these
things.

These may be but the gilded delusions which we mistake for

the true riches, and while we are vainly saying, “We arc rich
and increased in goods.” God has written of this that we are
‘”wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.”
They will be, if we are not sleeplessly vigilant, but the costly
spices and splendid decoration which embalm and entomb our
spirituality. True strength lies in the vital godliness of the
people. The aggregate of the personal holiness of the members
of each church is the only true measure of strength. Any other
test offends God, dishonours Christ, grieves the Holy Spirit,
and degrades religion.

A church can often make the fairest and best showing of

material strength when death in its deadliest form is feeding on
its vitals. There can scarcely be a more damaging delusion than
to judge of the conditions of the Church by its material exhibits
or churchly activity. Spiritual barrenness and rottenness in the
Church are generally hidden by a fair exterior and an obtrusive
parade of leaves and an exotic growth. A spiritual church
converts souls from sin soundly, clearly and fully, and puts
them on the stretch for perfect holiness, and those who are
straining to get it, to keep it, and to add to it.

This spirituality is not a by-play, not to be kept in a corner of

the Church, not its dress for holiday or parade days, but it is its
chief and only business. If God’s Church is not doing this work
of converting sinners to holiness and perfecting saints in
holiness, wherever and whenever this work is not blazing and
conspicuous, wherever and whenever this work becomes
secondary, or other interests are held to be its equivalent, then
the Church has become worldly. Wherever and whenever the
material interests are emphasized till they come into
prominence, then the world comes to the throne and sways the
scepter of Satan. There is no readier and surer way to make the
Church worldly than to put its material prosperity to the front,
and no surer, readier way to put Satan in charge. It is an easy
matter for the assessments to become of first moment by
emphasizing them till a sentiment is created that these are
paramount. When collecting money, building churches, and
statistical columns are to stand as evidences of real church
prosperity, then the world has a strong lodgment, and Satan
has gained his end.

Another scheme of Satan is to eliminate from the Church all the

lowly self-denying ordinances which are offensive to
unsanctified tastes and unregenerate hearts, and reduce the
Church to a mere human institution, popular, natural, fleshly
and pleasing.

Satan has no scheme more fearfully destructive and which can

more thoroughly thwart God’s high and holy purposes, than to
transform God’s Church and make it a human institution
according to man’s views. God’s right arm is thereby paralyzed,
the body of Christ has become the body of Satan, light turned
into darkness and life into death.

Men who sit in apostolic seats often through a marvellous

blindness, sometimes through a false attachment to what they
deem truth, and for what they consider the honour of Christ,
are found trying to eliminate from the system of Christ those
painful, offensive, unpopular, and self-denying features to
which it owes all its saving efficacy, and beauty and power,
and which stamp it as divine.

We have a painful illustration most instructive and warning in

Peter, recorded thus:

“From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples,
how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of
the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be
raised again the third day. Then Peter took him, and began to
rebuke him, saying, Be it far from thee, Lord; this shall not be
unto thee. But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind
me, Satan, thou art an offense unto me; for thou savourest not
the things that be of God, but those that be of men. Then said
Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him
deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For
whosoever will save his life shall lose it; and whosoever will
lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited
if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what
shall a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of Man
shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then
he shall reward every man according to his works.”

Here is a lesson most suggestive, a lesson for all times, a

warning for each man, for all men, for church men, for saintly
men and for apostolic men. An apostle has become the
mouthpiece of Satan! Alarming, horrible, unnatural and
revolting picture! An apostle, zealous for his Master’s glory,
advocating with fire and force a scheme which would forever
destroy that glory! An apostle, the apostle Peter, Satan’s
vicegerent! The apostle who had but just made that inspired
confession, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,”
which placed him in highest honour and commendation with
Christ and the Church! Before the words of that divine and
marvellous confession had died from his lips, this same apostle
is the inflamed and self-willed advocate of views and plans
which will render his confession a nullity, and raze the
impregnable and eternal foundations of the Church.

Peter, a chief apostle, fathering and advocating schemes which

would discrown Christ of His Messiahship, and bring heaven’s
favourite plan to a most disastrous and shameful end! How
came this? What baneful impulse impels Peter? Satan has
entered him and for the time being, has mastered his purposes,
and so Christ reproves Peter, but in the reproof strikes a
crushing blow at Satan. “Get thee behind me, Satan,” a
reminder and duplicate of the wilderness temptation. “Thou art
an offense (a stumbling block) to me.” The devil’s trigger to
catch Christ in the devil’s trap—“Thou savourest not the
things which be of God, but those that be of men.” The devil is
not in sight. Man appears and his views are pressed to the
front. The things which men savour in church plan and church
life are against God’s plan. The high and holy principles of self-
denial, of unworldliness of life, and of self-surrender to Christ,
are all against men’s view of religion, a losing thing with them.
The devil does not seek to destroy the Church only indirectly.
Men’s views would eliminate all these unpopular principles of
the cross, self-denial, life surrender and world surrender. But
when this is done, the devil runs the Church. Then it becomes
popular, cheery, flesh-pleasing, modem and progressive. But it
is the devil’s church, founded on principles pleasing in every
way to flesh and blood. No Christ is in it, no crucifixion of self,
no crucifixion of the world, no second coming of Christ, no
eternal judgment, no everlasting hell, no eternal heaven.
Nothing is in it that savours of God, but all that savours of
men. Man makes the devil’s church by turning Christ’s Church
over to men leaders. The world is sought and gained in the
devil’s church, but the man, the soul, heaven, are all lost, lost
to all eternity.

The very heart of this disgraceful apostasy, this dethroning

Christ and enthroning the devil, is to remove the Holy Spirit
from His leadership in the Church and put in unspiritual men as
leaders to plan for and direct the Church. The strong hands of
men of great ability and men with the powers of leadership
have often displaced God’s leadership. The ambition for
leadership and the enthronement of man-leadership, is the
doom and seal of apostasy. There is no leadership in God’s
Church but the leadership of the Holy Spirit. The man who has
the most of God’s Spirit is God’s chosen leader, ambitious and
zealous for the Spirit’s sovereignty, ambitious to be the least,
the slave of all.
CHAPTER VI – The Devil and the Church
(Continued)
Sometime in the country I have stood and watched the
village blacksmith at work, and for a long time could not
make out the use of the little trip hammer. The big
hammer I could understand, but why should the smith
strike in turns the anvil and the iron puzzled me. One
day I ventured to ask an explanation, and found that
the little hammer regulates the stroke of the big one.
The smith holds the glowing metal, turning it lest the
stroke fall too often upon the same spot, directing the
blows that they may descend at the right moment;
turning, tempering, regulating till the metal is fashioned
to the desired shape. So God holds the soul and
regulates the stroke. Sometimes He makes the Devil His
hammer-man… Satan strikes to smash. God regulates
the stroke, and turns His malice to our perfecting, and
the Devil sweats at the task of fashioning saints into
the likeness of Christ. —Samuel Chadwick,

THERE are two ways of directing the Church, God’s way and
the devil’s way. God’s way and man’s way of running the
Church are entirely at poles. Man’s wise plans, happy
expedients and easy solutions, are Satan’s devices. The cross
is retired, the world corner in, self-denial is eliminated, all seems
bright, cheerful and prosperous, but Satan’s hand is on the ark,
men’s schemes prevail, the Church fails under these taking, pet
devices of men, and the bankruptcy is so complete that the
court of heaven will not even appoint a receiver for the
collapsed and beggarly corporation.

All God’s plans have the mark of the cross on them, and all His
plans have death to self in them. All God’s plans have
crucifixion to the world in them. But men’s plans ignore the
offense of the cross or despise it. Men’s plans have no
profound, stern or self-immolating denial in them. Their gain is
of the world. How much of these destructive elements,
esteemed by men, does the devil bring into the Church, until all
the high, unworldly and holy aims, and heavenly objects of the
Church are retired and forgotten?

One of these taking, man-savouring, Satanic devices is to

pervert the aims of the Church after this manner of statement
and effort, that the main object of the Church to-day is not so
much to save individuals out of society, as to save society, not
to save souls so much as to save the bodies of men, not to
save men out of a community so much as to save men and
manhood in the community. The world, not the individual, is
the subject of redemption.

This popular, seductive and deadly fallacy entirely subverts

the very foundation of Christ’s Church. Its materializing trend
is so strong that it will sweep away every vestige of the
spiritual and eternal if we do not watch, work and speak with
sleepless vigilance, tireless energy, and fearless boldness. The
attitude and open declaration of much of the religious teaching
we now hear is in the same strain and spirit which characterized
Unitarian, Jewish, or rationalistic utterances half a century ago.
To save society is a kind of religious fad to which much
enterprising, lauded church work is committed. Advanced
thinkers and discoverers have elaborated the same idea. They
seem not to realize their true condition, which is one of going
back, and not going forward. This backward step entombs
religion in the grave where Judaism has been buried all these
centuries. It may well accord with the idle dreams of the worldly
rabbis to think of regenerating the world and ignoring the
individual.

The phrase “ to save the world,” has a pompous sounding;

and right taking to flesh and blood is it for the Church to apply
itself to bettering the temporal surroundings of the individual,
and improve his sanitary conditions; to lessen the bad smells
that greet his nose, to diminish the bacteria in his water, and to
put granite in the pavement for him to walk on instead of wood
or brick. All this sounds finely, and agrees well with a material
age, and becomes practical in operation, and evident and
imposing in results. But does this agree with the sublime
dignity and essential aim of the Church? Do we need any
Church to secure these ends? Councilmen of common talent,
an efficient street commissioner, and the ordinary vigilance of
the average policeman, will secure these results in their best
way. It needs no Church, no Bible, no Christ, no personal
holiness, to secure these ends, and this is the point to which all
this vaunted advance tends. If the ends of the Church are
directed to those results which can be as well or better secured
by other agencies, the Church will soon be regarded as a
nuisance, a thing to be abated by the most summary process.

The purposes of the Church of God rise in sublime grandeur

above these childish dreams and effete philosophies. Its
purpose is to regenerate and sanctify the individual, to make
him holy and prepare him by a course of purifying and training
for the high pursuits of an eternal life. The Church is like the
seine cast into the sea. The purpose is not to change the sea
so much as to catch the fishes out of the sea. Let the sea roll
on in its essential nature, but the net catches its fishes. No
bigger fools would ever be found than fishermen who were
spending all their force trying by some chemical process to
change the essential elements of the sea, vainly hoping
thereby to improve the stock of the fish that they had not and
never could catch. By this method, personal holiness, the great
desideratum for church operation and ends, would be
impossible, and heaven would be stricken from creed and life
and hope.

To save the world and ignore the individual is not only

Utopian, but every way damaging. It is the process, fair and
laudable in name, to save the world, but in results it is to lose
the Church, or, which amounts to the same, making the Church
worldly, and thereby unfitting her for her holy and sublime
mission. Christ said that gaining the world and saving the man
are antagonistic ends. Christ teaches Peter that his Satanic
device would gain the world to and for the Church, but would
lose the soul. Everything would seem thrifty to the cause when
in reality all was death.
The Church is distinctly, preeminently and absolutely a
spiritual institution, that is, an institution created, vitalized,
possessed and directed by the Spirit of God. Her machinery,
rites, forms, services and officers have no comeliness, no
pertinency, no power, save as they are depositions and
channels of the Holy Spirit. It is His indwelling and inspiration
which make its divine being and secure its divine end. If the
devil can by any methods shut the Holy Spirit out from the
Church, he has effectually barred the Church from being God’s
Church on earth. He accomplishes this by retiring from the
Church the agencies or agents which the Holy Spirit uses, and
displaces them by the natural, which are rarely if ever the media
of His energy. Christ announced the universal and invariable
law when He said, “That which is born of the flesh, is flesh;
that which is born of the Spirit, is spirit.” The Church may have
a holy preacher, a man of great prayerfulness, of great grace,
filled with the Spirit. But if Satan can by any method retire him,
and put a man of no prayerfulness, plausible, eloquent and
popular, the Church may seem to have gained, but it has
gained by the substitution of natural for spiritual forces, a gain
which has all unconsciously revolutionized the Church. Officer
a church with holy men, not highly cultured, but well-versed in
the deep things of God, and strong in devotion to Christ and
His cause, not wealthy, nor of high social position. Now
change these officers and put in men who are every way
decent in morality, but not given or noted for prayer and piety,
men of high social position and fine financiers, and the Church
scarcely marks the change save marked improvement in
finances. But an invisible and mighty change has taken place in
the Church, which is radical. It has changed from a spiritual
Church to a worldly one. The change from noonday to
midnight is not more extreme than that.

At this point Satan is doing his deadliest and most damning

work, the more deadly and damning because unnoticed,
unseen, producing no shock and exciting no alarm.

It is not by positive, conspicuous evil that Satan perverts the

Church, but by quiet displacement and by unnoticed
substitution. The higher is being retired, the spiritual gives
place to the social, and the divine is eliminated, because it is
made secondary.

The perversion and subversion of the Church is secured by

Satan when the spiritual forces are retired or made subordinate
to the natural, and social entertainment, and not edification
becomes the end. This process involves not only the aims and
ends of entertainment, but it is intended to soften and modify
the distinctly spiritual aim, and to widen from what is deemed
the rigid exclusiveness of spiritual narrowness. But in the end it
eliminates all that is distinctly spiritual, and that which is in any
sense deeply religious will not survive the death of the
spiritual. Edification as the end of God’s Church is wholly lost
sight of, and entertainment, that which is pleasing and
pleasant, comes to the front. The social forces not only retire
the spiritual forces, but effectually destroy them.

A modem church with its kitchen and parlour, with its club and
lyceum, and with its ministries to the flesh and to the world, is
both suggestive and alarming. How suggestive in the contrast
it presents between the agencies which the primitive Church
originated and fostered, as the conserver of its principles and
the expression of its life, and those which the modem and
progressive Church presents as its allies or substitutes. The
original institutions were wholly spiritual, calculated to
strengthen and cultivate all the elements which combine to
make a deep and clear experience of God. They were training
schools for the spiritual life, subservient to its culture as the
chief end. They never lingered in the regions of the moral, the
aesthetic and the mental. They fostered no taste nor inclination
which was not spiritual, and did not minister to the soul’s
advance in divine things.

They took it for granted that all who came to them, really
desired to flee from the wrath to come, and were sincerely
groaning after full redemption, and that their obligation to
furnish to these the best aids were of the most sacred and
exacting kind. It never occurred to them that the lyceum or
sociable were channels through which God’s grace would flow
and could be laid under tribute for spiritual uses. These social
and fleshly forces are regarded in many quarters as the
perfection of spiritual things. These agencies are arrayed as the
mature fruit of spiritual piety, flavoured and perfected by its
culture and progress, and ordained henceforth as the
handmaids of the prayer and testimony meeting. We object
most seriously to the union. What have they in common?
“How indeed can two walk together unless they be agreed?”
What elements of piety are conserved by the lyceum or
sociable? What phases of spiritual life do they promote? By
what feature of the lyceum is faith invigorated? Where do you
find in it any elements which are distinctly pious, of are aids to
piety? How does the sociable produce a more prayerful, a
holier life? What secret springs has it to bring the soul nearer
to God? Wherein does it form or strengthen the ties of a
Christly fellowship? Is it not frivolous and worldly? Is it not
sensuous and fleshly? Does it not cater to and suit the tastes
of the carnal, the light and worldly? What unity of purpose and
spirit is there between the lyceum and witnessing for Christ?
The one is intensely spiritual. The other has in it no jot or tittle
of spiritual uses.

We might as well add to the list of heavenly helpers, the

skating rink, calisthenics and the gymnasium. If the young
people desire to join a lyceum, enjoy a sociable or establish a
bank, let them do so, but do not deceive them and degrade
piety by calling these things holy institutions and feeders of
spiritual life.

Disguise it as we may; reason about it as we will; apologize for

it as we do; vainly philosophize of growth and change and
culture, the truth is, we have lost that intense type of personal
experience, that deep conviction of eternal things which are
such evident features of all great spiritual movements. Many
preachers and people have fallen so low in their experience that
they do not relish these distinct and strongly spiritual
agencies; and are devising schemes and institutions to gratify
their non-spiritual tastes with schemes which are midway
between Christ and the world; which, while not essentially
wrong, do not possess one grain of spiritual power, and can
never be the channels of heavenly communications.

It is said we cannot get the people to attend the distinctly

spiritual means of grace. What is the trouble? Are the
institutions worn out and no longer of value to the humble,
pious soul? Who will dare affirm this? The tastes of the people
are low and perverted. Shall we then change the agencies to
suit the unsanctified appetites? No; let us tone up the appetite
for spiritual things, and correct and elevate the tastes of our
people. Let the revolution begin with the preacher. Let him
wrestle with God until his ordination vow becomes vitalized, so
that all can feel the pressure of his aim, the ardour of his zeal,
his singleness of purpose, and the holiness and elevation of
his life, and until the people catch the fire and purpose of his
heart, and all press on to the regions of perfect love, panting
for all the fulness of God. Under this united, mighty, divine
impulse the social and the lyceum will be forgotten and become
stale, and all saintly assemblies will be attractive and
delightsome.

The Church cannot confederate with non-spiritual agencies. By

this she breaks the tension of her faith and discards the Holy
Ghost. She cannot be the purveyor to unsanctified desires.
Neither is it her province to fall down to the beggarly task of
entertaining the people. This is her saddest mistake, when her
solemn assemblies are surrendered to the concert and lecture,
her praise turned into worldly music, her classrooms into
parlours, her sociables more popular than her prayer-meetings,
the house of God made a house of feasting, and social cheer is
sought after rather than a house of prayer. The unity of the
Spirit and the holy brotherhood are displaced and destroyed to
make room for social affinities and worldly attractions. Her high
and royal duty, that by which she maintains her spotless
fidelity to her Lord, is to stress holiness and afford all means
for its advancement and perfection. This done, spiritual
character and affinities will order all the rest.
CHAPTER VII - The Devil and the World
By the ”power of the air” is meant not simply in the
abstract, Satan’s government over the air whereof he is
prince, but his devils, his angels that live and fly up and
down in the air as the most convenient place for their
residence; these have that power whereof he is prince;
and as the “power of the air” refers to those airy spirits
that are principalities and powers and rulers with him in
this world, and who work under him in the men of this
world; and they are a united kingdom, a body politic
under this one prince, Satan: and they are called power,
as we call an army a power, a force, as Pharaoh’s host
in Exodus 14:28; 15:4.The whole creation above the
earth may be divided into three parts, whereof each part
has its powers that are it, inhabitants; there are the
highest heavens, where is God and His host of angels;
there are the starry heavens, with the sun for the prince
of its hosts, and there is the air of this sublunary world,
with Satan’s trained crew there, called the “power of the
air” or hosts of devils in the air under their prince. —
Thomas Goodwin.

There is no more fundamental statement than that the world is

to be renounced by every true disciple of Christ, and that to
love the world and the things of the world puts us in open and
standing enmity to God. By virtue of the relationship of love or
friendship to the world, we are the enemies of God. There
needs no other sin, no other crime by virtue of our attachment
to the world. By that alone, we are the enemies of God.

Christ Jesus lays it down as an obvious truth that between the

world and His disciples there would be hatred. The two
discipleships to Himself and to the world were inimical and
impossible. The call, the touch and choice of Christ when
accepted and obeyed, becomes at once the secret and the
source of the world’s hatred.

Jesus declares the native and inevitable enmity of the world to

His followers: “The world hath hated them because they are
not of the world even as I am not of the world.” Again, in the
sacerdotal prayer, He declares this distinct and eternal
separation and conflict: “They are not of the world, even as I
am not of the world.” By virtue of their relation to Christ they
are separated from and are in conflict with the world.

The two persons, Jesus and Adam, their natures, affinities and
opposition, are declared in the clearest language: “The first
man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from
heaven. As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy;
and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly.
And as we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also
bear the image of the heavenly.” How strong is the opposition
to the world declared and demanded. The love of the world is
hostile to and destructive of the love of God. The two cannot
co-exist.

“Ye adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world

is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore would be the friend
of the world maketh himself an enemy of God” (R. V. James 4:4).

Nothing is more explicit than this, nothing is more

commanding, authoritative and more exacting. “Love not the
world.” Nothing is more offensive to God, nothing is more
criminal, more abominable, violative of the most sacred
relationship of the soul with God. “Adulteresses”—purity
gone and shame and illicit intercourse exist. Friendship for the
world is Heaven’s greatest crime and God’s greatest enemy.

The world is one of the enemies which must be fought and

conquered on the way to heaven. “For this is the love of God,
that we keep his commandments; and his commandments are
not grievous. For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the
world, and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even
our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that
believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?”

The Gospel is represented as a training school in which to

deny worldly desires is one part of its curriculum. “For the
grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men,
teaching us, that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we
should live soberly, righteously and godly, in this present
world; looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious
appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ; who
gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity,
and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good
works.” There is something somewhere in the world which
makes it a deadly foe to the salvation of Christ and which
poisons us against heaven.
What is “this world,” which so effectually alienates us from
heaven and puts us by virtue of our relation to it and in
flagrant enmity to God, and friendship to which violates our
wedding vow to God, whose love is enmity to God, whose
friendship is criminal to the most abominable and utmost
degree? What is it? “The world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of
the eye, the pride of life.” What are they? The world includes
the whole mass of men alienated from God, and therefore
hostile to the cause of Christ. It involves worldly affairs, the
aggregate of things earthly, the whole circle of earthly goods,
endowments, riches, advantages, pleasures, and pursuits,
which although hollow, frail and fleeting, stir desire, seduce
from God, and are obstacles to the cause of Christ. The
divorced or torn relation between heaven and earth, between
God and His creatures, finds its expression in the term, “the
world.”

Our English word, “desire,” expresses the meaning of the word

lust, including the whole world of active lusts and desires, to
which the seat of desire and the natural appetites impels.

Alford’s Commentary says: “The world was constituted at first

in Adam, well pleasing to God and obedient to Him. It was
man’s world, and in man it was summed up, and in man it fell
into the darkness of selfish pursuits, and by which man has
become materialized in spirit and dragged down so as to be
worldly and sensual. The world is man’s world in his fall from
God. The “lust of the flesh,” human nature averse to God; “lust
of the eyes,” that sense which takes note of outward things
and is inflamed by them. The “pride of life,” the manner of life
of worldly men among one another whereby pride is to display
and pomp is cherished.

Bengel says: “The lust of the flesh” means those things on

which the sense of enjoyment, taste and touch, feed. “Lust of
the eyes” means those things by which the senses of
investigation, the eye and sight, hearing and smelling, are
occupied. “Pride of life” means when any one assumes too
much to himself in words or actions. Even those who do not
love arrogance of life may possibly pursue the “lust of the
eyes,” and they who have overpowered this yet frequently
retain the lust of the flesh, for this prevails in the greatest
degree and to the widest extent among the poor, the middle
classes and the powerful, even among those who appear to
exercise self-denial.”

John Wesley says: “The desire of the flesh means the

pleasures of the outward senses, whether of taste, smell or
touch. The ‘desire of the eye,’ the pleasures of the imagination
(to which the eye chiefly is subservient), of that internal sense
whereby we relish what is grand, new or beautiful. The ‘pride
of life' means all that pomp in clothing, houses, furniture,
equipage and manner of living which generally procure honour
from the bulk of mankind, and so gratify pride and vanity. It
therefore directly includes the desire of praise and remotely
covetousness. All these desires are not from God, but from the
prince of this world.”
This world arrays itself and all its forces against heaven.
Worldliness is the epidemic foe to heaven. To live for this
world is to lose heaven by counter attraction. The Son of God
declares of His disciples, and reiterates the declaration to His
Father as one of prime importance: “Thou gavest them me out
of the world. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the
world.” It remains true to this hour that all the true disciples of
Jesus are not of the world, but are chosen out of the world,
have left the world, have renounced the world, and are
crucified to the world.

Fundamental and eternal are these truths, of which heaven has

an illustration in every follower of Jesus.

What gives the world its fatal charms? What makes its
witchery so deadly? Sometimes its beauty is all withered, its
brightness all night, its hope all despair, its joy the bitterest
anguish, and all its prospects decay and desert, but still it
holds and binds. We are loath to leave it. Whence is its deadly
sorcery and its fatal snares? Whence is its malignant hate?
Whence is its hostility to God and its alienation from heaven?
This world is the devil’s world. In that fatal hour when man fell
from his allegiance and devotion to God, he carried the world
with him in his rebellion against God. Man was the world’s
lord, and it fell with its lord. This is the solution of its full
influence, its malignant rivalry, and its intense opposition to
heaven. The devil has his kingdom here. It is his princedom. He
clothes it with all beauty and seductive power as the rival of
heaven. Heaven’s trinity of foes are the world, the flesh, and
the devil. The world is first, the most powerful and engaging.
They all center in and are strong for evil because the devil
inspires and inflames them. The flesh wars with the spirit
simply because the devil inflames its desires. The world gets its
deadly and fascinating snares from the devil. The world is not
simply the ally, but is the instrument and the agent of Satan. It
represents him with the most servile and complete loyalty.

The text from John already quoted, “Love not the world,
neither the things that are in the world,” needs, for its full
understanding, to have the preface which reads: “I write unto
you, young men, because ye have overcome the wicked one. I
write unto you, little children, because ye have known the
Father. I have written unto you, fathers, because ye have
known him that is from the beginning. I have written unto you,
young men, because ye are strong, and the Word of God
abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one.”

To “overcome the wicked one,” the world, its love and its
things must be abjured. There stands at the threshold of many
a church door these words, which in spirit belong to the sacred
honour of every soul’s true espousal to Christ: “Dost thou
renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory
of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the
carnal desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow or be led
by them?” “I renounce them all,” was the answer solemnly said
in the serious hour, and the preacher and the people and our
own hearts, if true, said, “Amen.” And Amen let it be now and
forever.
This world must be renounced and this is to renounce Satan.
This is the deadliest blow at his rule. The friendship of the
world is violative of our marriage vows to heaven.

We will not understand James in his severe denunciations of

the world, where he makes its friendship so criminal and
declares that to be the friend of the world is of itself to be the
enemy of God, except we note how he is declaring that the
world’s friendship is the devil’s religion, earthly, sensual,
devilish; and that we can get back to God only by renouncing
the friendship of the world and by cleansing our hearts and
hands of its soiling touch. We draw nigh to God by resisting
the Devil. We resist the devil by renouncing the world.

The Apostle James sums up the distinct characteristics of the

devil’s world-counterfeit religion. Passion, appetite and
pleasure reign and make war. How much of this passion,
pleasure and world-religion has there been in church annals?
Too often its history is a history of passion, strife, ambition
and blood. Its ecumenical councils are the battlefield of
passion in its unbridled, most malignant form. “Earthly,
sensual, devilish,” is the Divine stigma put on it, and obloquy
is put on much of that which marks and mars ecclesiastical
history. What volumes of this worldly religion, unwritten
volumes, a world full of volumes, belong to the lives of many
old reputed saints and to many modem church members and
church goers. They are friends of the world, its advocates and
lovers. They do not pray and only say prayers in order not to
miss praying. There is no drawing nigh to God and no fighting
against the devil and driving him from the field of action. Their
religion and its performances and worship descendeth not from
above, but is “earthly, natural, devilish.” “Submit to God” and
“resist the devil,” is the keynote of an unworldly religion. A
personal God and a personal devil are among the primary
articles of creed and experience in true religion. Surrender to
God, draw nigh to Him, live close to Him, fight against the
devil, and get rid of him by denouncing and abjuring the world.
CHAPTER VIII – The Devil and the World
(Continued)
Hesiod, speaking of the devils, saith, “Being clothed
with air, they run up and down.” By air is here meant
this elementary sublunary world, and especially the airy
part of it, that interstice between heaven and earth. All
the Devil’s workmanship in apparitions and visions is
air condensed, he took Christ up into an exceeding high
mountain, to make an outward representation wherein
his power lay. Beelzebub signifying “god of flies” might
allude to the air being as full of devils as it is of flies;
certainly they are called “fowls of the air” (Luke 8:5-12).
Frantzius reports that a holy man in Germany on the
night of the great massacre in France saw many spirits
in the air, and was thereby assured of some great thing
done in the world on that night. When angels come to
minister they are compared to the meteors of the air, as
in Psalm 104:4, “He makes his angels spirits, and his
ministers a flame of fire.” Now the air is only a place
passage to angels, but it is the region wherein devils fly
up and down, except where they possess men’s bodies.
—Thomas Goodwin.

THE divine warning against the course of the world, against

the fashion of the world and against the spirit of the world,
finds its solution in the fact that the devil is directing the
world’s course, the devil is creating the world’s spirit, and the
devil is cutting the pattern of the world’s fashion. The touch of
the world pollutes because Satan’s fingers are in its touch. Its
desires are deadly and heaven-quenching because Satan
kindles its desires. The world and its things are contraband in
the Christian warfare because Satan is the ruler of the world
and the administrator of its affairs.

In Ephesians, Satan and his legions are called the “world-

rulers.” We quote from the Revised Version: “Put on the whole
armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles
of the devil. For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood,
but against the principalities, against the powers, against the
world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of
wickedness in heavenly places.” The “world-rulers” are
principalities and powers under the direction of the devil. How
they rule this world by ruling the things which rule this world!
How Satan seizes and directs all the mighty forces of this
world! War he seizes, and instead of it being the patriot’s
struggle for freedom and for the defense of home and native
land, it becomes the pliant tool of despotism, crushes liberty
and right, enslaves freedom, and carries on a campaign of lust,
rapine, cruelty, desolation and death.

Money is another of the world’s ruling forces which might be

used to Edenize earth and to lay up a good foundation against
the time to come. It ought to be used to ease the burdens of the
poor, to banish beggary, and to brighten the homes of
widowhood and orphanage. A mighty world-ruling power is
money. The devil rules it and instead of flowing at the
command of pitying love, it is diverted by Satan to all selfish
and unholy purposes. Inflaming into covetousness and
hardening into callousness, men become noted, illustrious and
esteemed, as they are money-getters and money-keepers.

Education, a mighty world-ruling force, Satan chains this to his

car, and it becomes the source of pride and ungodly power,
and its mighty engineering is turned into “ higher criticism,”
and under the guise of Christian learning, it becomes the most
powerful ally to Satan, unsettling faith in God’s Word in
multitudes of hearts, and opening a wide door of skepticism in
the temple of God.

In Ephesians the devil is called the “prince of the power of the

air.” The very atmosphere of this world ministers to his cause
and is under his baneful rule. How much of storm and
cyclones, terror and ruin is he responsible for we may not
know. “And you hath he quickened who were dead in
trespasses and sins; wherein in time past ye walked according
to the course of this world, according to the prince of the
power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of
disobedience. Among whom also we all had our conversation
in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of
the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of
wrath, even as others.” “Among whom we all had our
conversation,” says Paul of himself and the saints. They
formerly lived in Satan’s kingdom, and he ruled them by the
lusts of the flesh, “fulfilled the desires of the flesh and the
mind.” We see in this how Satan rules through the world. He is
the god of this world, and by the world he excites its desires,
both low and high, low in the desires of the flesh, and high in
the desires of the mind. Whether the world fills the passions or
appetites, or draws out and chains the mind in its high worldly
pursuits and refined tastes, it is all of Satan, because of the
world. The “lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and pride of
life,” these are of the world, and Satan is the exciter of them,
“and lust when it is finished bringeth forth death.”

“We know that whosoever is begotten of God sinneth not, but

he that was begotten of God keepeth him and the evil one
toucheth him not. We know that we are of God and the whole
world lieth in the evil one” (Revised Version). The world
“lieth,” means that it is in the power of the devil, is held in
subjection by him, and is fixed and established. The devil is
pictured not only as trying to kindle into a flame the desires
which may remain in a good man’s heart after conversion, but
also as folding in his arms the whole world and making it
subject to his power and submissive to his absolute control.

When the world comes in at many a door, it comes in in many a

form, but at whatever door and in whatever form it comes, it is
always as the devil’s servant. It comes in to do his work as his
most obsequious and faithful slave. When the world comes in,
dressed in its most seductive and beautiful garb, the devil has
fashioned its clothing and ordered its coming. The world is the
devil’s heaven. Its rest, crown and good are here. When the
world comes in, God’s heaven goes out. It fades from the eye
and heart. The struggle for it ends, and God’s heaven, with its
fadeless and eternal glories, is lost.
In these declarations of the Bible about the world and the devil,
we see why the world opposes heaven. We learn the enmity of
the two. Heaven is Christ’s place, the place where He is, and to
which He would win men. The world is Satan’s place. His
power is here. To fix our hearts on the world, is to be loyal to
him. To fix our hearts on heaven, is to be loyal to Christ.

Here we have the solution of the cruel hatred of the world to

Jesus and why it has persecuted so bitterly and to death His
followers. We see why it is that the Spirit lusteth against the
flesh and the flesh against the Spirit, and likewise we see why
these are not only contrary to one another, but at war with one
another. The devil is in the flesh and rules it. Christ is in the
Spirit. This world leads from Christ. It is the invincible foe of
Christ.

This great truth is illustrated and enforced by the fact that

Christ’s work is to get possession of the world and make its
attractive power further His purposes. But He establishes a
kingdom of heaven which is not of this world. A new power
has come in, a new kingdom established and a new world made.
It will take the fires of the judgment and the new creative power
to make a new heaven and a new earth before the stains and
ruin of the devil’s debasing and death-dealing hands can be
removed, and this alien and hell-debauched, yet beautiful,
world fitted for God’s holy purposes.

The Christian, by the urgent demand made upon him to

forswear allegiance to the world, is, by his very relation to
Jesus Christ, lifted out of the world’s deadly embraces, and its
polluting witcheries are broken. In this subserviency of the
world to the devil, we have the solution of the world’s intense
hatred to Jesus Christ, and we see why it has armed itself with
all its forces under the power of the devil to destroy the cause
of Christ. The world’s opposition and enmity have been always
against true religion, but often its smiles are more fatal than its
hate.
CHAPTER IX – The Power of the Devil
This kingdom and these angels of Satan have great
power; they are therefore called the “power of the air,”
We wrestle not against flesh and blood (the power of
kings and armies and men are nothing) but against
principalities, and powers, against spiritual wickedness;
against devils that infinitely exceed all the sons of men:
and the word is not only dunamis, physical power of
understanding, insinuation, but exousia, authority. If
God had not given this great enemy so long, and so
great, and so extensive a power to set up himself, His
Son’s kingdom had not been so glorious in the
overthrow of it. O the mercy of God in translating us
from the one to the other; we are pulled from the power
of darkness by redemption (Col. 1:13), and by Christ
Himself being subject to the power of Satan as in Luke
22:53 where the wicked have their hour but the saints
shall have their day of it. –Thomas Goodwin.

In all we have seen, instead of minifying the power of the devil,

Jesus exalts him to the pinnacle of power as a prince, with this
world as his princedom.

In the prominent features of Christ’s life the devil appears as

the one being and the one evil agent which Christ has in mind,
to whose rule He is opposed. We have seen how soon the
devil followed in the wake of our Lord’s baptism at the Jordan,
after the anointing of the Holy Ghost, and His public entrance
on His ministry. When He first commissioned His disciples,
among other great miracles they were to “cast out devils.”
When the seventy returned to report their work to Christ, they
said, with evident surprise and gratulation, “Even the devils are
subject to us through thy name.” He replied: “I beheld Satan as
lightning fall from heaven.” When He is opening their hearts to
receive the great comfort of that great promise of the Holy
Spirit, He declares that one of the trinity of great ends to be
executed by the Holy Spirit was “to convict the world of
judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.”

In one of His troubled and impassioned outbreaks, as the

shadows and pain of His great agony are coming on Him, He
cries, “Now is my soul troubled.” The darkness is relieved by a
gleam of light in which He sees the ruins of Satan’s kingdom
and the devil spoiled, dethroned, cast out by the almightiness
of His cross, “Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the
prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the
earth, will draw all men unto me.”

But as the darkness grows deeper, and the anguish more bitter,
He sees the approaching form of him whose hour and power of
darkness it is. Hushed into silence in the presence of this
relentless and cruel foe, the Son of God says to His sorrowing
and awe-struck disciples: “Hereafter I will not talk much with
you; for the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in
me.”

The devil’s sad and mighty influence is farther set forth on the
circle of chosen disciples. Peter staggers under the blow of the
devil; his narrow, shameful escape of Peter is thus referred to
by Christ: “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have
you, that he might sift you as wheat: but I have prayed for
thee, that thy faith fail not: and, when thou art converted,
strengthen thy brethren.”

Jesus Christ acknowledges the great power and authority

which the devil has in the present deranged and usurped order
of things. He declares, “Now is the judgment of this world, now
shall the prince of this world be judged.”

How defiant Satan is, and how he opposes Christ stubbornly

with reckless and too often successful courage is plainly
revealed. Into the chosen circle of the twelve he entered, into
the one who had been trusted as their treasurer, the receiver,
the depositor and the disburser of their money and their
charity.

How close he comes, and how large his successes! One of the
sacred twelve he has seduced, possessed and moved to carry
out in the most hypocritical, false way his infamous designs.
How near he came adding Peter to the black roll of his immortal
ones, immortal in infamy, is very evident. That the devil had
much every way to do with Peter’s dastardly course, his lying
and blasphemy, is evident from the words of Christ, “And the
Lord said unto Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to
have you that he may sift you as wheat But I have prayed for
thee, that thy faith fail not; and when thou art converted,
strengthen thy brethren. And he said unto him, Lord, I am
ready to go with thee, both into prison, and to death. And he
said, I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before
that thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me.”

In the Parable of the Sower Christ sets forth the unseen but
powerful influence which the devil exerts to neutralize the word
of God. In the record of this parable by Matthew, the devil is
termed the “wicked one,” a statement of personality and of the
concentration and comprehension of preeminent wickedness.
He catches away the word sown with vigilant and diabolical
hate. “Then cometh the devil and taketh the word.” He is the
destroyer of the seeds of good. So powerful is he that the word
of God, incorruptible and eternal, is prevented from securing its
benign and saving effort by his vigilance and influence over
the mind.

In the story of Job and his sore trials, we see the Sabeans and
Chaldeans are ready to respond to his suggestion to make their
predatory raids on Job’s herds. Satan’s power is not limited to
outside influence, but is direct and powerful, getting into the
inside, and making suggestions of evil, almost godlike
sometimes, and again so inflaming our passions or principles
that we cannot see the wrong till too late, as in the case of
Satan’s suggestion to David to number Israel. His power is so
great that even good men, the best, who are able to resist his
temptations, yet for a time are under his power. The Christians
at Smyrna were so under his power that while he could not
alienate their affections or disturb their loyalty, he could put
them in prison. Paul felt all his life the rankling poison of a
wound inflicted by Satan’s power. Peter was in his hands and
tossed about, and was brought nigh to the fatal verge by his
power. Job was for a while put in his power, and was driven
and torn and desolated like a cruel and reckless tempest,
wherein everything was wrecked and lost but his patience.
How great was Satan’s power to destroy fortune and family
and friends and reputation! The Son of God was in his
mysterious and all desolating power, led to the mountains and
led to the temple by the fearful spell of Satan. Angels retired
and heaven hushed its music and was draped in silence and
trembled in awe while Satan’s dread power was allowed to
spend its dark force on heaven’s Anointed One. The power of
disease was in the devil’s hands. He smote Job. Christ said of
the woman with the spirit of infirmity: “Ought not this woman,
being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo!
these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath
day?” Doubtless much of sickness is due to the power of the
devil. To this there is reference in the Statements of Christ’s
work. “When the even was come, they brought unto him many
that were possessed with devils; and he cast out the spirits
with his word, and healed all that were sick. That it might be
fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah, the prophet, saying,
Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses.” “How
God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with
power; who went about doing good, and healing all that were
oppressed of the devil; for God was with him.”

Satan’s power did not extend to death in Job’s case, but it did
in that of his children. The Smyrna Christians he could hold in
prison but ten days, but thousands of others he held unto
death. His own cruel, deadly hands weaved for them the
martyr’s crown of gold and glory.

The power of the devil over the body is further seen and
illustrated by numbers of cases in the New Testament, of
demoniacal possessions. The devil had possession by some of
his imps of the bodies of persons. Some of the cases were
fearfully tormented in body and almost wrecked in mind, others
had functions of the body suspended, some were made dumb
by him, and others made deaf and blind. These cases were
many in number and of great variety. The great power and
malignity of Satan is seen in that among the most distressing
cases were those who were not noted for great sins, but the
young and comparative innocent ones were the victims of his
dread power. The whole person came under the power of this
alien spirit. The power of Satan, his nearness and personality,
had a constant and destructive manifestation in these cases.

Of these demoniacal possessions it has been well said that the

Gospel narratives are distinctly pledged to the historic truth of
these occurrences. Either they are true or the Gospels are false.

Nor can it be said they represent the opinions of the times.

They relate to us words spoken by the Lord Jesus in which the
personality and presence of the devil are distinctly stated. Now
either our Lord spoke these words or He did not. If He did not,
then we must at once set aside the concurrent testimony of the
Evangelists to a plain matter of fact. In other words, we
establish a principle which will overthrow equally every fact
related in the Gospels.
CHAPTER X – The Power of the Devil
(Continued)
Christ’s physical sufferings before Pilate; His awful
scourging with the Roman thongs; His hanging
between heaven and earth by copper nails; His
bleeding brow surmounted with a wreath of thorns;
were no more severe perhaps than many saints endured
upon crosses just after His day, and later in the fires of
Smithfield. The inexplicable mental suffering of Christ
when God withdrew His face from Him, was the
suffering that broke His pure heart When Christ’s
physical sufferings were at the climax, then it was that
God permitted the soul of Jesus to enter for a few
moments into the soul of death,—the horror a sinner
experiences the moment he is adrift from Time and his
hope is dead. Jesus could not bear it for a moment and
cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
O! Sinner, O! Sinner, if Christ’s heart was broken at the
momentary experience of a soul lost eternally, what will
you do? —H. W. Hedge.

THE power of Satan is far greater than that of God’s highest

and saintliest earthly ones. In the third chapter of Zechariah we
have the picture of his power with God’s high official
representatives. Joshua, the high priest, is there, the angel of
the Lord is there, and standing at Joshua’s right to resist all his
righteous acts is Satan. Joshua and the angel, realizing their
insufficiency when contending with Satan, they send a cry to
heaven, “The Lord rebuke thee, O Satan.”

Jude gives us this item. “Michael the archangel, when

contending with the devil he disputed about the body of
Moses, durst not bring him a railing accusation, but saith. The
Lord rebuke thee.”

Whatever this obscure text may mean in regard to this contest

between Michael and the devil, while it teaches us spirit and
tongue control, it does, without obscurity or doubt, clearly
show that an archangel’s strength is not sufficient to contend
single-handed and alone with the devil.

Daniel gives a side glance into the power and conflicts which
exist in the unseen and spiritual world which lies so near our
own, which has so much to do with us where our spiritual
battles are fought, and victories won. Daniel had been praying
three weeks before the angel and the answer came. “Then said
he unto me, Fear not, Daniel, for from the first day that thou
didst set thine heart to understand and to chasten thyself
before thy God thy words were heard and I am come for thy
words. But the prince of the Kingdom of Persia withstood me
one and twenty days; but lo, Michael, one of the chief princes,
came to help me.” We see how he plans. If he cannot keep
people from praying nor absolutely prevent the answer to
prayer, he can cause delay in the answer to prayer that he may
discourage and break down faith and discount urgent,
importunate praying.

He has power to cast into prison. To the little pious church at

Smyrna, Jesus Christ writes in commendation, warning and
consolation: “Fear none of those things which thou shalt
suffer; behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that
ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days. Be thou
faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life,”

There are special seats or headquarters of his power, places

where the devil makes his home and rules with an absolute
sway. To this Christ refers in His letter to the Church of
Pergamos: “I know thy works, and where thou dwellest, even
where Satan’s seat is; and thou holdest fast my name, and hast
not denied my faith, even in those days wherein Antipas was
my faithful martyr, who was slain among you, where Satan
dwelleth.”

Some said they were Jews, but were the “synagogue of Satan.”
Are there churches which are called Christian, but are churches
of Satan?

In Christ’s letters to the seven Churches in Asia, we see how

the ascended and enthroned Son of God presents the same
view of the devil. The “depths” of Satan are referred to in the
address to Thyatira. In this Revelation of Christ to John, the
devil Is still declared to be “the great dragon, the old serpent,
the devil, and Satan.” He is declared to have great “wrath.”

The devil’s power is greatly and strangely enhanced by his

system of worship, which, while it degrades, it fascinates and
holds. The system of pagan worship and devotion is very
powerful. It holds its devotees by iron chains. It is not a work
of chance, neither does it spring from native religious instincts.
It is a system of rare power and of rare skill, constructed by a
graduate in the craft of seduction and delusion. Satan’s hand
and head are in it, all planning, ordering, and inspiring it. It is
this fact which gives its strength and influence.

Of Jeroboam, who perverted the religious instinct and debased

worship for sinister, worldly, and selfish purposes, it is said he
ordained him priests for the devils. The Psalmist declared they
sacrificed unto devils. The New Testament declares that “the
things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and
not to God; and I would not that ye should have fellowship
with devils. Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of
devils; ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table and of the
table of devils.” Again we have it declared, “Now the Spirit
speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart
from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of
devils.”

The intensity and power of the devil’s worship is illustrated

and enforced in the last book of the New Testament, showing
how his worship would increase in intensity and would militate
against the worship of the Lamb. We have all along rival altars
and rival worship. The devil is the author, inspirer, and
protector of the one, and Christ is the author, inspirer and
protector of the true and pure worship. There are wonders in
each, miracles and martyrs in the false and devilish, as well as
in the true and heavenly.

Revelation summarizes the situation: “And they had a king

over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose
name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek
tongue hath his name Apollyon. One woe is past; and, behold,
there come two woes more hereafter.”

These are not lawless woes, nor are their authors lawless
bands, disorderly and reckless mobs. They are organized. The
strictest obedience to the devil prevails. “Devil with devil
damned firm concord holds.” They are “principalities and
powers,” not only of high and first order in creation, not only
of great personal power and dignity, but ordered and sub-
ordered, coordinate and subordinate. There is the most perfect
government, military in its drill and discipline, absolute and
orderly in its arrangement, under one supreme, dictatorial,
powerful head, with rank and file and officers complete. “For
our wrestling is not against flesh and blood but against
principalities, against the powers, against the world, rulers of
this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the
heavenly places,” These high and wicked spirits are
everywhere. They fill the air, are everywhere intent on evil,
following the direction of their leader, carrying out his plans
with hearty accord, ready obedience and implicit confidence.
How loathsome their nature! How marvellous and miracle-
working their power! How high and kingly their influence! How
martial their purposes! All this is vividly and strongly set forth
in the sixteenth chapter of Revelation: “And I saw three
unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon,
and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the
false prophet. For they are the spirits of devils, working
miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the
whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of
God Almighty.”

The power of Satan finds its great increase and expression in

the efforts and instrumentality of the unregenerate, who are by
Bible teaching under his power, subjects of his kingdom of
darkness. More than that, so intimate is their connection with
Satan, so close the unity, purpose and relationship, that they
belong to his family. His paternity gives birth and character to
them, his fatherhood binds them in a strong embrace.

The power of the devil—how defiant, bold, sacrilegious,

presumptuous! How near the sacred person of Christ he came!
See how he invaded the sacred circle of His chosen apostles.
Judas falls from his high position—tempted, possessed by
Satan and filled with remorse and infamy, committing suicide,
and hell is his forever. Peter acts as the spokesman of the devil,
becomes the advocate of a non-cross bearing, non-self-
denying, worldly religion. He is so affected by the devil’s
power that he curses and swears and lies, and finds himself all
besmirched, bemired and befouled, from which he is only saved
by the prayers and look of Christ. John and James fell a prey to
the devil as they wanted fire to come down from heaven and
bum up the Samaritans. Christ sharply shows that they had not
His Spirit, but the other spirit, the spirit of the destroyer which
actuated them. Paul had his apostolic plans interfered with and
hindered by the devil. To the Thessalonians, he writes:
“Wherefore we would have come unto you, even I, Paul, once
and again; but Satan hindered us.” And he bore to his grave
the marks of the power of this inveterate foe to apostolic
fidelity.

The power of Satan is not supreme. It is limited. It was so in

Job’s case. Satan could go only so far to afflict. Since the Son
of God came into the world, the devil’s power has been
curtailed. The cross gave a shock to Satan and his power.
Death, his realm has been abolished, and “life and immortality
brought to light through the gospel.” His kingdom received its
death stroke on Calvary. The almighty forces of the Gospel are
laying hold of the mighty forces of Satan.
CHAPTER XI – The Devil and His Methods
Christ fought three notable battles with the Devil and
his demons. I am pleased to call them:

1st The Battle of the Wilderness.

2nd. The Battle of Gethsemane.
3rd. The Battle of Calvary.

In the battle of the wilderness, there were no seconds,

and no trench warfare; and in the open, Christ met the
three onslaughts of His wily adversary; three times His
enemy retreated. The first charge we call DISTRUST;
that is, Satan suggested: ”Leave off a life of
dependence on God; take things in your own hand and
make these stones bread.” Jesus drew the sword of the
Spirit up to the hilt in His adversary when He quoted
this passage, viz, “ Man shall not live by bread alone
but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of
God” (Matt. 4:4). — H. W. Hodge.

BOTH in the New Testament and in the Old, the devil is

represented as being most assiduous and tireless in his
activities and efforts. In Job, in answer to God’s inquiry,
“Whence comest thou?” he replies, “From going to and fro in
the earth, and from walking up and down in it.” The declaration
is one of rapid and extensive goings and of repeated and
careful observation. In Peter he is said to be “walking about as
a roaring lion.” Activity, scrutiny, power and purpose are in his
methods.

Thomas á Kempis says: “Know that the ancient enemy doth

strive by all means to hinder thy desire to be good and to keep
thee dear of all religious exercises. Many evil thoughts does he
suggest to thee, that so he may cause a weariness and horror
in thee, and to call thee back from prayer and holy reading.”

The careless and half-hearted Christian knows nothing of the

devil or his devices, but the souls astir for God and the good,
on a stretch for heaven, they are the ones who demand his
attention, provoke his ire and call forth his machinations.

Says that marvellous man of faith and power. Pastor Blumhart:

“He who is ignorant of the wiles and artifices of the enemy,
only beats the air, and the devil is not afraid of him.” Blumhart
himself is an illustration. “In interesting myself in behalf of one
possessed,” he says, “I became involved in such a fearful
conflict with the powers of darkness as is not possible for me
to describe.”

Christians may live and die all unaware of the devil’s being and
hate, and he may be as indifferent to their religion because they
are unharmful of his kingdom. But wherever one of the
Blumhart type lives, there is a big commotion and fear in
Satan’s realm.

Satan works by imitation. To make something as near like the

true as possible, and thereby break the force and value of the
genuine. This is one of his favourite methods. As Jannes and
Jambres withstood Moses by their false tricks, so is he
carrying on by lying wonders his work. As his apostles are
transformed into angels of light, so his wonders are looked on
as first class miracles. They do indeed discount true miracles.

What of the revelations of his person? God and Christ have

been revealed to men in bodily shape, by figure, by
representation. Matchless, majestic, beatific theophanies have
holy men seen of God. Has the devil power to clothe himself in
form and object to the eye? Can he incarnate himself? He
seems to have clothed himself in some visible shape at the
temptation of Christ The form is not recorded. Perhaps in that
of a man, doubtless a pious man, gathering in the assembly of
the righteous, or as a pious hermit in the seclusion and
retirement of the desert. In the days of Christ he revealed
himself by taking absolute possession and sway over the
person, and used other personalities through which to manifest
his being and power. His manifestations are disguises,
insidious and deceptive. Sometimes as “an angel of light,” with
the bloom, beauty, and spices of paradise on him. His person
unearthly in splendour, his voice gentle, musical, winning, with
no lines or traces of the fall.

The devil affects the body, and through the body affects
loyalty to Christ. Job was tried by his sickness. So the devil
tries us by sickness. In the days of Christ, he carried on a large
business by affecting the body, not simply by ordinary
diseases, but by what is termed, “possessed with a devil.” In
those cases his work was by breaking down the body in some
of its chief functions.

His method is to assume that shape which will suit his

purposes at the time. Doubtless there was something in the
shape or character of the serpent which gave him the readier
access to Eve. Garbed as an angel of light his appearance
commends him fully to the pure and unsuspecting. As a thorn
he desires to give only pain to those who, like Paul, cannot be
seduced nor swerved from the fixed course of fidelity. The
Christians at Smyrna he puts in prison that by that process he
may fetter their bodies whose souls he could not fetter. With
matchless cunning and unspeakable fidelity he plies his trade
to seduce and damn.

He has access to the minds of men from which he ought

forever to be barred. But he has so much of diabolical trickery
that he clothes the meanest act with the fairest guise, and
conceals a world of infamy with beautiful rainbow colourings.
He hoodwinked good David and provoked him to number
Israel in opposition to God’s will, and brought swift and fearful
judgment on the nation.

He readily snatches away from the mind the truth which is

superficially received. He also blinds the minds of them which
believe not and obstructs the light of saving truth. His process
of taking the word out of the heart to prevent faith, and of
blinding the mind to the beauties and light of salvation, is a
very common one with him.

He makes people sick for the same end as he did Job. He

entices men to do wrong, and inflames and urges them on to
evil. He keeps at it and eats no idle bread. He takes the Word of
God out of the untilled heart and sows tares among the wheat.
The devil goes out into the wilderness, finds us in a fainting,
discouraged condition, the pulsations of faith weak, its sky
cloudy and its vision misty. Then he shows us the world from
the loftiest peak of observation, apparelled in its most
attractive form, and tries to ensnare us by its bewildering
glories. He never tires in trying to ruin us till the coffin lid is on
our folded arms and closed eyes, and our happy spirits are
bathing in the land “where the wicked cease from troubling and
the weary are at rest.” With the wisdom of an archangel and
the observation and experience of half an eternity, as the
Captain General of all the hosts of hell, he is an adept in the
acts and arts of deception and trickery, and has almost
exhaustless resources at command to serve his purposes. A
wiser and more powerful spirit than Satan (save God) perhaps
does not live, a more malignant one than he could not be.
There is no greater worker than he. His inveterate industry and
tireless perseverance are the only things in him worthy of
imitation. There are in him the things that make him so patent
and so dreadful.

In the Parable of the Sower, we are taught the devil’s ability to

work on the mind, and take away the good impression there
made. “And those by the wayside are they that have heard;
then cometh the devil, and taketh away the word from their
heart, that they may not believe and be saved.” We are also
taught how the devil influences the mind to do the most
dastardly things, in the case of Judas, chosen as an apostle,
into high and holy fellowship, a royal vocation, a select
company. Satan had much to do in influencing Judas to the
great crime that brought him to despair and suicide, and to
immortal infamy in this world and hell in the next.

Satan’s thorn in the flesh changed Paul’s sorrow into joys, his
poverty into wealth, his weakness into strength, his reproaches
into sweet heavenly solaces. So mightily does God work to
make Satan’s all bad work together for good to the faithful
ones. As an old saint says, “ The devil is but a whetstone to
sharpen the faith and patience of the saints.” He may keep God
busy polishing the stones which he makes rough, but the
devil’s dirt makes their luster brighter, and they become
genuine diamonds of first water.

His methods are as varied as the men with whom he deals. The
devil knows man, and that which is much more, he knows men.

To Eve he came in the guise of a well-wisher, subtle,

serpentine, and deadly, behind the guise. He incites her to
disobedience by pointing her to higher heights of godlikeness,
along paths of sensual and animal enjoyment. A fearful charge
of the false and selfish is lodged in her mind against God. No
malignity is seen, no distress or anguish does he use. He
allures, deceives, ensnares.

How striking the contrast in his method with Job. A man, by

God’s own estimate, of divinest mould, “None like him in the
earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God and
escheweth evil.” What methods can he devise for this the
saintliest of the saints? He begins by accusing him to God as
selfish in his motives, reducing his piety to the worldly, selfish
and sinister. No alluring paths, no divergent flowery ways are
pointed out to Job, not a word is said to him. With not a
premonition, without a note of warning, as an awful surprise
and shock, at one fell and desolating blow, his family of ten
children are dead, his princely fortune gone, and one dark hour
has bereft him of family and fortune. Stripped naked by the
fearful rapidity and depth of his losses, he becomes homeless,
childless and friendless, in a grief inconsolable, and a pall of
mystery impenetrable and insoluble.

The integrity of Job, like a column blackened by the smoke, but

unrent and unshaken by the fiery ordeal, is still pursued by the
devil. Still he insinuates and charges the genuineness of Job’s
piety. He sees nothing of noble fidelity, of lofty loyalty in Job.
He still attributes low motives as the basis of his integrity. No
touch of sympathy, no relentings, with heartless cruelty and
malignity, he pursues his death-dealing work. Out of his
magazine of hellish enginery he comes with a loathsome
disease. He concenters on this one saint, woe after woe, and
affliction upon affliction, till his wife is alienated, his friends
estranged, his enemies triumphant. His hopeless, bitter grief
has not one ingredient to relieve, his pious reputation
blackening, his body tortured, his mind in agony. This is one
method of Satan’s to distress and defame those whom he
cannot seduce.
To the Son of God in the wilderness, he comes not as he did to
Job in lowering and seething storms of distress, but in the form
of apparent sympathy and friendliness. It may have been in the
guise of a saintly hermit in the wilderness. “If thou be the Son
of God”—you want this matter of your sonship to God settled,
and so do I. You are very hungry and faint. “Command that
these stones be made bread.” An innocent and a proper way to
settle at once a great question and to appease a great hunger.

Then he comes to Christ with the sanctity of the holiest place,

and affords Him an opportunity to attest before the wondering
and awe-struck worshippers His Messiahship, a shorter and a
better road tills to gain credence to His mission than the slow
and thankless process of daily teaching and daily ministering,
and marching to the cross with the dark shadows of its shame
and heaviness ever darkening His way.

Satan’s desperate venture was to seduce Him by the world’s

array of grandeur, power and glory. Satan plunged Job from
serene and cloudless, heavenly height down to a midnight,
starless and stormy. To the Son of God he would be a present
friend to save Him from pain, poverty, hunger, shame, toil and
death.
CHAPTER XII – The Devil and His Methods
(Continued)
The battle of Gethsemane opened on Thursday night in
an upper room in Jerusalem. It commenced by one
twelfth of Christ’s body guard being captured by a
bribe of twenty dollars. The real battle opened
Thursday evening near midnight He set Peter, James
and John on picket duty inside the garden in a stone’s
throw of His redoubt; the eight disciples He
commissioned as the outer watch. The battle of
Gethsemane was fierce when Jesus fell on His face and
prayed saying, “O, my Father, if it be possible, let this
cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will but as
thou wilt” Jesus then summoned His human
reinforcements, but alas, “Human sympathy is
comforting but helpless.” The second time amid legions
of Devils and the curse of a world’s sin, He sought His
body guard; the second time they were asleep. But
Jesus won. “And there appeared an angel unto him
from heaven, strengthening him.” The angel took Jesus
in his arms and wiped the death sweat and blood from
His face and comforted Him. This is one time it seems
He was made “A little lower than the angels.” The
second battle completed; the Devil defeated. —H. W.
Hodge.

The devil is rarely seen in his movements and methods. He has

rare tact in getting others to do his work and execute his plans.
His methods are to blind, to put a veil on the evil results and all
the sad consequences of sin. He so blinds that the evil cannot
be seen. So with the keen-eyed David, brave, true and dear-
eyed for God, yet Satan blinded him completely to the
treachery, infamy and murder in Uriah’s case. So sinners are
held by him in unbelief. He puts out their eyes to all the light
and glory of the Shining Sun of Righteousness. “In whom the
god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe
not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the
image of God, should shine unto them.”

The power of the devil extends to the mind. He can influence

the mind, insinuate thoughts, suggest purposes, excite the
imagination, inflame the passions, stir the appetites, kindle the
fleshy fires, awaken old habits, and fan old dead flames or light
new ones. The artless purity of Eve he beguiled. He entered
into the half traitorous Judas and possessed him fully, and
made his half-formed treason full and his treachery immortal in
its infancy. He was in the private council of Ananias and
Sapphira, a party of their fraud, and suggested their lying plan
to deceive the apostles. His access to the mind is evident in
that he snatches away the divine seed implanted by holy lips in
the soil of the heart as taught in the Parable of the Sower.

In Corinthians the devil is called “the god of this world.” “The

god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe
not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the
image of God, should shine into them.”

The devil uses this world as a veil to shut out the truth of God,
the light of His glorious Gospel, and to close the eyes of faith
to all the discoveries in the unseen and eternal.

The antagonism between the children of the world possessed

by Satan, and the children of God possessed by God, is set
forth by John. “Ye are of God, little children, and have
overcome them; because greater is he that is in you, than he
that is in the world. They are of the world; therefore speak they
of the world, and the world heareth them. We are of God; he
that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not
us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.”

Who is in us? God. Who is in the children of the world? The

devil. Our faith, our hope and our final triumph are in the truth
of the Word of God. “Greater is he that is in us than he that is
in the world.”

Satan perverts the things which are truly works of God and
misemploys miracles to obscure God’s glory.

The devil often tries to break the soul down and reduce it to
despair. He tells us to discourage us that we shall never
succeed. The way is too hard and narrow and the burden too
heavy.

He takes advantage of weak and distracted nerves, and

suggests fears. Grace is hid from the sight, shortcomings are
magnified and infirmities are classed as gross sins. Sometimes
the fear of death is used by Satan to quench the fire of faith,
and the grave becomes something awful. He darkens the
future. Heaven and God will be out of sight, hidden by a thick
veil of to-morrow’s cares, trials and needs. The imaginary
disasters, failures and evils of to-morrow are powerful weapons
in Satan’s hand. He suggests that the Lord is a hard master,
and that His promises will fail. He works on the remaining
corruption in the heart, and raises a great storm in the soul.

Samuel Rutherford says:—“Oh, if our faith could ride out

against the high and proud waves and winds when our sea
seemeth all on fire! Oh, how oft do I let my grips go. I am put to
swimming and half sinking. I find the devil hath the advantage
of the ground in this battle, for he fighteth in known ground in
our corruption. However matters go, it is our happiness to win
new grounds daily in Christ’s love, and to purchase a new
piece of it daily, and to add conquest to conquest, till our Lord
Jesus and we be so near each other that Satan shall not draw a
straw or a thread betwixt us.”

He tempts to evil tempers, to hasty words, to impatience and to

carnal reasoning, which is his powerfully in our minds. Back to
Christ. More of His Spirit-renewed and thorough self-
dedication, and in darting prayers upward by an uplifted eye
and heart—thus will we be able to resist and conquer the great
adversary of our souls.

One of the most intelligent and God-honoured among the

saintliest of saints wrote: “I have keen inward sufferings, what
are termed the buffetings of Satan. Horror at times has taken
hold of me. I felt much, but feared more.”
The devil may tempt us to think too meanly of ourselves as
Moses did, and too highly of ourselves as Peter did. In one
sense, we cannot think too meanly of ourselves, but in another
we can. He persuades us that we are so poor and weak we can
do nothing, and so we are weakened in faith and broken in
effort. But his master method is to fill us with self, self-
importance and self-ability, and then not only is faith
weakened, but destroyed. Our efforts and doings may increase
in number and vain show, but the seal of self and Satan are on
them all.

John Wesley notes: “I preached at eight on that delicate device

of Satan to destroy the whole religion of the heart. The telling
Christians not to regard frames or feelings, but to live by naked
faith, is in plain terms, not to regard either love, joy, peace or
any other fruit of the Spirit; not to regard whether they feel
them or the reverse; whether their souls be in a heavenly or
hellish frame. Satan’s method with some is to make them rely
too much on frames and feelings. With others he deals the
reverse and urges them to discard all frames and feelings.”

Many anxious errors sprang up with the rank growth in

Wesley’s day, and he pruned and trimmed with a master’s
hand. Naked faith is often nothing but a sapless, arid, fruitless,
unconscious thing, and brings an arid, fruitless, unconscious
salvation with it, if it brings salvation at all.

Whatever may be his method, how numberless his devices, the

words of his conqueror to us are these: “Behold, I give unto
you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the
power of the enemy; and nothing shall by any means hurt
you.” Of this text. Miss Havergal writes, “Why, this is grand—
power over all the power of the enemy. Just where he is
strongest there they shall prevail. Not over the very center of
his power, not over his power here and there, nor now and
then, but over all his power. And Jesus said. Is not that
enough to go into battle with?”

The devil’s brain is prolific in plans. He has many ways of

doing many things. Perhaps he has many ways of doing each
thing. With him nothing is stereotyped. He never runs in ruts.
Fruitful, diverse and ever fresh, is his way of doing things.
Indirect, disingenuous, insidious and graceful are his plans. He
acts by artifice and always by guile.

His plans by Bible statement are “wiles.” The original word

means to follow up or investigate by method and settled plan.
It is not a bad word but one of order, arrangement and
methods, conceived and executed. But when the word gets into
the devil’s hand it is defined by his dictionary. It receives a
strong tincture, a deep colouring of cunning and trickery.

Sometimes Satan comes disrobed of his heavenly garments, a

thorn, sharp and pointed and painful, a poisoned thorn, a thorn
that rankles and stays, a thorn that cannot be extracted by
prayer, which retrieves all other ills. The saints who have seen
most of heaven are often decreed to see most of hell. Saints
who have the fullest and most transporting revelation of God,
often have the saddest experience of Satan.
Paul’s thorn was as much to Paul as his abundance of
revelations. His thorn made him more a saint than his vision of
the third heavens. Satan only lifted him higher by keeping him
lower.

Satan may come to us in his own native character, the thorn

breeder and piercer. He may put in us thorns which no prayer
power can extract Thorns which will poison and pain, but the
thorn will enrich grace, increase and mature humility and make
infirmities strong and glorious. Satan’s thorns will clothe
necessities with richest attire, change distresses and
persecutions into divinest pleasures, make room for God’s
greatest power in us and on us, make the lowest point of
spiritual depression the highest point of vision, and make
strength out of weakness and wealth out of poverty.
CHAPTER XIII – Exposed Positions
The battle of Calvary: The conflict of Gethsemane
closed around the first hour of the fourth watch and the
last conflict began immediately in an offensive personal
encounter between one of the awakened body guard of
Jesus and a servant of Caiaphas. The battle went on
with heat and vigour when the High Priest asked Jesus,
“Art Thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” And
Jesus said, “I am and ye shall see the Son of Man
sitting on the right hand of power and coming in the
clouds of Heaven.” The cross is reached. Though
pressed on all sides by Hell, Death and Demons, He
provided for His mother. At 2:59 p. m, April 7th, He
seemed to have lost the battle and said, “Father into
Thy hands I commend my spirit. It is finished.” He
conquered Satan by seeming weakness. He gained the
battle of Calvary by a surrender of His life. This is
Scriptural. “Through death he deposed him who had
the power of death and delivered them who through
fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.”
—H. W. Hodge.

THERE are positions and conditions which lie open to the

attacks of Satan. These points must be guarded by sleepless
vigilance. The devil is a remorseless, cruel and mighty foe. To
watch him with unsleeping eye, is not only a duty, but safety
to life, deliverance from hell, certainty of heaven, all, and more,
if more there can be, are involved in overcoming the devil.
Stupidity, neglect, being off guard in the conflict, with Satan
are much more than mistakes or indiscretions. They are fatal
undoings, eternal and remediless losses.

The apostle places his Corinthian brethren on the vantage

ground in the war with the devil by declaring, “We are not
ignorant of Satan’s devices.” Ignorance is always an exposed
condition. Ignorance is open to attack and surprise by day and
by night To be ignorant of the existence, character and ways of
the devil, is the prelude and prophecy of fatal results in the
fight for heaven. If this be true, how hopeless is the case of
one who is not only ignorant of the temptations, but denies or
ignores the existence of the tempter. The devil’s great device,
his masterpiece of temptation, is to destroy faith in his own
existence. God’s struggle is to establish faith. The devil’s great
work is to eradicate all spiritual facts, principles and persons,
good or evil, God and devil. He who denies or ignores the
existence of the devil, puts a fatal bar to ultimate salvation,
paralyzes all efforts in that direction, and gives one over,
chained hand and foot, to the merciless foe whose existence
has been denied and derided. Nothing advances Satan’s work
with more skilful and readier hands than to be ignorant of Satan
and his ways. To escape his snare, we must not only have a
strong faith in the fact that Satan is, but also must have a most
intimate knowledge of him and of his plans and many-sided
ways.

Much akin to the foregoing exposed position is the one which

makes light of Satan. Frivolous views of him, his works, or his
character, light talk or dishonouring epithets in the line of
jesting—are all detrimental to any serious views of life’s great
work, its solemn engagements, its serious conflicts and its
weighty hindrances. Presumption, self-will and foolishness are
the characteristics of those who thus deal with these weighty
concernments. The existence and work of the devil is a serious
matter, and it is to be considered and dealt with from the most
serious standpoint, and none but serious people can deal with
it. And with this well accords the iterated and reiterated New
Testament exhortation and note of warning, “be sober.” That
which gives it point and arousing power is, “Be sober, for your
adversary, the devil,” etc.

How germane to this attitude is Jude’s nervous, incisive, and

almost rough handling of these sacrilegious characters, who
make light of sacred things and sacred persons.

“Likewise also, these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise

dominion, and speak evil of dignities. Yet Michael the
archangel, when contending with the devil, he disputed about
the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing
accusation, but said. The Lord rebuke thee. But these speak
evil of those things which they know not; but what they know
naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt
themselves.”

Peter takes the same class of flippant irreverent talkers to task

somewhat after the same manner, “Presumptuous are they, self-
willed, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities. Whereas
angels, which are greater in power and might, bring not railing
accusation against them before the Lord. But these, as natural
brute beasts made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the
things that they understand not, and shall utterly perish in
their own corruption; and shall receive the reward of
unrighteousness, as they that count it pleasure to riot in the
daytime. Spots they are and blemishes, sporting themselves
with their own deceivings while they feast with you.”

A paralyzing attitude, a staying to talk, a listening to Satan’s

insinuations, are all fatal. This was Eve’s mistake. His tongue is
smooth as oil, his words circulate and inflame like poison.
Bristling opposition, embattled for war, no inlets, no down
bars, no open gates, no low places; all fenced, and high, and
shut against the devil, is the only safety.

An unforgiving spirit invites Satanic possession. His favourite

realm is the spirit. To corrupt that, to incense or provoke to
retaliation, revenge or unmercifulness—that is his chosen work
and his most common and successful device. Paul puts it to the
front so as to thwart Satan: “To whom ye forgive anything, I
forgive also; for if I forgive anything, to whom I forgive it, for
your sakes forgive I it in the person of Christ; lest Satan should
get an advantage of us; for we are not ignorant of his devices.”

When he begets an unforgiving spirit in us, then he has us, we

are on his ground. Then wicked men and good men, all kinds of
men, are likely to do us harm, sometimes at vital and very
sensitive points. Sometimes all unconsciously they wrong us
and sometimes knowingly and willfully they wrong us. As
soon as a spirit of unkindness possesses us for the wrong
done, Satan has the upper hand.

We quote from the Revised Version the warning words of our

Saviour: “Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them
of old time. Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shall perform
into the Lord thine oaths. But I say unto you. Swear not at all;
neither by heaven, for it is God’s throne; nor by the earth, for it
is his footstool; neither by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the
great king. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou
canst not make one hair white or black. But let your
communication be, yea, yea; nay, nay; for whatsoever is more
than these cometh of the evil one.” The injunction is against
strong oaths in language. Expletives and appeals and
declarings added to our words all are wrong, and expose us to
the snare of Satan. “In the multitude of words,” says Proverbs,
“there wanteth not sin.”

Satan tempts us to asseverations and declarations to confirm

truth which destroy truth. Equivocal words and words by way
of substantiating the truth of those already spoken, expose us
to Satan’s power. “But above all things, my brethren, swear
not, neither by heaven, neither by the earth, neither by any
other oath; but let your yea, be yea; and your nay, nay; lest ye
fall into condemnation.” So St. James seals the words of Christ.
The devil lies concealed in many words. Simplicity, fewness
and seriousness of words, mightily hinder and thwart his
ensnaring plans.

It is so easy for the devil to stop us just a little short of a faith

that will save. There are many initials, prefaces, preludes and
introductions which are sometimes quite taxing, and are a right
good advance in the right direction, but which do not bring us
into the heart of the matter. Like Sarah they start with full intent
to go to Canaan, but stop at Haran and dwell there. Like Jacob,
Shechem stays their steps and holds them instead of Bethel.

On the other hand, even those who are earnestly striving after
that “holiness without which no man shall see the Lord,” Satan
tempts them to go a little too far and their zeal degenerates into
party spirit and unhallowed heat. “Strict earnestness
degenerates into severity, gentleness into weakness, energetic
activity into imprudent meddling and narrowness, calm
moderation into careless acquiescence, bold decision
maintaining its own convictions firmly becomes intolerant, self-
opinionated, narrow, arbitrary, bigoted. Due regard for the
peculiarities and convictions of others degenerates into
paralyzing indifference and skeptical indolence. Lively trust
lapses into presumption and haughtiness, a wise prudence into
cowardice and hesitating anxiety,” and confession and
profession degenerate into and evaporate into aridity. So Satan
watches and is alert always, and wary, to hold us back from the
goal, or to press us by an impetuous, unkindly or vehement
spirit to go beyond the goal. So all this uncovers often our
strongest positions and turns them into exposed conditions.

Yoking with unbelievers in the relationship of lifeties of

friendship and intimate and confiding associations with
unbelievers, are exposed positions of great peril, and of which
the devil takes instant and great advantage. Partnership in
business, or the more sacred relation of marriage with
unbelievers, is perilous to one united to Christ by close ties.

Satan is called Belial by the apostle, meaning worthlessness,

contemptibleness, wickedness. He and Christ cannot be joined
in agreement. No unequal yoking, no fellowship, no
communion, no concord, no agreement can exist. All is perilous
and mixed. Contamination and impurity result. A maimed
enfeebled holiness is the fruit of these voluntary close
yokings. Under the law, an ox and an ass could not be yoked
together. Under the Spirit, Christ and Satan can have no
concord. Separation, cleansing and perfected holiness are
necessary to secure the vantage ground against Satan. How
strong, minute, explicit, and comprehensive, is the charge here
given against union, communion or intimate association with
unbelievers. Unequally yoked, no pulling together, not equal,
no fellowship, no sharing, no communion, no intimacy, no
concord, no agreement, no part, no portion, no agreement, no
voting together. Commentators have found in this great variety
of expression, Paul’s fine command of the Greek language. We
find in it the fire of impassioned and profound convictions,
demanding the most self denying abstemiousness in forming
intimate and voluntary associations with the unbelieving world
in the way of business and pleasurable or social pursuits and
intimacies.

This rule he laid down in his first epistle to the Corinthians: “I

wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators.
Yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the
covetous, or extortioners, or with Idolaters; for then must ye
needs go out of the world. But now I have written unto you not
to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a
fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard,
or an extortioner; with such a one, no, not to eat.” Not the
casual, courteous Christian intercourse, was he objecting to
and barring, but the more intimate, voluntary and social.

St. James locates and defines and opposes these affinities and
attachments as not only “exposed positions,” but resulting in
the most radical and criminal violation of the holiest
relationship. I quote from the Revised Version: “Ye
adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is
enmity with God? Whosoever, therefore, would be a friend of
the world maketh himself an enemy of God.” By it the marriage
vow of God is broken.

Dean Alford, commenting on this passage, says, “Of the world,

it means men and men’s interest, ambitions and employments,
in so far as they are without God. The man who is taken out of
the world by Christ cannot again become the friend and
companion of worldly men and their schemes for self, without
passing into enmity with God. God and the world stand
opposed to one another, so that a man cannot join the one
without deserting the other. He, therefore, who is minded to be
the friend of the world, and sets his mind and thought and wish
that way, must make up his mind to be God’s enemy.”

“But must I not be intimate with my relations, and that whether

they fear God or not? Has not His providence recommended
these to me?” Undoubtedly it has, but there are relations nearer
or more distant. The nearest relations are husbands and wives.
As these have taken each other for better or worse, they must
make the best of each other, seeing as God has joined them
together, none can put them asunder, unless in case of
adultery, or when the life of one or the other is in imminent
danger. Parents are almost as nearly connected with their
children. You cannot part with them while they are young, it
being your duty to “train them up,” with all care, “in the way
wherein they should go.” How frequently you should converse
with them when they are grown up, is to be determined by
Christian prudence. This also will determine how long it is
expedient for children, if it be at their own choice, to remain
with their parents. In general, if they do not fear God, you
should leave them as soon as is convenient. As for all other
relations, even brothers or sisters, if they are of the world, you
are under no obligation to be intimate with them. You may be
civil and friendly at a distance.

But allowing that “ the friendship of the world is enmity against

God,” and consequently, that it is the most excellent way,
indeed the only way to heaven, to avoid all intimacy with
worldly men, yet, who has resolution to walk therein? who
even of those that love or fear God? Whatever it cost thee, flee
spiritual adultery! Have no friendship with the world. However
tempted thereto by profit or pleasure, contract no intimacy with
worldly-minded men. And if thou hast contracted any such
already, break it off without delay. Yea, if thy ungodly friend be
dear to thee as a right eye, or useful as a right hand, yet confer
not with flesh and blood, but pluck out the right eye, cut off
the right hand, and cast them from thee! It is not an indifferent
thing. Thy life is at stake; eternal life or eternal death. And is it
not better to go into life having one eye or one hand, than
having both, to be cast into hell-fire? However importuned or
tempted thereto, have no friendship with the world. Look
around, and see the melancholy effects it has produced among
your brethren! How many of the mighty have fallen by this
very thing! They would take no warning. They would
converse, and that intimately, with worldly-minded men, till
they “measured back their steps to earth again!” Oh, “come out
from among them!” from all unholy men, however harmless
they may appear, “and be ye separate,” at least, so far as to
have no intimacy with them. As your “fellowship is with the
Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ,” so let it be with those,
and those only, who at least seek the Lord Jesus Christ in
sincerity. So “shall ye be,” in a peculiar sense, “my sons and
my daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.”

How Satan surrounds us! How strongly he holds us! How he

entangles, enchains and fetters us by the worldly association!
We lie in the sweet friendship, the embraces and converse of
these worldly ones, while they with the whole world lie in the
arms of the wicked one.

If simplicity drops out of our faith, our fortications against

Satan are weakened. “I am jealous over you with godly
jealousy, for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may
present you as a chaste virgin to Christ But I fear, lest by any
means as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtility, so
your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in
Christ.” Here we have Satan recognized in the serpent and his
ability in allusion to fall in Eden and intimations that he is still
busy at his old tricky trade. Satan has such a dexterous and
successful hand at deception that Paul was uneasy. The lack of
simplicity would be fatal to their purity and faith, as the taste of
the forbidden fruit was fatal to Eve, to her purity and
obedience, and to paradise. The loss of a little thing, but with
it, all is lost.

An untrained body exposes readily to Satan’s assaults. Even

the natural, innocent appetites and passions have to be held in
with bit and bridle. An apostle was aware of this: “But I keep
under my body, and bring it into subjection, lest that by any
means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a
castaway.” An undisciplined body would hurl Paul from the
apostolic heights down to the fearful abyss of apostasy. Two
statements are made as to his body. “Keep under” and “bring it
into subjection.” The first means that part of the face under the
eyes. A blow on that part of the face, a black and blue spot by
the bruise of a heavy blow, restrained and suppressed by
heavy blows, and its native power is broken.

The second statement means to make a slave of, to treat with

severity, to subject to stern and rigid discipline. The apostle
sets forth the body as an important fact in the contest for
heaven, and teaches us that if it be untrained, without the
strong repressing, moulding hand of discipline, it becomes an
easy prey to the assaults of Satan.

After the same order is the direction of Peter, “Be sober, be

vigilant; because your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion,
walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. Whom resist
steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are
accomplished in your brethren that are in the world.” A listless,
drowsy, sleepy, stupid state, gives us into Satan’s power
without a struggle or even a surrender, or the decency of a
parley.

To the same end is the strong injunction of Christ to the

drowsy and fainting disciples, “Watch and pray, that ye enter
not into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is
weak.”
CHAPTER XIV – Exposed Positions
(Continued)
My soul, be on thy guard;
Ten thousand foes arise,
The hosts of sin are pressing hard
To draw thee from the skies.
O watch, and fight, and pray;
The battle ne’er give o’er;
Renew it boldly every day,
And help divine implore.

We have two statements in first Timothy of serious import in

regard to the appointing of men to active and official leadership
in the Church. The first is against appointing novices to such
leadership, “Not a novice, lest being lifted up with pride, he fall
into the condemnation of the devil.” To press young converts
to the front, to put immature ones into spiritual leadership, is to
blind and puff with pride. It is to put the young convert in an
exposed place, where he readily falls into the condemnation,
into which the devil fell through the blinding effects of pride.
This is a text, which by its reminiscential reference, is of much
value, giving, as it does, credence to the Church’s almost
universally received opinion, that the devil fell through pride,
its aspiring and blinding and blasting effects. Let the novitiates
be hardened and matured by discipline ere they are put to the
front. Staying behind is often a greater cross, as well as a
greater virtue, than pushing or being pushed to the front. It is
always an unsafe place for faith till faith has its beard or grows
its spurs.

Men of questionable reputation placed in church leadership or

official position, bring reproach and help the devil much in his
disgraceful business. “Moreover he must have a good report
of them which are without, lest he fall into reproach and the
snare of the devil.” Men of good character and spotless
reputation in the lead of church affairs, closes Satan’s mouth,
cuts off his revenue, and brings his business low. The
violation of these two rules in church control, novices in lead
and men whose reputation is not spotless as leaders, puts the
novices in bad case, and increases the bad odour of the leaders
of questionable repute. The entire Church is also put in an
exposed condition, imperiling the whole army. Leaders are
standard bearers, conspicuous. They ought to be conspicuous
in spotless piety. They ought to be mature in age, sound and
advanced in faith and love and sobriety. Gifted, wise, sober,
grave, blameless leaders, will make the Church strong and
victorious in the day of battle.

Novices in leadership is an exposed condition. Put novices to

the rear till sheltered and trained.

Bad reputation is a treacherous or cowardly leadership for

God’s army.

Young widowhood in sable sadness is an exposed condition.

No widower has as keen an eye to invade the sanctities of
widowed grief as Satan. Paul writes plainly. He knew the
hidden gins of Satan. He writes broadly, tenderly, honestly,
with discrimination: “Honour widows that are widows indeed.
But if any widow have children or nephews, let them learn first
to shew piety at home, and to requite their parents, for that is
good and acceptable before God. Now she that is a widow
indeed, and desolate, trusteth in God, and continueth in
supplications and prayers night and day. But she that liveth in
pleasure, is dead while she liveth. But the young widows
refuse: for when they have begun to wax wanton against
Christ, they will marry, having damnation, because they have
cast off their first faith. And withal they learn to be idle,
wandering about from house to house; and not only idle, but
tattlers also and busybodies, speaking things which they
ought not. I will, therefore, that the younger widows marry,
bear children, guide the house, give none occasion to the
adversary to speak reproachfully. For some are already turned
aside after Satan.”

This salutary advice relieves the sorrow of the young woman,

and puts her where her heart and hands are full of sweet and
sacred responsibilities, and nerve, and time, and heart are full
of taxing toil. Satan has a hard job to work on a person thus
filled fully in heart and hands with holy toil, rearing the home
and state and Church of the future.

There are in man what the Scriptures term lust, strong natural
desires. They are called “lusts of the flesh,” “lusts of the eye,”
“worldly lusts,” the “lusts of men.” There are things of time
and sense which the heart naturally craves after and clamours
for. They form the basis of temptation within. A wily and
powerful seducer may tempt and lead innocence and purity
astray when there is no inward response to his allurements, but
these lusts or desires within form the basis and afford the
groundwork for Satan’s insidious temptations. St. James
describes the whole process: “Let no man say when he is
tempted, I am tempted of God, for God cannot be tempted with
evil, neither tempteth he any man. But every man is tempted,
when he is drawn away of his own lusts, and enticed. Then
when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin; and sin, when it
is finished, bringeth forth death.” The term “drawn away”
means to “lure forth.” The metaphor is from hunting or fishing.
As game is lured from its many ranges, so man by lust is
allured from the safety of self-restraint to sin. The word
“enticed” means a bait, to catch by bait.

The Scriptures demand that these lusts or desires be banned

and reprobated.

We see how Satan and the world are in these lusts. The Gospel
is a training school in which these lusts are to be denied. “For
the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all
men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts,
we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present
world.” The solemn declaration is made without qualification or
deception, a declarative carrying the force of an imperative
demand and also that of a condition, “And they that are
Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts.”
The whole work of Christ is presented as an engaging and
exciting pattern for us to copy in destroying these lusts, “For
as much then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm
yourselves likewise with the same mind; for he that hath
suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin; that he no longer
should live the rest of his time in the flesh to the lusts of men,
but to the will of God.”

We are taught that these lusts are put in opposition to the will
of God. They cannot be yielded to and obey God. No man can
serve these two masters. These lusts are the basis and sources
of corruption. They war against the soul. We are to “put off
concerning the former conversation the old man, which is
corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; and be renewed in the
spirit of your mind, that ye put on the new man, which after
God is created in righteousness and true holiness.”

The war with Satan is much concerned about these lusts.

These lustings after the things of time and sense are not
wholly destroyed when we are converted to Christ. They are
broken in power, enfeebled more or less, but the remains, the
roots of these, are there. Like a tree in life, cut down at its
stump, they throw up many shoots. If we allow these shoots to
remain they will keep Satan in his work.

They who are content to leave the remains of these lusts in

them will be hampered by internal conditions. To allow sin or
the tendency to sin to remain in us, is as fatal as the leaving of
the remains of the original natives in the land of Canaan was
fatal to the piety, peace and prosperity of Israel. God’s
command to Israel was that those nations were to be destroyed
completely so as to leave neither root nor branch. Israel’s
failure to do this was the source of untold evil to them.
Exposed conditions these remaining lusts are, as much so as
the remains of a decayed and broken tooth are the exposed
conditions of toothache or neuralgia. So we are charged, “For if
ye live after the flesh ye shall die; but if ye through the Spirit
do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.”

In another text we have these words: “They that are Christ’s

have crucified the flesh, with its affections and lusts.” “Lust” is
the larger word in Scripture, including the whole world of active
lusts and desires. The “affections” is not so much the soul’s
disease in its more active operations, as the diseased
conditions out of which these spring. The lusts spring from the
passions and are nourished by them. They deserve the same
punishment as the flesh. All, the flesh, the lusts, and
affections, are crucified. This puts the Christian in the best
fortified condition to resist the attacks of the devil. With these
lusts remaining, he is but half armed and wholly exposed.

Low aims in the spiritual life, satisfaction and quiescence in

present conditions and attainments, is exposed condition. The
devil may visit the highlands and mountain ranges of spiritual
elevation, but he makes his home in the lowlands. He will attack
the strongest, maturest giant form of piety, but he works his
havoc and gains his spoils where the Christian slumbers in the
cradle of spiritual babyhood. There is no safety but in high
aims, strenuous effort and constant advance.

It is on the field of low aims and satisfied results, that the devil
wins his chief victories. A spiritual growth, constant and sure
spiritual development, is the surest safeguard against Satan’s
wiles, assaults and surprises. Constant growth is all eyes and
all strength. Satan never finds it asleep, drowsy nor weak.
Onward, upward, is the great battle cry. Constant advance is
the steel armour in the fight with the devil.

Israel lost Canaan by not possessing Canaan. Satan has all the
vantage ground when we do not maintain the aggressive.

When the Bible sounded the clarion call, “Let us go on unto

perfection,” it was seeking to arouse a Church which had lost
immensely in the vigour, manliness and fighting ability of
Christian character by feeding on milk, and indulging in the
lazy luxury of being children. It raises a standard and marks a
point for them to gain. The point is far ahead, but it is a real
point, as real as the point at which their steps had been stayed
by a ruinous stay. They are called out of the cradle and away
from the nursery to the strength, conflicts and perfection of a
royal manhood.

The eulogy on Wesley by a great writer of being “ the first of

theological statesmen,” pays him no high compliment; but his
spiritual perception, the man of open, divine vision, is his
highest eulogy, and this is evidenced by the fact that he re-
echoed the trumpet call of the Bible, and sounded it on every
key and in every refrain, and sought to stir into a forward
movement the Church, and quicken its members to seek an
advanced position, which had not only dropped out of their
experience, but out of their hopes and creeds. God gives
religion in its beginnings, and these beginnings are glorious;
but to be content with the beginnings of religion, is to forfeit
not only its possibilities, but is to leave us opened, naked to
Satan, a prey to his schemes. Additions to our spiritual capital
are the conditions of solvency, and of the retaining of the
capital, and is a victory over the devil as well. To stand still in
religion is to lose it. To enter into camp at regeneration, is to
forfeit regenerating grace. To stop at any other transitional
advance station, is to go backward. The weakness of men is
inconstancy to a great aim. The drafts of a long and exhaustive
strain are intolerable. We are willing to pay the cost of nerves
for a great temporal success, but the price is too dear for
religious success. The tendency in religion is to be satisfied
with rudiments and to die in infancy. Teething time is a perilous
time for spiritual babes. The great sin of the Israelites was
hugging the shores and not going up to possess the land. The
marvellous glory of their entrance into Canaan paled in the
lethargy and timidity of their after advance.

A stopping, standing still, a non-growing, non-fighting

condition, is a position fully exposed to Satan. Many run well,
fight well, but at some point their running and fighting cease.
At once spiritual development is arrested and the devil moves
at once to an easy victory. This spiritual arrest may be at the
initial steps or stages of spiritual life. The raptures and triumph
of the first stages may arrest advance and cause a standstill
while the cradle is not out of sight, and the steps are unsteady
by baby toddling. It is true that Paul calls the Corinthian saints
baby saints, but this was the point where their saintship turned
back to carnality and lost its odour, sanctity and strength.
Their great sin and backslidings were found in their babyhood,
not that they began as babes, but that they stayed babes.
Baby sainthood is the popular sainthood of these days. To
begin as babes is well, but to remain babes forty years is a
fearful deformity.

It would be well for us if spiritual arrest belonged only to the

high regions of spiritual advance. While not a few, doubtless,
of those who have received a great spiritual baptism after the
grace of conversion, have crystallized around this point of
advance, the far greater number of people and preachers have
crystallized around the initials of grace. We may have some
specimens of Christian mummies who in size approach to
maturity, but the number of the dwarfed and cradled ones is
legion.

Spiritual arrest is not confined though to the initial steps. Its

life-blood may chill and its step halt at the point of highest
advance. Many Christians are so enthusiastic over some
marked advance, some higher elevation gained, that they
become enchanted with the beautiful and lofty regions, and are
lulled to sleep, and, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim, lose their roll, and
are all unconscious of their loss; and instead of pressing on
with tireless steps, they but cover the future with their
imaginations, and while their fancies are filled with the rich
colourings of their advanced position, their feet have declined
and are in the vale again. They are so happy that it is almost
impossible to bring them to their senses, and make them
understand that there is many a weary and toilsome step
between their Red Sea deliverance and the Promised Land, and
that even after the desert is crossed, and the Jordan divided,
and the sanctified soil of Canaan pressed by sanctified feet,
there is many a battle to be fought, and many an enemy to be
destroyed before the goodly land is all possessed. A singing
and shouting sanctification is good, but if it is not joined with a
marching and fighting sanctification, it will sing and shout
itself as thin as a ghost and as dry as a chuck. “Forgetting
those things which are behind and reaching forth to those
things that are before,” is the divine process to hold what we
have by getting more. Paul’s marvellous career was simple, not
complex. He sums it up in fighting, running, watching, the three
elements of continuous advance. Many a great battle has been
lost by the demoralizing effects of the halt caused by a partial
victory in the earlier part of the conflict It is no easy matter to
keep place and march in rank when the spoils of a half-gained
victory cover the ground. There is no position this side of
heaven free from the dangers of spiritual arrest and secure from
the devil’s attacks. The conflict and vigilance of advance must
mark every step till our feet are within the pearly gates.

A non-growing piety, with an arrested spiritual development,

whether the arrest is in the initial stages or at the more
advanced steps, is always and everywhere an exposed
position, always vulnerable to Satan’s attacks.
CHAPTER XV – Our Defense Against the
Devil
Bid me of men beware,
And to my ways take heed,
Discern their every secret snare,
And circumspectly tread:
O may I calmly wait
Thy succours from above,
And stand against their open hate,
And well-dissembled love!

He that with Christian armour manfully fights against

and repels the temptations and assaults of his spiritual
enemies, and he that keeps his conscience void of
offense, shall enjoy peace here and forever. —Ray.

Fill up and crowd out. Leave no room for the devil. Be too busy
for him. Have no time and no place for him. Vacant places invite
him. The devil loves a vacuum. A very busy person himself, he
does his biggest business with those who have no business.
The apostle in writing to the Ephesians gives this direction,
“Neither give place to the devil.” Leave no opening, no space
for him. Keep him out by prepossession. Keep him out, nose,
head, and all. “Give him an inch he will take an ell.”

“Give no place to the devil.” The apostle is writing of wrath,

which is wicked, by which we give full scope to the devil. He
comes into power and has full sway when we relinquish
ourselves to the Indulgence and continuance of evil passion.
Our bad passions are the regions where Satan finds his
favourite field and largest sphere of operation. Suppress evil,
every tendency to indignation, bitterness and wrath. Suppress
and purge out every heated impulse, every unholy flame, every
stirring that is not of God. The devil’s occupation will then be
gone, when gentleness and benignity reign in the spirit.

“Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” This is James curt
directory for getting rid of the devil. Resist means to set one’s
self against, to withstand. Yield him nothing at any point, but
oppose him at every point. Be always against him, belonging
ever to the party of the opposition as far as his plans,
suggestions and ways are concerned. Bravely and strongly to
resist what the devil proposes is half victory. To hesitate is to
lose. To parley is to yield, to give an inch is the surrender of
the whole ground. Firmness, decision and opposition, these
the devil cannot stand. He is easily defeated if we are decided
and uncompromising. Loyalty to God is rout and ruin to Satan.

We are taught the same simple all important lesson in Peter,

with an addition: “Be sober, be vigilant, because your
adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking
whom he may devour; Whom resist steadfast in the faith,
knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your
brethren that are in the world.” The first part of the direction
has reference to the elements of personal character. What we
are, is of prime consideration in this conflict with the devil.
Strong, good character is thrice armed. Character tells in all
relations, duties and trials, but nowhere is character more
telling in its gracious results than in our encounters with Satan.

Sober, calm and collected, free from passion or intemperance,

that cannot be clouded or bewildered; always against spiritual
dangers and beguilements; vigilant, cautious and active; never
to be surprised nor overcome through unwatchfulness or
indolence; aroused and wakeful, because of the full
apprehension of the presence of an all powerful, all malignant,
all cruel foe. This is our strong defense. Here we have James
directing us to “resist,” to set one’s self against the devil, with
will and thought, with conscience and heart, with might and
main; rigid and firm, in the faith of God; the Word of God held
strictly, strongly and rigidly; the truth of God inflexibly held to
make one invincible to the devil, yielding to no assault of his,
succumbing to no toil, fainting under no affliction, knowing
that these trials have been the portion of God’s saints in all
ages, and by this warfare with the devil we are perfected,
stablished, strengthened and settled. “Be sober,” says the
apostle, for your adversary, the devil, walketh about. This calm,
self-collected condition, free from passion, and with the full
mastery of all our powers, is one of the elements of successful
resistance to Satan. A passionate man is a weak man. A cool
head and a calm heart are the conditions of successful contest
with the devil. The apostle adds to this sobriety and vigilance.
“Be vigilant,” he says, watch, give strict attention, be cautious,
be active. Vigilance awakens, sobriety arouses and gives
fullest strength.
The Apostle James, in his frank, practical, earnest way, says:
“Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” Resist means to
set yourself against, to have no parley with, make no
concession to, meet the devil only to fight him, talk with him
only to withstand him. “Whom resist,” says Peter, “steadfast in
the faith.” That is, be solid, firm, rigid in the faith. Be stalwart in
orthodoxy, for heterodoxy has no devil, or only a very amiable
and young one, and makes no fight against him.

The spirit of forgiveness always maintained and constantly

exercised is a supreme defense against the attacks of Satan. An
unforgiving spirit is not only Satan’s widest door into our
hearts, but it is the strongest imitation and warmest welcome.
St. Paul not only urges a spirit of forgiveness as a bar to the
devil’s ingress, but hastens to close the door by his own
readiness to forgive even in advance. “To whom ye forgive
anything, I forgive also; for if I forgave anything, to whom I
forgave it, for your sakes forgave I it in the person of Christ.
Lest Satan should get an advantage of us; for we are not
ignorant of his devices.” A lofty spirit, ready and compliant
with the spirit of forgiveness, free from all bitterness, revenge
or retaliation, has freed itself from the conditions which invite
Satan, and has effectually locked and barred his entrance. The
readiest way to keep Satan out is to keep the spirit of
forgiveness in. The devil is never deeper in hell nor farther
removed from us than when we can pray, “Father, forgive
them; they know not what they do.”

The devil is to be overcome. He is not only a hypocrite, full of

quiet, slippery and artful ways, but he is a man of war, a warrior
of renown of many a campaign and many a battle-field. It is not
all poetry nor myth that his valour and prowess were tested in
heaven. Angels were his foemen there, heaven the scene of his
conflict and his defeat, and still he fights. It takes strong young
blood with its fire and valour to meet him and conquer.

The devil must be defeated. Victory over him is victory all

along the line. It takes strength and valour to overcome him. He
is no baby foe, no disheartened enemy. The ardour and valour
of a manly faith is requisite in this battle. The Word of God is
the conquering sword in this warfare. He who has his quiver
full of these divine arrows, swift, strong, penetrating and
deadly to Satan and to sin, will be more than conqueror over
the devil. The weapon used by the Son of God in His conflict
with Satan was the Word of God, and by it He conquered.

“I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong,

and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the
wicked one.” The John of love, nearest the heart and deepest
in the Spirit of his Lord, is full of this victory. John’s love was
too genuine to evaporate itself into sickly sentiment, or
evaporate the devil into a mere influence. His experience was
too profound, his memory too quick and retentive for an
impersonal devil or an impersonal Christ. He had the scars of
the battles with the adversary of his soul. He had witnessed
the conflicts of many a young soldier. His soul had shared in
their triumph and recorded their victories. Fight the devil and
overcome him, is John’s process of becoming fathers in
spiritual power, rooted, grounded and perfected. Overcoming
the devil, is with John the presage of overcoming the world.

The mighty new-birth principle makes a man watchful like a

sentinel at his post, when the enemy in power is massed in the
front, like a watchman on the walls of a beleaguered city and
like a guard over a royal prisoner. This keeping and guarding
himself, is safety against Satan’s inflaming touch. As with his
Lord, so the faithful, vigilant Christian keeps himself, and Satan
comes and finds nothing in him. Every point is barred and
sleeplessly watched. “We know that whatsoever is born of
God sinneth not; but he that is begotten of God keepeth
himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not. And we know
that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in the evil one.”
“Keeping ourselves” is the surest pledge that Satan will not
keep us. Hands on ourselves in holy vigilance keeps Satan’s
hands off. The martyr spirits who are faithful unto death, who
love not their lives unto death, are victors in this warfare with
the devil: “And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is
come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and
the power of his Christ; for the accuser of our brethren is cast
down, which accused them before our God day and night. And
they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word
of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the
death.” The blood of the everlasting covenant must be
sprinkled on the warriors who are victors against Satan. A clear
conscious experience of the saving power of that blood and an
ability to be a martyr-witness before any company at any cost
mark their devotion to Christ and their experience of His
salvation. “He is mine and I am his.”

Satan cannot stand an exposition of the blood of Christ. He

turns pale at every view of Calvary. The flowing wounds are
the signals of his retreat. A heart sprinkled with the blood is
holy ground, on which he not only dares not tread, but he
dreads and trembles and cowers in the presence of the blood-
besprinkled warrior.

A clear-ringing word of testimony as to the power of that

blood, he fears more than the attack of a legion of archangels.
It is like the charge of an irresistible phalanx which bears
everything down before it. It is the blood applied and the
testimony to its application, the martyr witness in life and by
tongue of the power of that blood is more a barrier against
Satan than a wall of fire. The atoning blood, an experience of
that blood—that is heaven’s infallible protection against Satan.
They in heaven thus overcame the devil. We also “overcome
him by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony.”

No sorrow is so pathetic as the sorrow of young widowhood,

which is an exposed sorrow, as we have seen, to Satan’s
attacks. Paul’s direction puts them on the defensive and
guards them against the insidious attacks of the enemy, I quote
from the Revised Version: “I will therefore that the young
widows marry, bear children, guide the house, give none
occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully. For some are
already turned aside after Satan.” No defense is more secure
against Satan than a life crowned and crowded with sweetest
duties all so fully discharged as to give no occasion to the
devil to speak reproachfully.

The devil’s work is much helped or much hindered by the spirit

of the servants of Christ. Gentleness becomes the servants of
Christ not only as a beautiful adorning, but as the comer
foundation stone. Meekness and gentleness win men, for they
form the Christly character. Sharpness, impatience and
contention are no spiritual propaganda, neither are they good
recruiting officers for Christ. “And the servant of the Lord must
not strive, but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient; in
meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God
peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging
of the truth. And that they may recover themselves out of the
snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will.” A
very passionate preacher is long-suffering doctrine.

“Watch” is the keynote of safety. The devil plies us by a

thousand instruments, comes to us in a thousand ways,
administers a thousand rebukes, and assaults by a thousand
surprises. Wakefulness at all times is our only safety, wide-
awake not only when we see his form and fear his presence,
but wide-awake to see him when he is not to be seen, to repel
him when he comes in any one of his ten thousand guises or
disguises—this is our wise and safe course.

No alarm cry is so frequent in the New Testament as the call to

watch. No call hurts Satan so vitally and none defeats him so
readily and so totally as to watch. Being on the watch tower
prevents all surprises, and is the presage of victory at all times.
The Son of God makes it the keynote to many a solemn saying.
It is a call to be sleepless, to vigilance, to be ready, always
ready. It is an image drawn from shepherds, in which we have
Jacob’s indignant defense and protest against Laban: “In the
day the drought consumed me and the frost by night and sleep
departed from mine eyes.” To watch is to be opposed to all
listlessness, a wakeful state, sleep gone. It implies a wakeful
state, as the rousing effort in the presence of some great peril,
cautious, wary, a state untouched by any slumbering or
beclouding influence. Drowsiness and bewilderment are gone.
It quickens us against laziness and spiritual sloth.

Read how the church at Sardis is called to the exercise of

watchfulness, because she was stupefied by the opiates of a
fair exterior and a goodly religious frame. The Ephesian Church
is charged to unite watching with persevering prayer. The
Corinthian Church is urged to watch and stand fast. The
Colossians are exhorted to “continue in prayer and watch in
the same.” The Thessalonians are to “watch and be sober.”
Timothy, the young preacher, was to “ watch in all things.”
Peter’s call is “to be sober, and watch unto prayer,” because
the solemn end of all things was hastening. Again he says: “Be
sober; be vigilant; because your adversary, the devil, as a
roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he might devour.” In
Revelation we have the startling call, “Behold I come as a thief.
Blessed is he that watcheth and keepeth his garments, lest he
walk naked, and they see his shame.”

The most frequent call to watchfulness is from our Lord.

“Watch, therefore,” He says, “for ye know not what hour your
Lord doth come.”’ Again He calls us to the exercise of this
great grace, “Watch, therefore, for ye know neither the day nor
the hour the Son of Man cometh.” Again and again does He
call us “to watch ye therefore.” The herald cry, the trumpet call
from Him to us, is to be awake, to be fully awake, to be
tremendously awake. “Watch ye, therefore, and pray always,
that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things
that shall come to pass and to stand before the Son of Man.”
“Watch and pray,” He charged His disciples, and so He
charges us to “Watch and pray, that ye enter not into
temptation; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
Still the flesh is weak, and watchfulness must ever be united
with prayer while we are in the flesh.
CHAPTER XVI – Our Defense Against the
Devil (Continued)
Soldiers of Christ arise,
And put your armour on,
Strong in the strength which God supplies
Through His eternal Son;
Strong in the Lord of Hosts,
And in His mighty power,
Who in the strength of Jesus trusts,
Is more than conqueror.
Stand then in His great might,
With all His strength endued;
But take, to arm you for the fight,
The panoply of God;
That having all things done,
And all your conflicts past,
Ye may o’ercome through Christ alone,
And stand entire at last.

How many prayers have missed the mark and been in vain
because not mixed with wary vigilance. How many sad failures
in Christian life because watchfulness failed. The devil has no
readier prey than a sleepy Christian. Bunyan’s Christian lost
his roll when he fell asleep. Many Christians, not in allegory,
but in fact, have lost their souls by the same failure. Eternal
vigilance is the price of political liberty. No less a price must be
paid for our spiritual safety. The foolish virgins missed heaven
because they failed in this grace. Watchfulness would have
brought them with the Bridegroom into the high joys of
heaven’s festal hour.

In the sixth chapter of Ephesians, we have the whole warfare

with the devil and his legions, and the sources of defense and
victory:

“Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power

of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be
able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not
against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against
powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against
spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore, take unto you
the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in
the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand, therefore,
having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the
breastplate of righteousness; and your feet shod with the
preparation of the gospel of peace. Above all, taking the shield
of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts
of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword
of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. Praying always with all
prayer and supplication in the Spirit and watching thereunto
with all perseverance and supplication for all saints. And for
me that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my
mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the gospel. For
which I am an ambassador in bonds; that therein I may speak
boldly, as I ought to speak.” In this passage we have a view of
the strenuous conflict and of the battle-field on which the
issues of eternity are tossed.
The Christian’s battle is with the devil and his wiles or
methods. His struggle is arranged with order, wisdom and skill.
Principalities and powers are under his management and
subject to his orders, they, the first and the highest, the first in
creation and the highest in dignity. They are his lieutenants,
his prime ministers, his captain generals, to carry out his orders
and represent him fully. They are the world rulers, world-wide,
world-powerful. They master and control all the evil forces of
the world. The devil and his higher confederates are world-
rulers. Their might is coextensive with the world. A mighty
sway is theirs, a fearful rule for evil, against the good and
against man. Their subordinates, the rank and file, are
innumerable and invincible, save to a God-equipped man. What
a vast and powerful array of enemies are there, aggressive,
malignant and cruel. They are high or in heavenly places, the
very place where Christ’s power is located. This power is over
us, above us and around us. They are too mighty for us.
Against this invisible, innumerable, all-powerful and vast array,
we wrestle. A dose conflict is wrestling. An intense and
arduous conflict it is, strenuous, which tests all strength and
strains every fiber. It is hand to hand, foot to foot, close
contact, a grappling. It is not with men, though men may give
us much opposition in our Christian course. But our chief
trouble, our main trouble, our great war, is not with man but
with all the mighty evil forces of the devil. A life and death
struggle it is, a war for heaven and hell, for time and eternity.

The Christian must be a soldier by birth, by fortune, by trade.

The best elements of a divine soldiership must be his, “not
entangled with the affairs of this life.” Princely in the elements
and measure of self-denial, courage and endurance, are the
engraved characteristics of this soldierhood. Strength is the
fruit of these high qualities. But strength far beyond his own
strength. “Strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might.”
For the preparation for this war the Christian soldier must go
out of himself. The strength of God, the very strength of God’s
almightiness, must be his. The ability to stand, to fight, to
conquer and to drive the foe from the field, will be found in
God’s armour. God’s strength is imparted through God’s
armour. No power short of God can enable us to meet the devil.
No partial equipment will suffice. We are charged twice to make
it doubly sure to take the whole armour. We take God by taking
His armour. We have God by having put the armour on us.
Make His armour our own. We put on God by putting on His
armour. Not outside but inside, not objective but subjective,
not imputed only, but inwrought. Christ made the armour, the
Holy Spirit fits and puts it on us, and makes it ours. We have to
fight through to the end and drive the foe and hold the battle-
field, and having done all, to stand. First withstand, and then
stand. We gain and hold, and then advance. Stand ready for
the fight, stand in the fight.

Strong and valorous for the truth, in the inward parts; no sham
soldier, no sham fighting. All is real and true. Being truthful, a
girded soldier, strong and tucked up and narrowed to the
intensest and deepest form of truth, his girdle the truth, for
truth is the band, the ornament of a jewelled girdle, a diamond
set in gold. We must conquer the devil by truth as the strength
and support of our lives. We know the truth and have the
truth, for we have Christ who is the truth.

“The breastplate of righteousness.” Heart righteousness

makes head righteousness and life righteousness. We cannot
fight without heart righteousness. The “breastplate of
righteousness” protects the heart and makes us feel right. The
old heart cannot be made right by the most skillful artificer nor
by the most correct doing. No tinkering on the old heart can
make it right. It is as hard as a stone and crooked as the Jordan,
and no melting can make it soft and no human effort can make
it straight A new heart soft as flesh and washed whiter than
snow in the blood of Christ, a copy and a piece of Christ’s
heart, “perfect, and right, and pure, and good”—this is what is
needed.

The feet must be shod with a preparation which is always

ready to go, to do and to suffer. Slow movements, a dilatory
doing of God’s will, being off guard, a general unreadiness for
life or death, for earth or heaven, for sacrifice or service, for
doing or for suffering, cuts the nerves of Christian valour and
lays us open to surprises and crushing defeats. Always ready
is the soldier attitude of safety, and ready to move presages
victory. Flying columns are Satan’s most dreaded foes.
Wakeful vigilance is assured victory against the devil.

The “shield of faith” is the all-important and the all-covering

article of armour. The devil lets fly his fiery, poisoned darts, but
faith catches them as they are directed to head or heart, and
arrests and quenches them. Dost thou believe all victories are
possible to the soldier, valiant and strong in faith? No battle
was ever planned by hell’s most gifted strategist which can
conquer faith. All its inflamed and terrible darts fall harmless as
they strike against the shield of faith. “These all died in faith.”
Faith made their death the crowning point. Faith brought to
their dying hour the spoils of their victories.

“The helmet” protects the head. Bear In mind that head-

salvation and heart-salvation, real and full, are stronger than
brass to protect the head. A heart fully saved holds the head to
truth and righteousness, like the anchor holds the ship in
stormiest seas. “The hope of salvation,” says Paul in
Thessalonians, is the helmet. The Christian soldier must put
heaven strongly in his head and heart He must see heaven, feel
heaven and keep heaven in the eye and in the heart all the time.
He will stand with unsteady step if heaven be far off. He will
fight feebly if heaven be seen dimly. The full sight of heaven
will give strength to his loins, ardour to his faith, glory to his
future and victory to the present. The head will never be
pierced while hope is its helmet. Nurture hope, strengthen hope
and brighten hope, for we are “saved by hope.” We must
“abound in hope” by the power of the Holy Spirit

“The sword,” the aggressive and powerful weapon, is the

Word of God. The Spirit wields it in death to all our foes. The
Word of God is our battle-field and victorious weapon. On it
we stand and fight. With it we deal rout and ruin to every foe.
The Christian soldier is “not to live by bread alone but by
every word of God.” We cannot make too much of the Word of
God. Christ foiled Satan with it. If we be valiant, true and
invincible, we also must have the Word of God dwelling in us
richly. The shield of our faith, and the shape and form of that
shield, is the basis of our prayers, the granite and essence of
our girded truth. Head and hands and heart must be filled,
impregnated and surcharged with God’s Word; by it we live
and by it we grow. It is our battle call, and the sign by which
we conquer. A glittering royal blade it is in all the assaults of
Satan. “It is written,” goes like steel to the heart of Satan. As a
weapon of defense and offense, God has magnified His Word
above all His name. Thrice armed against all Satan’s wiles and
his devices, are those who are filled with God’s Word. It is
“quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword,
piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit,” and
Satan feels it penetrating his joints and marrow, dissolving into
weakness all his strength and making poor and foolish all his
wisest plans.

The soldiers in the warfare against the devil must understand

how to wear the armour of all prayer. “All prayer” in all kinds,
and at all seasons, in the intensest form, with deepest sense of
personal need of God, is the demand. Prayer must deepen and
narrow and intensify into supplications, helped into this
mighty praying, clothed with this resistless power of prayer by
the Holy Spirit This intense conflict with the devil requires
sleepless vigilance, midnight vigils, a wakefulness which
cannot be surprised, a perseverance which knows neither
halting, fainting, nor depression, which knows by dearest
spiritual intelligence what it needs, and what the illimitable
provisions are to supply all those needs, and the imperative
necessity of pressing the prayer till the need is supplied and
the succour is secured. This praying holds itself in loving
sympathy with the entire family of God, making their conflicts,
perils and needs its own. It is in line of battle with the whole
familyhood of God, taking in their foes, their safety and their
perils. “Supplication for all saints” gives victory to every saint.
The line of battle is one. Defeat or victory must come to all. It is
the soldier fully equipped in God’s armour, who is a veteran
against the devil and invincible to all of his attacks.

It is not an easy thing to pray. Back of the praying there must

lie the conditions of prayer. These conditions are possible, but
they are not to be seized on in a moment by the prayerless.
Present they always may be to the faithful and holy, but cannot
exist in nor be met by a frivolous, negligent and laggard spirit.
Prayer does not stand alone. It is not an isolated performance.
Prayer stands in closest connection with all the duties of an
ardent piety. It is the issuance of a character which is made up
of the elements of a vigorous and commanding faith. Prayer
honours God, acknowledges His being, exalts His power,
adores His providence and secures His aid. A sneering half-
rationalism cries out against devotion, and charges that it does
nothing but pray. But to pray well, is to do all things well. If it
be true that devotion does nothing but pray, then it does
nothing at all. To do nothing but pray fails to do the praying,
for the antecedent, coincident and subsequent conditions of
prayer are but the sum of all the energized forces of a practical
working piety.
Prayer puts God in the matter with commanding force. “Ask of
me things to come concerning my sons,” says God, “and
concerning the work of my hands, command ye me,” We are
charged in God’s Word, “always to pray,” “in everything by
prayer,” “continuing instant in prayer,” to “pray everywhere,”
“praying always.” The promise is as illimitable as the command
is comprehensive. “All things whatsoever ye shall ask in
prayer believing ye shall receive.” “Whatsoever ye shall ask;”
“if ye shall ask anything;” “Ye shall ask what ye will and it
shall be done unto you.” “Whatsoever ye ask the Father he
will give it you.” If there is anything not involved in “ All
things whatsoever,” or not found in the phrase, “Ask
anything,” then these things may be left out of prayer.
Language could not cover a wider range, nor involve more fully
all minutia. These statements are but samples of the all-
comprehending possibilities of prayer under the promises of
God to those who meet the conditions of right praying.

These passages, though, give but a general outline of the

immense regions over which prayer extends its sway. Beyond
these the effect of prayer reaches and secures good from
regions which cannot be traversed by language or thought.
Paul exhausted language and thought in praying, but
conscious of necessities not covered, and realms of good not
reached, of battles not gained over enemies and not
conquered, he covers these impenetrable and undiscovered
regions by this general plea: ”Unto him that is able to do
exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according
to the power that worketh in us.” The promise is, “Call unto me,
and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things,
which thou knowest not.”
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 Table of Contents
Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow
Foreword
CHAPTER I - The Devil: His Beginning
CHAPTER II - The Devil: His Personality
CHAPTER III - The Prince of This World
CHAPTER IV - The Devil a Busy Character
CHAPTER V - The Devil and the Church
CHAPTER VI – The Devil and the Church (Continued)
CHAPTER VII - The Devil and the World
CHAPTER VIII – The Devil and the World (Continued)
CHAPTER IX – The Power of the Devil
CHAPTER X – The Power of the Devil (Continued)
CHAPTER XI – The Devil and His Methods
CHAPTER XII – The Devil and His Methods (Continued)
CHAPTER XIII – Exposed Positions
CHAPTER XIV – Exposed Positions (Continued)
CHAPTER XV – Our Defense Against the Devil
CHAPTER XVI – Our Defense Against the Devil
(Continued)