That Ole Devil

Being sick meant a backlog of work that I spent all day slogging through, and now I have an hour before midnight to make sure I get a post in. So I’m going to cheat a little. My father-in-law is having me transcribe some tapes he recorded as part of the process of him writing a book about one of the more famous—or, more accurately, infamous—characters in the Bible: Satan.

I thought it might be interesting for me to share a little of the first chapter of his four-chapter work, which talks about the origin and nature of Satan. To avoid too long a post, what I will do is post a little now and then over the course of several days (yes, I’ll make original posts too during this time) add more as comments to this post. So, if you want too see more, just tune in the next day to see when I’ve added a comment to it. Here we go:

The church today—the church universal or the earthly church—has failed to set forth Satan as a real and formidable adversary. The church has done well in lifting up Jesus Christ, but it has failed to make known the evil one called Satan. If we will consider the model prayer that our lord and savior Jesus Christ gave the apostles, gave the disciples—and instructed them to give us—what we call today the Lord’s Prayer, we are usually very attentive in reading and praying this prayer. Again, these are words from the mouth of the Lord Jesus himself. Are we ignorant of that phrase in the Lord’s Prayer? Where Jesus clearly tells us to ask God our Father to deliver us from the evil one—that, of course, being Satan.

When we take an impartial and even a historical view of Jesus—and when I say historical writers I refer to Josephus, Origen and several other fathers of the church—we see that a vast majority of Jesus’ earthly ministry was rebuking the devil and his agents—what we would call today exorcisms.

Our Lord and savior Jesus Christ was well aware of the creature called Satan.

The purpose of this chapter is to set forth undeniable proof from the Word of God, as well as living experiences, testifying to the existence of our adversary Satan.

If we fail to comprehend, if we fail to acknowledge the realness of Satan, we will never understand the nature of the Christian ministry. We will never fully understand the ferocity of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now, without being technical, what am I saying? We need to understand why the child of God suffers so very much in this Christian life. Satan, according to the writings of Paul in the book of Corinthians, both 1 and 2, clearly tells us that Satan has placed his agents in the pulpit of many churches today. We read in the second book of Corinthians, chapter two, where Paul tells us that we shouldn’t be surprised that Satan has placed his ministers in the pulpit, for he says, “has not Satan himself transformed himself on occasion into ministers of light?” We read in the book of Revelation where it tells us that Satan has deceived this whole world.

My brothers and sisters in Christ, Satan has deceived the earthly church.

We are in a battle. And to understand that battle, we must understand the enemy. Even nature—and Paul told us to look to nature, the visible world of nature, to see the invisible God—even nature and perhaps this most common phenomenon of night and day, darkness and light, testifies of the struggle of good and evil in this present-day world.

On this present Earth, why must we know Satan? Because if we don’t know him, we will not resist him. If we do no understand Satan, we will not understand the nature of our misfortune as children of God. Hence, we will not resist.

(You want to know something really weird? As of reaching the word “resist” above, my intro and this excerpt together totaled 666 words…LOL)

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