FORESIGHT AND PERSEVERANCE OF THE DEVIL.
By R. F. C.
Unbelief is the parent of sin. Had not the word of God been doubted, sin would not have entered the world. But doubt entered first, and was followed by transgression. Hence, in order that fallen man may be benefited by the gospel of salvation, and restored to the favor of God, first of all things, faith is necessary, and obedience follows as a natural consequence. There can be no acceptable obedience without belief, "for without faith it is impossible to please God." Our faith must have a controlling influence upon our actions; and therefore it is vastly better to believe the truth than to believe the opposite of the truth which is a lie. Hence the idea that it matters not what one believes if he is only sincere, is a great mistake, and will prove fatal to thousands who choose to believe a lie rather than to obey the truth. Jesus prayed for his disciples, "Sanctify them through thy TRUTH; thy word is truth." Those that receive not "the love of the truth," are left "to believe a lie;" and the consequence is condemnation. That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness. Jno. xvii, 17; 2 Thess. ii, 9-12. Satan knew that he could not introduce sin into157the world while faith in the word of God remained unshaken. Hence he first whispers a doubt: Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? He then comes out boldly and contradicts the word of the Lord, saying, Ye shall not surely die. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened; and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. This is the first discourse on the immortality of the soul. Like many an orthodox sermon, it has three grand divisions. 1. Ye shall not die. That is, you are immortal and cannot die. This doubtless was the idea conveyed. 2. There are more gods than one. 3. Man may become a god. Ye shall be as gods. By disobedience you may obtain desirable knowledge and be as gods. Here, happy creature! fair, angelic Eve!
Partake thou also, happy though thou art,
Happier thou may'st be; worthier canst not be;
Taste this, and be henceforth among the gods.
Thyself a goddess, not to earth confined,
But sometimes in the air, as we, sometimes
Ascend to heaven, by merit thine, and see
What life the gods live there, and such live thou.
This grand plan of the enemy, laid in the garden, has been followed out with the most unconquerable perseverance. The grand fundamental idea is that man is immortal—that he cannot die. And though death entered into the world, and men saw the awful sentence, Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return, verified before their eyes, yet Satan was not long in persuading the heathen philosophers that the man proper did not die, that man had an immortal soul that went to be with the gods when separated from the body by what is called death, and that those that distinguished themselves in this life—the mighty emperors and heroes—were deified, or became gods. And, as a consequence, these human gods were worshiped under the title of demons. Hence, what is called "doctrines of devils," in 1 Tim. iv, 1, is more properly rendered by Macknight, "doctrines concerning demons," and by Wakefield, "doctrines about dead men." Thus Satan stuck to his text, Ye shall not die, but be as gods. He knew that if men believed this, they must disbelieve the word of God, Dying thou shalt die. They could no longer believe man was of the dust and turned to dust again; but when the body fell, the man himself—the little god that had dwelt in the flesh—migrated to fairer climes, the elysian fields, or the spirit-land that we hear so much about at the present day. Thus what was called death, by the Author of life, was only an emigration—a thing not to be dreaded as expressive of God's abhorrence of sin, and the penalty of transgression against his holy law. So the heathen were blinded and made to believe Satan's lie in preference to God's truth. But it is objected that the Jews, as well as heathen nations, held the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. To this we reply, that the question is not what professed Jews or Christians have believed upon the subject, but what do their oracles teach? If we follow the faith and practice of apostate Jews, we may have other gods besides the one only living and true God set forth in their Scriptures. If the belief of Jews in the immortality of the soul is to be taken as proof of the doctrine, their frequent idolatries may be taken as a proof of a plurality of gods. Why refer to false professors of religion, and those that the Lord Jesus called hypocrites, to prove one point of faith, and reject their testimony in other things? To leave the Scriptures that God gave the Jews, and talk about what the Jews believed, is like quoting the faith of the Roman Catholic church for christian doctrine, instead of the New Testament. Satan has always been persevering in his efforts to make men believe his lie, and the Jews were always too ready to receive the fables of the heathens with whom they came in contact. Dr. Campbell says, "Before the captivity, and the Macedonian and Roman conquests, the Jews observed the most profound silence upon the state of the dead, as to their happiness or misery. They spoke of it simply as a state of silence, darkness and inactivity. But after the Hebrews mingled with the Greeks and Romans, they insensibly slid into their use of terms, and adopted some of their ideas on such subjects as those on which their oracles were silent." This, and many other testimonies that might be cited, will show how Jews obtained this doctrine. Satan has done his best to make all men believe it; for he has a grand, ultimate design in view. His plan has ever been to cause men to reject the word of God. That word has lived, and there have always been a few that have believed it. It seems that Satan foresaw that copies of the Bible would abound in the last days, and has been, from the beginning, pursuing a regular plan of operations to increase his temptations as light increases, so that the last generation of men, by a belief of his first lie, may be prepared to reject all the increasing light of divine truth, and come out boldly, and totally reject the word of God. Like a cunning gamaster, he has concealed his "hand," professing that his doctrine is the doctrine of the Bible, thus preparing the way to play off his "last card," and make men openly reject that very Bible that they have claimed as teaching the prime article of their faith—the immortality of the soul. This last card, by which Satan intends to "sweep the board," is Spiritualism. After getting his favorite doctrine into the creeds of all the churches, and generally admitted by those outside of the churches, he opens, as it were, a new plan of operation, and, in the character of an angel of light, proposes "to draw mankind together in harmony, and convince skeptics of the immortality of the soul." A skeptic, in Satan's vocabulary, is one who believes the Bible means what it says, on the subjects of death and immortality. The number of these, though few, was increasing at the time when spirit manifestations arose. The Advent doctrine and the unscriptural theories by which it was opposed, had awakened a spirit of inquiry in honest minds concerning what the Bible taught on these momentous subjects, and the result was, that Bible students were receiving God's truth, and rejecting Satan's lie. Therefore, though the mass of men believed the lie, something must be done to head this skepticism, which was opposing itself against his most ancient and favorite doctrine. R. F. C.