of the secrets of the government. An enemy who can remain unknown and unacknowledged, certainly has advant ages over a known enemy who can be forestalled. Many men today hold that good and evil are impersonal so far as spiritual entities are concerned. They hold that the universe came into being through impersonal forces, therefore, there is no need of a concept of God—if no God then no need to postulate an evil per sonality. Such evil as appears in the history of man is, to them, an overall part of progress whereby man is achieving light out of primal darkness. If such a personality exists, would he not share the cleverness of the commu nists and foster a belief in his own nonexistence to achieve his purposes? This brings us to consider what we actually know about such a personage. In the Book of Job, which may be the earliest written document of the Old Testament, we have a picture of a great adversary who, having access to God, acts as accuser of the righteous, under circumscribed freedom, to op press and try them! Within limits, he has power to bring disaster and death. This picture is of a person and does not change as we go through the remainder of the Old Testament. It is given very great amplification, without change, in the teachings of Jesus and in the New Testament in general. While the Old Testament does not give Satan a great deal of free pub licity, he is presented, nevertheless, in his capacity as deceiver, murderer, ad versary, and roaring lion; always as the enemy of God and mankind. But so much has man fallen under his dominion that the New Testament writers can say that the whole world lieth in the lap of the Evil One. In Genesis 3, Satan appears in the Garden of Eden as a serpent and a deceiver. In Ezekiel 28, he is spoken of as “the anointed cherub, perfect in thy ways from- the day thou wast created till iniquity was found in thee.” He appears in Isaiah 14 as having fallen from heaven through pride and the de sire to be like the Most High, but ulti
mately to be brought down to hell to the sides of the pit so “ they that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee saying, Is this the man who made the world as a wilder ness, and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his pris oners?” Zechariah gives a most enlightening passage: “And he shewed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to resist him. And the Lord said unto Satan, the Lord rebuke thee, O Satan; even the Lord that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee . . .” It seems that Satan is a regular attendant at church. Most Christians are entirely familiar with the New Testament passages testifying to this personality who is wholly dedi cated to evil and whose final doom is pronounced in Revelation 20. It is not our purpose to give the com plete Biblical account of the personal ity of the Devil, but to call attention to two great fallacies that have gripped the modem mind. The first we have already mentioned; namely, that many men do not acknowledge and do not believe that there is a personality, a great integrating a n d co-ordinating personality, back of all the evil that is in the world today. The second fallacy is even more deadly; namely, that we live in a universe with either no God at all, or in one in which there is a helpless and an indifferent God. It is said that when Emerson once visited Carlyle, that Carlyle broke out with the cry, “If there is a God, why doesn’t He do something?” I would as sume that he meant by this, why does not God abolish the evil that men will ingly perpetrate; why does He not de stroy cause and effect in the moral realm—and why must evil go on? There is a story that has come out of Russia in the days of the Revolution. A group of children, who had been taught to believe in God, were kept without food for a considerable length of time. They were asked if they be lieved in God, and when they said (continued on next page) 29
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