King's Business - 1921-07

T HE K I N G ’S B U S I N E S S 643 Good for Dr. Fox! A true servant of God, loving his brethren, hut not -willing to sit quietly by and see the work of God on the Foreign Field ruined by those who have departed from the fundamentals of the faith. Our position has been such that wo have been compelled to know facts concerning the conditions on the fields which are sufficiently serious to burden the hearts of lovers of the truth who long to see the evangelization of the world, and who sorrow over the consciousness that many of God’s people have been deceived with reference to their investments for God. We bespeak for the true men and women of God in the regions beyond your special prayers in their fight for the faith, and also for those in auth­ ority that there may be a speedy return to evangelical normalcy. T. C. H. “Jump” on the Devil. The Rev. H. A. Jump, D.D., a Congregational pastor in New Hamp­ shire, is quoted in the papers as follows: “Christendom has now progressed sufficiently far along the road toward en­ lightenment to be able to write the obituary of the devil. Without terror or regret and with no sense of genuine loss we should be able in these days to bury his Satanic majesty. He was a tradition that served many uses while he lasted, but we can now explain the dark facts of sin and moral evil by more scientific devices than a personal Beelzebub. And with the deepening of the sense of personal responsibility for sin we shall be in a better way to build up the Kingdom of righteousness and truth pnd brotherly love. It is not necessary for a man to believe in a personal devil in order to be a Christian. He ought to believe in God and Jesus and the Bible and the soul, but the devil is not in a class with these spiritual fundamentals. It is most important to draw the distinction between the essential and eternal aspects of Christian faith, and its incidental and temporary forms in which that faith was revealed. “Let us bury the devil. Let us have no more fears of his power. But let us hate and loathe and avoid sin more than ever, and devote ourselves to its extinc­ tion with a zeal as unquenchable as that of the Son of Man.” Hell abolished, the devil buried—leave it to the Modernists to fix up everything “ nice and pretty.” But there is nothing at all modern about these attempts after all. There have always been a goodly number of high­ brows who thought it wise to get rid of sin, hell and the devil, simply by denying their existence. However, there is still considerable evidence that the attempts have been unsuccessful except in the minds of these broad thinkers. , Mr. Jump has jumped altogether too far. He wants us to believe God, Christ and the Bible, and bury the devil. Doesn’t he know enough about the Bible to see that by consigning the personality of the devil to the religi­ ous junk-pile, he has thrown the Bible into a jumble of-contradictions and inconsistencies and made God and Christ the worst of liars? Believe in them! Who would be so dumb—if all that is said about a personal devil is mere rubbish? v Jesus Christ certainly believed in and combated a personal devil, a being of individual substance, intelligence and will, a being who has at his command legions of evil forces. Satan is clearly distinguished from the world and the flesh (Eph. 2 :2, 3; Jas. 4 :4; 1 Jno. 5 :3, 4). He is coming to a personal and individual doom (Rev. 20:10). If Satan is not a personal being, then the temptation of Jesus (Mt. 4) was from within His own

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