nuclear dilemma. Jesus has come and the world is on the spot because it must choose between light and darkness, Christ and Antichrist, light and darkness. Calvary was the greatest event o f all time. Dr. Toynbee may not think so, some little history professor may not know it but Calvary is the watershed of history. Heaven, earth and hell all met there and this world is judged by what it does about Jesus Christ. “He that believeth on Him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already.” “ And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” This is the only way Greeks or anybody else will ever truly know Him. “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him.” He draws by the magnetism of the cross. We do not come by our own goodness, by joining church, by human resolution. But you say that He is not drawing all men? Yes, He is, but men can resist that drawing power, the pull of Calvary. There is a tug of war between God and the devil for every man’s soul and all de pends on whether man yields to the lifted-up Christ or the down-drag o f the devil. “Neither YIELD ye your members as instruments of un righteousness unto sin: but YIELD yourselves un to God.” It is all a matter o f what you yield to! When I was a little boy, my father gave me a horseshoe magnet. I marvelled that with it I could pick up a nail and then that magnetized nail would pick up still another. When we yield to the Christ of the cross and live in touch with Him, we are able to pull others in His direction. The only power that can overcome the downward pull o f darkness is the upward pull of the light. The only match for the DEMON-stration of the devil is the demon stration o f the Spirit. We are living in the last chapter “YOUR HOUR AND THE POWER OF DARKNESS.” Only the uplifted Christ can deliver from the down-drag o f Antichrist. BE MI am coming to the cross; f am poor and weak and blind; 1 am counting all but dross, I shall full salvation find."
On one occasion our Lord said: “ I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.” He saw what was going to happen as though it had happened in a moment of time. Every time demons are cast out and the devil defeated, we have a small demon stration of what happened on Calvary once for all and what will happen when Satan is cast into the lake of fire to stay forever. Mind you, our Lord did not behold Satan as victorious but as defeated. Satan may seem to be having things his way to day but our Lord saw him not as victorious but van quished. We need to see the devil through the Saviour’s eyes. But is not Satan still very much in power? Is he not the god o f this age? Yes, he possesses the king doms of this world temporarily and offered them to Jesus in the third temptation. But the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof. The devil may possess it for the time being but God owns it. Satan has already been cast out in the mind and purpose o f God. He is putting up a hard fight today for he knows that his time is short. His final and complete defeat lies ahead when Christ returns. There is no devil in the first two chapters of the Bible and no devil in the last two chapters. Thank God for a Book that disposes of the devil! We are living in the last chapter of this age. Darkness is intensified and compounded. A moun tain preacher said that “ gross darkness” is 144 times darker than ordinary darkness! We are in an hour of gross darkness. Because Satan knows that he is defeated, he is pulling out all the stops, heating the furnace seven times hotter. All the fearful things you read in the papers are the last mad frantic onslaught of the god o f this age. The issue is not Communism, secularism, materialism, crime waves, worldwide lawlessness and the putrid immorality of this modern Sodom and Gomorrah. We confuse the issue with this detail and that and do not see that all of them are manipulated back- stage by the prince and powers of darkness. In this Punch and Judy show of history, Hitler, Stalin, Ho Chih Min, Castro and Mao tse Tung are only puppets. Back of all the beatniks and crackpots on the center of the stage and pulling all the strings is Lucifer. We are not seeing ordinary wickedness today but demonism. This is their hour and the power of darkness. Current events make no sense, news reports mean nothing, panelists and commen tators and experts only make confusion more con founded and the jigsaw puzzle more hopeless unless we understand what Jesus meant by “MY HOUR” and “ YOUR HOUR.” He said, “Now is the judgment o f this world.” John tells us: “ And this is the condemnation (the krisis, the test by which men are judged) that light is come into the world and men loved dark ness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” The crisis is not Viet Nam or inflation or the
THE KING'S BUSINESS
12
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker