The Devil a Busy Character
We are apt to think that Satan is most powerful in crowded thoroughfares. It is a mistake. I believe the temptations of life are always most dangerous in the wilderness. I have been struck with that fact in Bible history. It is not in their most public moments that the great men of the past have fallen; it has been in their quiet hours. Moses never stumbled when he stood before Pharaoh, or while he was flying from Pharaoh; it was when he got into the desert that his patience began to fail. David never stumbled while he was fighting his way through imposing armies; it was when the fight was over, when he was resting quietly under his own vine and fig-tree that he put forth his hand to steal. The sorest temptations are not those spoken but those echoed. It is easier to lay aside your besetting sin amid a cloud of witnesses than in the solitude of your own room. The sin that besets you is never
so besetting as when you are alone. -George Matheson.
IF THERE BE any virtue in not being an infidel, the devil may claim this virtue. If it be any praise to be always busy, the devil may claim that praise, for he is always busy, and very busy. But his character does not spring from his faith. His faith makes him tremble, his character makes him a devil.
The devil is a very busy character. He does a big business, a very mean business, but he does it well, that is, as well as a mean business can be done. He has large experience, big brains, a black heart, great force, and tireless industry, and is of great influence and great character. All his immense resources and powers are laid out for evil. Only evil inspires his activities and energies. He never moves to relieve or bless, a stranger alike to benevolent doing and kindly feeling.
Satan's history antedates the history of man- the only beings, he and his angels, who know by sad experience, Heaven, Earth and Hell. These three words are familiar to him. He has walked the streets of Heaven side by side with its purest and best. He has felt the thrill of its purest joys. He knows the bitterest anguish of hell, and has felt its keenest flames.
He does a big business on earth. He is a prince and a leader. Men and devils are his agents, and the elements are often by him debauched from their benignant purposes, and are made to destroy. He is busy tempting men to evil. He has large experience in this business, and is an adept at it. By him sin loses its sinfulness, the world is clothed with double charms, self is given a double force, faith is turned into fanaticism and love into hate. A spiritual character can work through agencies or directly on the spirit. He infuses thoughts, makes suggestions and does it so deftly that we do not know their paternity. He tempted Eve to take the forbidden fruit. He put it into David's mind to number Israel, thereby provoking the wrath of God. He influenced Ananias and Sapphira to lie to God. Peter's yielding to presumption was at his instance. Judas' betrayal was from the same baneful source. The temptation of Christ was a typical and master piece of his business in seeking to seduce our Lord from God, showing his power to array agencies and pleas, and to back these by all forms of sanctity and persuasiveness. He is blasphemous, arrogant and presumptuous. He slanders God to men and infuses into men hard thoughts of God. He intensifies their enmity and inflames their prejudice against Him. He leads them to deny His existence and to traduce His character, thereby destroying the foundations of faith and all true worship. He does all he can by insinuation and charges to blacken saintly character and lower God's estimate of the good. He is the vilest of calumniators, the most malignant and artful of slanderers. Goodness is the point of his constant attack. He says nothing good about the good, nothing bad about the bad. He is always at church before the preacher is in the pulpit or a member in the pew, to hinder the sower, to impoverish the soil, or to blast the seed, that is, when courage and faith are in the pulpit, and zeal and prayer in the pew. But if dead orthodoxy or live heterodoxy are in the pulpit, he then puts in his time elsewhere at some point of danger.
Christ expressly declared that some sickness, at least, was the direct infliction of Satan.
The devil goes about to do evil and oppress men, at every point the antagonist of Him who went about to do good and heal all that were oppressed of the devil. In some way he had power over death and worked a fearful work of bondage and fear and death. Through death, Christ works to destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil. He puts a thorn in Paul's flesh and makes a special effort and requisition for Peter. He directs the whirlwind, kindles the fire and orders the disease which overwhelm and devastate Job and his/property. He arms the thieving Chaldeans and Sabines against him and gets into his wife, and directs the divers agencies of his empire to ruin this one saint. He will wreck an empire at any time to secure a soul. He sows the tares in the wheat, the bad among the good, bad thoughts among the good thoughts. All kinds of evil seed are sown by him in the harvest fields of earth. He is always trying to make the good bad and the bad worse. He fills the minds of a Judas and inflames and hurries him on to his infamous purpose. He fills Peter with an arrogant pride which tries to thwart the divine plans and to inject human views into the purpose of Christ instead of God's purpose.
The devil goes about as fierce, as resolute, and as strong as a lion, intent only to destroy, restrained by no sentiments which soften and move human or divine hearts. He has no pity and no sympathy. He is great, but only great in evil. A great intellect, he is driven and inspired by a malignant and cruel heart.
At the threshold of Christ's ministry there we meet with His temptations by the devil,-one of those conflicts on which one of the mightiest issues turn. The history of the case presents the devil as a spiritual person, the head and embodiment of all evil, making a fierce, most wily, and protracted assault on the Son of God. We are not informed as to what shape he assumed to veil the treachery and wickedness of his attack. The temptation is noted as one of the preliminary and pivot facts of Christ's ministry, and can no more be resolved into the visionary than can His baptism, the descent of the Spirit, His wilderness trip, or His fasting. It was no influence tempting Christ. The whole transaction forbids that. “He was led of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil." The devil came to Him and the devil left Him, and then "the angels came and ministered to him."
In this temptation the methods, hypocrisy and craft of the devil are seen. How materially and benevolently he comes to the weak, exhausted Son of God! How innocent is the suggestion that Jesus use His power to relieve His hunger! What could be more allowable than that? To use His spiritual power for temporal ends! How often is it done? What a world of evil to religion when it is used to subserve the natural. Man living for bread alone. The temporal the first. The secular and worldly prime. Religion not simply to serve money or business, but religion secondary or subservient to business. The heavenly used for the earthly, the spiritual for the natural, more intent on daily food than on daily grace, eyeing the seen more than the unseen. That is the devil's main business-to materialize, earthlyize religion, to get man to live for bread alone, to make earth bigger than heaven. Time is more engaging than eternity. What a fearful conflict is being carried on in that quiet wilderness between the fainting Son of God and Satan, between the earthly and the heavenly, between God's religion and the devil's religion!
The conflict surges around three points. The fleshly, the presumptuous and the worldly. But this little circle holds all the shapes and forms of temptation, all the crafty devices, all the hidden depths, all the glittering seductions which Satan has devised to swerve men from the lofty allegiance which faith demands. The devil's assault on Christ is in striking contrast with his temptation to beguile Eve, and in more striking contrast with his fearful ordeal through which he tried Job's integrity. No suspicion cast on God's goodness as with Eve, no terrific, curdling sorrow in Job's case. All is friendly, sympathetic and inviting.
The second temptation includes in it, not merely the fanatical presumption of overheated zeal and brainless devotion, but all the methods of sensational and abnormal piety by all those short cut processes by which the severe and tedious principles of a genuine faith are set aside, and spurious, superficial and flesh-pleasing substitutes are brought in to make a more attractive and popular guise of faith. It seeks to take man-devised methods, easy, fragrant of sentiment, rank and material, in the stead of God's lowly way of godly sorrow, strict self denial, and prayerful surrender.
Then the last, the world, its kingdoms and its glory, these as the reward of his devotion to Satan, worship the devil, that is, the world's god. How the devil massed all his forces! Religion was invoked. The world and the flesh all conspired, under Satan's power, to tempt the Son of God. With what reluctance the pure soul of the Son of God went unto this close conflict with Satan is seen in Mark's statement: "And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness." No wrestling can warp this statement into a mere influence. It is history, fact-plain, simple, historical fact. Reread the record as to the devil. How clearly, without a doubt or figure of speech, does it stamp the whole transaction with personality. "Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And he was there in the wilderness forty days tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him. Then the devilleaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him." These are not figures of speech, but the narrative of a transaction and of persons engaged in the transaction. The wilderness and the fasting are literal. The beings are all literal, the wild beasts, the angels, Jesus and the devil. The conflict of Jesus with Satan is not incidental, nor accidental, nor casual, but essential and vital. Satan held man and man's world in thrall. They had fallen into his hands and were held by him in bondage and ruled by him with desperate power.
The record has been made, "And when the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from him for a season." The season has ended and he is back again as though he had brought seven other spirits more wicked than himself. Gethsemane is the sum of the devil's most maddened and desperate methods. The guises are off. He appears there as he is. It is a rare thing to get a clear, true light on the devil. He assumes so many roles, acts so many parts, wears so many guises. Here we have him in life size and in perfect features. The air is heavier by his breath, the night is darker by his shadow, the ground is colder, and his chill is on it. Judas is falser still, and Peter more cowardly and dastardly, because Satan is there. On the threshold of Gethsemane he exclaims, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death," and he began to be sore amazed and very heavy. Why? Because “this is your hour and the power of darkness." Why? Because "now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out." Silence is there, dread and horror, and a great darkness and a fearful conflict. Why? "For the prince of this world cometh and hath nothing in me."
How different the devil's method now with Christ than in the wilderness. Then there was mildness, an assumed sympathy, the spirit of an inquirer, one desirous to relieve. The most pleasant and attractive and satisfying ministries to flesh did Satan then offer, something of the gentleness of the lamb, the interest and sympathy of a friend. But now how changed! The lamb is transformed into the lion, a roaring lion, maddened and desperate. Jesus could not be seduced by the flesh, nor self, nor the world in the wilderness. He must be overwhelmed with dread and horror, and be driven. His steadfastness must be overcome by weakness and fear. So comes he to many a saint in the fierceness and power of the lion when the gentle inducements fail.