DEVILS VOICE 1 OF 4

"Yea, hath God said?"—Genesis 3:1

That is the voice of the devil. We are living in an hour in which we are very conscious that in this world of ours, and in the midst of all its affairs, hell is let loose. I resolutely use that phrase, and say hell is let loose, for hell can have no power, except under the government of God; just as Satan could not touch Job until he had asked permission, just as it is true that when he desired to have the disciples to sift them as wheat, he obtained them by asking. It is forever so. That is a tremendous truth, at which we may often be puzzled; but our confidence is in God, and in the assurance that when He allows the forces of hell to be loosed, there is a reason for it, and a meaning in it. It is so in the days in which we are living.

The existence of evil, spiritual principalities is granted by all those who accept the Biblical revelation. Words we have doubtless often quoted recently to ourselves, occurring in Paul's letter to the Ephesians, are true. "Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood." That is to say that such conflict is not final. Behind it there is something else, "But against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wick­edness in the heavenly places." This fact of the existence of the principalities of evil is assumed and revealed throughout the Bible; and at the head of this empire of evil is one, named vari­ously, named Satan. We are very conscious of his power and of his deeds. It is an interesting thing to remark in hurried passing, when we open our Bible, we do not find him in the first two chapters. He does not appear. And it is equally arresting that we do not find him in the last two chapters. He is not there at the begin­ning or end of the Bible, though, as Browning had it, "a wide compass first be fetched."

When Paul wrote to the Corinthians, he said, "We are not ignorant of his devices." That is a suggestive word rightly understood, "devices," which might correctly be rendered his mental activities, his conceptions, his purpose, his think­ing. We are not ignorant, said Paul, of these things. Sometimes we are inclined to say, if Paul was not, we are. Yet it is not so. As we are men and women of faith, and followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, and believers in the Biblical revelation, we can say we are not ignorant of his mental activity, of the conceptions that underlie that activity, and of the purpose that inspires that activity. Paul had what we have, the Biblical history, with its revelation of this personality, and the story of Jesus, with the utmost revelation of this personality through His ministry. Paul had these things. So have we, and so we can say we are not ignorant of his devices.

On a memorable occasion, which Matthew re­cords for us, Jesus uttered something which had another application, but which I venture to sug­gest had a wider application than the Lord then made use of: "For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." That is a tremendous statement, one that would bear thinking about, and illustrating in various ways. It is true that words are the ex­pression of the inner thinking, and consequently they form the basis of judgment of the inner thinking. That is true of God. By His words He is justified, and by His words He might be condemned. Of course that is unthinkable; and that is why the Word became flesh. It was the revelation of God.

It is equally true of man, and it is equally true of the devil. When Paul wrote, "We are not ig­norant of his devices"—and I claim we stand with Paul—how shall we find out about him? That leads us to this very simple, almost childish con­clusion, the result of our knowledge of the Bible. In the process of all this literature, of the process of the story it has to tell, the voice of the devil is heard only three times. His deeds are recorded all through the record, but his voice, that which gives expression to the deepest truth concerning his personality, is heard only three times—three references to the speech of Satan in all the Bible. One is found in Genesis 3. We find him speaking again when we get to the book of Job. We never find him chronicled as speaking again until in the wilderness he con­fronted the God-man in the hour of temptation. Just three occasions through the Bible in which the voice of the devil is heard, uttering words which are the utmost revelations of his devices, and of another fact concerning him, to which Paul made reference in another letter, "the wiles of the devil." His devices, and his wiles; that is, his conceptions, his purpose; and his tricks, the methods he adopts. Paul did not say we are not ignorant of his wiles, because we never know what they will be; but we do know the revelation that is given to us of them.

So I am asking you to stay with the devil for a little while! We are in a world in which we are confronting him everywhere. I ask you to stay and listen to him. Take these three occasions. To summarize, he is first heard slandering God to man. That is our first and present subject. When we hear his speech again in Job, he is heard slander­ing man to God. When we hear him speak again, he is facing the God-man in the wilderness.

Confining ourselves to the first, in the story we know so well, we have the account of what he said upon this occasion, and the phrase of my text introduces the whole story of the fall of man, to use again, without any apology, the old theological formula. It is the story of how man fell. We are at the source of all the rivers of sin and sorrow and desolation and damnation that have blasted and cursed human history. We are right at the beginning, and the voice of Satan is heard.

To summarize on the whole story, what did Satan do? First, he questioned the goodness of God. Secondly, he denied the severity of God. Finally, he slandered the motive of God. Here is the voice of Satan, and we are confronted with evil, with hell, with Satan. Here we are at the very beginnings, and we listen to his voice.

He first questioned the goodness of God. No­tice that is only a phrase I read, "Yea, hath God said?" See what he is doing. It is an interroga­tive method of directing attention to something. That is what Satan is here doing. He is trying to direct attention to the fact that God is not good, that His action is not good, that God is unkind in withholding certain things. At the very be­ginning we are in the presence of something false. "Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of any tree?" No, God has said nothing of the kind. He had said, "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat," except one. There is the suggestion that has in it the element of untruth, and that is equally so in the reply of the woman. She also was inaccurate; accurate so far, as she said, "Of the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat"; but inaccurate when she said, "But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die." God had not said, "Neither shall ye touch it." They might not eat of it, but here is an overemphasis of something God had said. So a lie that is half a truth is uttered in reply, and we are in the pres­ence of the fact that the very genesis of evil in the history of man is born of the fact that the devil suggested that God was not good, was not kind. God had said nothing of the kind. He had definitely marked the limits of human freedom by the sacramental tree in the garden.

Someone may say to me, Do you really believe the story of the tree? Yes, if I believe the story of a garden. Then they may say, Do you believe the story of a garden? With what else would you start history? A city? Every city comes out of a garden. We cannot find anything in America, nothing existing in America that has not come finally out of the earth, out of the garden of God. We must begin in a garden. What is the sacramental symbol then? Not a ledger! Oh, it may be to some of you! The sacramental symbol is a tree, necessarily so. I do not want to stop to ar­gue that. But the point is this. God had set there a sacramental symbol in a tree. I would not say an apple tree. It is wonderful how people have said it was an apple tree. How do you know it was not an orange? It was a tree that bore fruit, and it is called not an apple tree, but "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." It was a sacra­mental symbol, and God said, No, you must not take that. That marks your limitation. That in­dicates sovereignty over you; and the devil en­tered by saying, "Yea, hath God said" that?

That is where evil always begins, and that lies at the back of the objection to law, that law lim­its realization, that if we can break away from law then we shall be free. So we have the idea of escape and emancipation from all law; which by the way is the definition of lawlessnes. That is what we have here. That is what we have in the world today. Lying at the back of all devil­ishness against which we are gathered in solemn dedication and endeavor is the idea that the God of the Bible is not good, is not kind—I mean good in that sense—and the first element of Satan's word limits the goodness of God and His law.

Then, when we take the rest of the story, we see that he denies the severity of God. Yes, has God said you shall die? You will not. God does not mean that. You won't die. Instead of dying you will be as God is. You will be like God.

You will know good and evil; but without the power to do the good. He denied the severity of God. He declared that the wages of sin is not death. Again, we are in the presence of the fact that the whole of this conception is based upon an untruth. Of course it may be almost a grotesque question how far this great prince of the power of evil believed what he said himself. Oh, he does not believe it. He knows he is lying.

He knows God had not said anything that was unjust and unkind. He knew God was severe, and that His law would tolerate no breaking. But he was lying, and that is what Jesus meant when He said he was "a liar from the beginning." It is per­fectly true. Here we have it. The wages of sin is not death. Satan was degrading man by sug­gesting that death was to be treated as physical only; and the moment this fruit was taken, men would still be walking about, still thinking, still knowing. Death that is not death. What Satan strove to hide is the deeper truth of the spiritual essence of human nature, and the fact that death is not the separation of the soul from the body ultimately, but the separation of the soul from God; and in the day that man ate, he died, he lost his fellowship. That is why, when God came walking in the garden in the cool, or wind, or as I prefer to translate ruach in the spirit of the day, came walking for communion, man was afraid.

Of what was he afraid? He had lost touch with God. He had lost communion with God.

He was harboring wrong thinking about God, and consequently he became afraid of God; he died.

Yet this is always the outcome of the first fact. If we deny the goodness of God, we will inevi­tably deny His severity; and to deny the severity of God is surely to deny the ultimate goodness of God. If we could be persuaded that God can tolerate evil, with all its blighting, blasting effect, we could not believe in His goodness. We can believe in His goodness only as we believe in His severity. Yet here it is. This is the beginning of the whole process of evil. Goodness is misinter­preted as to its method, and people say, Oh, God is too good to punish, too good to be severe; and that means that God is not good at all. There is the lie on which this whole movement started.

Finally, and with equal brevity, the motive of God was challenged. A suggestion was made that the action of God had at its heart and center the selfishness of God, that man was being kept out of his kingdom by the law of God. That is the point at which man rebels against the govern­ment of God, or else he denies the fact of God altogether. All the story of the centuries is just the story of the fact that man has accepted these false views of God, has listened to the voice of the devil, as it questioned the goodness of God, denied His severity, and slandered His motive.

This is the first occasion upon which we hear the voice of Satan, and today we are facing the results of his calumny, the results of his slander upon God, which humanity listened to, took to, accepted, and rebelled against the government. And the issue has been the denial of God, or else denial of the revelation of God that has been granted to man in Christ.

To me it is of value to stop thus and think. I began by saying hell is let loose. We are face to face with the forces of evil as we never were in our lives before. We saw something of it two world wars, with Viet Nam, with Iraq, and Afghanistan, and soon Iran; but we have never seen anything quite like this. We ask, Where does this madness come from, this iniquity of the human race? We find it in this fact, that man has accepted the views of Satan, has yielded to them, and has brought about all the sorrow and trouble that re­sult from such acceptation. Let us realize that; and in these days when we are massed together as an empire against these things, let us wonder­ingly say, in spite of all our failure, God does seem in His overruling to have made us the cus­todians, for the moment, of the things of truth and righteousness and order until we buy this lawless, liar’s rendition and evaluation of God and His Word.