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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About the Tempter (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 011. The Bible Viewpoint
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The Bible Viewpoint
Will you now turn to this Book of God for a little? The clearer light is in the New Testament, It really becomes the explanation of what is said in the Old Testament. In the light shed upon the Old by the New, the Old becomes full of clear teaching.
The last of the books, John's Revelation, contains the most explicit direct teaching. There we are plainly told that the serpent of Eden is Satan himself. There was a being working behind Eden's serpent, with all the characteristics commonly associated with that dreaded reptile.
The Gospels reveal the greatest Satanic and demon activity on record. There Satan and his whole world of attendant demon-spirits, are accepted as real beings, of real power. Our Lord plainly so believed, and so taught. His experience in the Wilderness, and without doubt in Nazareth before, and certainly through the three years and more after, leave no doubt, both of His belief, and the realness of his fight, and the sweet reality of His victory that marked every step of His way.
His teachings about Satan are very plain and clear. Satan is the determined foe of God, and of all that is good. He is the "prince of this world." He is conducting an aggressive warfare. The whole action of life is against him. And he is defeated. Every one who will resist and fight him is assured of victory.
St. Paul's letters are full of the same sort of information, as are also the other epistles. These men who stood nearest to our Lord, who did such tremendous working and fighting in their Master's Name and power, these early giants of faith and tireless service, and heroic suffering—these men have no question, nor doubts, about a personal devil. Their fighting was too real to admit of doubt. They fought at too close grips, hand-to-hand, for doubt to get in.
And they knew victory too, constant and un-mistakable. That intensified their belief in the realness of the fight, and the one fought. The best cure for doubt here is fighting, real fighting; resisting, stubborn resisting, and steady insisting on the will of Jesus, on the victory of Jesus our Lord.
Now these simple plain New Testament teachings throw a flood of light on the allusions to Satan in the Old Testament. Go back to Eden fresh from the newer pages of Revelation, back to Job, to the twenty-first chapter of First Chronicles, and the one hundred and ninth Psalm, and the third of Zechariah, and you understand at once clearly who this personality is that works in such deadly ways, and with such stubborn hate. The New Testament makes one keener in detecting the serpent trail. And once our eyes are sharpened to recognize it, we can see it with startling plainness in the old pages of the Book, and in all the pages of the book of common life.