Quiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About the Tempter: 042. His Mental Status

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Quiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About the Tempter: 042. His Mental Status



TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About the Tempter (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 042. His Mental Status

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His Mental Status

He is credited with having great intellectual keenness and force. He is thought of as a giant of intellectual power. And there must be much truth in such a supposition. The story of his creation, his close fellowship with God in his early history, and the work entrusted to him would all lead to the conclusion that his mental acumen and resourcefulness must be very great. This should be carefully noted.

Yet there is a bit of vast import on the other side of this fact. There is very much to lead us to believe that his mentality is distinctly of a secondary-grade. His is not a first-grade mentality. This should be noted, for it has great bearing upon our dealings with him.

Note, please, that he has great cunning and craftiness. His keenness is so great as to make one feel uncanny. He has a peculiar quality of persistence, and enormous driving power. Indeed these are his dominant traits mentally. Yet note that animals have great cunning and craftiness and keenness and persistence and energy. These do not indicate a first-grade mentality. Yet they are Satan's dominant traits.

Certainly he is not wise. That quality could not be ascribed to him, and it is a peculiar thing to mark that he constantly reveals a defective judgment. He constantly overreaches himself, and defeats his own purposes in dealing with us. This suggests that he is more of a shrewd guesser, with long experience back of his guessing, than anything else. A vast lot of what might be thought of as keen thinking, and as indicating wide knowledge or fore-knowledge, is simply very shrewd, crafty guessing.

Note that his dominant mental trait is imitation. He has been called "the ape of God." Read through Saint John's Revelation, and note how in everything he does there he is simply imitating God. There is a trinity of evil. One of his chief agents appears as a lamb. Step by step, every plan of his seems to have been patterned on something of God's.

Now it is true of course that imitation is the most dominant law of all life. It is one of the commonest laws governing all action, from childhood on. Originality does not mean an absence of imitation. It means unusual wisdom and judgment and insight in the selection, and combination into one's own action, of what is found in others. The basis is still imitation. The new thing called originality is the rare judgment in choosing what to imitate, and how to combine what is chosen. Yet mark that this great traitor-prince imitates slavishly what God has done. There is no trace of originality. His mental powers are second-class.

This is not so surprising as it may seem at first flush. He has cut himself off from God, the source of all life and wisdom. All life, physical and mental and of the spirit, is in God, and from Him. Satan has existence, but in breaking away from God he broke away from the source of wisdom, and of strong mental power.