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The Overthrow Of Satan’s Empire
"And He laid hold on the Dragon, that old Serpent, which is the Devil
and Satan, and He bound him a thousand years, ... that he should deceive the
nations no more."—Re 20:2,3.
Long has the world been taught the
fable that Satan is in some far-off and unknown place called Hell, stoking
fires and causing untellable anguish to millions of our race. But the Bible
tells no such fable. It represents Satan as a great and powerful spirit
being—"the Prince of this world." (Joh 14:30.)
Again it styles him the ruler or "god of this world, who now worketh in
the hearts of the children of disobedience." (Eph 2:2.)
He has a great spiritual empire amongst men, which controls through ignorance,
superstition and fear, the vast majority of the human family. The Bible
declares him to be the great expert in deceiving the people—making darkness
appear to be light, falsehood appear to be truth, and truth appear to be
falsehood. It declares that God has permitted Satan thus to rule as a prince,
but has never authorized him—that his power is purely usurpation, based upon
these deceptions. It tells why God has permitted him, what object will be
served eventually by the permission of evil, how Satan shall be restrained or
bound during the thousand years of Messiah’s glorious Kingdom, and that
eventually he will be utterly destroyed—annihilated.—Re 20:7,9.
SATAN ORIGINALLY A GLORIOUS ANGEL
The Bible story is that Satan was created perfect, an angel of very high rank,
named Lucifer, which signifies bright, glorious, intelligent. He was the first
creature of God to rebel against the Divine arrangement. Pride
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and ambition beclouded his wisdom. He desired to become a king, an autocrat, in
some realm of his own, which he apparently fancied he could rule more wisely
than could Jehovah. Beholding the newly created Adam and Eve, with procreative
powers and authority from God to fill the earth with glorious perfect human
beings, Satan concluded that he would never have a better opportunity than this
for establishing himself as a great king.
If he could alienate man from the Creator, he would soon have an empire of his
own. He succeeded in tempting Adam to disloyalty—disobedience to God—and thus
barred him from Divine favor. But later, he found that God’s pronouncement,
"the wages of sin is death" (Ro 6:23), was not an idle threat; and
that all of his subjects were dying. The blight of sin was upon his kingdom,
and the only way he could continue it at all was through continued deceptions.
His next move was to establish a new race, infused with fresh blood. The fact
that God had not punished Satan’s disloyalty was, no doubt, a surprise to all
the holy angels. It appeared as though Satan were too powerful for God to
punish him. Hence, when Satan presented the proposition that the angels should
materialize as men and beget human children of the human mothers of the race, a
considerable number of the angels deflected, and participated in the proposition.
As the Bible declares, "they left their own estate," or condition.
The Bible tells us that the result of this unauthorized union was a new race,
physically giants, "men of renown"—intellectually strong, but morally
perverted. The record further is that this new race filled the earth with
violence, dominating, enslaving, mistreating humanity.
WHAT THE DELUGE ACCOMPLISHED
Foreknowing these conditions, God had arranged for a flood; for mankind had
become so corrupt under these evil influences that a continuance of those
conditions could no longer be beneficial. The entire race, except Noah’s
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family of eight persons, were drowned in the Deluge.
Not a word in the Bible tells that these antediluvians went to eternal torture,
but everything in it teaches that they died—lost life entirely. But because God
purposes their eventual deliverance from death during the thousand years of
Christ’s Reign, therefore the Bible teaches that they fell asleep in death, not
to be awakened until after the Millennial dawn and the establishment of
righteousness in the earth. Then they are to come forth, not all at once, but
"every man in his own order."
St. Peter (2Pe 2:4) and St. Jude (Jude 6) inform us that from the time of the
Deluge, Satan and the other angels of lower order, who were misled by him into
misuse of their powers, were put under chains of darkness until the judgment of
the great Day, now at hand. This signifies their restraint, their hindrance
from materializing.
Since then, their dealing with mankind has been, not open as before, but in
darkness, in deception, etc.
Satan is called the Prince of Darkness, of evil, of sin, of error. Jesus styles
him the "father of lies"; and because it was through his
misrepresentations that Adam and his race came under the Divine sentence of
death, therefore Jesus styles Satan "a murderer from the
beginning."—Joh 8:44; 2Co 4:4.
For approximately four thousand years this mighty, wicked spiritual prince has
not only been the Prince of demons, "the angels that sinned," but
also, by deception, the god or ruler of humanity. His rule of darkness has not
been an open one, which the race would resent, but a reign through deception
and through the wickedness of humanity—"children of
disobedience."—Eph 2:2.
The work of Satan and his demon hosts is manifest amongst the heathen peoples.
As St. Paul declares, these are so deceived that they really worship the demons
instead of God—ignorantly. (Ac 17:23.) The demonology by which they have been
deceived has operated through dreams, visions and spirit mediums.
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CHRISTENDOM IS SATAN’S TRIUMPH
When God entered into a Covenant with the Israelites at Mount Sinai, His Law
forebade them to have anything to do with these evil spirits, whose
communications were through necromancers, wizards, etc. The Divine command was
that no such agents of the Evil One were to be permitted to live in the land of
Israel. But by putting darkness instead of light, Satan brought many of the
Israelites under the influence of his errors, so that in the days of Jesus one
of His most prominent works was that of casting out demons from those who had
come into so close contact with the evil spirits that they were obsessed by
demons. The same was true of the Apostles, who also cast out demons. A notable
instance was that of the maid that brought her masters much gain through
soothsaying—fortune telling. St. Paul commanded the evil spirit to come out of
her, and forthwith her power to foretell events, etc., was at an end.—Ac 16:18.
The teachings of Jesus and the Apostles brought a great light into the world
and established new standards, in proportion as their teachings were received.
The Bible tells us that as the darkness hates the light, so those who are under
the influence of Satan’s falsehoods hate the true Message of God, promulgated
by Jesus and His followers.
Much of the persecution of the children of light must be ascribed to Satan and
his hosts. As we read, "The Devil shall cast many of you into
prison," etc. (Re 2:10.) Throughout the eighteen hundred years of this
Gospel Age there has been a warfare between the light and the darkness, between
Satan’s false teachings, insidiously ingrafted into men’s minds, and the
teachings of the Lord and His people, who received these into good and honest
hearts. Pride and ambition were stirred up in the Church; and those who should
have been humble followers of Jesus were misled into pomposity, with a form of
godliness, but denying its power.—2Ti 3:1-5.
About the year 325 A.D., the Bishops of the Church,
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misled by Satan, proclaimed themselves to be successors to the Apostles in
power and Divine authority; whereas the Bible declares that there were only
"Twelve Apostles of the Lamb." (Re 21:14.) We see clearly that the Church
has their testimony in the Bible as fully today as ever; and, as St. Paul, who
took the place of Judas, declares the Word of God is sufficient, that the man
of God may be thoroughly furnished. (2Ti 3:17.) The deluded Bishops, claiming
Divine authority, made many changes from the teachings of the Bible, claiming
that they individually had the same inspiration as the Apostles.
They additionally fortified their position by holding Apostolic Councils, and
through these making creeds which for more than twelve hundred years entirely
supplanted the Bible.
The first of these creeds claimed to be a simplification of the Bible story,
making Bible study unnecessary. The Nicene Creed was made in the year 325 A.D.,
at the Council of Nice, attended by three hundred and eighty-four Bishops, at
the invitation of Emperor Constantine, who paid their expenses. According to
his promise, he backed up this creed, made at his suggestion and in harmony
with his assurances. Hundreds of thousands of the heathen forthwith flocked
into the Christian churches, with practically no knowledge of God or of the
Bible. Considering it impossible to immerse these multitudes, the Bishops
sprinkled them, claiming full authority for their action; and the heathen
following of the Emperor are said to have been baptised by the dipping of
boughs and branches of trees into water and the sprinkling of it upon them en
masse!
For more than twelve centuries anybody found in possession of the Bible, or
studying it, was suspected of heresy and liable to persecution; for why should
they study the Bible when the Emperor and the so-called Apostolic Bishops had
declared the Nicene Creed to be a condensation of the Bible, and all that was
necessary to
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be believed? During those twelve centuries in which the professed followers of
Jesus were without the guidance of the Bible, the so-called Bishop-Apostles met
from time to time and made new creeds containing fresh errors—the very errors
which have troubled the whole world ever since, and which are still troubling
us and confusing us.
The Bible, speaking of the influence of these false doctrines of the civilized
world, declared that all nations "were made drunk by the wine" of
false doctrine. (Re 17:2.) Gradually we are getting over the drunken stupor of
error which has so beclouded our faculties that they led us to think of our
Almighty Friend and Creator—the God of all grace, the Father of all mercies,
from whom cometh down every good and perfect gift—to think of Him as a great
devil, who from the beginning has plotted knowingly and intelligently for the
creation of the race, nearly all of whom were to spend an eternity in torture.
SATAN HAMPERED REFORMATION
Any one familiar with history realizes that both Catholics and Protestants are
truer and nobler men and teachers since the Reformation time than they were
before.
We are not blaming humanity for the reign of darkness. We are charging the
matter to our great Adversary, Satan, as the Bible does. It has ever been his
custom to pose as an angel of light—a leader—to defend the Truth and to spread
knowledge; whereas in reality he has always persistently continued to be the
enemy and adversary of God—seeking to thwart every feature of the Divine Plan.
No doubt at many times he has thought himself successful, not catching the
spirit of the Divine Program or realizing that God is able to make all of his
machinations to work out eventually for good.
When in the Sixteenth Century the light of the Reformation began to break, the
people began to look past the Bishops and to inquire what Jesus and the
Apostles had said. They wanted the Bible. But for a time the
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Bishops stood in their way. It was in the year 1526 A.D., exactly twelve
centuries after the making of the first creed, that Professor Tyndale, a godly
man and a scholar, translated the New Testament into English and sought to give
it to the British people. Although printing and paper had been invented, he
could not have his work published in Great Britain; for the power of the
Bishops was too strong. No printers dared offend them.
Professor Tyndale finally succeeded in having his work printed on German
presses in the city of Hamburg, and then imported these New Testaments into London.
They appeared in the shop windows, and the people rejoiced. But the masses
found themselves unable to read; for education was only amongst the favored
few.
They started to have Bible readings—to hire scholarly persons to read to them.
But the Bishops, learning of these things, bought up the entire edition of
Tyndale’s New Testament and publicly burned the books in front of St. Paul’s
Cathedral, in London—Protestant Bishops of the Church of England! They reasoned
that if the people got back to the Bible, they would ignore the creeds and
those who had made the creeds; and that thus their own honor and influence be
lost. They foresaw also that all the creeds would be challenged by Bible
authority, and that their Apostolic claims also would be challenged by the words
of Jesus, who declares that those who so claim "do lie."—Re 2:2.
But the Lord’s time came for the Bible to return gradually to its proper place.
The Bishops found that the people were murmuring against their course; and in
forty years the murmuring reached such a height that the Bishops found it wiser
to bring out a Bible translation.
They called it the Bishop’s Bible, in order that they might draw back to
themselves the favor of the people, and thus offset their previous Bible
burning. But they warned the people that in reading the Bible they must
interpret it by the creeds which the Bishops had
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made during the preceding twelve centuries; that otherwise they would be
heretics and suffer eternal torment.
The matter worked well. Then the Catholics said, "Why cannot we similarly
give the people the Bible, and yet hold them down to creedal interpretations of
it?"
So they prepared at Douay College, France, the Douay Bible, and gave it to the
Catholics, with similar warnings that there was great danger in reading it, and
that whoever interpreted it otherwise than by the creeds would be heretics and
could not even get off with Purgatory, but would go down to eternal torture.
In addition to these handicaps, we must remember that all the reformers who
really appreciated the Bible had their minds warped and twisted by twelve
centuries of human misrepresentation of the Divine character and Plan, under
the malevolent influence of "the Prince of this world." Hence,
although the translations of the Bible are generally good, they are
interspersed here and there with the mental coloring of the translators. Nor
can we wonder at this. Twelve centuries of error and darkness must greatly
becloud the mind and require time to be dislodged.
SECT FOLLOWED SECT SEEKING LIGHT
Again Satan sought to block the path of Christian progress from the darkness to
light by encouraging sectarianism.
Yet each sect was really seeking more light; and Satan, as the Prince of
Darkness, succeeded in leading some this way and some that way, and in
perpetuating and to some extent increasing the confusion of doctrines, until
today the vast majority of even those who profess full consecration to God are
perplexed, bewildered. The fire of Higher Criticism and of Evolutionary theories
emanating from the colleges is bringing up the false faith of many, as St. Paul
foretold would be the case with those who built their faith with the wood, hay
and stubble of human tradition, and who did not
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sufficiently search out and build with the gold, silver and precious stones of
Divine Truth.—1Co 3:12.
The eminent Cardinal Newman expressed the sentiment of all honest Christians in
his hymn, which has met with such general favor everywhere. In it he says:
"Lead, kindly Light, Amid the
encircling gloom; Lead Thou me on.
The night is dark, And I am far from home: Lead Thou me on."
Like the Cardinal, all Christian
people are coming to realize that they have been in an encircling gloom; and
that somehow or other, error, false doctrine, has been the cause of that gloom.
All Christians, as well as the Cardinal, realize the need of a Divine Light to
guide the people of God. They realize that they are still in the dark night,
and that the morning of Divine blessing has not yet burst in upon the people of
the world. Thank God, however, it is breaking now! We are in the dawn of the
glorious Millennial Kingdom.
Soon the Sun of Righteousness will arise with healing in His beams. (Mal 4:2.)
Soon Satan will be bound for a thousand years, to deceive mankind no longer.
(Re 20:2.) And then, a little later, according to the Word of the Lord, Satan
and all those who will then intelligently sympathize with his wrong course, and
who refuse obedience to God under the blessed influence of Messiah’s Kingdom,
will be destroyed in the fire, or judgment, which will come down from
Heaven—the Second Death, from which there will be no redemption, no recovery.
(Re 20:9.) Of those St. Peter declares that they shall perish like natural
brute beasts; and St. Paul tells us that they shall be punished with
everlasting destruction.
Although Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans—all—admit,
as does the Cardinal, that they are encircled in the gloom and the darkness of
the night everywhere about, nevertheless each consoles himself with the thought
that it is no more dark or gloomy
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with him than with those of other sects. Evidently this is the truth. But the
difficulty has been that although there are many sects, parties and divisions
amongst the people of God, there is no more authority in the Bible for one of
these sects than for another. The only Church of the Bible is "the Church
of the First-borns," whose names are "written in
Heaven"—"in the Lamb’s Book of Life."—Heb 12:23; Re 21:27.
The course which God’s people should have pursued would have been to keep free
from any sectarian bondage and to continue to walk in the light of the Truth,
instead of binding themselves with human creeds and staking their minds back to
the teachings of Luther, Calvin, Wesley and others. It is not too late yet to
step out from all human bondage and to obey the command of the Lord’s Word,
which says that we should walk in the Light, and not sit in sectarian darkness.
The Bible tells us that "the path of the just is as a shining light that
shineth more and more unto the perfect day." (Pr 4:18.) We are now in the
beginning of that perfect Day; and all who are walking in the light, and are
free from bondage, are receiving blessings from the Lord; for it is "due
time."—1Ti 2:6.
It is safe to say that no ministry of education in any of the so-called
orthodox sects believes the creed of his own denomination or would think for a
moment of defending it before the public. A Baltimore minister, recently
challenged by one of his congregation as to the truthfulness of the creeds
respecting the eternal torment of all except the saintly believers in Christ,
said, "George, George, I do not believe those things one bit more than you
do! But, George, I am bound to preach them. I cannot help myself!"
Alas, poor man, how terrible his slavery! What mighty power could bind him to
slander his Creator?
The wealth of the world should not be worthy of the slightest consideration if
it could be obtained at such
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a price. The sale of the Almighty’s name and character necessarily seem worse
to us than the course of Judas Iscariot in the selling of Jesus for thirty
pieces of silver.
Additionally, how much more would any honorable man demand for deceiving the
congregation who trusted him and who supplied a living for himself and his
family?
How much money should it require of any honest man to keep his confiding flock
in ignorance of his real views and of the teachings of the Bible?
Alas, alas, how much hypocrisy appears to be in the world under the cloak of
religion! The ministers of today have taken vows to preach creeds which they do
not believe, and are quietly assenting to those creeds and allowing their
congregations to think that they believe them, when privately they confess to
their fellows and to many of their congregations that they have no faith
whatever in those teachings. As with the pulpit, so with the pew! How many
bankers, doctors, lawyers, far too intelligent to believe the monstrosities of
the creeds, nevertheless back with their personal influence and their money
those very creeds which dishonor God, and which have driven thousands of
sensible people away from all denominations! Would these same men be so
dishonest in respect to their vows to the Masons or the Odd Fellows or other
human organizations? Would they support things which they did not believe? We
cannot think so.
The only explanation we have for
such a terrible course of hypocrisy is that these good people do not realize what
they are doing and believe themselves justified in professing a lie because
others so do. Surely the hour of awakening and of decision is upon us. If I am
correct in teaching that Messiah’s Kingdom is at the door, surely it is time to
be sobered up from the false doctrines, time to be very penitent for our share
therein, time to step out of all false representations into the liberty
wherewith Christ has made His people free (Ga 5:1), and time to profess the
Truth and to uphold it and it alone.
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