<< Back |
Chosen no: SM-128 , from: 0 Year. |
Change lang
| |
Humanity Deluded By Demon Doctrines
"The god of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not,
lest the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ...should shine unto them."—2Co
4:4.
During the Dark Ages doctrines of
demons were foisted upon the Church by Satan’s hosts of fallen angels.
Millions were driven into the
Church, but driven away from God and from the Bible. The theory was that all
not members of the Church would surely go to eternal torture, but that by
joining the Church they would have a chance of Heaven, even though the path led
through Purgatory. Under these unscriptural teachings, Christianity has
enrolled its hundreds of millions, very few of whom know anything about the
real Christianity of the Bible—true discipleship of Jesus Christ.
We see them in Europe today—of all
creeds—doing their best to destroy each other—to send each other to Purgatory
or to eternal torture. About five per cent are estimated to be Mohammedans,
Jews and infidels, and the remaining ninety-five per cent Christians. What a
farce! What a hypocritical deception! The fact is that probably less than one
per cent of all those millions would make any claim to be followers of Christ
or of seeking to cultivate His Spirit of meekness, gentleness, patience,
long-suffering, brotherly kindness, love. The great majority manifest the
reverse spirit of anger, malice, hatred, envy, strife—works of the flesh and of
the Devil.—Col
3:8; Ga 5:19-23; 1Jo 3:8.
How few anywhere profess to be disciples or followers of Jesus and His
teachings! Christian standards have been so lowered that today a Christian is
not one who has surrendered his whole being to God and His service, and who has
devoted himself to following the
SM129
Master’s example, but merely one who refrains from profanity and such gross
sins as murder and immorality.
This change has come about as a revulsion against the thought that everybody
except a mere handful of saints is enroute to eternal torture. Kind-hearted
people could not think of their friends and relatives as suffering thus.
They had the thought of eternal torture firmly fixed and let it remain, but
moved down low the standard of worthiness for everlasting life.
DEMONOLOGY AND THE FIRST LIE
Lucifer, the cherub, through ambition became Satan, God’s opponent. He deceived
our first parents into sin by his great falsehood, "Ye shall not surely
die." (Ge 3:4.) Since then he has supported that lie personally and
through his demon hosts of fallen angels. These are not far off stoking fires
in Hell and Purgatory, but right with humanity, perpetuating the original lie
and convincing the world that Satan told the truth when he said, "Ye shall
not surely die"; and that God lied when He said, "Thou shalt surely
die." The doctrines of demons have so far succeeded that now practically
everybody believes that lie, and the claim is made that the dead are more alive
after death than before.
On this original foundation-falsehood Satan has built up various theories, all
of which tend to delude humanity and to drive them away from God and from the
promises of the Bible. He tells them that the dead are alive somewhere, and
that at death the good and the bad immediately enter their rewards and
punishments without resurrection. The errors are so skillfully framed as to
teach that Heaven can be entered only through a number of passage-ways; such as
baptism in infancy, confirmation, holy water, holy candles and holy burial,
prayers, Eucharist and masses. Satan enlists on his side all who are interested
in these various Heavenward helps. These have been reverenced; money has been
paid to them freely;
SM130
they have made the success already suggested, and claim four hundred million
Christians. But how few of these really know the true God or really love Him!
"GATHER MY SAINTS TO ME"
In the Bible, however, God sets forth the True Church
of the First-borns, whose names are written in Heaven.
Jesus is the Head over these; and they all are brethren, and not divided into
clergy and laity. They are called saints. (Psalm 50:5.) God could indeed use
force in gathering His Elect Church, but He will not do so. He will now gather
merely those who have the hearing ear and the responsive heart. Of these He
says, "They shall be Mine in that Day when I make up My jewels."
Then a New Epoch will open; and under the Headship of Jesus these jewels will
constitute the Messianic Kingdom.
Then the blessing of the world will begin. The first step in that blessing will
be the binding of Satan, that he may deceive the people no more. Next will come
the sweeping away of the ignorance and superstition which have been his web for
entangling humanity. Thus all the blinded eyes will be opened, and all the deaf
ears unstopped—all will see; all will hear; all will know of the Love of God,
which passes all human understanding. (Isa 35:5; Ro 8:38,39.) Then the
knowledge of the glory of God will fill the earth; and as a result every knee
shall bow and every tongue confess, to the glory of God.—Isa 11:9; Hab. 2:14;
Php 2:10,11.
The outcome will be that all wilful sinners will be destroyed in the Second
Death, while all others will be ushered into the perfection of life in a
world-wide Eden.
Then there shall be no more sighing, no more crying, no more dying; for all the
former things shall have passed away. "And He that sat upon the Throne
said, Behold, I make all things new."—Re 21:4,5.
Is it not strange that we ever believed the monstrous falsehoods taught us by
these doctrines of demons—that the dead are more alive than ever; that nearly
all of them
SM131
are suffering untellable tortures, while the remaining small remnant look over
the battlements of Heaven and rejoice in the misery of the unfortunates?
Assuredly no human brain ever concocted such a Satanic theory!
We challenge the ability of any man to sit down and deliberately concoct
anything worse than what has been described to us as the Plan of the great
Heavenly Creator, the Father of mercies, from whom cometh down every good and
every perfect gift, and whose very name is Love. We have never found man or
woman so fiendish as our God has been described to us.
Herein we see the Satanic cunning of our great Adversary: By establishing great
religious institutions he has satisfied a certain mental craving, bound to
assert itself in humanity. Yet by these false doctrines which blaspheme the
Divine character and the Bible by misrepresenting them, he has driven far away
from God nearly all, even of those who have professed church
membership—"They profess that they know God; but in works they deny
Him."—Ti 1:16.
Some may be disposed to say Satan would never teach about eternal torment; for
it would be contrary to his interests and would keep people away from him. We
reply that after eighteen centuries this theory is proven to be wrong, and
Satan is proven to have been wise in his method. Mankind do not wish to serve
Satan and sin.
Naturally they would be, as the Apostle declares, feeling after God and
desirous of finding Him; for every man has inherently some degree of reverence
for a supreme Creator. Let me illustrate how Satan’s lie operates: A Christian
lady who has become a Bible student, and who now dearly loves God and the
Bible, told me her experience thus: "I was a Presbyterian, trusted that I
was one of the Elect, and felt serene, but not without sympathy for the
non-elect, who were to be tortured eternally.
Then came the thought, Are you sure that you are one of the Elect? In distress
I went to my pastor. In
SM132
substance he said, ‘You are all right; you are one of the Elect. Do not bother
your head about such questions.’ "But still I was troubled. Finally I
feared that I would land in an insane asylum; for I could not lift my thoughts
from my danger of eternal torture. To escape insanity I plunged into society,
gave and attended social functions, and made my life one busy whirl, in which I
had no time to think of God or Satan or the Bible. Oh, how changed everything
is now, Pastor Russell! My heart always yearned for God, and now I know Him. I
read His Book, and see its great Divine Plan of the Ages, showing a gracious
blessing for the Elect on the Heavenly plane and a grand Restitution for the
non-elect to perfection on the earthly plane. I ever thank God for the ‘Studies
in the Scriptures.’" Have we not driven away from God and from the Bible
some of the very best minds of the world, plunging them into business,
pleasure, society, novel-reading, theater-going or intoxication—anything to stop
themselves from thinking about the terrible possibilities of the future related
to them by you and me who have been deluded by these doctrines of devils.
"SPEAKING LIES IN HYPOCRISY"
St. Paul
describes Satan’s work concisely in the statement which forms our text. If the
true light of God shines into any heart, it begins a transformation work at
once; hence Satan’s anxiety to keep people from thinking of God as a reasonable
and adorable Creator and from studying His gracious plan for human redemption.
We see how the eyes of all have been much holden—the world seeing nothing at
all, and Christians seeing little enough of the goodness of God. Thus St. Paul prayed for
Christians that the eyes of their understanding opening, they might be able to
comprehend the lengths and breadths, the heights and depths, and to know the
Love of God, which passes human understanding.—Eph 1:18; 3:19.
This Love of God was completely obscured by the
SM133
dense darkness of the medieval period, when the doctrines of demons got full
hold upon the minds of the people, because the Bible was reprobated and out of
use for twelve hundred years, while the people were misguided into thinking
that so-called Apostolic bishops had the same authority as the original Twelve
Apostles whom Jesus ordained. The creeds made by these bishops took the place
of the Word of God until the beginning of the Sixteenth Century; and since
then, it has been a battle for the Bible to get into the hands of the people
and for the latter to realize their privilege of Bible study. Protestant
bishops, in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, set the example of
burning the New Testament, because those who would study it would thereby be
ignoring these false apostles, who styled themselves Apostolic Bishops, and of
whom Jesus said, "They are not Apostles, but liars."—Re 2:2.
Finally the people, feeling after the True God and His true Message, and
wondering why the bishops kept it from them, made such a stir about the matter
that both Protestant and Catholic bishops gave them the Bible in English, but
with dire threats that if in reading they got anything different from the
creeds that the bishops had made, they would roast to all eternity. Ever since,
the Bible has been obliged to fight for every inch of ground it has
gained—fighting against bishops and clergy who, if they could not keep it from
the people, did their best to make it support the doctrines of demons—the
clergy themselves being deceived also, and verily thinking that they were doing
God service.
DIFFERENCE IN THE PAST FIFTY YEARS
During the past fifty years general education has come. Satan realized that he
must adopt a new course.
As St. Paul
foretold, he affected to be an angel of light, a leader into new light. (2Co
11:13-15.) He got hold of the colleges and seminaries, and now sees to it that
practically everybody of college education has his religious
SM134
faith entirely destroyed, so far as a Divine Revelation is concerned. Surely
not five out of every hundred ministers and others graduated make any pretense
of believing in the inspiration of the Bible, when they are speaking privately
and confidentially! They are too intelligent to believe in eternal torture, and
experience a revulsion of feeling against the Bible, which they mistakenly
believe teaches these Satanic delusions.
As a result, we have thousands of ministers drawing salaries totalling millions
of dollars annually, who outwardly pose as God’s servants, ministers of His
religion revealed in the Bible, but who in reality are hypocrites.
Privately they will confess that they do not believe that man was created in
God’s image and fell from it. Neither do they believe that Jesus redeemed man
from the fall; for they say, There was no fall. Neither do they believe in a
coming Time of Restitution, which the Bible declares is the great hope for the
world. (Ac 3:19,23.) They are hypocrites pure and simple. As the Apostle Paul
declares, they "speak lies in hypocrisy, having their consciences seared
with a hot iron."—1Ti 4:1,2; Isa 56:11.
There are exceptions to this general rule. They are found amongst the less
educated ministers, whom their educated brethren style "mossbacks."
There are others whose consciences are not entirely seared, and who are in
great distress, wishing to be honest, but fearing the cost. They say little
about the future, occasionally work in a little Truth, and are generally very
unhappy. I have hope for many of these yet, that they will get right with God
and take their stand for truth and righteousness, casting all their cares and
fears upon the Lord—fears respecting their living and provision for their
families, respecting their good names, which will be cast out as evil, as mine
has been, if they will firmly stand. The time of decision is here. Whoever is
not for God and for the Truth is against the same.
SM135
The great leaders of Ecclesiasticism seem to have no conscience. If approached
by their confiding flocks, they dodge the questions with deceptive phrases,
fearing not God, neither regarding man, but merely looking for gain, each from
his own quarter—his denomination.
It is the duty of all who see the Truth clearly to act positively. (2Co
6:17,18.) Whoever lends financial aid or moral support to the great systems
which are opposing the true teachings of God’s Word, and assisting in the
perpetuation of Satan’s lie, is a partaker of the evil deeds and will share in
the woes soon to come.
BLASPHEMY THE GREATEST CRIME
Recently a young business man told me of his experience.
He inquired of his pastor, "Is there a Hell of eternal torture for all
except the saintly?" The cheerful answer was, "Yes, certainly."
The young man had been reading and thinking, and told the pastor his
conclusions.
As he left the study, the pastor put his hand on the young man’s shoulder,
saying, "George, I do not believe in eternal torture, either. But, you
know, we must preach it; otherwise, what would become of the world? They would
go from bad to worse."
What does that young man think of his pastor now?
—a liar, a hypocrite, a blasphemer of God—all to hold his place in the
religious firmament—justifying himself by saying, "Let us do evil that
good may come; let us blaspheme God’s name, that we may lead the people, and
drive them away from God and the Bible!" We know of no worse crime that
humanity could commit than that of blaspheming God’s holy name. In the Jewish
Law this sin was placed ahead of all sins relating to fellowmen.
That minister is merely a sample of
about nine-tenths of the entire clergy, so far as we are able to know from
their creed professions and their private denials of these. St. Paul’s words
surely appeal to every true Christian when he declares that the Love of God and
of Christ—not fear—constrains us.
SM-128