These two passages,—the one before us, and the one respecting the case of incest at Corinth,—are conclusive as to St. Paul’s teaching respecting the existence and personality of the devil. They are supported and illustrated by a number of other passages in his writings; as when he tells the Thessalonians that “Satan hindered” his work, or warns the Corinthians that “even Satan fashioneth himself into an angel of light,” and tells them that his own sore trouble in the flesh was, like Job’s, “a messenger of Satan to buffet” him. Not less clear is the teaching of St. Peter and St. John in Epistles which, with those of St. Paul to the Corinthians, are among the best authenticated works in ancient literature. “Your adversary the devil as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour,” says the one: “He that doeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning,” says the other. And, if we need higher authority, there is the declaration of Christ to the malignant and unbelieving Jews. “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father it is your will to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and stood not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father thereof.”[32] With regard to this last passage, those who deny the personal existence of Satan must maintain either (1) that the Evangelist here attributes to Christ words which He never used; or (2) that Christ was willing to make use of a monstrous superstition in order to denounce his opponents with emphasis; or (3) that He Himself erroneously believed in the existence of a being who was a mere figment of an unenlightened imagination: in other words, that “the Son of God was manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil,” when all the while there was no devil and no works of his to be destroyed.
The first of these views cuts at the root of all trust in the Gospels as historical documents. Words which imply that Satan is a person are attributed to Christ by the Synoptists no less than by St. John; and if the Evangelists are not to be believed in their report of Christ’s sayings on this topic, what security have we that they are to be believed as to their reports of the rest of His teaching; or indeed as to anything which they narrate? Again, how are we to account for the very strong statements made by the Apostles themselves respecting the evil one, if they had never heard anything of the kind from Christ.
The second view has been adopted by Schleiermacher, who thinks that Christ accommodated His teaching to the ideas then prevalent among the Jews respecting Satan without sharing them Himself. He knew that Satan was a mere personification of the moral evil which every man finds in his own nature and in that of his fellow-men: but the Jews believed in the personality of this evil principle, and He acquiesced in the belief, not as being true, but as offering no fundamental opposition to His teaching. But is this consistent with the truthfulness of Christ? If a personal devil is an empty superstition, He went out of his way to confirm men in their belief in it. Why teach that the enemy who sowed the tares is the devil? Why interpret the birds that snatch away the freshly sown seed as Satan? It would have been so easy in each case to have spoken of impersonal temptations. Again, what motive can Christ have had for telling His Apostles (not the ignorant and superstitious multitude), that He Himself had endured the repeated solicitations of a personal tempter, who had conversed and argued with Him?
Those who, like Strauss and Renan, believe Jesus of Nazareth to have been a mere man, would naturally adopt the third view. In believing in the personality of Satan Jesus merely shared the superstitions of His age. To all those who wish to discuss with him whether we are still Christians, Strauss declares that “the belief in a devil is one of the most hideous sides of the ancient Christian faith,” and that “the extent to which this dangerous delusion still controls men’s ideas or has been banished from them is the very thing to regard as a measure of culture.” But at the same time he admits that “to remove so fundamental a stone is dangerous for the whole edifice of the Christian faith. It was the young Goethe who remarked against Bahrdt that if ever an idea was biblical, this one [of the existence of a personal Satan] was such.”[33] And elsewhere Strauss declares that the conception of the Messiah and His kingdom without the antithesis of an infernal kingdom with a personal chief is as impossible as that of North pole without a South pole.[34]
To refuse to believe in an evil power external to ourselves is to believe that human nature itself is diabolical. Whence come the devilish thoughts that vex us even at the most sacred and solemn moments? If they do not come from the evil one and his myrmidons, they come from ourselves:—they are our own offspring. Such a belief might well drive us to despair. So far from being a “hideous” element in the Christian faith, the belief in a power, “not ourselves, that makes for” wickedness, is a most consoling one. It has been said that, if there were no God, we should have to invent one: and with almost equal truth we might say that, if there were no devil, we should have to invent one. Without a belief in God bad men would have little to induce them to conquer their evil passions. Without a belief in a devil good men would have little hope of ever being able to do so.
The passage before us supplies us with another consoling thought with regard to this terrible adversary, who is always invisibly plotting against us. It is often for our own good that God allows him to have an advantage over us. He is permitted to inflict loss upon us through our persons and our property, as in the case of Job, and the woman whom he bowed down for eighteen years, in order to chasten us and teach us that “we have not here an abiding city.” And he is permitted even to lead us into sin, in order to save us from spiritual pride, and to convince us that apart from Christ and in our own strength we can do nothing. These are not Satan’s motives, but they are God’s motives in allowing him to be “the ruler of this world,” and to have much power over human affairs. Satan inflicts suffering from love of inflicting it, and leads into sin from love of sin: but God knows how to bring good out of evil by making the evil one frustrate his own wiles. The devil malignantly afflicts souls that come within his power; but the affliction leads to those souls being “saved in the day of the Lord.” It had that blessed effect in the case of the incestuous person at Corinth. Whether the same is true of Hymenæus and Alexander, there is nothing in Scripture to tell us. It is for us to take care that in our case the chastisements which inevitably follow upon sin do not drive us further and further into it, but teach us to sin no more.
FOOTNOTES:
[30] Dr. David Brown in Schaff’s Popular Commentary, iii., p. 180.
[31] Heb. xii. 5, 11; comp. 1 Cor. xi. 32; 2 Cor. vi. 9; 2 Tim. ii. 25; Luke xxiii. 16, 22: Soph., Ajax 595; Xen., Mem. I. iii. 5.
[32] 1 Thess. ii. 18; 2 Cor. xi. 14, xii. 7; 1 Pet. v. 8; 1 John iii. 8; John viii. 44.