The lesson for our encouragement is clear. So jealous is God of His own Name, so deeply dishonoured is that Name whenever we sin, that the Spirit again and again, in teaching us to pray against the devil, tells us to plead with God on this very basis. When His Name is involved God will rise in His might, and come to our help with a mighty hand and a stretched-out arm. Even if His mighty love were not a motive force, we can trust Him to care for His own good Name, to do His utmost to save us, since the fall of one who is called by His Name will lay His honour in the dust.
(3) Again, consider what is the meaning of each particular defeat to God. Every baptized soul is a point on the far-flung battle line of the Church Militant; every baptized soul is His soldier, made in His image and sealed with His Sign of adoption, and set to defend a definite point in the front of God's army. Is it nothing to Him that such a soul be beaten down by the foe? Is it nothing to Him that His divine image be marred and denied with the marks of the Fiend, and that he who bears it be dragged away a captive of hell?
Unless all revelation concerning His love be false, even the smallest defeat in the battle is to God something at which the imagination staggers when it seeks to grasp it. What would a loving earthly father think to see his beloved child torn from his bosom, and carried away into the power of a savage enemy, consigned to untold and eternal woe? Would he take it philosophically, dismissing the whole affair from his mind after a time, justifying himself that this dread calamity came by the child's fault, and was the result of its own disobedience? And is our heavenly Father less loving, less tender, of His children, than an earthly father? True, suffering in any human sense, cannot touch the Godhead, but there must be some awful and mysterious thing which human thought can never fathom, and which we dare not seek to understand, that enters, as it were, into the Godhead when souls fail and are lost; or else the Holy Spirit could never have inspired the Apostle to reveal concerning the risen, ascended, and glorified God-Incarnate, that in our surrender to Satan there is a crucifying of Him afresh.[[17]]
Where then have we warrant for discouragement? When Satan sets the battle in array against my soul, I am not alone. The call to arms rings through all heaven. The Lord Christ Himself goes forth to war in the unconquerable might of His Sacred Humanity. Angels and archangels, and all the glorious company of heaven, spring forward to action. The great multitude which no man can number, of all nations and kindreds, and people, and tongues, that stand before the throne and before the Lamb, war for me in the might of their ceaseless intercession; and as the vast and splendid front of the armies of the living God sweep on to the conflict, my soul is caught up in the mighty movement and advance, and their spirit becomes my spirit, as we go forth, conquering and to conquer, in God's behalf and mine.
[[1]] St. Matt. xi, 29-30.
[[2]] St. John xiv, 1 and 27.
[[3]] St. John xiv, 13; xv, 7 and 16; xvi, 23 and 24.
[[4]] St. John xiv, 16.
[[5]] St. John xv, 16.
[[6]] St. John xvi, 20, 22, and 24.