Biblical Psychology

This book is simply compiled from verbatim reports of my lectures on Biblical Psychology, delivered at the Bible Training College, 45 North Side, Clapham Common, London, England, during 1911.

The reports were taken by my wife and sent on to the editors of the " Revivalist, " who now, out of the generosity of their hearts, are publishing them in book form.

May this "Introduction to the Study of Biblical Psychology'' stir up the minds of the saints, lest Satan as an angel of light instil error. (2 Pet. 1: 12, 13.)

(Although the passages quoted appear as "texts," they are really portions of connected revelation.)

(b) Celestial Catastrophe, Isa. 14: 12; Luke 10: 18.

(c) Terrestrial Cosmos. Gen. 1: 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31.

3 CLIMAX OF CREATION. Gen. 1: 26, 27.

Between Genesis 1, verses 1 and 2, there is a great hiatns. Verse 1 refers to an order of things before the reconstruction referred to in verse 2. I mean- by (a) celestial creations, the creations that were before men and our system of things as we understand them. These celestial creations all belong to the period before man. The creations first alluded to then are not men, but something other than man. Job 38, verses 4 to 7, has a distinct reference to such a time when the "sons of God shouted for joy." Who were these sons of God? They were certainly not men; they were unquestionably angels and archangels, and you will find that the indirect inference from the Bible is that God had put that former world under the charge of an archangel "Lucifer."

The Bible also alludes to (b) a catastrophe before man, was created, which makes the first and second verses of the first chapter of Genesis understandable. God gave the rule of this universe to Lucifer, and he opposed himself to God's authority and rule, and dragged everything down with him, and consequently called forth on this earth a tremendous judgment, which resulted in chaos "and the earth was without form and void." You will find this catastrophe referred to in such passages as Isaiah 14:12, and Luke 10:18, "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from Heaven." When did out Lord behold this? Surely it is legitimate to suggest that it refers to the period before our Lord's incarnation, when He was with God, in the very beginning, before all things. (This particular verse is frequently taken to refer to the time yet to be, and that our Lord is annihilating time in His forelook.) These verses are like mountain peaks revealing a whole tableland of God's revelation of the order of things before man was created.

Then comes (c) the condemnation of the "angels," a celestial condemnation, nothing whatever to do with man, but the condemnation of Lucifer and all his angels. (Jude 6.) When- Jesus Christ alludes to the beginning, He does not mean the beginning of man; He means the beginning of the creation of God which was long enough before man was created. (See John 8: 44.) f("Hell" has nothing whatever to do with man primarily.) Hell is a place of angelic condemnation. You will never find that God says Hell was made for man. It is true that it is the only place for a man who rejects God's salvation. Hell was the result of a distinct condemnation that was passed by God on celestial beings, and is as eternal as those celestial anarchists.

There are three amazing episodes that indicate the conditions before the creation of man, viz.: that the archangels and the angels governed a wonderful world which God created in the beginning, and which God's Spirit is alluding to by that phrase in Job, "The sons of God sang together.' ' Lucifer fell, and with him all his angels in a tremendous ruin (clearly mentioned in Genesis 1:2), and "the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Without some such indication, the second verse would be unintelligible, for to say that "in the beginning God created the Heaven and the earth," and then to say that "the earth was without form and void" is a confusion and a confounding. The inference is that between the epochs referred to in the first and second verses there has occurred this catastrophe which the Bible does not say much about. The evident purpose of the Bible is to tell us what God's purpose is with man. Roughly outlining that purpose, we might say that God created man to counteract the devil.

2. Conditions Leading to Man's Creation.

(a) Terrestrial Chaos. (Gen. 1:2.) Satan has been the means of the ruin of the first created order, and now God begins to create another order out of the confusion of ruin. "Void" means the aftermath of destruction by judgment, or the result of Divine judgment.

(b) Terrestrial Creations. God began to create things. Genesis 1: 2-25, gives a detailed account of the creation of the earth and the life on it. The Bible nowhere says that God set processes at work, and out of these processes were evolved the things which appear. The Bible says the things of this world were created by a distinct "fiat" of God. If the Bible entirely agreed with modern science, it would soon be "out of date," because modern science is in the very nature of things bound, to change. Genesis 1 indicates that God created the earth and the life on the earth to fit the world for man.

(c) Terrestrial Cosmos. The order and beauty of this world were created by God for man. Genesis 1, verses 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25 and 31, all say that "God saw that it was good." After the judgment by God on the previous order, God created "a new thing," to fit all for a totally new being whom no angel had ever seen before. He was to be a man, and he was to stand at the end of the six days' work as a creation of earth, and at the threshold of God's Sabbath day. God created man, not <an angel, and not God Himself. He created him to be a unique being. Man was related to this earth, created out of this earth, and yet he was created in the image of God, whereby God could prove Himself more than a match for the devil by a creation a little lower that the angels (the order of beings Satan belongs to). This is, as it were, God's tremendous experiment in this creation. He puts man at the head of the Terrestrial Creation. The whole meaning of the creation of the world is to fit and prepare it for this wonderful being called Man that God had in. His mind. There is nothing in the Bible about evolving and developing man as a "survival of the fittest," or the "process of natural selection." The Bible reveals that we are earth and spirit, a combination of the two. The devil is spirit, just as God is; the angels are spirit; but when we come to a man, man is to be earth and spirit.

(a) "Son of God!" -(Luke 3: 38.) Adam' was a son of God. As far as the terrestrial is concerned, there is only one other primal "Son of God" in the Bible, and He is Jesus Christ. This is an important point. Yet we are called "sons of God," but how? By being reinstated through the atonement of Jesus Christ. We are not the "sons of God" by natural generation. Have you noticed that Adam did not come into the world as we do? Neither (lid Adam come into the world as Jesus Christ came. Adam was not " begot- ten;" Jesus Christ was. Adam was " created/ ' God created Adam, He did not beget him. We are all "generated," we are not created beings. Adam was the "son of God," and God made him as well as everything else that was created.

In Genesis 1:27 we read, "So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them." This is a point of importance. "Adam and Eve" are both needed before the image of God can be perfectly presented. God, as it were, is all that the best manhood presents us with, and all that the best womanhood presents us with. This aspect will be dealt with again in subsequent lectures.

(b) "The Six Days' Work." This word "day" unquestionably means roughly what we understand by twenty-four hours, and has no such meaning as "Day of Atonement" or "Day of Judgment." These terms do not refer to a "solar day," but to a "period of years of time." The devotion to the ephemeral scientific doctrine of evolution must be held responsible for the endeavor to make the Bible mean periods of years, instead of a solar day. The particular unparabolic use of the term "morning and evening" in Genesis distinctly indicates a solar day. Man was the end of the six days' work. In God's plan the whole of the six days' creation was meant for man. (The tendency nowadays is to put the six days' work of creation above man. Men and women are far more concerned about dogs and cats than about human beings. It is the reverse of what God made it. The whole purpose of creation in God's plan is man.)

There is not only the tendency to exalt animals above man, but there is the new speculation of the superman, i. e., a doctrine which holds that man, as we understand him and as the Bible reveals him, is not the climax of creation, but there is a higher race yet to be called "the superman/ ' and that man is as inferior to this being that is going to be as the ape is to him. Now all through the New Testament Jesus Christ foretold, and the Spirit of God, foretold, that we were going to have the "worship of man" installed, and it has begun already, it is in our midst to-day. We are told that Jesus Christ and God are simply ceasing to be of importance to the modern man, and what we are worshipping more and more now is humanity, and this is slowly merging into a new phase. All the "up-to-date" minds are looking towards the manifestation of a "superman/' a being much greater than the being we know as man. II. Thessalonians 2, gives us the picture of the head of this great expectation. He is to be the darling of every religion; there is to be a consolidation of religions, and races and everything on the face of the earth, a great socialism. The ethical standard for the superman claims to be higher than Jesus Christ's. The tendency noticeable already is that people object to some of Christ's teaching, such as "Loving your neighbor as yourself/' they say, "That is selfish, you must love your neighbor and not think of yourself/' The doctrine of the superman is absolute sinless perfection. We are going to evolve a being, they say, who has got to the place where he cannot be tempted. This is all an emanation from Satan. Man is the climax of creation. He is on a stage a little lower than the angels, and God is going to overthrow the devil by this being who is less than angelic. God has, as it were, put him in the "open field," and He allows the devil to do exactly what he likes up to a certain point, because God says, "I know that He who is in you is greater than he that is against you." That is the explanation in our own spiritual life-setting. Satan is to be humiliated by man, by the Spirit of God in man, and by poor fallen beings, too, like we were, but all by the wonderful regeneration through Jesus Christ.

Man is the head and the purpose of the six days' creation. Man's body has those •constituents in it that connect it with the earth; it has fire and water and all the elements of the life of animals, and consequently, God keeps us here. It is man's domain, and we are going to be here again after the terrestrial cremation. "Hereafter" without the devil, without the sin and without the wrong. We are going to be here marvelously redeemed in this wonderful place which God made very beautiful, and which has been, played havoc with by sin, and creation is waiting for the "manifestation of the sons of God."

Not only is man the head and the climax of the six days' work, but he is the beginning of, and stands at the threshold of (c) the very Sabbath of God. God's heart is, as it were, absolutely at rest now that He has created man, even in spite of the fact of the fall, and all else; God is absolutely confident that the whole thing will turn out as He said it would. The devil has laughed at God's hope for thousands of years and has ridiculed and scorned that hope. God is not upset or alarmed about the final issue. He is certain that man will bruise the serpent's head. This refers to those of us who are born again through Jesus Christ's amazing atonement.

The first condition was chaos, God created angels and they fell and there was ruin; than God remade the void into a new creation, and by making a being never existent before, a being a "little lower than the angels. "

(b) The Image of God in Angels. Gen. 6: 2; Ps. 89: 6; Job 1: 6; 38: 7.

(c) The Image of God in Man. Gen. 1:26; Ps. 8:4, 5.

(c) Man's Self -Consciousness. Prov. 20: 27; 1 Cor. 2: 11.

N. B. Visible creations that surround man are not in the image of God. Some notes will be given on the appearances of angels in our material universe. Some notes also on the human representations of God.

4. The Man of God's Making. God's heart, so to speak, is at rest now that He has created man. i(Gen. 2:4-25.)

(a) The Image of God. (John 4:24.) "God is spirit." This is a mountain-peak text which reveals a whole tableland of God's revelation about Himself.

(b) The Image of God in Angels. The phrase ' ' sons of God" in the Old Testament always refers to angels, and we have to take from the context whether they are "fallen angels" or not. Angels have no physical frame, they are not like man, and they are not manifested after this order of things. If, however, they are called "sons of God," the inference is clear that they bear the image of God.

(c) The Image of God in Man. The image of God in its primary reference to man must refer to the hidden or interior life of man.

From these three revelation facts in God's Book, men have reasoned backwards. They have said that because men have bodies, God has a corporiety, too. This mistake began centuries ago and it is continually being revived, the reason being that the Bible does refer to the form of God. For instance, the Old Testament alludes over and over again to what is called the " anthropomorphic " view of God. God is represented as having hands and limbs and looking like a man, and from this the inference is easy that surely God has a body like man. The answer is that all the Old Testament pictures of God are forecasts of the Incarnation, and have nothing to do with stating that God is in the form of a man. Read the passages in Isaiah alone, and they will reveal the apparently conflicting statements about God; He is represented in many contradictory phrases, yet immediately you read the life of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, all these contradictions blend in that unique Being, Jesus Christ, the second Adam. However, the Bible does speak of a "form of God" (Phil. 2:6), but the error arises from our too readily inferring that form" means physical body. The great Triune God has "form/' and the term used for that form is 11 glory.' ' Our Lord refers to this in John 17: 5. Our word " Trinity M is an attempt to convey the externally disclosed divine nature itself, and " glory' ' is the Bible term for conveying the idea of the external (so to speak) form of that Triune Being. This will be alluded to several times in the course of our studies in Biblical Psychology, and we will thus get familiar with this profound revelation.

(Sometimes God is referred to as the sun, but the sun is never stated to be made in the image of God, though there are illustrations in God's Book drawn from the sun to illustrate Him. But nowhere has it ever been stated that God made the sun in His own image.)

Angels in the Bible record certainly do appear to men. You may take this as a correct inference from the revealed facts in God's Word, that angels have the power of will to appear to human beings, when those human beings are in suitable, subjective conditions. That power is given to "good" and "bad" angels alike. You will find this inference a great guide regarding "Spiritualism." Spiritualism is not a trick, according to the Bible; it is a fact. Man can communicate with beings of a different order from his own, and he can put himself into a state of subjectivity in which angels can appear. Angels may thus be said to have a power of will to materialize themselves. It is probably to this that Paul refers in Romans 8: 38 and Ephesians 6: 12.

The Image of God in Man. The image of God in man is primarily spiritual, yet it has to be manifested in the body of a man also. We read in Psalm 8:5 that God made man a "little lower than the angels,' ' that might as well be translated a "little lower than God and the angels.' ' You will find that man's chief glory and dignity is that he was made of the earth to manifest the image of God in that substance. We are apt to think because we are made of earth that this is our humiliation, but it is not so. It is the very point that God's Word makes most of. He made man of the dust of the ground, and the redemption of Jesus Christ is for the dust of the ground as well.

Man's body before he degenerated, must have been dazzling with light. (We get this by direct inference from Genesis 3:7.) Man was obviously naked before his disobedience, and the death of his union with God instantly revealed itself in his body. (See next chapter.)

5. The Manner of Man's Making.

God did not create man by direct fiat but by His own deliberate power He moulded him. (See Gen. 1:26, 27.) The first mistake we must note is the inference that the soul was made along with the body; the Bible does not say it was. The Bible says that the body was created prior to the soul. Man's body was made by God, and it was built out of the "dust of the ground," that means that man is constituted to have affinity with everything on this earth. This is not his calamity, it is his peculiar dignity. (We dot not further our spiritual life "in spite of our bodies/ ' but in and by means of our bodies.) Then we read that God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life, and man became a "soul-enlivened nature.' ' There is another breathing mentioned in John 20: 22, when our risen Lord breathed on the disciples and said, "Receive ye the Holy Spirit." This is not exactly the same thing as Genesis 2:7. In the latter reference God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life which became man's spirit, not God's; but in the former reference in John, Jesus Christ breathed into His disciples Holy Spirit. "When God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life, man did not become a living God, man became a "living soul." Thus in man, degenerate or regenerate, there are three aspects, spirit, soul and body. The uniting of man's personality, body, soul and spirit, may be brought about in various ways. The Bible reveals that sensuality will do it (Eph. 5:5); that drunkenness will do it (Eph. 5:18); and finally that the devil will do it (Luke 11:21); but the Holy Ghost alone through Jesus Christ will do it rightly, this is the only at-one-ment. When our personality is sanctified, it is not God's Spirit that is sanctified, it is out spirit (1 Thess. 5:23), and cleansing from filthiness of the spirit refers to man's spirit. God's inbreathing into man's nostrils called into actual existence his soul, which was potentially in the body (potentially means existing in possibility, not in actuality). So man's soul is not his body or his spirit, but is that creation which holds his spirit and his body together, and is the medium of expressing his spirit in his body. It is not true to state that man's soul moulds his body; it is his spirit that moulds his body, and his soul is the medium the spirit uses to express itself.

It is absolutely impossible for us to conceive what Adam was like as God, made him, his very material body instinct with spiritual light, his very flesh in the likeness of God, his spirit in the image of God, and his soul in absolute harmony with God. In the personal life of a man who has fallen away from God, his soul and his spirit gravitate more and more to the dust of the earth, more and more to the brutish life on one side and the Satanic life on the other. The marvelous hope before us is that in and through Jesus Christ, our personality in its three aspects is sanctified and preserved in that condition blameless in this dispensation, and that in another dispensation body, soul and spirit will be all instinct with the glory of God, (Whenever an Old Testament character succeeded in doing God's will perfectly, earth seemed to lose its hold on him, e. g., Enoch, Elijah. Again, why did not Jesus Christ go straight back to Heaven from the Mount of Transfiguration? He emptied Himself a second time of the glory of God and came back again for the humiliation of the Cross. Then when Jesus Christ comes again, those who are saved and sanctified will be changed "in the twinkling of an eye," all the disharmony will cease and a new order begin.)

What does glorification mean? Adam is never spoken of as being glorified in the first decades of creation. Glorification is Christ enthroned in fulness of consummating power, having subdued all things unto Himself, and then finally entering back into the final being of the original Triune God as "in the beginning" before any first creations were.

In conclusion, God made man in His own image and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became, not a living God, but a living soul, a soul-enlivened nature, and this whole bodily temple, every corpuscle of blood, every nerve, every sinew, every muscle was the temple that could manifest an exact harmony with God and manifest the image of God in the very form of man in perfect faith and love. The angels can only manifest the image of God in what we call bodiless spirits, there is only one being who can manifest God on this earth, and that is man. Satan thwarted that purpose, and then laughed his devilish laugh against God, but the Bible says that God will laugh last.

(b) The Serpent and Eve. 2 Cor. 11: 3.

(c) The Serpent, Eve and Adam. 1 Tim. 2: 14. OEIGINAL SIN is— Doing without God.

(a) Satanic Pretensions. Implied, Matt. 4: 8; 2 Cor. 4: 4.

(b) Satanic Perversions. Gen. 3:5; implied, Job 1: 9.

(c) Satanic Perils. Jude 6; Matt. 16:23; 2 Thess. 2:9. OEIGINATOE OF SIN— Dethroning of God.

(a) Destitution and Death. Gen. 2: 17.

(b) Division from Deity. Gen. 3: 8, 13. *

OEIGIN OF SALVATION— Dating way back to God.

Now we come to the revelation statement as to how sin was introduced into this world.

•(a) The Serpent. (Gen. 3: 1.) This creature was evidently a beautiful creation of God, and we must beware of imagining that is was in the beginning as it was after God's curse. God, after the fall of Adam, cursed this beautiful creature into the serpent, to feed on dust and to crawl; and consequently the serpent in the physical domain is the picture of Satan in the spiritual domain. In our universe of physical things, we will find many which represent spiritual things; they are, as it were, pictures of them. The serpent is the physical picture from man's standpoint of what Satan appears in the spiritual domain from God's standpoint. However, this line of thought properly belongs to Biblical Philosophy, so we will only thus allude to it in passing.

(b) The Serpent and Eve. (2 Cor. 11:3.) Why did Satan come via the serpent, and to Eve, why did he not go to Adam direct? In talking about man and woman as they were first created, it is exceedingly difficult to present that subject without getting introduced to all sorts of small, petty and disreputable ideas, especially nowadays, relative to the distinctions between man and woman. In Adam and Eve we are dealing with the primal creations of God. Adam was created immediately by the hand of God, and Eve was created mediately. Eve stands for the soul side, the psychic side, of the human creation, all her sympathies and her affinities are with the other creations of God around. Adam stands for the spirit side, the kingly, Godward side. Adam and Eve are together the likeness of God, for God said, "Let us make man in our image, male and female created He them." Woman stands not as inferior to man; the revelation made here is that she stands in quite a different relation to all things, and both are required to make the complete, rounded creation of God referred to by the big general term MANKIND. Eve having affinity and sympathy with the creation round about, would naturally listen with very much more unsuspecting interest to the suggestions that came through the subtle creature that talked to her. The Bible says that Eve was deceived; the Bible does not say that Adam was deceived; consequently Adam is far more responsible than Eve, for Adam sinned deliberately. There was not the remotest conscious intention in Eve's heart of disobeying, she was deceived by the subtle wisdom of Satan via the serpent. Adam, however, was not deceived in any shape or form; when Eve came to him he understood it was disobedience, and he sinned with a deliberate understanding of what he was doing, so the Bible associates sin with Adam (Rom. 5: 12) and transgression with Eve. (1 Tim. 2: 14.) [In this connection it is of importance to note that the Bible reveals that our Redeemer entered into the world by the woman. Man as man had no part whatever in the redemption of the world; it was "the seed of the woman." In Protestant theology and in the Protestant outlook we have suffered much from our opposition to the Roman Catholic Church on one point, viz.: our intense antipathy to Mariolatry, and we have lost the whole meaning of the woman side of the revelation of God. All that we understand by womanhood and by manhood, all we understand by fatherhood and motherhood is embraced in the term "El Shaddai." (Gen. 17:1.) This is a mere hint at a line of thought we cannot take up here.] Perhaps one may legitimately make a distinction between transgression and sin in human conduct. (See Matt. 6: 12-15.) Transgression is nearly always an unconscious act, there is no conscious determination to do wrong. Sin is never an unconscious act, as far as culpability is concerned, it is always a conscious determination. Adam was the introducer of sin into this order of things. Original sin is doing without God. A noticeable feature in the conduct of Adam and Eve is that when God turned them out of the Garden they did not rebel. The characteristic of sin in man is "fear and shame.' ' Sin in man is doing without God, but it is not rebellion against God in its first stages, there is no rebellion anywhere in Adam and Eve against God.

(a) Satanic Pretensions. The pretensions of Satan are very clear. He is the "god of this world/ ' and he will not allow any relationship to the true God. Satan's attitude of pretence is the same as the attitude of a pretender to a throne — he claims it as his right. "Wherever and whenever the rule of God is established and recognized as such by man, Satan at once proceeds to instil the tendency of mutiny and rebellion and lawlessness.

(b) Satanic Perversions. Satan ever perverts what God says. Genesis 3: 5 is one of the revelation facts concerning Satan. Remember the characteristics of union with God are faith in God and personal, passionate devotion and love for God. The first thing Satan aims at in Adam and Eve is that, by perverting what

God says. (In Job 1:9 Satan goes the length of trying to pervert God's idea of man. There is an amazing revelation of power in Satan! He is represented as presenting himself with the "sons of God" in the very presence of God and trying to pervert God's mind about man. You may apply personally not exegetieally such a statement as the following in Isaiah: "He will not quench the smoking flax, nor break the bruised reed." Satan is also called the "accuser of the brethren." He not only accuses and slanders God to us, but he accuses us to God, and it is as if he looks down and points out a handful of people and insinuates to God, "Now; that woman is a perfect disgrace to you, she has only one spark of grace amongst all the fibres of her life, I advise you to stamp out that spark. ' ' What is the revelation? "He will raise it to a flame." Or, Satan points out a man and says, "That man is a disgrace to you, he is a c bruised reed/ I wonder you build any hope whatever on him, he is a hindrance and an upset to you, break him!" But no, the Lord will bind him up and make him into a wonderful instrument. The old reeds were used as wonderful musical instruments, and instead of crushing out the life that is bruised and wrong, He will heal it and discourse sweet music through it.)

In the Genesis revelation Satan says that God is jealous — "God knows if you disobey Him, you will beootne like God." He perverted God's statement, he did not say that God had said it. Satan is too wise for that, he said, "Has God said it?" insin- uating, "You do not know what He meant, but I do; He meant that if you eat of that tree and disobey Him, you will become like He is." I do not think that Eve accepted that statement about God, because when you watch, it worked as a deception, unconsciously, and what she saw was that it was remarkably delightful to take that fruit; but the discerning and understanding of it is given us by God. No wonder Paul says, and the Spirit says through the Epistles, that we are not "ignorant of the devices of Satan.' ' Eemember, Satan's pretension is that he is equal with God. His perversion is twofold: he perverts what God says to us, and tries to pervert God's mind about us.

(c) Satanic Perils. What are the Satanic perils? In Matthew 16: 23 we come to the location where we live. The perils spring straight out of the way we are made. Have you ever noticed the remarkable identification Jesus Christ makes in that passage? What is it Peter had said? "Pity Thyself, Lord." "Get thee behind Me, Satan." Then He tells Peter that he is saying the thing that belongs to the wrong disposition of man which is identified with Satan. Beware of Satanic perils where you take them to be natural tendencies. Remember Satan is an awful being, he is able to deceive us on the right hand and on the left, and the first beginnings of his deceptions are along the line of self-pity. Self-pity, self-conceit and self-sympathy will make us accept slanders against God. Satan's perils arise out of the wrong disposition that Adam introduced us to, and that wrong dispositon shows itself in self-pity and self-sympathy. (Beware of slandering the "old man/' as is very often done. I mean, making the "old man" appear ugly. The "old man" does not appear ugly to anybody but the Holy Ghost. The "old man," i. e., this disposition that connects me with the mystical "body of sin," is the most highly desirable thing on earth to me till I am quickened by the Spirit of God and born from above. It makes me consider "my rights"; it makes me look after myself and consider what is good for me.)

Then another peril. (2 Thess. 2: 9.) That means that there are tremendous and appalling external manifestations of Satan, and the curious thing is that nowadays people are paying much more attention, and watching out more eagerly for these great manifestations of Satanic power while they allow the other Satanic peril to have its way. Spiritualism is child's play compared to this other thing. Once you get the disposition altered, you will never be deluded by any of the Satanic powers that manifest themselves in spiritualisms in the external world. The peril is the inside peril which men never think of as a peril. "My right to myself," my "self-pity," my "self-conceit," my "consideration for my progress," my "ways of looking at things," that is the Satanic peril in me that will keep me in perfect sympathy with Satan's ideas.

Satanic anarchy is conscious and determined opposition to God. Wherever there is a law of God, Satan will break it. Wherever God's rule is, Satan will put himself alongside and oppose it. As we said in the last chapter, Satan's sin is at the summit of all sins; man 's sin is at the foundation of all sins, and between them there is all the difference in the world. Satan's sin is conscious, emphatic, and immortal rebellion against God. He has no fear, no veneration, and no respect for God's rule. "Whenever God's law is stated, that is sufficient, Satan will break it, and his whole purpose through the disposition of sin in you and me is to get us to the same place. The anarchy in Satan is, then, a conscious, tremendous thing. Satan in the Bible is never represented as being guilty of "sins," never represented as being guilty of doing wrong things. He is a wrong being. Men are responsible for doing wrong things, and they do wrong things because of the wrong disposition that is in them, and sometimes you will find that the moral cunning of your own nature makes you blame Satan, when you know perfectly well you ought to blame yourself. The true blame for sins lies in the wrong disposition in you and me, and I think it right to say that Satan in all probability is as much upset as the Holy Ghost, when men go into external sins, but from a different reason. When men go into external sins and upset their lives Satan knows perefectly well that they will want another ruler — a Savior, a Deliverer— but as long as he can keep us in peace and unity and harmony apart from God, he will do it. Remember, then, that Satan's sin is dethroning God.

3. The Punished Anarchists.

We found in a previous chapter how God punished Satan. He has reserved for him what is revealed as the eternal Hell. Now we come to the punishment of Adam and Eve. (Gen. 3:23, 24.) This is an old familiar revelation fact to us, but if we get the truth of it we see that there is no rebellion in Adam and Eve. They did not fight against God, they simply went out covered with fear and shame. Satan was the originator of sin; Adam was not. Adam accepted the way his wife had been deceived and sinned with his eyes open, and instantly •an extraordinary thing happened: "They knew they were -naked. ' ' The more you meditate on the verse, the more will you find in it, and there is quite sufficient to indicate this — that when Adam's spirit, soul and body were in perfect faith and love to God, united to God, his soul was the medium which brought down the marvelous life of the Spirit of God, the very image of God, into his material body and clothed it in inconceivable splendor of light, until the whole man was the likeness of God. Instantly he disobeyed, that went, the connection with God was shut off, and spirit, soul and body tumbled into death that instant. The question of dissolving Into earth in a few years time, is nothing more than death visible. Do not bring in the idea of time at all, death happened instantly in spirit, soul and body — spiritually and psychically. He tumbled into ruin because the connecting link with Deity was gone, and his spirit, soul and body tumbled into disintegrating death, and when Adam and Eve heard of the "goings of God in the Garden," they were both terrified and hid. By the great term Dearth, the body crumbles back again into the dust, the soul disappears, and the "spirit goes back to God who gave it." "What does this latter statement mean? That the spirit is the immortal part of every man, and that the spirit goes straight back to God who gave it, it is not absorbed into God. The spirit of man goes back with the characteristics that he has made on it, for judgment or for praise from God. It goes back to God who breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life.

God turned man out of the Garden of Eden into destitution. By turning man out, He put him on the way to become an infinitely grander and nobler being than even Adam was in the first place. He put hira out into destitution, and through the very worst onslaught of Satan, He made a better creature than the first Adam was. It seems to me that the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation instead of being a picture of despair is the very opposite. The " worst" is always bettered by God. Let Satan do his worst; God has "staked" His all on the new creation. He took His hand off, as it were, and let Satan do the very worst that diabolical spiritual genius could do, and Satan did it. Satan knew exactly what would happen to man, viz.: that God would have to punish him, and God did punish him, with a perfect certainty that the being that was going to come out of the ordeal of the fall was going to be greater than the Adam He first made. Adam and Eve went from the Garden covered with fear and shame. What are the characteristics of the old disposition in the New

Testament? "Fearfulness and unbelief." What does God's atonement do? It takes away ' tearfulness and unbelief" and gets us back again into ' 'faith and love" to God. What does regeneration mean? The Holy Spirit lifting man straight back again out of the slough he has got into by death and sin, into a totally new realm, and by sudden intuitions and impulses that new life is able to lift soul and body up for a time. If that soul will not obey the new union with God which the Spirit life has given, it will ultimately fall away from the new birth God has given it. The new birth God has given it is to get it to a place where soul and body will be identified with Christ, until spirit and soul and body are sanctified here and now, and preserved in that condition not now by intuitions, not by sudden impulses and marvellous workings of the new life within it, but by a certain, conscious, superior, moral integrity, transfigured through and through by the union made by the Spirit with God through the atonement of Jesus Christ. When Adam sinned, that cut off his union with God, and God turned him out and kept the way open to the tree of life, i. e., prevented Adam getting back as a fallen being; if Adam had gotten back as a fallen being he would have become an incarnate devil, and the devil would have thwarted God finally with man; but God guarded the way to the tree of life in turning Adam out. If Adam had been a, rebellious devil, there would have been the same havoc on this earth that there was when the angels fell, but Adam did not sin like Satan.

Adam was covered with fear and shame, and the light referred to just now that glistered all through man's physical body, faded out by sin; but Christ will change this "body of humiliation' ' and make it like His glorious body, and it will result not only in an intuitive innocency, but in a conscious manly and womanly holiness. Holiness is tested innocence, holiness is really the outcome of the new disposition God has given us maintained against every odd. It is militant, Satan is continually pressing and ardent, but it maintains itself. It is morality on fire and transfigured into the likeness of God. Holiness is not only what God gives me, but what I manifest that God has given me. I manifest by my reaction against sin, the world, and the devil, this corruscating holiness. "Whenever God's saints are about in the world they are protected by a "wall of fire," they do not see it, but Satan does. "That wicked one toucheth him not." Satan has to ask and plead for permission; as to whether God grants him permission, has to do with the sovereignty of God, and is not in our domain to understand. All we know is that Jesus Christ taught us to pray, "Lead us not into temptation."

Man was turned into destitution, and thus he was divided from Deity. God disappeared from him, and he disappeared from God. As we mentioned before, there are three false unities possible in man's experience, viz.: sensuality, drunkenness, and the devil, whereby man's spirit, soul and body are brought back again into harmony, quite peaceful, quite happy, no sense of death about him. A drunken man has no self-consciousness, he is perfectly delivered from all things which disintegrate and upset. Sensuality and Satan do the same thing, but each of them only for a time. "When Satan rules, men's souls are in peace, they are not troubled like other men, not upset, but happy and peaceful. But there is only one right at-one-ment, and that is in Jesus Christ. There is only one right unity, and that is when body, soul and spirit are united by God the Holy Ghost through the marvelous atonement of Jesus Christ.

The origin of salvation is a daring way back to God. How did Jesus Christ work a way back to God? Through every worst piece of Satan's work. The statement in God's Book is that Jesus Christ, by the sheer force of the tremendous integrity of His incarnation, hewed a way straight through sin and death and Hell right back to God; more than conqueror over all.