March 19 One of the lessons suggested for the Lenten season is about the works and the ways of the devil. When I was a student in the seminary, I came across this poem, sometimes attributed to Alfred J. Hugh, and sometimes to Herbert Trench, sometime in the middle 1800s. However, I couldn‘t come up with one exactly as I had memorized it. So I don‘t know whether one exists exactly like the following, or my memory has changed it over some fifty plus years. I just know it‘s pretty relevant today. “Men don’t believe in a devil now, as their fathers used to do; they have forced the door of the broadest creed to let his majesty shine through. There’s not a print of his cloven hoof, nor a fiery dart from his bow, to be found in earth or air today, for the wise men have voted it so. But who is mixing the fatal draught that palsies heart and brain, and loads the bier of each passing year with ten hundred thousand slain? Who blights the bloom of our youth today with the fiery breath of hell? If the devil isn’t and never was, won’t some of these people tell? Who dogs the steps of the toiling saint and digs the pit for his feet? Who sows the tares in the field of time where God has sown His wheat? If the devil is voted not to be, and of course, the thing is true, then who is doing the kind of work that only the devil can do? Won’t somebody step to the front forthwith, and make his bow and show, how the frauds and the crimes of a single day spring up, we want to know! The devil has been fairly voted out and of course the devil is gone; but simple people would like to know, who carries his business on?” It should be noted that in one version of the poem I found, someone I think inserted “The Savior” in the place of God. There have been some surveys done that seem to indicate that a lot of people do not believe what the Bible says about the devil wanting to chip away at the foundation of the Christian faith and lead people into a real hell. But when you look around and see what’s going on in the world you wonder who is doing the work that only the devil can do. Jesus had no illusions about the devil calling him “a liar from the beginning and the father of lies.” Well, if that’s the truth, then we often hear him on the nightly news. Maybe Roger Floyd is right, “Satan is the sinister force that is eating away at the inwards of our cities and causing evil and chaos in the world.” Maybe Havelock Ellis is right “the Christian religion can no more afford to degrade its devil than it can afford to degrade its God.” Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, if it’s true that the first trick of the devil is to get us to believe that he doesn’t exist, strengthen us so that we do not give in to his lie.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 10:58:51 +0000
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