The First Deceiver

Up to the events of which we speak in the present chapter, everything on this earth was bright and gladsome. Infinite all-sufficiency and loveliness had called into existence this vast and beautiful creation, and by the same infinite power and goodness, formed a race holy as God is holy. We have seen him instituting and consecrating the domestic relations, and giving to this new-created world, that day of rest, of light, and of fellowship with heaven; thus setting this earth in motion under influences which may well be supposed, would secure its progress and its perpetuity in holiness. Heaven itself could scarcely present a scene of more exquisite beauty and loveliness, than these bright outlines of this early and unsullied creation.

But in an evil hour, a dark and heavy cloud is superinduced over all this matchless beauty; its light fades, its varied and splendid coloring becomes obscured. The “six days’ labor of a God” is spoiled; and from that hour to the present, every successive generation of men bears witness that some foul enemy has done this.

Among the “first things” therefore, which we are contemplating, is this First Deceiver. We have already adverted to the apostasy of a part of the angelic race; it was the great head and leader of this revolt who became the tempter of man.

We are not now about to enter into any philosophical disquisition upon the origin of man’s apostasy. The researches of men into the cause of this lamentable fact are almost as many as they are useless. Their explanations are profound and ingenious; but very many of them, instead of relieving the subject of difficulty, render it more complicated and embarrassed. The Mosaic narrative is intelligible to a child; if God had desired we should know more, more would have been revealed. So far as that narrative instructs us, the thought of man’s rebellion is one which originated in the mind of another; one to which he was tempted. Our object is to speak of the tempter.

It has been remarked by a learned commentator upon the book of Job, that “men who do not believe in the existence of the devil, do not believe in the existence of God.” With those who receive the sacred writings as the rule of their faith, there can be no doubt of the existence and agency of this Evil Spirit. It is no uncommon thing for writers, both of a philosophical and an imaginative cast of mind, to speak familiarly of “the principle of evil,” of the “genius of destruction;” as though by these, and such like designations, they conveyed some intelligible and well-defined thought. The Scriptures never utter themselves in this mystic language; they speak of the inciting cause both of evil and good; but they lead our minds to distinct and responsible personalities. The account which they give of the common enemy of mankind is as explicit and intelligible as that which they give of any other person, or agent. They give us his origin and history; they delineate his character, and set before us the great objects he is pursuing; they premonish the world of his subtlety and wiles; and they distinctly foretell his overthrow, and the triumphs of the mighty Conqueror by whom he is to be cast down. They give him his distinctive names and appellations, every one of them marking his distinctive qualities. “There is no characteristic property, or feature of distinct personality, and nothing which constitutes personal individuality in any case,” which they do not attribute to this great author of wickedness. The teachings on this subject in the book of Genesis alone are as explicit as language can make them. It were to make a romance of the Bible to call them allegory. If the representations in the third chapter of this book respecting the serpent and the woman be a mere allegory, then is the Saviour there promised an allegory; the whole revelation of God is an allegoiy; man’s apostasy is an allegory; his redetaption an allegory; the final judgment, heaven and hell, are allegories.

Great as are the power and influence which the adversary exerts, they are mainly dependent on his subtlety and craft. “Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field.” His characte)’ as the Deceiver and the extent of his deceptions are the two leading thoughts, therefore, to which our remarks are now directed.

In turning our attention to ins character as THE Deceiver, we may not venture into the fairy land of conjecture and imagination. The sacred records alone furnish the clue by which our pursuit may be safely governed; and wiibh these lights, we may ferret even the tortuous and slimy path of the serpent. These infallible records speak of him as one who “goes forth to decei-ve the nations;” as” the devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole worldP The character of this prince of darkness is to deceive; to mislead the mind; to cause it to err; to induce it to believe what is false, or disbelieve what is true; to impose upon it by stratagem and artifice.

In proof of this position, we advert, in the first instance, to the fact that his agency is concealed.

For this concealment lie is peculiarly fitted, as lie belongs to that class of beings, who, from their spirituality, are invisible. He is the head of those high and apostate spirits “who kept not their first estate.” With the exception of those instances in which, to answer some wise purpose of a righteous providence, he assumes a material form, he is as invisible to men as those angels who never fell, and all of whom are “ministering spirits to them that shall be heirs of salvation.”’ It is not the open assault of a manly foe that men encounter when they enter the conflict with this “angel of the bottomless pit;” but the stealthy assassin whose step is in the dark, and whose presence is indicated only by the blow he strikes. The best, as well as the worst of men, are not always aware of the subtlety with which he is lurking about their path. There is no bosom so pure, but in an evil hour, he may insensibly invade its tranquillity; no sanctuary so holy, but he may pollute it with sacrilegious, though unseen hands. And what is true of himself, as the head and chief of all evil spirits, is true of the “legion,” who act in concert with him. They are all perpetually employed, but wdth impervious silence and secrecy. We live on the verge of the world of spirits; good and evil angels are always hovering about us, though unperceived. It is the treachery of this arch deceiver, that he should persuade multitudes who are themselves the lnctims of his treachery, that his agency is visionary and unreal; so that, although his influence is so extensively felt, it should not be suspected. Amid the noise and bustle of the world, and amid the retirement and silence of the closet; at home and abroad, on the land and on the ocean, by day and by night, he is exerting his power; yet no touch feels, no ear hears, no eye sees him. Behind every scene of iniquity, he is the dark mover. His stratagems are often discovered; we And the gin, but we cannot detect the fowler. Millions writhe under the wounds they receive from his hand, but the hand that inflicts them is undetected. The pit itself may sometimes be left uncovered, but never the foe that digs it.

Kor is it his ageiwy only that is concealed; he conceals his object. ATiat this is, his deep malignity leaves us at no loss to determine. When he fell from his primeval integrity, from a pure spirit in the heavenly court he became a reprobate in the world of darkness; from an angel, he became an incorrigible, irrecoverable fiend. Every development of his character has been indicative of his fell malice and revenge. We have become acquainted with his object, not from himself. From the beginning to the present hour, he has kept his own secret; nor has so much as one note of alarm escaped his venomous tongue. Yet has his aim been steady and single. It were a dark chapter in the history of our race, that should recite even a few of the more prominent instances in which men have been beguiled by him to their undoing, and in which to have dealt honestly and have avowed his purpose, would have been to have defeated it. It matters not on whom he practises this deception, nor upon what scale; his object is alike concealed. It was concealed from Adam and Eve; it was concealed from Cain, when he made him the abhorred of his race, and brought upon him a punishment greater than he could bear. It was concealed from the antediluvian world and from Sodom, when their blind credulity in his promises was answered in the rushing waters of the Deluge, and in fire from the Lord out of heaven. It was concealed from Judas, when he “put it into his heart” to betray the Son of Man with a kiss. All the world over, those who yield to his temptations, find, when it is too late, that they were a lure, and that while he flattered them with the expectation of good, his object was evil. “The tree was good for food, and pleasant to the eye, and a tree to be desired to mahe one xoisi’^ — this is the whole story of his stratagems. It is an artful appeal to the three vulnerable points of hujnanity — “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life.” And in making it, the devil excels all other deceivers — never unfolding the flower without concealing the thorn; never aiming to injure, without promising to benefit. The poisoned cup is heki to the lips, and while it sparkles and exhilarates, shows no signs of the death that lurks within. Who of all the victims of his treachery are premonished of their overthrow? Not one. It is the voice of the Deceiver which they hear. It is the fascination of the lap of indulgence, where the head of the victim is laid to be shorn of its strength, and then blinded and delivered over to the tormentors. It is the syren song that invites to pleasure, and introduces to death. It is the serpeuf s breath, carrying its notes to the ear, and instilling its poison into the soul, till the unwary and deluded awake to the struggle only to be bound faster in his coils. The same artifice is also discoverable in the mecms by ivldcli his malignant ends are attained. Of his influence in the physical world we are not able to speak with definiteness or certainty. From the fact that he is represented in the Scriptures as the “Prince of the power of the air,” learned and sensible men have believed and taught, that it is not beyond his province to “produce winds and storms, and other natural evils to afllict mankind, and carry on his malignant opposition to Christ and his kingdom.” Some instances of this sort occur in the Scriptures. The magicians of Egypt seem to have a limited power over the material creation, when they “withstood Moses,” in the presence of Pharaoh. This great Enemy is also distinctly represented as obtaining permission from God to visit Job with various and sore physical calamities. The notion of his power in the material creation was certainly extensively prevalent among the Jews, as well as not a few

even of the learned Gentiles. Demons and evil genii were supposed by them to have the seat of their empire in the air, there exerting their influence, and watching their opportunities to harass and destroy. And it is a fact worthy, in this connection, to be mentioned, that in those portions of the world that are unvisited by the light of the gospel, and where the inhabitants are most under the power of the Prince of Darkness, his physical power is most dreaded.

Be this as it may, he has another sphere of action, which, if it be not his own selected sphere, is the one in which he has the divine permission most extensively to employ his subtlety. That sphere is the human mind, with all its faculties of perception, thought, imagination and memory. Nor do I know that we are warranted in saying that he has no power over the heart. It has been supposed, that if his power extended to the hearts of men, the havoc would be so fearful that there would be no hope for the race. The reasoning would be conclusive, if his power were not watched by an unsleeping eye, and restrained by an unwearied arm, and always effectually countervailed in exact accordance with the counsels of redeeming mercy. There is no more impossibility in his acting upon the minds of men than there is in any other invisible agent’s acting upon them. And there is no more absurdity. He “moved David to number Israel,” and he “filled the heart of Ananias to lie unto the Holy Ghost.” The way in which he influences the thoughts and affections of men may not be known to us, nor may the nature of his communications with them be capable of being explained, or even comprehended; while we see not how those communications themselves can be questioned. If I dared, I would make the appeal to the personal experience of my readers, and ask them to recall some dream of the night, some waking vision, some unwonted and wicked train of thought, some process of false reasoning, some fearful and fiendlike impulse, to which their own habits of thought and feeling were not only utter strangers, but to the last degree hostile and repulsive. I would make the appeal also to their observation. I would ask them to visit the asylums for the insane, and look into the solitary cells of the madhouse. Not a few of these instances of mental insanity, no doubt, are the effect of physical disorganization; but are there not among them those which present mournful instances of moral derangement? In tracing their history, is there not as much evidence as the subject admits, that the origin of the mania was cherished wickedness, the cherished tempter; and are there not instances of this sort, which are as truly specimens of demoniacal possession as those we read of in the records of the New Testament?

I have said that the appropriate sphere of the devil’s subtlety is the mind. And here he practises his deceptions with a skill and subtlety that show that he is no novice. To a great extent, he makes use of men as their own tempters. By theiV want of consideration, and not less by their unsleeping suspicions and jealousies; by their unguarded thoughtlessness and vanity; by their imperturbable sullenness and gloom; by their indifference, and by their over-prying curiosity, they lay open their own minds to his artful and intriguing suggestions. Sometimes he avails himself of the opinions they form before reason can discuss, or the judgment confirm them; and sometimes of that absence of all opinions, that mental vacuity which invites his cultivation. Where the prepossessions and prejudices are wrong, however dreamy and absurd they be, he leaves them undisturbed; while, if they are right and true, he spares no pains to agitate and disturb them, to assail them with sarcasm, abuse, and sneers, until these great outposts of truth and duty are, if possible, broken down. The mind of man is an apostate and depraved existence, while all its operations are most narrowly watched by the adversary. Its very excitability is one of those frailties of which he very often takes great advantage, and under which he urges men to say and do what, but for this excited state of feeling, they never would have thought of. Whence is it that such multitudes so unreluctantly abandon themselves to impulse and passion rather than be governed by cool reason and sober judgment, unless it be from ^ome practised delusion? Moral depravity here goes beyond its calculations, and supreme selfishness misses its aim. There is no characteristic of the mind more marvellous than the preference it is prone to give to the joys of the present moment. Nor can it easily be accounted for. This rude recklessness, so incorrigible in the young, and with such difficulty eradicated in the old; this utter disregard of consequences, so often condemned and never controlled, so often rebuked but rarely amended, so often held in check but not always subdued even by the grace of God, indicates the power of the charmer. Every man, too, has his ruling passion; nor is the tempter ignorant either of its nature or its power. If it be the love of money, he aims to bind the soul in fetters of gold; the love of power, he aims to dazzle it with the splendor of dominion; the love of pleasure, he aims to incite those “fleshly lusts that war against the soul.” And even where it is the love of God, he aims to quench its ardor, or inflame it by a misguided and headlong zeal; and as melancholy facts show, even instigate it to deeds of wickedness under the semblance of doing God’s service. Not only does he know the temptation that is fitted to address itself to the predominant disposition and habits, but the one that is suited to the existing state of the mind, whether that state arise from its outward circumstances, or its inward spirit. It may be the state of prosperity, or of adversity; of hope, or fear; of severe toil, or of relaxation, leisure, or idleness; of presumption, or despondency: and in either case, he fits the snare to the path in which the unwary pilgrim is travelling.

If you now advert to a few of those extraneous influences he employs, you will see that they partake of the same artful character. Sometimes they are those whom men love most in the endeared relations of human life; sometimes those in whom they have the deepest interest and confidence in the relations of business; and sometimes those who are most revered as the teachers of religion, as the makers of their laws, or as the leaders of a party. All those associations which have a tendency to taint the purity of the mind, or to familiarize it with men and scenes where God is dishonored, the authority of his word called in question, the ]3eculiar doctrines of Christianity ridiculed, or the obligations of morality regarded with loose indifference; present opportunities of which he is not slow to avail himself There is an exposure to moral assimilation amid such scenes which he most artfully promotes, and by which his malignant ends ai“e too often secured. Some he persuades to phrensied activity, that they may sin without reflection; and some he persuades to eat the bread of idleness, that he may have the better opportunity of employing them in his own work. Some he stupifies by their ignorance, and some he misleads by their knowledge. Some he infatuates by pride, and some he inflates by “a voluntary humility.” Some he ensnares by their ingenuousness; and others by overspreading and obscuring their minds by a web of sophistry. Some are led astray by an overweening attachment to their own rights and prerogative, others by a tame surrender of them; some by a sense of honor, and others by the fear of shame and reproach. Very rarely, if ever, does he carry his point by assuming the garb and showing the hideous face of wickedness, or by any such means, the just view of which stings the conscience and awakens disgust.

Another evidence of his deception will be found in tJw-se artful insinuations by which he tempts to evil by slow degrees. When a man lias taken a single step in wickedness, he is very apt to take another; and when he has taken a few more in the downward path, he is hurried onward with such accelerated and fearful velocity, that it is impossible to predict where he will stop. The stone has gone out of the sling, and no man can tell where it will alight, or what mischief it will do in its course. We may not doubt that the subtle agency of the Deceiver is employed, both in the first impulse, and in the subsequent and rapid progress. The history of Ahab, Jeroboam, and Judas; of Nero, the bloody Mary, and Voltaire, furnish melancholy exemplifications of the truth of these remarks. Nor are they less applicable to large bodies of men, than to individuals. Large bodies of men are indeed less apt to yield to the restraints of conscience, and more liable to be driven and hurried on, from small beginnings to courses of headstrong and unresisted iniquity. It takes time for a nation that was once moral and virtuous, to become immoral and vicious. They are drawn into the snare of the devil little by little. Some nations had their origin in an illustrious and noble ancestry; and could they have foreseen at a single view the downward course they would travel, ttey would have looked upon it with abhorrence, and have trembled to anticipate their destiny. Others had their origin in ignorance, superstition, idolatry, and blood; and even they would have scarcely thought it possible that their subsequent history would have been marked with the obdurate degradation which attended it. It was by slow degrees and smaller sins that the world began to be corrupted after the flood; yet in about half a century after the death of Noah, the earth was overrun by abounding iniquity. In the person and family of Abraham, the Hebrew nation was planted “wholly a right seed;” while according to the testimony of their own histoiian, “never was there a time from the beginning of the world more fruitful in wickedness,” than in remoter periods of their history. When Ashur, and the few adventurers who shared his fortunes, founded the Assyrian em];)ire, they little thought that the early pride of Nineveh would lead to the luxury in which so many generations slumbered, and finally kindle the fire by which an empire which had existed 1400 years was subverted in a day. It was not in a moment that “the iniquity of the Amorites became full;” nor that Babylon, “the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency,” became “as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.”

The evils which many portions of the earth now suffer, and the wickedness to which they are in bondage, were the offspring of a barbarous age, of which the adversary was the author. The time was when these unmitigated enormities were a novelty in the history of our race, and were all concentrated in the devices of his teeming bosom. There was no tumult of alarm at the first suggestion of them; they crept in with a snail-like progress. The Old Serpent is too great a veteran in the arts of deception to allow men to conjecture the course in which he means to lead them. It ia enough for him to know that they will be carried beyond their own expectations in sinning. His policy, his subtlety is not so much seen in what the sin is in its first encroachment, as in what he designs it shall be. It was but the entering wedge of destruction, but drove home by an experienced and dexterous hand. It was but the unnoticed trains and associations of thought, that sprung up almost imperceptibly; but which gradually increased like the stream that flows from a fountain of water, till it has become like the torrent of the wilderness, swollen and impetuous by the bursting of the storm. It was but the unobserved flake of snow, floating under the control of the “Prince of the power of the air;” now it ia the avalanche tumbling upon the plain below. It was but the invisible vapor, secretly struggling to find its way through some subterranean crevice of the sulphurous mountain; now, it is the dark exhalation from the bottomless pit, and “goes up like the smoke of a great furnace.”

Add to these one other thought, and his character as the Deceiver is complete and entire. I mean his hold and mihl/usliing falsehood. We do not slander him when we say he is an impudent liar. Falsehood is inherent in his very nature. If he ever speaks the truth, it is but to give emphasis to some greater falsehood. He never made a sincere declaration to men, save with the view of carrying into effect some sinister and base design. Truth, that eternal and unchangeable reality which forms the indissoluble tie, the sacred connection between God and man, and between all virtuous minds in the universe, and which animates their confidence, and secures and promotes their everlasting tranquillity and joy, is to him unknown, except to be hated and opposed. There is no degree, form, or color of falsehood with which he is not familiar, and which did not originate, and is not fostered within his own false bosom. His whole character and history are distinguished for treachery and lies. The Saviour, when speaking of him, says “he abode not in the truth;” and in the same sentence he not only calls him “a liar,” but “the father of lies.” He is false, not from inconstancy and fickleness; not from the instability of passion; but from cool reflection and settled principle. “He was a liar from the beginning;” and what he was in the beginning, he is now, and ever will be, world without end. As God is immutably and forever true, Satan is immutably and forever false. False declarations, false names, false reasonings, false quotations of Scripture, false promises, and hopes of impunity in sin which he knows are refuges of lies, are his ordinary, if not his universal and uniform resort.

It is worthy of remark, that in his influence upon the minds of men, he is wont to assail the most demonstrable truths. Mr. Locke observes of a certain class of propositions, that “they are those clear tiniths, that either their own evidence forces us to admit, or common experience makes it impudence to deny.” This shameless effrontery is the true character of the great Adversary. There is no truth more fully established than the indissoluble connection between sin and suffering. This is the great ordinance of the divine kingdom, and on this depend all its order and harmony. The laws of the physical creation are not more firmly established than this great law of the moral creation. It were just as rational to believe that heavy bodies do not fall, that light does not shine, that cold does not contract, that heat does not expand, and that fluids do not seek a common level, as that sin does not engender suffering.

Yet has the Deceiver set himself from the beginning to disprove and disallow this fundamental principle of the divine government. Scarcely had this great law been pronounced by the lips of unerring truth, than he had the shameless effrontery to call it in question, and give it a bold and flat denial. Thou shalt “not surely die!” Wonderful discovery! and found only in the depths of those deceptions which are nourished in the bosom of the “crooked Serpent.” His first, and with the exception of his menaces and terrors, his last resort, is to inject this delusion, either in unmingled, or diluted forms. His great strength lies in his powers of deception. With all his gigantic intellect, he would accomplish little without these artifices. This is his character; this is his nature; this is his work; the work for which he has the talent and the heart.