Conflict

“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: whom resist stedfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world.” — i Peter v. 8, 9.

“”^fy* would appear that the image of the flock is still in. the Apostle’s thought; and that he recals some

such incident as that narrated by David, when as a stripling he stood before Saul and related how, as he kept his father’s sheep, there came a lion and took a lamb out of the flock; and that he went after him, and smote him, and delivered it out of his mouth, and caught him by the beard, and slew him. However safely folded and watched, no flock is secure against the attempt of the beasts of prey which infest the wilderness. Especially at night they will prowl around, seeking for the unguarded spot, or the unwary sheep, and filling the night with their terrible roarings.

The figure of the lion roaring around the flock reminds us of a rendering given by some to one of God’s earliest words to men, when He warned Cain that sin, like a wild beast, was crouching at the door of his heart, waiting to spring in. And we may not forget how our Lord described the coming of the wolf to the flock entrusted to the hireling shepherd, filling him with panic, and resulting in the catching and scattering of the sheep. Satan is evidently no myth, no imaginary being, to the writers of the New Testament. From the distinct references made to him by our Lord, to the last great conflict described in the Apocalypse, when he is finally vanquished, there is abundant and emphatic evidence that, behind the veil of the visible, he is heading a great revolt against the rule of God, and is pledged to do his worst by stratagem or skill against his dominion and his saints. It is a subtle manoeuvre of his to lead men to suppose that there is no devil at all. A gang of thieves is never so dangerous as when they have it widely rumoured that they have left the neighbourhood. Any artifice succeeds which throws us off our guard.

There is no need to suppose that all God’s people are watched and attacked by the devil himself; for this would almost invest him with the attributes of omniscience and omnipresence. But he is supported and abetted by myriads of wicked spirits in the heavenly places, any one of which waits to do his will and to execute his plans; and the entire host, with long experiences of the frailties of human nature, with desperate malice against God, with unwearied watchfulness to do us harm, rests not day or night, but goes to make up that one malign and terrible adversary of which the Apostle speaks. And, indeed, we might relinquish all hope of being able to withstand his onsets, did we not know that he has been vanquished by our Leader, who is prepared to overcome him again, in and through and for each of those who put their trust in Him. O Victor of the Garden, the Cross, and the Resurrection morning, as Thou didst overcome Satan in thine earthly sojourn, so overcome him again in each of us that we may be more than conquerors, because He that is in us is greater than he that is in the world!

I. The Description here given of the Tempter. — //“^ is our adversary. — The prophet Zechariah was not mistaken when he beheld Satan, standing as an adversary beside the high priest clothed in his dishevelled robes, and standing there to resist him. For, when the veil is drawn aside, in the majestic prologue to the Book of Job, Satan is discovered suggesting an evil and mercenary motive for the uprightness of the patriarch. “Doth Job serve God for nought? Put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse Thee to thy face.” And thus, when he was cast out of the Heavenlies, as a prelude to his being cast down into the bottomless pit, it is not to be wondered at that loud voices were heard rejoicing that the accuser, who accused the saints night and day before God, had been cast out. But the defeats which he has met with already have only exasperated his hatred the more, and he now roams the earth in all the greater wrath, because he knows that a limit has been put upon his power, and that he hath but a short time.

He roars as a lion. — There is terror in his threatenings, which may well strike panic into timid hearts. But we must remember that it is the expending of ineffectual rage. He makes up in noise what he has lost in power. He hates our Shepherd, though he cannot now hurt Him. He did his worst against Him, and failed. He must content himself with bellowing out his hate; though this, too, shall be stayed. So Rutherford used to say that he preferred dealing with a roaring devil. It fills Satan with redoubled chagrin and malignity to know that the weakest saint is more than a match for him, if he dares to resist him, steadfast in the faith, and armed in the panoply of God. “My sheep,” said the Chief Shepherd, “shall never perish.”

He walketh about seeking. — There is no church-fold M’hich he does not eagerly visit; bent on injuring its usefulness, or snatching away its careless professors. No bishop so busy in his diocese as he. If only he can vitiate Christian teaching by false doctrine, so that every sermon may carry with it error enough to cancel its truth and power; if he can involve the leading professors in inconsistencies which shall neutralize the effect of their testimony; if he can entrap the weaklings into pride, or jealousy, or sensual pleasure, or backsliding; if he can scatter the flock by persecution, or bury it in a snowstorm of formalism, or drown it in a spate of worldliness, then he is full of glee. And he is always on the watch for such a chance. “Going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it.”

Satan considers the saints. “Hast thou considered my servant Job?” No neglect of the morning watch, no permission of the first faint thoughts of evil, no unwatchfulness, no tampering with wrong, escapes his attentive scrutiny. He

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never yet missed an opportunity of following up any clue, or making the most of any advantage. We are engaged in conflict with an accomplished and merciless opponent, who is quick to plunge in his sword wherever the joints of the armour open, and whenever we give him the chance. What need, then, for constant vigilance on our part to meet and parry his attacks! “Be sober! be vigilant!” And what need also for the ceaseless intercession of Him who sees the approach of temptation, and anticipates it by his prayers! “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not.”

II. The Aim of Satanic Temptation. — When the devil tempted our Saviour, He could truthfully say, “The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in Me.” But only He. could say this. In all else there is a certain proneness to go wrong, to which the great adversary makes his appeal. And before we can hope to vanquish assaults from without, we must be careful to have taken up that attitude with respect to the inner realm which is ours in the holy arrangements of God. We cannot successfully vanquish assaults from without, whilst there is revolt or anarchy within. And for this reason the Apostle has been careful, at the commencement of the previous chapter, to deal with the question of the flesh. For only when we have truly experienced what God is prepared to do in relation to the flesh, shall we be able to stand in his grace against our terrible adversary, or maintain the attitude of uncompromising vigilance and unremitting watchfulness. Perhaps there is, as Bengel suggests, a hint of this in the admonition, Be sober!

When man first came from his Maker’s hand, all his natural appetites and desires, which in themselves were pure and necessary, were under the control of the will, which itself was true to God, willing only what God willed, and obeying each prompting of his Spirit. But man swerved from that blessed condition, substituting self for God, and his own pleasure for obedience to the Divine law and will. And ever since that one fatal act there has been transmitted to all after-generations a bias towards evil, a tendency to repeat that first sin in aggravated forms, a predisposition to the gratification of natural instincts, irrespective of the Divine requirements. This inherited tendency is due to the operation of that great principle which scientific men know as the law of heredity, and which operates through all races of the creatures with which we are familiar in our world-home.

The sphere in which this inherited tendency mostly manifests itself is in relation to the appetites and desires of the body, the natural action of which has been much interfered with through successive generations, and which, as they come to us, bear evidence of the abuses to which they have been subjected by our progenitors. Now, of course, these natural impulses, though vitiated in their operation, cannot constitute sin until they have inflamed the imagination, captured the heart, and conquered the will. But, as a matter of fact, there is not one of us in whom they have not done all these things again and again, and in doing so have increased and accentuated our susceptibility to evil. This perverted tendency of our appetites, coupled with its inevitable influence on the inner life, is what the Word of God calls the Jlesh. “The flesh, with the passions and lusts” (Gal. v. 24). “We all had our conversation in times past, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind” (Eph. ii. 3).

God has judged this flesh in the person of Jesus, made in the likeness of sinful flesh, and has assigned it to the cross. There, on Calvary, is God’s verdict and doom for the flesh. And in his thought and purpose our flesh has been crucified there. “Our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away” (Rom. vi. 6, R.v). Also, “They that are of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh” (Gal. v. 24, R.v.) — statements which cannot be appropriated by one or two, but are made generally of all the saints, as they are considered in the person of their Representative and Head. Oh that there were viot, through our failure in faith and obedience, so great a gap between what all the saints are in the purpose and thought of God, and what they are in their practical realization!

But God has done more than assign “flesh” to the cross. He

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has given us his Holy Spirit, whose special office it is to restore to the inner life, and to the body also, a right-ordered and natural existence. There are some who seem to suppose that He takes the evil bias entirely away, so that they are as Adam before he fell. In our judgment this is contrary to the teaching of Scripture, which recognizes the presence of the flesh in believers, though it expressly teaches that they are “not in the flesh.” But the Holy Spirit is eager to dwell in each believer mightily, as a counteractive agency, lusting against the flesh, restraining its every manifestation, keeping it utterly in the place of death; and this so calmly and quietly, that the happy subject of his grace may begin to suppose that the flesh is extirpated or eradicated, when in point of fact it is present still, and would reveal itself, if the gracious operation of the Holy Spirit were restricted for a single moment (Gal. v. 17, R.V.).

It is not a question of what Christ can do, but of what He has undertaken to do. Of course, a moment is coming when we shall put off this body, and when the redemption of our entire bemg will be completed in the acquisition of a body fashioned in the likeness of our Lord’s. But till then we are doomed to carry about a body which is apt, through inclinations excited in the mind, to hurry us into sin (i Cor. ix. 27) Yet surely it is more blessed to have the constant indwelling restraining, sanctifying grace of the Holy Spirit, as the source of our deliverance from the flesh, than to have back again the nature of unfallen Adam, which might at least fall again before the onset of the tempter.

We once lived in a house, the cellar kitchen of which was so damp that the servant was able sometimes to sweep up the white mould from the tiles; but as long as we kept up a roaring fire, the damp was undiscernible, and the kitchen was warm and pleasant. Indeed, no stranger would have realized how strong the tendency to damp was. But if there was no fire for weeks, or even for days, the damp revealed itself. So, when the Spirit works mightily in the soul. He is like the ruddy glow of a furnace, and the evil tendencies of our nature are as if they were not.

We were informed that the workmen employed in making the subterranean tunnel through London came on a bed of sand, through which water was flowing freely, but they were kept perfectly dry so long as the parts excavated were filled by a strong blast of compressed air. So is the heart kept pure and sweet as long as the Spirit dwells in it in power. It is of the utmost importance, then, to live in the Spirit and walk in the Spirit, that we may not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.

Temptation does not only come from without, as some say. The spark may be flung in from without; but there is a magazine of gunpowder within. The match would be struck on the lid in vain if there were not a prepared surface on which it would ignite. “Every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed” (James i. 14). And it is because of the known presence of these evil tendencies within that the devil watches us so closely.

As long as we are kept by the mighty power of God, we are safe. The conflict is no longer within, but without. And all hell shall expend itself in vain on the nature which is experiencing the blessed reign of the Spirit of God, which makes us free from the law of sin and death. Yield yourselves to God; receive the filling of the Holy Spirit by faith; and then march to assured victory through the power of the Son of God.

III. Consolation TO THE Tempted. — (i) Your teinptations are twt an tincotnmoti experic7ice. — We have all the same constitution; and there is much more similarity in our temptations than we suppose. “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man.” “The same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are* in the world.”

(2) All temptation is imdcr the restraint of God. — As in the case of Job, Satan cannot tempt us without God being first acquainted with his designs. And, as in the case of Peter, there seems to be almost a seeking and receiving of permission to tempt before Satan assails. In any case, no temptation befals us greater than our power to combat and overcome. And we are permitted to be tempted, that we may learn to avail ourselves of the resources of which we might otherwise be unaware. (3) Snian can be conquered. — Watch and pray. Be sober in your tastes and habits, in your words and deeds. Never neglect to abide in your strong fortress, Christ. Keep with the flock of God. Nourish your souls with the Word, that you may be healthy and strong. Gird on the whole armour of God. Resist the first insignificant advances of the foe. Be steadfast in the faith. Look instantly to Jesus to cast the panoply of his protection around you; and to stand between you and your assailant, as a shield before the body of the warrior. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Go into battle assured of success: this your talisman. They overcame by the blood of ike Lamb; this your battle-cry, Jesus saves., Jesus saves.