The Devil and Man

Thus Lucifer, angel of light, became Satan, prince of darkness. Good became evil. The seraph became the devil.

Adam also followed suit, but with a vastly important difference. The father of lies was the primal anti‑God and anti‑Christ. He rejected God and the principles of the heavenly kingdom, and substituted a rival kingdom based on the polar opposites, to the nature of God; evil for good, self‑love for selflessness, force for meekness, war for peace. Likewise God rejected him, and he became evil personified, with no spark of his pristine purity remaining in him, incapable of repentance, fixed in iniquity.

Adam on the other hand, in his fall was not a total God‑rejector, a devil; but rather a world and flesh lover allured by their deceitful appeals, drawn away of his own lust and enticed. No sooner had he given consent than he was ashamed, feared and hid himself, sure evidence that all light had not died in him. And God came down, not to deliver him 'into chains of darkness', but to give him a promised seed which would one day fructify to his redemption. A vastly different judgment suited to a vastly different condition.

Plainly there remained a capacity for God, a something ‑‑ call it what we may ‑‑ a seed, a light, a work of the law written in the heart, which is God‑conscious, God‑hungry, God‑ responsive. Do not all fishers of men sense it? The wistful acknowledgment that it must be wonderful to have a sure faith, the multitude of religions, the ready response to vital testimony in the most unlikely quarters, the search for God which neither flame nor sword nor tyrant's decree can quench? Wise soul‑winners not only sense it, but give it central place in their method of approach.


By : Merrill Thompson
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