05 - Chapter 05

’THE IDEA OF A DEVIL.

ANYONE who has not given attention to the subject Jr\. would probably be surprised at what he would find if he turned up the two words, ’ Satan ’ and ’ The devil,’ in a good concordance, say Dr. Young’s. The surprise would be that it is in the New Testament they figure. In the Old Testament the title The devil ’ does not occur once, and the word in the plural, ’ devils,’ only four times. In the English Bible (Authorized Version) the word ’ Satan ’ is only found in four places in i Chron. xxi., in Psalms 109:6, in Zech. iii., and in the Prologue of Job. In the Hebrew Bible the word ’ Satan ’ occurs in a few passages where the English Bible reads ’ adversary,’ but there the meaning is simply an ’ opposer ’ e.g., the angel of the Lord stood in Balaam’s way as an adversary, as a Satan (Numbers 22:22). The Philistines object to take David with them into battle, lest in battle he should become an adversary, a Satan (1 Samuel 29:4). It was best to translate the word into adversary in those places, because there is no reference there to a special being or person known as Satan. In Psalms 109:6, also, we ought to read * adversary ’ for the same reason, and this correction is made in the Revised Version. That leaves us with only three references to Satan in the Old Testament, and these three, I take it, are after the exile in Babylon. Zechariah is post-exilic; Chronicles is also post-exilic;’ the date of the Prologue of Job may be more debatable, but the point is not vital. It is a notable fact, and one whose significance we must try to understand, that the idea of a devil, in, the sense of an arch-enemy of God and man, as head of a host of evil spirits, does not appear in any Hebrew literature which we can surely date before the captivity of Babylon, nor is it well developed in any Old Testament passage even after that date.

It may be well here, perhaps, to step a little out of our path to point out that the story of the serpent in Eden tempting Eve is not at all the same with the later idea of the devil. There is no suggestion in the Genesis story that the serpent is some other being in disguise; it is merely an intelligent and talking serpent. It is a remarkable fact, too, that the incident is nowhere referred to in the Old Testament. It was a long, long time before the people began to think that the serpent was the devil in disguise; the writer of the story had no such notion. Centuries after his time, when the belief in a devil had arisen, it came to be believed that if sin had come into the world through the seductions of a serpent, that serpent must have been the devil in disguise. But this theory is not to be found at all in the Old Testament. In all their teachings about sin the prophets never refer to it, which is certainly a fact of great importance. The author of the apocryphal Book of Wisdom (second century B.C.) says: ’ God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of his own eternity. Nevertheless, through envy of the devil came death into the world’ (Wis 2:23-24). This looks like an allusion to the Genesis story, though it is not quite definite. If it is an allusion, it is the earliest we know of. In the Genesis story, then, you have no idea of the Satan; but you have soon after the consciousness that something has gone wrong, that there has been opposition to God, and that is the consciousness, as we shall see, out of which the idea of a devil arose later.

It does not belong to my subject now to discuss the serpent story itself, but the difficulties which any modern mind may feel in it, when it finds intelligence and speech attributed to a serpent, vanish when the modern mind makes the acquaintance of the ancient mind. Professor Robertson Smith says that the kinship of gods and men, in antique religion, is only one part of the larger kinship of these with the lower creation. There was no difficulty at that stage in ascribing living powers and personality to a stone, a tree, or an animal. In old Babylonian legend, beasts as well as men were formed of earth mingled with the blood of a god. In Greek stories men spring from trees or rocks, and races have a tree for a mother and a god for a father. These things, Robertson Smith says, are often explained as allegories by those who forget that primitive thought treats all nature as a kindred unity; a speaking, intelligent animal was no difficulty to that mind. We are told further that the snake is an object of superstition in all countries, and endowed with a supernatural character. Men everywhere had a peculiar horror of it; when wild beasts had been driven into the desert, the snake came creeping about the dwelling, and continued to molest men, and the snake was the last animal to be deprived of its supernatural character. When it is known that such ideas were general, the Genesis story falls into its proper place, and we see that intelligent men to-day, in order to be religious, do not need to believe that a serpent knew the mind of God and persuaded men to sin. It is a striking fact that the Persians had a very similar story. God had promised men, they believed, endless happiness if they would be good, but the devil disguised himself as a serpent and tempted them to sin. The difference, you observe, between the Persian story and the Genesis story is that in the former the serpent is avowed to be the devil in disguise. In the thought of Israel before the exile there were, of course, * spirits ’ and ’ evil spirits ’ too. But, mark you, ’ evil ’ does not there mean apostasy from God, for the evil spirits themselves were the servants of God. Thus, in Judges 9:23 we read that ’God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the men of Shechem, and the men of Shechem dealt treacherously with Abimelech.’ Now, treachery to us is wicked; but it was not wicked then if it brought about the desired result. The spirit that made the men of Shechem treacherous was sent by God for that purpose, and it was called an evil spirit, not in the sense of ’ bad ’ or ’wicked,’ but in the sense of one who brought calamity from God.

Again, we read in 1 Samuel 16:14; ’ The spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from God troubled him.’ Saul suffered from mental disorder, and this calamity is regarded as the work of a spirit sent by God. The evil spirits dwell in God’s presence. The fullest description of the heavenly court is in 1 Kings 22:18-23. Ahab and Jehoshaphat want to know whether they shall go to battle to Ramoth Gilead. Micaiah, the prophet, is consulted, and he says to Ahab: ’ Hear thou the word of the Lord: I saw the Lord sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing by Him on His right hand and on His left. And the Lord said, Who shall deceive Ahab that he may go up and fall at Ramoth Gilead? And one said on this manner; and another said on that manner. And there came forth the spirit, and stood before the Lord, and said, I will entice him. And the Lord said unto him, Wherewith? And he said, I will go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And He (the Lord) said, Thou shalt entice him, and shalt prevail also; go forth and do so. Now, therefore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these prophets; and the Lord hath spoken evil concerning thee.’ If I were now discussing the conception of God I might say that not one of us could believe in the God of this passage the God who proposed and deliberately arranged to make a large number of prophets tell a lie in order to entice Ahab to his ruin. Those who say they believe the whole Bible do not consider what they say. But the point of the passage for our discussion now is that the evil spirit is a member of the Lord’s Court, and one of His servants to execute His purpose, not the devil, the enemy of God, as conceived later. All the spirits were subordinate to Jahweh. When you come to the prophets of the eighth century B.C. you find no doctrine of a supreme evil spirit. Israel knew calamity and wrong, but insisted, nevertheless, that the empire of the world was not divided. When Isaiah says, ’ The princes of Zoan are become fools, the princes of Noph are deceived; they have caused Egypt to go astray,’ how does he account for this? Not by any idea of a devil, or tempter, but * the Lord hath mingled a spirit of perverseness in the midst of her.’ The prophet of the exile pleads against the notion of two ruling powers, against dualism, and expresses the climax of the faith of the period when he says: " I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I am the Lord that doeth all these things ’ (Isaiah 45:7). Here, in Babylon, during the captivity, the strong monotheistic trend of Jewish faith reaches its highest utterance. Up to this time God Himself is the author of fortune and misfortune; He gives health and He sends disease.

Now, we must note the fact that soon after this there appears in Israel the figure of the Satan. I take Job to be post-exilic at least, the prologue. And in the prologue Satan is a prominent figure. If, however, a pre-exilic date is claimed for Job, it would not much modify the foregoing statement, because the Satan of Job is still a member of God’s court, and appears in the company of the sons of God. His distinction among them seems to be that he is a great tourist. Each time when he is asked whence he has come he replies: * From going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it.’ He wants to put Job to the test, and upon presenting the case to God he receives a commission to do so. It is God who gives Job into Satan’s power, and (Job 2:3) God identifies Himself as the Author of the calamities which Satan was said to have inflicted on Job. Job is still good, * although thou movedst Me to destroy him without cause,’ said God. This, as you see, is not at all the devil of our traditional theology; he is still a servant of God. God and Satan are working together with a perfect understanding, and Satan does nothing but what God definitely agrees that he shall do. We do feel, however, that he distrusts Job too easily, and that he is too eager to put him to the test of affliction. Here, perhaps, is the seed, though a small one, of the later conception of an arch enemy. In Zechariah 3:1-10, whose date is about 520 B.C., the figure of Satan appears against Joshua, the high-priest. Joshua is the representative of the people who are home in their own land, but in evil fortune, a brand plucked from the burning; and now the Satan definitely appears as an adversary, and the Lord rebukes him. It is not said that he is a member of the heavenly court now; his only character is adversary, and as such God rebukes him. You see the conception has developed since Job, though the immediate withdrawal of Satan from further mention still leaves him far from the later conception.

More than two centuries after this, in i Chron. xxi., you find a deed attributed to Satan which, a few centuries before, had been attributed to God. David had taken a census, and that came to be regarded as a sin. According to 2 Sam. xxiv. it was God Himself in His anger who had moved David to commit this sin, and afterwards punished him for doing it; but, according to 1 Chronicles 21:1-30, it was Satan that moved David to do it. The explanation is that when the Book of Samuel- was written there was no Satan. God made light and darkness, created peace and evil; but by the time Chronicles was written Satan had arrived, and the sin of David, formerly attributed to God, was transferred to him. After this, Satan does not appear in the Old Testament. So far as the Old Testament is concerned the charge-list against Satan is very light. He has put Job to the test, appeared once for a moment as the adversary of Joshua, and tempted David to take a census. Surely the most severe tribunal would admit that this is a comparatively inactive and harmless devil. In other Jewish literature, however, which lies between our Old Testament and New Testament, Satan assumes a much greater significance. In the Book of Wisdom, as I pointed out, he is the author of death. In the Book of Enoch he is the head of a great army of evil spirits, acting in direct and avowed antagonism to the good. In Tobit, under the name of Asmodeus, he opposes Raphael the angel. How can we account for this development of thought in Israel? How did those people who repudiated dualism come to believe in Satan, an apostate from God, with an army of wicked spirits fighting against God?

There must be significance in the fact that the belief arose after the captivity in Babylon, and was elaborately developed after the people of Israel made the acquaintance of the Persians. In old Persian religion there was a battle from the beginning between the good God and the wicked spirit. For thousands of years the wicked spirit was in the ascendant, but a great prophet was born to break his power, and ultimately to overthrow him. That is the Persian counterpart to the Christian faith, that Jesus came to undo the works of the devil. It is very interesting and encouraging also to find that in Persia, where the belief in the devil was so definite, and where the power and dominion of the devil was supposed to be so great, evil was not to be ultimately triumphant; God would conquer at last. That was the old Persian faith. Did Israel learn their Satanology from Persia? They went to Babylon without it; they had some of it soon after the exile, and developed it later. That other nations influenced the development of Jewish thought there can be no doubt. One nation cannot have intercourse with another without influencing and being influenced. Jewish Satanology, however, though probably influenced by Persian beliefs, need not be considered a Persian product. George Meredith, somewhere, says that if a man is in the habit of regarding himself as a favourite child of Providence he will require some day to believe in a devil. He means, of course, that some things will happen to him which he cannot ascribe to a favouring of Providence. So to Israel, long accustomed to believe itself the favourite child of God, intensified trouble, persistence of disappointment, and blighted hope might well produce the idea of some great oppressor, some adversary working against them. The exile in Babylon had been a great disappointment, and made impossible the Deuteronomic regulations for worship at one sanctuary. The Jews saw their cultus fall to pieces, and the few who returned from exile saw no fulfilment of the glowing promises the prophets had made to them. Instead of returning into dominion and supremacy, and receiving the merchandize of Ethiopia and the labour of Egypt, their land, within fifty years, was a Persian province. This might well give them the sense of a great adversary acting against them. This is the sense that is reflected in the vision of Zechariah 3:1-10.

Again, there is another fact to be considered. The prophets, as we have shown before, had discovered the moral character of God His righteousness and purity. As this deepened its hold upon the people, and as the consciousness of sin became more acute, the notion of God as author of sin became more and more impossible. Surely there must be a devil who was the source of it all. So, I think, the idea arose, and under Persian and other influences it grew to its later proportions. It is necessary to remember, however, that Israel did not relinquish the supremacy of God. The devil was at best only partly independent, and to be at last surely subdued.

Now it is the Satan ology and demonology of the Book of Enoch that we meet with in the New Testament. Here it is a kingdom of evil spirits with a chief, sometimes called by the Hebrew name Satan; sometimes by the Greek word ’ Diabolos,’ devil or adversary; and sometimes ’ Beelzebub.’

He can tempt to sin; he can inflict bodily disease; he is the enemy of truth; his legions enter into men, and once even into swine; he is the ’ god of this world,’ the ’ prince of the power of the air.’ He has immense power, and yet one writer thinks he is a considerable coward. ’ Resist the devil,’ he says, ’and he will flee from you.’ The devil and his hosts are said to be sound in their theology, though they are bad in spite of it. ’ The devils believe and tremble.’ The Satan of the New Testament, like the Persian Ahriman, is the personification of all wickedness. Nor is there any hope of his salvation. For him and his angels is reserved ’ eternal fire ’; he must be cast into the lake of fire and brimstone. The salvation of Satan is not suggested anywhere. He is to be crushed and tormented, but nevertheless left alive, apparently for ever. God is to conquer, and yet His conquest is not complete, for Satan shall have hell to rule over. The whole universe will not be won for God. There are evil ones whom God Himself neither saves nor kills. In the Book of Revelation we have the notion that God, who is quite able to chain up Satan, for a time lets him loose. Of course, if we took such a notion seriously into our idea of God, our God would be no better than a man who, though quite able to control his passions, yet for a time gave them license to work what havoc they could on society, then chained them up when it suited his convenience. That would be an immoral view of God. God must be as just now as He ever will be. A God who can postpone justice is unjust. At the end, too, even when justice is done, Satan in Revelation is still alive.

It must, however, be said that, though the New Testament in many passages records these beliefs, yet there are in other passages points of view gained, and heights reached, from which a larger and brighter vision is afforded. Does it not speak of ’ the restitution of all things ’? Does it not look forward to a time when Jesus shall deliver up the kingdom, and ’ God be all in all ’? Will God be ’ all in all as long as there is a spot of hell anywhere, or a devil in existence? Listen to these magnificent words of the Epistle to the Ephesians: * It is in accordance with the loving design which God planned from the first to carry out in Christ the establishment of a new order when the times were ripe for it, when He would make everything, both in heaven and on earth, centre in the Christ. I say " in the Christ," by our union with whom we also became God’s own possession, having from the first been marked out for this in the intention of him who, in all that happens, is executing His own fixed purpose.’ I take Paul to be the writer of these words, and I take them to represent his deepest thought. In this whole letter you get Paul at his highest. For breadth of view, for grandeur of conception, for magnificent scope of promise, for wealth of hope, for depth of insight, for a triumphant realization of power, it stands, to my mind, with Colossians, transcendent in literature. He looks upon the whole universe, and thinks of Christ, and says: ’All has been created through Him and for Him.’ If all is for Christ, what of hell, what of doomed men, what even of an unredeemable devil? Paul declares that Christ is the key to the solution of the mystery of being; He is the explanation of creation. He is also the explanation of history; all time, all space, all existence take their meaning from Christ. Is there room in this kind of philosophy for a host of evil spirits doomed for ever? I take it there is not. At his highest point of view, it seems to me that to Paul evil is not an ultimate power. I believe, further, that here Paul was at one with Jesus, and that it was from a vision of Jesus he got the truth. Jesus grew up amid the traditional belief of His time that the empire of the world was divided between God and the Evil One, and that under Satan there were hosts of evil spirits working mischief in the world. The physical disease which we now treat as lunacy was regarded as possession by devils. According to the New Testament, as it stands, Jesus shared these beliefs, and I must honestly say that I think it is impossible to resist that conclusion. I am thankful, however, for the measure of relief in this matter which historical criticism affords I mean that allowance must be made for the fact that the accounts were written by men who had inherited these beliefs, and the strong colour is often due to that fact; and further that the accounts were also written years after the events, when the historic fact would have grown considerably in oral tradition.

If Jesus, then, by the operation of strong psychic and spiritual forces, and by tenderness, soothed poor, fevered lunatics who were cruelly treated by society, this, in the language and opinion of the time, would be recorded as casting out devils. This very kind of disease exists under its old name to-day. Subscriptions are being asked for now in this country for the first hospital for the insane of Syria. You will find that those now in Syria treated by medical men as insane persons show the same symptoms as the demoniacs of the new Testament, and their own countrymen regard them as possessed by devils. Many of them, we are told, are curable by kind, gentle treatment. This, I believe, is the key to many of the stories in the Gospels of the casting out of devils by Jesus. Whether He believed in demoniacal possession, and so used the language of that belief, or whether He simply used the words as an accommodation to the belief of the patient in order to help his cure, or whether the mere fact of the cure is recorded in the language of the time, it is almost impossible to tell. The certainty is this: that the gentle method of treatment, which we have only come to after so many centuries, was adopted by Him so long ago. Up to a comparatively recent time the insane in this country were regarded as possessed by devils, and treated with barbarous cruelty in consequence, and when medical science was opposing that theory it was denounced as heresy. The infallible Bible theory required the old belief. Men asked then, as now: ’Shall we give up the Bible?’ The right answer now, as then, is: ’ No; but you shall give up your false theory of the Bible, and cease to talk ignorantly about it, or else in the march of thought you will be left behind.’ Now, though I do not claim that Jesus was clear of the traditional beliefs, I do most certainly think that the records are exaggerated. There is not, e.g., to my mind, the slightest reason for believing the absurd story of the swine of Gadara. The old-fashioned infidel has had many a turn on that story. It was quite possible, however, for such a story to grow when you remember that the scene was placed in a heathen part of the country, and that the Jews often called the heathen swine. The belief in the Evil One, too, was probably part of the creed which Jesus inherited by His incarnation into Jewish life. But if you want to estimate an outstanding personality fairly you must, as Harnack maintains, put into the foreground, not what He shared with His contemporaries, but what was most characteristic of Him. What He had in common is the proper background. On this principle we must give to Jesus the highest ranges of the teaching found in the Gospels, for we find no one else to take His place. When we do this, I think the conclusion of Edward Caird is well taken: ’ In any case it may be said that the idea of an absolute power of evil, which does not exist with a view to a greater good, is essentially opposed to the whole spirit of the teaching of Jesus, and must ultimately be set aside by the development of His thought, even if it was included in traditional conceptions of the time which He was unable to repudiate.’ Now, it is this ’ spirit of the teaching of Jesus ’ which I think Paul had at last caught when in the Ephesian letter he sees the whole universe and all history, past, present, and to come, centred in the Christ, and God ’ in all that happens’ fulfilling His own fixed purpose of grace and salvation. The value of the belief in a devil is not that it is a satisfactory explanation of sin, but that it has been man’s assertion that sin does not belong to his own real self, nor does it belong to God. The belief in a devil is a witness to man’s consciousness that sin is alien to the highest purposes of his own life, and also to the true end of the world-life, and is therefore to be conquered, that God and man may come to their own. It is a witness to the grandest fact in human experience viz., the refusal of man to identify the essence of his being with sin, and his consciousness that God must be absolutely good. Now this remains when man ceases to believe in a personal devil, and believes with James that when a man is tempted he is ’ drawn’ away by his own lust and enticed.’ It is his own in the sense that he must accept responsibility for it, but it is not of his very self, because his own proper, higher life can only be realized by its conquest. Evil, in our belief, only exists to be overcome by the power of God in man. We cannot believe in two ultimate powers which will somehow divide the world between them at the finish. Just as we refuse to believe that the seat of authority in ourselves belongs to sin, so we refuse to believe that the seat of authority in the universe belongs to evil. It is God the Eternal Righteousness, God the Eternal Truth, God the Eternal Love, who reigneth over all. Whatever sin may be, we cannot believe that it belongs to the eternal order. It shall not, therefore, break our heart, or silence our song, or take away our prayer. Fall we may, but climb we must. If we fail to-day we will renew the struggle to-morrow. The speech of the angel of faith comes upon the night with prophecy of a brighter day, the day of perfect righteousness, the promised day of God.