I. AS IT IS A WORK OF DESTRUCTION. "That He might destroy him that had
the power of death, that is, the devil."
1. _Satan_, _then_, _is a person_, _and the enemy of Jesus_, _who died
to destroy him_.
(i.) The personality of the devil is necessarily implied in the words of
the text. The theory which seeks to divest all that is said about the
devil in Scripture of everything like personality, and to refine it away
into figurative representation of "the principle of evil," is as
unphilosophical as it is unscriptural. How can we conceive of moral evil
in the abstract? How can we think of it apart from the depraved will of
some intelligent being? Whatever theories may be held respecting the
difficult question of the origin of evil, it is surely inconceivable that
it should exist independently of some living, conscious, intellectual
author. No truer or more philosophical solution can be found than that
of the Bible, which attributes it to the devil,--a being originally good,
who fell from his first estate, broke his allegiance to the Creator, and
so became the leader of a vast and fearful rebellion against Almighty
God. The case of man shows us the possibility of a being existing in a
holy but mutable state, and lapsing, under certain inducements, into sin.
What the inducements were in the instance of the prince of darkness we
are not told; and thus the question of the origin of evil seems to be
insoluble by us. But the identification of it with the personal
defection of Satan is far more intelligible and reasonable than the
attempt to treat it as a metaphysical abstraction. All the
representations of the Bible on the subject are instinct with the awful
personality of the devil. He is our "adversary;" he is "the accuser;" he
is "the God of this world;" he is "the prince of the power of the air,
that wicked one that now worketh in the hearts of the children of
disobedience;" he that hath "blinded the minds of them that believe not;"
he "leadeth" sinners "captive at his will." Surely that is a bold and
unscrupulous theology which resolves all these clear and strong
expressions into the mere ideal impersonation of a principle. O no!
Satan is a being of subtle intelligence, with a depraved, unconquerable,
malignant will; a dread living power, with whom we have continually to
do, who "desireth to have us, that he may sift us as wheat," and with
whom, if we wish to get to heaven, we must be prepared to fight at every
step of our way.
(ii.) And he is emphatically the enemy of Jesus, who came to "destroy"
him. "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed
and her seed." It was in pursuit of his designs against the living God
that Satan persuaded our first parents to commit sin; it was by lying
insinuations against God that he deceived her who was "first in the
transgression." Of course, he is the enemy of man. Of course, his
design is to inflict ruin and misery on men, and to bring them to his own
state and place of torment. But he does this by seducing them into
rebellion against the Most High. Hatred of God is the spring of all his
conduct, the motive of every enterprise which he undertakes. And Jesus,
the Son of God, the vindicator of the divine honour, is necessarily the
sworn eternal foe of the devil; and He has come into our world as into
the arena of a supreme conflict for the defeat and overthrow of Satan;
has assumed the very nature which the foul fiend seduced and degraded, in
order that, in that same nature, he might avenge the wrong done to the
being and government of God, and put an eternal end to the usurpation and
tyranny of his enemy.