Satan Is Anti-Missionary

Satan Is Anti-Missionary Satan Is Anti-Missionary
R. C. Bell No matter how Satan originated, he, throughout the entire Bible, is the powerful, perpetual enemy of God. And especially when God begins a new work is Satan, hoping to destroy it before it gains mo`mentum, active against it. Witness the tragedy m Eden, the tempta`tion of Christ in the wilderness, and, after he had failed with Christ personally, his unrelenting opposition to Christ’s infant church. He bitterly contested every inch of ground the church gained from the very first. In Jerusalem, after failing to stop the preaching of the apostles by threats, imprisonment and by scourging, he changed his tactics and struck from within, filling the heart of Ananias to lie to God. (Acts 5:3.) When Christ overruled Stephen’s martyrdom to Satan’s confusion and started the church on its way to the uttermost parts of the earth, Satan followed to Samaria and found another hu`man agent in Simon the sorcerer. (Acts 8.) When Christ put to sea and went to the island of Cyprus, the home of one of Satan’s most efficient agents (Venus, whose worship was most wicked and licen`tious), Satan used his son, Bar-Jesus, to interfere. (Acts 13:10.) When Christ’s church in her Christian Odyssey reached the shores of Europe, Satan, although fighting a consistently losing war, used the girl with a spirit of divination in a desperate effort to keep Christ out of Europe. (Acts 16.)

Satan, “the prince of this world,” was defeated in the first Christian century; but he was not captured, and he has continued the struggle wfith Christ down through, the centuries. He is sagacious and changes his weapons as occasion requires, even unto fashioning “himself into an angel of light.” He learned long since a better way to make war on Christ and His saints than to use fire and sw’ord. If in the twentieth century he can exceedingly curtail the missionary activity of the first century, not by bloody persecution, but by induc`ing Christians to be just selfishly indifferent about such work, it is all the same to him. Verily, “our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against rhe powers, against the world rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wicked`ness in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:2.) “Be sober, be watchful; your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour; whom withstand steadfast in your faith ” (1 Peter 5:8.) In this world-old controversy between God and Satan, whose side are we on? Neutrality is impossible. “He that is not vfith me is against me,” saith the Lord.

Lite appalling neglect of missionary work, the chief purpose and end of the Church of Christ on earth, among us today surely is the result of Satan’s doings. Can it be that he is blinding our eyes? He cannot deceive us about baptism and the Lord’s Supper, as he is doing the denominational world, but may it not suit his purpose just as well to deceive us about something else? If he can defeat the divine will and destroy human souls, what does he care about the way in which he does it? Of course he does not want Christ to start new work now in Mexico, the pagan Orient, or anywhere else. Indeed, nothing suits him better than to keep simple New Testament Christians (?) and their money within a comparatively small district of our South. The church of God is now and always has been engaged in a desperate struggle for her very life with the Devil, and it helps her to prepare and to fight successfully to know who her enemy is. Moreover it helps in like manner to know the ways and means he uses in waging this war. Else she may fight as “beating the air.”