Satan Wrecks Minds

The mind has always been a citadel for which the devil has striven. We read that “the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not.”* (2 Corinthians 4:4) The devil is tireless in his efforts to get a wrong thought, impression, or idea lodged in the mind of people. This he attempts usually through the agency of evil spirits, and they, in turn, through mixing a certain amount of truth with error. Volumes could be filled with the record of the almost inconceivable number of methods by which children of God have been deceived by Satan. That they were children of God did not save them; nor in many cases was it because they were ungrounded in the fundamentals of the Christian faith. I can recall the cases of men whose names, in their day, were household words in Christian circles, but who, nevertheless, were ensnared. My point is this: allowing for all that is embraced in the mysteries of suffering and divine providence, there are still cases which can be understood only in these words: “your adversary the devil… walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: Whom resist stedfast in the faith.”* (1 Peter 5:8-9)

The highway of the church is strewn with a sufficient number of mental and physical wrecks to make us seriously wonder if there is not some truth with reference to Calvary which these folks missed or ignored. I believe there is. One’s spirit sometimes groans because of the cry of their bound souls, but it is not sufficient to groan and pity; we must act. Calvary has bequeathed both a charter of freedom and a weapon of emancipation which we must use for their deliverance. We cannot say that there is no immediate or progressive release other than that of death for them until we have done our part to liberate them from the satanic powers that deceive and blind them.

We cannot merely cast the responsibility on the Lord and supplicate for His will to be done, and leave it there. It may be precisely and definitely His will to resist the devil, and for us to do it, not someone else. Test it, and see what happens. Get the enemy exposed and then claim Christ’s victory over him. I know of cases where no change for the better occurred in the condition until the work of the devil was exposed and he was withstood in the name of the Lord. In some cases it will be necessary to gain the cooperation of the afflicted person before complete deliverance can be effected.