The Devil Is a Murderer

It may help someone if I touch briefly on another phase of satanic activity. It relates to the question of self-destruction. Let us not debate the question as to what God would allow in the life of His children, but deal with the facts as they are known to many. A young fellow, whom I knew to be saved and living a good and careful moral life, told me that he scarcely ever shaved without having suggestions and urgings to take his life. Moreover, he found it difficult to shave at all, as proven by his frequently cut face. Except that he was not having an easy time at home or with his friends at work—the type of persecution that is the common lot of the Christian—there was no particular natural reason to account for the depression and daily horrors through which he was passing.

I had had some experience with things of this kind, so I ventured to suggest that the devil was seeking his life. He was greatly relieved to know that his problem could be dealt with as something originating from a source outside his own mental life. Having prayed by himself with little relief, he asked me to pray with him, and I consented. “But,” I said, “it is something more than prayer to God that is needed. He will help you, but you have to stand ‘in Christ’ and tell the devil that you resist him in the name of the Lord, and that you refuse to let him move you to take your life.” That was something new to him, but he did it and, praise God, was delivered! He was then able to shave without the slightest fear, for the devil, as a murderer, had been exposed and resisted. Moreover, the man knew what to do in any future assault and strengthened his position by praying for others in similar trouble.

I have told that incident at many meetings and have rarely found a gathering in which there was not someone who was pestered of the devil in a similar way. Usually the assault would be made under the pressure of home or business cares, after the recurrence of sinful habits that were deplored and wept over, or even during disappointment and despair over Christian service. The devil would use anything to persuade the man that he would be better out of the way. I thank God that I know that the power of Calvary works in this realm, and that what God may not take away in answer to asking can be cast off by resisting the devil on the ground of Christ’s finished work at the cross.