"Giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of demons" (1 Tim. 4:1) "spirits in high positions" (Eph. 6:12) "The heathen sacrifice to devils and not to God" (1 Cor. 10:20)
The Bible's teaching that the earth's atmosphere is infested with evil spirits is now very generally disbelieved. As a result of the disbelief thousands of well-meaning people are being the more easily entrapped by these evil spirits. The blight is both physical and moral. The usual method of procedure is to arouse curiosity. While the quest for knowledge proceeds, an influence much like that of hypnotism affects the investigator, impelling him forward to further investigation. Sometimes the curiosity is attracted through the outer senses, at spiritualistic seances, with ouija boards, etc. At other times it is by spirit rappings. Again, it may be by whisperings in the ear, inaudible to others. At other times the messages come through trance mediums.
In every instance these communications purport to come from dead human beings. This of itself gives to the communication a special charm to many. They feel honored in being sought out by the dead and in being able to communicate with them. They are curious for information respecting the hereafter. They forget that they have been taught from infancy that the holy dead are far off in heaven, and that the unholy dead are far off in torment.
How fully this is forgotten is shown by a letter which we received on the first day of this month from a Catholic lady. In it she tells how she first obtained clairvoyant powers the gift of hearing what others could not hear. This, in turn, permitted her to communicate with the evil spirits, the [HGL466] fallen angels. These, representing themselves to her as inmates of purgatory, came to her for help. They solicited her prayers and were progressing to get her more and more under their control. Just in time she was rescued through reading our writings on the subject. Since then she has exercised her will and her prayers against having any fellowship whatever with these fallen angels. Gradually she is becoming more and more enlightened in the Truth of God's Word.
Not infrequently do these spirits personate the Heavenly Father and Christ, urge more prayer, accuse of sin, recommend the reading of the Scriptures, etc. This appears to be with a view to gaining the confidence, the relaxing of the will. Later on dishonorable suggestions are made. The Bible is scorned, prayer is laughed at. If, then, the subject takes fright and seeks to break the hypnotic chain, the evil spirits laugh at him, swear at him, and sometimes tell him that they will shortly have him fully in their power to roast him forever. If he attempts to pray, they intrude and interrupt and tell him that God would not hear him now, that he has gone too far, etc.
With some the matter goes so far that the human will is broken down completely and the spirits obsess them and use their bodies foolishly sometimes viciously, sometimes insanely, until, finally, they are pronounced dangerous and committed to asylums. We do not claim that all the insane are obsessed of evil spirits, but so far as we can judge, nearly one-half of the inmates in asylums are obsessed by demons, who live in them while they are mastering their wills.
God, through His Word, has forewarned His people against these delusions. In permitting many, nevertheless, to fall into these traps, He is merely teaching a great lesson; the terrible results of disobedience, of neglect of God's Word, are not eternal. The Divine arrangement is that ultimately the entire human family shall be released from the bonds of sin and death, ignorance and superstition, and all have full opportunity for coming into full harmony with God. The present lesson will illustrate the necessity for searching the Scriptures and obeying God's voice therein.
St. Paul, in describing our day, declares one of its prominent signs to be that many will now give heed to these seducing spirits, whose teachings and practices lead away from God. St. Paul intimates also that by these misleading spirits many will come to hold doctrines of demons, or devilish doctrines. It is a sad commentary upon our wonderful day of enlightenment that the most enlightened people should hold the most awful doctrine respecting the hereafter.
A doctrine of demons it most surely is which tells, to the dishonor of God's name, that nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand of humanity are to be eternally tortured, either because of Divine incompetence to make better arrangements for them, or because God willed and foreordained it so before creation. This doctrine of demons has enslaved many honorable people who would themselves scorn to make such a plan of the ages as they attribute to God.
Thank God, the time is not far distant when these seducing spirits will be completely bound, restrained, and deceive humanity thus no more. But the deception has so long prevailed that poor humanity is thoroughly under its control. The falsehood leading up to all this error is Satan's first lie to our parents in Eden. There, contradicting the words of God, he said, "Ye shall not surely die." Ever since, for six thousand years, he has worked along this line, and all the fallen angels with him. His message is, "Ye shall not surely die" you do not surely die; when men seem to die, they become more alive than before they died.
On account of these errors, that dead men are alive, Satan and the fallen angels, contrary to the teachings of the Bible, have instilled into the whole world, nonsensical, heathen superstitions respecting heaven, purgatory and hell. The Catholics pray for those who go to Purgatory, to help them out. Protestants do not so pray, believing that the saintly few go direct to heaven and all of the unsaintly go as directly to eternal torture.
If this great lie wherewith Satan first seduced Mother Eve and murdered our race could be fully eliminated from our minds and our creeds, it would mean a religious revolution to both Catholics and Protestants back to the Bible and away from the domination and seduction of the lying spirits, the fallen angels, who personate humanity.
So far as we can learn from those who have once been spirit mediums, the trend of Spiritism is toward unchastity, impurity. And this agrees well with the Scriptural declaration relative to the sin through which these fallen angels first became reprobate.
St. Jude (6) and St. Peter (2 Pet. 2:4), tell us briefly of the fall of the angels that "they left their own habitation and kept not their first estate." Both Apostles mention the circumstance in connection with human lasciviousness. The story of the fall of the angels is given us briefly in Gen. 6:1-4. After man's fall into sin God permitted the holy angels to have communication with humanity. And because human eyes cannot see spirit beings, God permitted the angels to materialize. For instance, we note the case of the angels who visited Abraham on the plains of Mamre and for whom he prepared a veal dinner. We read that, materialized, these angels were like men, and taken by Abraham to be men, while they ate and talked with him. It was subsequently that Abraham learned that they were really heavenly visitants.
So it was with all the angels before the flood. They were permitted to materialize and to appear in every sense of the word as men. The record shows that the angels became lustful. We read, "The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair and took unto themselves wives of such as they chose." The angels, with superior powers and superior knowledge to man's, acted as the masters of men, who were practically obliged to do their bidding. The result is stated in few words. The children of this mis-alliance, we are told, were giants as compared with the ordinary members of our race. And not only were they giants physically, but also intellectually- "They were men of renown." Poor [HGL467] humanity could not compete with this race. The result was that strife and contention and lustful, sinful practices abounded in all the earth until God declared that every imagination of the thoughts of man's heart was only evil continually.
God had foreknown all this, and a canopy of waters, which then surrounded the earth, similar to Saturn's rings now, was held in readiness to cause a flood, that sinful men and the human offspring of the angels might be destroyed. Only Noah and his family were found worthy of preservation to be the new start of humanity this side of the flood. The declaration of the Scriptures respecting Noah's family is, "Now Noah was perfect in his generation." He was properly generated or born so were his children. There was no strain or admixture of the angelic stock in that family. The plain information is that the remainder of humanity were so degraded by the seductions of those fallen angels that they were not fit to live. The entire race had become corrupt.
Of course, the fallen angels were not destroyed in the flood, for they not only had the power to materialize, but also the power to dematerialize. It was at that time, however, that all of the fallen angels were put under restraints not permitted again to materialize, the limitation lasting "until the Judgment of the great Day."
Their chains are not physical, to confine them to a certain place in Tartarus the earth's atmosphere. They may roam at will, but are chained, or restrained from materializing. The intimation of the Scriptures seems to be that, with the ending of this Gospel Age, just prior to the inauguration of the New dispensation, these evil spirits may be allowed to break their chains and manifest themselves as men, in connection with the great trouble time incidental to the change of Dispensation.
Separated from God and the holy angels, and unable to assume human bodies, the sinful angels have probably had terrible experiences during the past forty-four hundred years. True happiness is not to be expected amongst those alienated from God. Anger, malice, hatred, strife, "works of the devil," the Apostle says, are not compatible with the love, joy and peace which belong alone to a condition of holiness. Under such circumstances we cannot wonder that these fallen angels would seek association with humanity. Being under the control of Satan as a chief or prince of devils, they have followed his course and propagated his original falsehood- "Ye shall not surely die." They have conjured to men's minds the hell of the heathen, the hell and Purgatory of the Catholics, and, worst of all, our Protestant misconception of awful and unending torture for all except the saintly few.
These doctrines of demons have increased the gulf between God and humanity and have made the Bible, the Message of God's love, a book of terrors not to be loved, merely to be endured or kept as a fetish to secure possibly a cooler place in purgatory. We may safely say that all the false doctrines of Christendom, represented in all of the creeds of the "Dark Ages," are doctrines of demons. Our minds became defiled our hymn-books, our creeds, everything.
Thank God that the light of the New Dispensation is now bringing to us the beginning of blessing release from some of our darkness. The seeing of the true wage of sin that it is death and not eternal torment is one of the most important features connected with our enlightenment. When we learn that the dead are really dead and, as the bible declares, will not know anything until the resurrection, then we begin to see the beauty of God's Plan the need of Christ's death, the need of His second coming; the need of His Kingdom; the need of a resurrection; the need of an opportunity for all mankind to come to a clear knowledge of the great Truth of redemption through the precious blood and the opportunity then, by God's grace, of attaining eternal life either during this Gospel Age, as New Creatures, spirit beings like unto the angels, or in the New Dispensation, during the more general salvation of the world to human perfection in an earthly Paradise.
Our great Redeemer manifested His power by casting out demons from those who had become obsessed. And we read further that He commissioned His Apostles to heal all manner of diseases and to cast out unclean spirits. We are told that they did this and numerous instances, in illustration, are given us. One man was obsessed by a legion of these spirits. No wonder the poor fellow was crazy. But after they were cast out he was clothed and in his right mind and became a disciple (Luke 8:26-36).
St. Paul and Silas had an experience with an obsessed young woman who practiced soothsaying, fortune-telling, by the power of the evil spirit which obsessed her. As the evil spirits recognized Jesus and cried, "We know Thee, who Thou art, Jesus," so this spirit knew the Apostles and, through the young woman's lips, cried after them, "These be the servants of the Most High God, which show to us the way to obtain eternal life" (Acts 16:16-18).
Neither Jesus nor the Apostles were willing to accept demon testimony and commanded the evil spirits to come out of their victims.
The Scriptures indicate that there will be a wonderful activity amongst the fallen angels in the close of this Gospel Age. The Master declared that the deceptions would be such that, if it were possible, the "very elect" would be deceived. But that will not be possible, because Divine providence stands engaged to protect the elect. The Ninety-First Psalm, which gives a picture of the closing of this Age and its sundry trials and tests, declares that God will give His messengers a charge concerning the feet members of the body of Christ in all their ways lest a foot should be dashed against a stone of stumbling (Psa. 91:12).
If our understanding of the Scriptures be correct, we need not be surprised if the fallen angels may again seemingly gain a victory over the Divine restraints and materialize in broad daylight personating not only the dead, but also at times personating the living. Spiritists and mediums are claiming such things as already beginning and likely to be accomplished on a grand scale shortly. Should it come it will inaugurate a terrible time of trouble such as had not been since the flood. God's people, while resting confidently and at ease [HGL468] under Divine supervision, should be on the alert to resist everything akin to Spiritism, Occultism, Hypnotism, and to warn their friends respecting these things.
Numerous scientific men are being entrapped by these lying spirits whose doings and powers they are investigating under the name of Psychic Phenomena.
Thank God we are nearing the time when Satan shall be bound and when every evil influence shall be restrained. Not only will there be a full cleansing from a physical obsession, but a still greater cleansing and freeing from the doctrines of demons.
HERALD OF THE EPIPHANY
November 15, 1923
Whole Number 021
DEMONS FILL OUR ATMOSPHERE
THE BIBLE'S teaching that the earth's atmosphere is infested with evil spirits is now very generally disbelieved. As a result of this disbelief thousands of well-meaning people are being the more easily entrapped by these evil spirits. The blight is both physical and moral. The usual method of procedure is to arouse curiosity. While the quest for knowledge proceeds, an influence much like that of hypnotism affects the investigator, impelling him forward to further investigation. Sometimes the curiosity is attracted through the outer senses at spiritualistic séances, with Ouija boards, etc. At other times it is by spirit rappings. Again, it may be by whisperings in the ear, inaudible to others. At other times the messages come through trance-mediums. In every instance these communications, while actually coming from devils, purport to come from dead human beings. This of itself gives to the communication a special charm to many. They feel honored in being sought out by the dead, and in being able to communicate with them. They are curious for information respecting the hereafter. They forget that they have been taught from infancy that the holy dead are far off in heaven, and that the unholy dead are far off in torment. How fully this is forgotten is shown by a letter recently received from a Catholic lady. In it she tells how she first obtained clairvoyant powers—the gift of hearing and seeing what others could not hear and see. This, in turn, permitted her to communicate with the evil spirits, the fallen angels. These represented themselves to her as inmates of purgatory who had come to her for help. They solicited her prayers, and were getting her more and more under their control. Just in time she was rescued through reading some Truth writings on the subject. Since then she has exercised her will and her prayers against having any fellowship whatever with these fallen angels. Gradually she is becoming more enlightened in the Truth of God's Word.
Not infrequently do these spirits personate the Heavenly Father and Christ, urge more prayer, accuse of sin, recommend the reading of the Scriptures, etc. This appears to be with a view to gaining the confidence and the relaxing of the will of their intended victim. Later on dishonorable suggestions are made. The Bible is scorned, prayer is laughed at, etc. If, then, the subject takes fright and seeks to break the hypnotic chain, the evil spirits laugh at him, swear at him, and sometimes tell him that they will shortly have him fully in their power to roast him forever. If he attempts to pray, they intrude and interrupt and tell him that God would not hear him now, that he has gone too far, etc. With some, the matter goes so far that the human will is broken down completely and the spirits obsess them and use their bodies foolishly—sometimes viciously, sometimes insanely, until finally they are pronounced dangerous and committed to asylums. We do not claim that all the insane are obsessed of evil spirits, but so far as we can judge, nearly one half the inmates of asylums are obsessed by demons who live in them while they are mastering their wills. God, through His Word, has forewarned His people
Page 45-C2
against these delusions. In permitting some, nevertheless, to fall into these traps, He is merely teaching a great lesson. The terrible results of disobedience, of neglect of God's Word, are not eternal.
The Divine arrangement is that ultimately the entire human family shall be released from the bonds of sin and death, ignorance and superstition, and all have full opportunity for coming into full harmony with God. The present lesson will illustrate the necessity for searching the Scriptures and obeying God's voice therein. St. Paul, in describing our day, declares one of its prominent signs to be that many will now give heed to these seducing spirits, whose teachings and practices lead away from God. St. Paul intimates also that by these misleading spirits many will come to hold doctrines of demons, or devilish doctrines. It is a sad commentary upon our wonderful day of enlightenment that the most enlightened people should hold the most awful doctrine respecting the hereafter—eternal torment. A doctrine of demons it most surely is which tells, to the dishonor of God's name, that nine hundred and ninety-eight out of every thousand of humanity are to be eternally tortured, either because of Divine incompetence to make better arrangements for them, or because God willed and foreordained it so before creation. This doctrine of demons has enslaved many honorable people who would themselves scorn to make such a plan of the Ages as they attribute to God.
Thank God, the time is not far distant when these seducing spirits will be completely bound and restrained, to deceive humanity thus no more. But the deception has so long prevailed that poor humanity is thoroughly under its control. The falsehood leading up to all this error is Satan's first lie to our parents in Eden. There, contradicting the words of God, he said, "Ye shall not surely die." Ever since, for six thousand years, he has worked along this line, and all the fallen angels with him. His message is, "Ye shall not surely die." You do not surely die. When men seem to die, they become more alive than before they died. On account of this error, that dead men are alive, Satan and the fallen angels, contrary to the teachings of the Bible, have instilled into the whole world nonsensical, heathenish superstitions respecting heaven, purgatory and hell. The Catholics pray for those who go to purgatory, to help them out. Protestants do not so pray, believing that the saintly few go direct to heaven and all of the unsaintly go as directly to eternal torture. If this great lie wherewith Satan first seduced Mother Eve and murdered our race (John
8: 44) could be fully eliminated from our minds and our creeds, it would mean a religious revolution to both Catholics and Protestants—back to the Bible and away from the domination and seduction of the lying spirits, the fallen angels, who personate humanity.
So far as we can learn from those who have once been spirit mediums, the trend of Spiritism is toward unchastity, impurity. And this agrees well with the Scriptural declaration relative to the sin through which these fallen angels first became reprobate. St. Jude (6, 7) and St. Peter (2 Pet.
2: 4), tell us briefly of the fall of the angels—that "they left their own habitation
Page 46-C1
and kept not their first estate." Both Apostles mention the circumstance in connection with human lasciviousness. The story of the fall of the angels is given us briefly in Genesis 6: 1-4. After man's fall into sin, God permitted the holy angels to have communication with humanity. And because human eyes cannot see spirit beings, God permitted the angels to materialize. For instance, we note the case of the angels who visited Abraham on the plains of Mamre and for whom he prepared a veal dinner. We read that, materialized, these angels were like men, and taken by Abraham to be men, while they ate and talked with him. It was subsequently that Abraham learned that they were really heavenly visitants. Such materializations occurred to others, e.g., Lot, Jacob, Balaam, Gideon, Manoah, David, Zechariah, Mary, Peter, etc. So it was with all the angels before the flood. They were permitted to materialize and to appear in every sense of the word as men. The record shows that some of the angels became lustful. We read, "The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair and took unto themselves wives
of such as they chose." The angels, with superior powers and superior knowledge to man's, acted as the masters of men, who were practically obliged to do their bidding. The result is stated in few words. The children of this misalliance, we are told, were giants as compared with the ordinary members of our race. And not only were they giants physically, but also intellectually— "They were men of renown." Poor humanity could not compete with this race. The result was that strife and contention and lustful, sinful practices abounded in all the earth, until God declared that every imagination of man's heart was only evil continually.
ANGELS RESTRAINED IN CHAINS OF DARKNESS
God had foreknown all this, and a canopy of waters, which then surrounded the earth, similar to Saturn's rings now, was held in readiness to cause a flood, that sinful men and the human offspring of the angels might be destroyed. Only Noah and his family were found worthy of preservation to be the new start of humanity this side of the flood. The declaration of the Scriptures respecting Noah's family is, "Now Noah was perfect in his generation." He was properly generated or born—so were his children. There was no strain or admixture of the angelic stock in that family. The plain information is that the remainder of humanity were so degraded by the seductions of those fallen angels that they were not fit to live. The entire race had become corrupt. Of course, the fallen angels were not destroyed in the flood, for they not only had the power to materialize, but also the power to dematerialize. It was at that time, however, that all of the fallen angels were put under restraints—not permitted again to materialize in the light, the limitation lasting "until the judgment of the great day." Their restraints or chains are not physical, but are powerful enough to confine them to the earth's atmosphere, within which they may roam at will, but are chained, or restrained from materializing in the light. The intimation of the Scripture seems to be that now, with the ending of this Gospel Age, just prior to the inauguration of the New Dispensation, these evil spirits are allowed to break their chains and in the light manifest themselves as men, in connection with the great trouble time incidental to the change of Dispensation.
Separated from God and the holy angels, and unable to assume human bodies, the sinful angels have probably had terrible experiences during the past forty-four hundred years. True happiness is not to be expected amongst those alienated from God. Anger, malice, hatred, strife, "works of the devil," the Apostle says, are not compatible with the love, joy and peace
Page 46-C2
which belong alone to a condition of holiness. Under such circumstances we cannot wonder that these fallen angels would seek association with humanity. Being under the control of Satan as the chief or prince of devils, they have followed his course and propagated his first falsehood—"Ye shall not surely die." They have conjured to men's minds the hell of the heathen, the hell and purgatory of the Catholics, and, worst of all, our Protestant misconception of awful and unending torture for all except the saintly few. These doctrines of demons have increased the gulf between God and humanity and have made the Bible, the message of God's love, a book of terrors—not to be loved, but merely to be endured or kept as a fetish to secure possibly a cooler place in purgatory, or an escape from eternal torture. We may safely say that all the false doctrines of Christendom, represented in all of the creeds of the "Dark Ages," are doctrines of demons. Our minds became defiled—our hymn books, our creeds, everything.
Thank God that the light of the New Dispensation is now bringing to us the beginning of blessing—release from some of our darkness. The seeing of the true wage of sin—that it is death and not eternal torment—is one of the most important features connected with our enlightenment. When we learn that the dead are really dead, and, as the Bible declares, will not
know anything until the resurrection, then we begin to see the beauty of God's Plan—the need of Christ's death; the need of His second coming; the need of His Kingdom; the need of a resurrection; the need of an opportunity for all mankind to come to a clear knowledge of the great Truth of redemption through the precious blood and to the opportunity then, by God's grace, of attaining eternal life—either during this Gospel Age, as New Creatures, spirit beings like unto the angels, or in the New Dispensation during the more general salvation of the world to human perfection in an earthly Paradise.
Our great Redeemer manifested His power by casting out demons from those who had become obsessed. And we read further that he commissioned His Apostles to heal all manner of disease, and to cast out unclean spirits. We are told that they did this; and numerous instances of such works, in illustration, are given us. One man was obsessed by a legion of these spirits. No wonder the poor fellow was crazy. But after they were cast out he was clothed and in his right mind and became a disciple (Luke 8: 26-36). St. Paul and Silas had an experience with an obsessed young woman who practiced soothsaying, fortune-telling, by the power of the evil spirit which obsessed her. As the evil spirits recognized Jesus and cried, "We know Thee, who Thou art, Jesus," so this spirit knew the Apostles and, through the young woman's lips, cried after them, "These men are the servants of the most high God, which show unto us the way of salvation." (Acts 16: 16-18). Neither Jesus nor the Apostles were willing to accept demon testimony and charged the evil spirits to come out of their victims.
The Scriptures indicate that there will he a wonderful activity amongst the fallen angels in the close of this Gospel Age. The Master declared that the deceptions would be such that, if it were possible, the "very elect" would be deceived. But that will not be possible, because Divine providence stands engaged to protect the elect. Psalm 91, which gives a picture of the closing of this Age and its sundry trials and tests, declares that God will give His messengers a charge concerning the feet members of the Body of Christ in all their ways—lest a foot should be dashed against a stone of stumbling (Psalm 91: 12). As Satan and the fallen angels operate largely through "the children of disobedience," so God and His holy messengers use
Page 47-C1
not only the Scriptures but God's children of obedience as mouthpieces, as helpers, as God's ambassadors in "building one another up in the most holy faith." Hence the time when "a thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand at thy right hand" is also the time when these ensnaring and deceptive errors will "not come nigh thy dwelling"—not come nigh the members of the Body of Christ, the Elect.
If our understanding of the Scriptures be correct, we need not be surprised if the fallen angels may again seemingly gain a victory over the Divine restraints and materialize in broad daylight—personating not only the dead, but also at times personating the living. Spiritists and mediums are claiming such things are already beginning, and are likely to be accomplished on a large scale shortly. Should it come it will inaugurate a terrible time of trouble such as has not been since the flood. God's people, while resting confidently and at ease under Divine supervision, should be on the alert to resist everything akin to Spiritism, Occultism, Hypnotism, and to warn their friends respecting these things. Numerous scientific and some literary men are being entrapped by these lying spirits whose doings and powers they are investigating under the name of Psychic Phenomena. They are deceitfully told that the demons that make the communications are dead humans. Thank God we are nearing the time when Satan shall be bound, and when every evil influence shall be restrained. Not only will there then be a full cleansing from all physical obsession, but a still greater cleansing and freeing from the doctrines of demons.
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