167. Why Are Satan and Sin Permitted?

Why Are Satan and Sin Permitted?

Job_21:7 : ’93Wherefore do the wicked live?’94

Poor Job! With tusks and horns and hoofs and stings, all the misfortunes of life seemed to come upon him at once. Bankruptcy, bereavement, scandalization, and eruptive disease so irritating that he had to re-enforce his ten fingernails with pieces of earthenware to scratch himself withal. His wife took the diagnosis of his complaints and prescribed profanity. She thought he would feel better if between the paroxysms of grief and pain he would swear a little. For each boil a plaster of objurgation. Probably no man was ever more tempted to take the bad advice than when, at last, Job’92s four exasperating friends came in, Eliphaz, Zophar, Bildad and Elihu, practically saying to him, ’93You old sinner, serves you right; you are a hypocrite; what a sight you are! God has sent these chastisements for your wickedness.’94 The disfigured invalid, putting down the pieces of broken saucer with which he had been scraping his arms, and with swollen eyelids looks up and says to his garrulous friends, in substance, ’93The most wicked people sometimes have the best health and are the most prospered,’94 and then in that connection hurls the question which every man and woman has asked in some juncture of affairs, ’93Wherefore do the wicked live?’94

They build up fortunes that overshadow the earth. They confound all the life-insurance tables on the subject of longevity, dying octogenarians, perhaps non-ogenarians, possibly centenarians. Ahab in the palace, Naboth in the cabin. Unclean Herod on the throne, consecrated Paul twisting ropes for tent-making. Manasseh, the worst of all the kings of Judah, living longer than any of them. While the general rule is the wicked do not live out half their days, there are exceptions where they live on to great age and in paradises of beauty and luxuriance, and die with a whole college of physicians expending its skill in trying further prolongation of life, and have a funeral with casket under a mountain of calla lilies, the finest equipages of the city jingling and flashing into line, the poor angle-worm of the dust carried out to its hole in the ground with the pomp that might make a spirit from some other world suppose that the archangel Michael was dead.

Go up among the finest residences of the city, and on some of the door-plates you will find the names of those mightiest for commercial and social iniquity. They are the vampires of society’97they are the gorgons of the century. Some of these men have each wheel of their carriage a Juggernaut wet with the blood of those sacrificed to their avarice. Some of them are like Caligula, who wished that all people had only one neck that he might strike it through at one blow. Oh, the slain, the slain! A long procession of usurers and libertines and infamous quacks and legal charlatans and world-grabbing monsters. What apostleship of despoliation! Demons incarnate. Hundreds of men concentring all their energies of body, mind, and soul in one prolonged, ever-intensifying, and unrelenting effort to scald and scarify and blast and consume the world. I do not blame you for asking me the quivering, throbbing, burning, resounding, appalling question of my text, ’93Wherefore do the wicked live?’94

In the first place, they live to demonstrate beyond all controversy the long-suffering patience of God. You sometimes say, under some great affront, ’93I will not stand it;’94 but perhaps you are compelled to stand it. God, with all the batteries of omnipotence loaded with thunderbolts, stands it century after century. I have no doubt sometimes an angel comes to him and suggests, ’93Now is the time to strike.’94 ’93No,’94 says God; ’93wait a year, wait twenty years, wait a century, wait five centuries.’94 What God does is not so wonderful as what he does not do. He has the reserve corps with which he could strike Mormonism and Mohammedanism and Paganism from the earth in a day. He could take all the fraud in New York on the west side of Broadway and hurl it into the Hudson, and all the fraud on the east side of Broadway and hurl it into the East river in an hour. He understands the combination lock of every dishonest money safe, and could blow it up quicker than by any earthly explosive. Written all over the earth, written all over history are the words, ’93Divine forbearance, divine leniency, divine long-suffering.’94

I wonder that God did not burn this world up two thousand years ago, scattering its ashes into immensity, its aerolites dropping into other worlds to be kept in their museums as specimens of a defunct planet. People sometimes talk of God as though he were hasty in his judgments and as though he snapped men up quick. Oh, no! He waited one hundred and twenty years for the people to get into the ark, and warned them all the time’97one hundred and twenty years, then the flood came. The American Line gives only a month’92s announcement of the sailing of the St. Louis, the White Star Line gives only a month’92s announcement of the sailing of the Britannic, the Cunard Line gives only a month’92s announcement of the sailing of the Campania; but of the sailing of that ship which Noah commanded God gave one hun-dred and twenty years’92 announcement and warning. Patience antediluvian, patience postdiluvian, patience in times Adamic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, Pauline, Lutheran, Whitefieldian. Patience with men and nations. Patience with barbarisms and civilizations. Six thousand years of patience! Overtopping attribute of God, all of whose attributes are immeasurable.

Why do the wicked live? That their overthrow may be the more impressive and climactic. They must pile up their mischief until all the community shall see it, until the nation shall see it, until all the world shall see it. The higher it goes up the harder it will come down and the grander will be the divine vindication. God will not allow sin to sneak out of the world. God will not allow it merely to resign and quit. This shall not be a case that goes by default because no one appears against it. God will arraign it, handcuff it, try it, bring against it the verdict of all the good, and then gibbet it so high up that if one-half of the gibbet stood on Mount Washington and the other on the Himalaya it would not be any more conspicuous.

About thirty years ago we had in this country a most illustrious instance of how God lets a man go on in iniquity, so that at the close of the career his overthrow may be the more impressive, full of warning and climacteric. First, an honest chairmaker, then an alderman, then a Member of Congress, then a supervisor of a city, then school commissioner, then State Senator, then commissioner of public works’97on and up, stealing thousands of dollars here and thousands of dollars there, until the malfeasance in office overtopped anything the world had ever seen’97making the new Court House in New York a monument of municipal crime, and rushing the debt of the city from thirty-six million dollars to ninety-seven millions. Now he is at the top of millionairedom. Country seat terraced and arbored and parterred clear to the water’92s brink. Horses enough to stock a king’92s stables. Grooms and postillions in full rig. Wine cellars enough to make a whole Legislature drunk. New York finances and New York politics in his vest pocket. He winked, and men in high place fell. He lifted his little finger, and ignoramuses took important office. He whispered, and in Albany and Washington they said it thundered. Wilder and mightier and more baleful his influence, until it seemed as if pandemonium was to be adjourned to this world, and in the Satanic realm there was to be a change of administration, and Apollyon, who had held dominion so long, should have a successful competitor.

To bring all to a climax, a wedding came in the house of that man. Diamonds as large as hickory nuts. A pin of sixty diamonds representing sheaves of wheat. Musicians in a semicircle, half hidden by a great harp of flowers. Ships of flowers. Forty silver sets, one of them with two hundred and forty pieces. One wedding dress that cost five thousand dollars. A famous libertine, who owned several Long Island Sound steamboats, and who not long afterward was shot for his crimes, sent as a wedding present to that house a frosted silver iceberg, with representations of Arctic bears walking on icicle-handles and ascending the spoons. Was there ever such a convocation of pictures, of bronzes, of bric-a-brac, of grandeurs, social grandeurs? The highest wave of New York splendor rolled into that house and recoiled perhaps never again to rise so high. But just at that time, when all earthly and infernal observation was concentred on that man, eternal justice, impersonated by that wonder of the American bar, Charles O’92Conor, got on track of the offender. First arraignment, then sentence to twelve years’92 imprisonment under twelve indictments, then penitentiary on Blackwell’92s Island, then a lawsuit against him for six million dollars, then incarceration in Ludlow Street jail, then escape to foreign land, to be brought back under the stout grip of the constabulary, then dying of broken heart in a prison cell. God allowed him to go on in iniquity until all the world saw as never before that ’93the way of the transgressor is hard,’94 and that dishonesty will not declare permanent dividends, and that you had better be an honest chairmaker with a day’92s wages at a time, than an influential commissioner of public works, all your pockets crammed with plunder.

What a brilliant figure in history is William the Conqueror, the intimidator of France, of Anjou, of Brittany, victor at Hastings, snatching the crown of England and setting it on his own brow, destroying homesteads that he might have a larger game forest, making a Doomsday Book by which he could keep the whole land under despotic espionage, proclaiming war in revenge for a joke uttered in regard to his obesity. Harvest fields and vineyards going down under the cavalry hoof. Nations horror-struck. But one day while at the apex of all observation he is riding out and the horse put his hoof on a hot cinder, throwing the king so violently against the pommel of the saddle that he dies, his son hastening to England to get the crown before the breath has left his father’92s body. The imperial corpse drawn by a cart, most of the attendants leaving it in the street because of a fire alarm, that they might go and see the conflagration. And just as they are going to put his body down in the church which he had built, a man stepping up and saying, ’93Bishop, the man you praise is a robber. This church stands on my father’92s homestead. The prop-erty on which this church is built is mine. I reclaim my right. In the name of Almighty God I forbid you to bury the king here, or to cover him with my glebe.’94 ’93Go up,’94 said the ambition of William the Conqueror. ’93Go up by conquest, go up by throne, go up in the sight of all nations, go up by cruelties.’94 But one day God said, ’93Come down, come down by the way of a miserable death, come down by the way of an ignominious obsequies, come down in the sight of all nations, come clear down, come down forever.’94 And you and I see the same thing on a smaller scale many and many a time’97illustrations of the fact that God lets the wicked live that he may make their overthrow the more climacteric.

What is true in regard to sin, is true in regard to its author, Satan, called Abaddon, the prince of the power of the air, the serpent, the dragon. It seems to me any intelligent man must admit that there is a commander-in-chief of all evil. The Persians called him Ahriman, the Hindus called him Siva. He was represented on canvas as a mythological combination of Thor and Cerberus and Pan and Vulcan and other horrible addenda. I do not care what you call him, that monster of evil is abroad, and his one work is destruction. John Milton almost glorified him by witchery of description, but he is the concentration of all meanness and despicability. My little child, seven years of age, said to her mother one day, ’93Why doesn’92t God kill the devil at once, and have done with it?’94 In less terse phrase we have all asked the same question. The Bible says he is to be imprisoned and he is to be chained down. Why not heave the old miscreant into his dungeon now? Does it not seem as if his volume of infamy were complete? Does it not seem as if the last fifty years would make an appropriate peroration? No; God will let him go on to the top of all bad endeavor, and then when all the earth and all constellation and galaxies and all the universe are watching, God will hurl him down with a violence and ghastliness enough to persuade five hundred eternities that a rebellion against God must perish. God will not do it by piecemeal; God will not do it by small skirmish. He waits until all the troops are massed, and then some day when in defiant and confident mood, at the head of his army, this Goliath of hell stalks forth, our champion, the son of David, will strike him down, not with smooth stones from the brook, but with fragments from the Rock of Ages. But it will not be done until this giant of evil and his holy antagonist come out within full sight of the two great armies. The tragedy is only postponed to make the overthrow more impressive and climacteric. Do not fret. If God can afford to wait you can afford to wait. God’92s clock of destiny strikes only once in a thousand years. Do not try to measure events by the second hand on your little timepiece. Sin and Satan go on only that their overthrow may at last be the more terrific, the more impressive, the more resounding, the more climacteric.

Why do the wicked live? In order that they may build up fortresses for righteousness to capture. Have you not noticed that God harnesses men, bad men, and accomplishes good through them? Witness Cyrus, witness Nebuchadnezzar, witness the fact that the Bastile of oppression was pried open by the bayonets of a bad man. Recently there came to me the fact that a college had been built at the far West for infidel purposes. There was to be no nonsense of chapel prayers, no Bible reading there. All the professors there were pronounced infidels. The college was opened, and the work went on, but, of course, failed. Not long ago, a Presbyterian minister was in a bank in that village on purposes of business, and he overheard in an adjoining room the board of trustees of that college discussing what they had better do with the institution, as it did not get on successfully, and one of the trustees proposed that it be handed over to the Presbyterians, prefacing the word Presbyterians with a very unhappy expletive. The resolutions were passed, and that fortress of infidelity has become a fortress of old-fashioned orthodox religion, the only religion that will be worth a snap of your finger when you come to die or appear in the Day of Judgment. The devil built the college. Righteousness captured In some city there goes up a great club-house’97the architecture, the furniture, all the equipment a bedazzlement of wealth. That particular club-house is designed to make gambling and dissipation respectable. Do not fret. That splendid building will after a while be a free library, or it will be a hospital, or it will be a gallery of pure art. Again and again observatories have been built by infidelity, and the first thing you know they go into the hand of devout science. God said in the Bible that he would put a hook in Sennacherib’92s nose and pull him down by a way he knew not. And God has a hook to-day in the nose of every Sennacherib of infidelity and sin, and will drag him about as he will. Marble halls built for sinful amusements will yet be dedicated for religious assemblage. All these castles of sin are to be captured for God as we go forth with the battle shout that Oliver Cromwell rang out at the head of his troops as he rode in on the field of Naseby: ’93Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered.’94 After a great fire in London, amid the ruins there was nothing left but an arch with the name of the architect upon it; and, my friends, whatever else goes down God stays up.

Why do the wicked live? That some of them may be monuments of mercy. So it was with John Newton, so it was with Augustine, perhaps so it was with you, chieftains of sin, to become chieftains of grace; Paul, the apostle, made out of Saul the persecutor; Baxter, the flaming evangel, made out of Baxter the blasphemer. Whole squadrons, with streamers of Emanuel floating from the masthead, though once they were launched from the dry docks of diabolism. God lets these wicked men live that he may make jewels out of them for coronets, that he may make tongues of fire out of them for Pentecosts, that he may make warriors out of them for Armageddons, that he may make conquerors out of them for the day when they shall ride at the head of the white horse host in the grand review of the resurrection.

Why do the wicked live? To make it plain beyond all controversy that there is another place for adjustment. So many of the bad up, so many of the good down. It seems to me that no man can look abroad without saying’97no man of common sense, religious or irreligious, can look abroad without saying, ’93There must be some place where brilliant scoundrelism shall be arrested, where innocence shall get out from under the heel of despotism.’94 Common fairness, as well as eternal justice demands it. We adjourn to the great assizes the stupendous injustices of this life. They are not righted here. There must be some place where they will be righted. God cannot afford to omit the judgment day or the reconstruction of conditions. For you cannot make me believe that that man stuffed with all abomination’97having devoured widows’92 houses and digested them, looking with basilisk or tigerish eyes upon his fellows, no music so sweet to him as the sound of breaking hearts’97is at death to get out of the landau at the front door of the sepulchre and pass right on through to the back door of the sepulchre, and find a celestial turnout waiting for him, so that he can drive tandem right up primrosed hills, one glory riding as postillion ahead and another glory riding as lackey behind, while that poor woman who supported her invalid husband and her helpless children by taking in washing and ironing, often putting her hand to her side where the cancerous trouble had already begun, and dropping dead late on Saturday night while she was preparing the garments for the Sabbath day, coming a-foot to the front door of the sepulchre, shall pass through to the back door of the sepulchre and find nothing waiting, no one to welcome, no one to tell her the way to the King’92s gate. I will not believe it. Solomon was confounded in his day by what he represents as princes a-foot and beggars a-horseback, but I tell you there must be a place and a time when the right foot will get into the stirrup. To demonstrate beyond all controversy that there is another place for adjustment God lets the wicked live.

Why do the wicked live? For the same reason that he lets us live’97to have time for repentance. Where would you and I have been if sin had been followed by immediate catastrophe? While the foot of Christ is fleet as that of a roebuck when he comes to save, it does seem as if he were hoppled with great languors and infinite lethargies when he comes to punish. Oh, I celebrate God’92s slowness, God’92s retardation, God’92s putting off the retribution! Do you not think it would be a great deal better for us to exchange our impatient hypercriticism of Providence because this man, by watering of stock, makes a million dollars in one day, and another man rides on in one bloated iniquity year after year’97would it not be better for us to exchange that impatient hypercriticism for gratitude everlasting that God let us who were wicked live, though we deserved nothing but capsizes and demolition? Oh, I celebrate God’92s slowness! The slower the rail-train comes the better, if the draw-bridge is off.

How long have you lived unforgiven? Fifteen, twenty, forty, sixty years? Lived through great awakenings, lived through domestic sorrow, lived through commercial calamity, lived through providential crises that startled nations, and you are living yet, strangers to God and with no hope for a great future into which the next moment you may be precipitated. Oh, would it not be better for us to get our nature through the grace of Christ revolutionized and transfigured? For I want you to know that God sometimes changes his gait, and instead of the deliberate tread he is the swift witness, and sometimes the enemies of God are suddenly destroyed, and that without remedy. Make God your ally. What an offer that is! Do not fight against him. Do not contend against your best interest. Yield to the best impulse of your heart, and that is toward Christ and heaven. Do not fight the Lord who made you and offers to redeem you.

Philip of France went out with his army, with bows and arrows, to fight King Edward III, of England; but just as they got into the critical moment of the battle a shower of rain came and relaxed the bow-strings so that they were of no effect, and Philip and his army were worsted. And all your weaponry against God will be as nothing when he rains upon you discomfiture from the heavens. Do not fight the Lord any longer. Change allegiance. Take down the old flag of sin, run up the new flag of grace. It does not take the Lord Jesus Christ the thousandth part of a second to convert you if you will only surrender, and be willing to be saved. The American Congress was in anxiety during the Revolutionary War while waiting to hear news from the conflict between Washington and Cornwallis, and the anxiety became intense and almost unbearable as the days went by. When the news came at last that Cornwallis had surrendered and the war was practically over, so great was the excitement that the doorkeeper of the House of Congress dropped dead from joy. And if this long war between your soul and God should come to an end now by your entire surrender, the war forever over, the news would very soon reach the heavens, and nothing but the supernatural health of your loved ones before the throne would keep them from being prostrated with overjoy at the cessation of all spiritual hostilities.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage