Lesson Thirty-nine
THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE DEVIL
(Read
from the Doctrine and Covenants: 1:35; 10:12, 27; 29:36-40; 76:44, 87;
88:110-114; 121:10; 123:10; 128:20; 129:8. From Book of Moses, 1:12-22.)
1. Purpose of this Lesson:
Latter-day Saints are often ridiculed for their belief in a personal devil, and
made to feel that they are behind the times in their religion. For nowadays
comparatively few educated Christians, let alone the non-Christians, accept the
teachings and inferences of the Gospels as to the identity of a spirit-being
known there as Satan or Devil.
Which view is the more tenable, and on
what foundation does each rest?
Now that this lesson will argue the point.
Arguments never settle anything. All that will be attempted here will be (a) to
clear the two conceptions and (b) to state clearly the view held by the
Latter-day Saints.
2. Grounds of the New View:
There was a time when Christians everywhere believed in a personal devil. Just
how did they lose that belief?
Like a good many other alterations in
the religion of Jesus, the change came about through a misunderstanding of a
set of simple ideas in the New Testament by believers in the ages following
Christ.
In a period of Christian history when
a broken leg could be sooner mended than a cold could be cured, human ailments,
from a sore finger to a deformed spine, were attributed to Satanic influence.
There had to be a cause, and this was the cause. (See Shailer Matthews’ The
Gospel and the Modern Man, p. 37) So many fantastic details grew around the
idea of the Devil that an Italian author, in 1931, was able to write a
three-hundred-page book about him. (Arturo Graf, The Story of the Devil)
To our Christian ancestors the Devil was a great deal more real than was God.
They knew his size, his form, his looks, his loves, his offspring, his deceptive
ways of working against man; and they knew how to exorcise him by magical
means.
These notions were so fantastic, so
absurd, so grounded in superstition that they reacted to the mind of the modern
most unfavorable. No one who lived in the atmosphere created by the modern
scientific spirit could accept such grotesque beliefs. And so they disappeared.
But in the process of eliminating the errors, as so often happens, the truth
went with the errors. It is as if one were to strip a clown of his mask and
bizarre clothing only to deny that there is a clown. This is to go to the other
extreme.
If there is a personal devil, as the
Gospels assure us there is, then he is a spiritual being, and if he is a spiritual
being, how can he be investigated by the same processes that we use when we
study a plant, a star, or the human body? Obviously he cannot be. Hence the
scholar, even though he be a theological scholar, is ruled out as an authority
on the subject. The scholar may, indeed, study manifestations, or phenomena,
and he may ascertain their causes; but that is all; he can tell us nothing
about the Devil, if he be the cause. That is to say, he may inform us about the
diseases and trace the cause of them not to the Devil as did the ancients, but
to germs. In other words, his fight is not with the disease, but with the ancient
explanations of disease. What he says about Satan, therefore, is not to be
taken authoritative.
3. Is There a Devil? Mormonism
answers this question in the affirmative. There is a Devil, but not the sort of
Devil that the Christian of Joseph Smith’s time had in mind.
Satan, like all men in the flesh, is a
spirit-child of God. He is a brother to man and to Jesus. The only difference
between him and the rest of God’s children on the earth is that he does not
have a body, and we do. And like the children of men, Satan was in the pre-earth
world of the spirit, and he took part in the discussion of the “plan of life
and salvation” designed for man on the newly-created planet, the Earth. God’s
plan involved freedom to act; his force, compulsion. He was, therefore, Goethe’s
“spirit that denies.” His plan was rejected, he rebelled with his followers, he
was thrust out of heaven, and thereafter he was to be bodiless. All this was
the necessary effects of his scheme.
The Devil and his angels exert
undoubted influence upon mankind individually—in what way we have never been
informed. It is, however, optional with man as to whether or not he is
influenced by the evil power. Every man, every woman, has a personal responsibility
in the situation. “Satan is generally blamed for the evils which we do,” says
Joseph Smith, (Cited in Introduction to Volume IV of the History of the
Church (Documentary), p. XLI) but if he were the cause of all our
wickedness, men could not be condemned. The Devil cannot compel mankind to do
evil. All is voluntary. Those who resist the Spirit of God, will be liable to
be led into temptation. God will not exert any compulsory means and the
Devil can not. Such ideas are as entertained on this subject by many are
absurd.”
4. The Devil in Mormon Literature:
Anyone who expects to find in the teachings of Joseph Smith the notions that
prevailed in his time and before among Christians, will be disappointed. Diseases,
bodily afflictions, and mental derangements are ascribed to him to natural
causes, just as they are by intelligent men and women outside the Faith, and
they are to be treated, as a rule, in the same manner. Nevertheless, as already
suggested, he teaches that there is a personal Devil and that he has power over
men. Latter-day Saints accept the authenticated findings of science respecting
bodily and mental diseases, as within its undisputed province, and they make
use of specialists to the same extent as do others. But the Devil exists. He is
a person. His power is felt by men for unrighteousness.
The work known as the Book of Moses,
in the Pearl of Great Price, is a peculiarly Mormon document. It is
Joseph Smith’s version of the early chapters of Genesis—an inspired revelation.
There Moses has a contest with Satan. The prophet is about to undertake a
decisive work among his people, and the Devil attempts to deceive him with
respect to that work. Satan appears to the prophet as an actual being, but
without the dazzling glory that envelops Jehovah. It is intended, evidently, as
the record of an actual not an imaginary, even. Moses was not asleep. (Chapter
I, verses 12-24)
Thousands of years later, in the woods
on the Smith farm in Western New York State, Joseph Smith is about to open up a
new dispensation. Accordingly Satan makes another famous appearance. There is a
struggle for mastery. The evil power, Joseph assures us, was not “an imaginary,
but an actual, being from the unseen world.” Again the description was intended
as the record of an actual, not an invented, incident in his life—not a mental
struggle.”
The Doctrine and Covenants
abounds in references to the Devil. Indeed, the existence of Satan is
postulated in the New Movement. Here we learn of his origin, his nature and disposition,
his aims, his designs, and the end of his power over man. We read that he was “thrust
down” to earth after his plan failed; (Doc. & Cov., 29:36) that he “tempted
Adam;” (Doc. & Cov., 29:40) that he “goeth to and fro on the earth,
seeking to destroy;” (Doc. & Cov., 10:27) that it is necessary for
men to be tempted by him, as a test of their “free agency” (Doc. & Cov.,
29:39) that he is to be bound for a thousand years, during the millennial
reign of Christ on the earth; (Doc. & Cov., 88:110) and that it is possible
to “detect” him in his wiles and to resist his allurements. (Doc. &
Cov., 129:8)
5. Inevitability of Satan’s Exit: Wherever
and whenever in Christian thought, human reasoning has taken the place of
divine revelation, the spiritual hierarchy has made an inglorious fadeout. For
one naturally follows the other. If there is no personal God, there is no
personal Satan; if there are no personal God and personal Devil, then there is
no human spirit in the biblical sense. In the New Theology, of which we hear so
much nowadays, there is no Devil, and God is “the mysterious Power which is
finding expression in the universe, and which is present in every tiniest atom
of the wondrous whole.” (The New Theology, Campbell, New York, 1907, pp.
1, 18. The entire chapter is enlightening) In other words, impersonal, the “uncaused
Cause.”
Thus Satan has been betrayed in the
house of his friends. But that would probably not displease him, for always he
has preferred to travel about incognito. (Gospel Doctrine Sunday School
Lessons For The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Lessons for 1940 [Salt
Lake City: Deseret Sunday School Union Board, 1940], 104-7)
For more on the realty of Satan, see: