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Origin of Evil
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far, he declared that God’s unjust restrictions had led to man’s fall,
as they had led to his own rebellion.
But the Eternal One himself proclaims his character: “The Lord
God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in good-
ness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and
transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty.”
[
Exodus 34:6, 7
.]
In the banishment of Satan from Heaven, God declared his jus-
tice, and maintained the honor of his throne. But when man had
sinned through yielding to the deceptions of this apostate spirit, God
gave an evidence of his love by yielding up his only begotten Son to
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die for the fallen race. In the atonement the character of God stands
revealed. The mighty argument of the cross demonstrates to the
whole universe that God was in no wise responsible for the course
of sin that Lucifer had chosen; that it was no arbitrary withdrawal of
divine grace, no deficiency in the divine government, which inspired
in him the spirit of rebellion.
In the contest between Christ and Satan, during the Saviour’s
earthly ministry, the character of the great deceiver was unmasked.
Nothing could so effectually have uprooted Satan from the minds
and affections of the heavenly angels and the whole loyal universe
as did his cruel warfare upon the world’s Redeemer. The daring
blasphemy of his demand that Christ should pay him homage, his
presumptuous boldness in bearing him to the mountain summit and
the pinnacle of the temple, the malicious intent betrayed in urging
him to cast himself down from the dizzy height, the unsleeping
malice that hunted him from place to place, inspiring the hearts of
priests and people to reject his love, and at the last to raise the cry
“Crucify him! crucify him!”—all this excited the amazement and
indignation of the universe.
It was Satan that prompted the world’s rejection of Christ. The
prince of evil exerted all his power and cunning to destroy Jesus;
for he saw that the Saviour’s mercy and love, his compassion and
pitying tenderness, were representing to the world the character of
God. Satan contested every claim put forth by the Son of God, and
employed men as his agents to fill the Saviour’s life with suffering
and sorrow. The sophistry and falsehood by which he had sought to
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hinder the work of Jesus, the hatred manifested through the children