Satan’s Enmity Against the Law
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for foul license; the evil passions of the heart would be unrestrained,
and Satan would have full sway.
At the very foot of Sinai, Satan began to execute his plans for
overthrowing the law of God, thus carrying forward the same work
he had begun in heaven. During the forty days while Moses was in
the mount with God, Satan was busy exciting doubt, apostasy, and
rebellion. While God was writing down His law, to be committed to
His covenant people, the Israelites, denying their loyalty to Jehovah,
were demanding gods of gold! When Moses came from the awful
presence of the divine glory, with the precepts of the law which they
had pledged themselves to obey, he found them, in open defiance of
its commands, bowing in adoration before a golden image.
By leading Israel to this daring insult and blasphemy to Jehovah,
Satan had planned to cause their ruin. Since they had proved them-
selves to be so utterly degraded, so lost to all sense of the privileges
and blessings that God had offered them, and to their own solemn and
repeated pledges of loyalty, the Lord would, he believed, divorce them
from Himself and devote them to destruction. Thus would be secured
the extinction of the seed of Abraham, that seed of promise that was to
preserve the knowledge of the living God, and through whom He was
to come—the true Seed, that was to conquer Satan. The great rebel
had planned to destroy Israel, and thus thwart the purposes of God.
But again he was defeated. Sinful as they were, the people of Israel
were not destroyed. While those who stubbornly ranged themselves
on the side of Satan were cut off, the people, humbled and repentant,
were mercifully pardoned. The history of this sin was to stand as a
perpetual testimony to the guilt and punishment of idolatry, and the
justice and long-suffering mercy of God.
The whole universe had been witness to the scenes at Sinai. In the
working out of the two administrations was seen the contrast between
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the government of God and that of Satan. Again the sinless inhabitants
of other worlds beheld the results of Satan’s apostasy, and the kind of
government he would have established in heaven had he been permitted
to bear sway.
By causing men to violate the second commandment, Satan aimed
to degrade their conceptions of the Divine Being. By setting aside the
fourth, he would cause them to forget God altogether. God’s claim to
reverence and worship, above the gods of the heathen, is based upon