the deep sympathy resulting therefrom,—these and similar ends were contemplated and fulfilled.  But the grand purpose was disclosed and accomplished on the cross, where God made his soul an offering for sin.  “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.”

The death of Jesus, then, and the end to be accomplished by it, constitute the central, vital, culminating truth of Christianity.  The apostle puts the death of Christ in a striking point of view,—as a work done, rather than a calamity suffered.  And it was a double work,—a work of destruction on the one hand, and of deliverance

on the other,—of destruction in order to deliverance.  That is the conception of his mission embodied in the first promise.  The bruising of the serpent’s head by the bruised heel of the Saviour, in order to repair the ruin wrought by the tempter, suggests very significantly the truth which is so explicitly announced here.  And a similar combination runs through the ancient providential history.  The destruction of the old world in order to the salvation of the righteous, and the fulfilment of the promise of redemption; and the destruction of the first-born of Egypt in order to the deliverance of Israel, are instances in point.  But the death of Christ upon the cross in order to the emancipation of the slaves of Satan is the most glorious and perfect illustration.  Let me ask your attention to the work of Christ’s death,

I.—As it is a Work of Destruction.

II.—As it is a Work of Deliverance.

I.  As it is a Work of Destruction.  “That He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.”

1.  Satan, then, is a person, and the enemy of Jesus, who died to destroy him.

(i.)  The personality of the devil is necessarily implied in the words of the text.  The theory

which seeks to divest all that is said about the devil in Scripture of everything like personality, and to refine it away into figurative representation of “the principle of evil,” is as unphilosophical as it is unscriptural.  How can we conceive of moral evil in the abstract?  How can we think of it apart from the depraved will of some intelligent being?  Whatever theories may be held respecting the difficult question of the origin of evil, it is surely inconceivable that it should exist independently of some living, conscious, intellectual author.  No truer or more philosophical solution can be found than that of the Bible, which attributes it to the devil,—a being originally good, who fell from his first estate, broke his allegiance to the Creator, and so became the leader of a vast and fearful rebellion against Almighty God.  The case of man shows us the possibility of a being existing in a holy but mutable state, and lapsing, under certain inducements, into sin.  What the inducements were in the instance of the prince of darkness we are not told; and thus the question of the origin of evil seems to be insoluble by us.  But the identification of it with the personal defection of Satan is far more intelligible and reasonable than the attempt to treat it as a metaphysical abstraction.  All the representations of the Bible on

the subject are instinct with the awful personality of the devil.  He is our “adversary;” he is “the accuser;” he is “the God of this world;” he is “the prince of the power of the air, that wicked one that now worketh in the hearts of the children of disobedience;” he that hath “blinded the minds of them that believe not;” he “leadeth” sinners “captive at his will.”  Surely that is a bold and unscrupulous theology which resolves all these clear and strong expressions into the mere ideal impersonation of a principle.  O no!  Satan is a being of subtle intelligence, with a depraved, unconquerable, malignant will; a dread living power, with whom we have continually to do, who “desireth to have us, that he may sift us as wheat,” and with whom, if we wish to get to heaven, we must be prepared to fight at every step of our way.

(ii.)  And he is emphatically the enemy of Jesus, who came to “destroy” him.  “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed.”  It was in pursuit of his designs against the living God that Satan persuaded our first parents to commit sin; it was by lying insinuations against God that he deceived her who was “first in the transgression.”  Of course, he is the enemy of man.  Of course, his design is to inflict ruin and misery on men,

and to bring them to his own state and place of torment.  But he does this by seducing them into rebellion against the Most High.  Hatred of God is the spring of all his conduct, the motive of every enterprise which he undertakes.  And Jesus, the Son of God, the vindicator of the divine honour, is necessarily the sworn eternal foe of the devil; and He has come into our world as into the arena of a supreme conflict for the defeat and overthrow of Satan; has assumed the very nature which the foul fiend seduced and degraded, in order that, in that same nature, he might avenge the wrong done to the being and government of God, and put an eternal end to the usurpation and tyranny of his enemy.

2.  The devil “had the power of death.”

(i.)  We must not understand this as meaning that Satan has direct, independent, and absolute control over death, inflicting it how, and when, and where, and on whom, he will.  The later Jewish writers taught the horrible doctrine that the fallen angels have power or authority generally in reference to life and death.  But this never was the case.  Death was the sentence pronounced by God upon man, and it could only be inflicted by his appointment and concurrence.  The power of life and death is necessarily in God’s hands, and his only.

(ii.)  But Satan had the power of death, in this sense; namely, that he tempted man to commit the sin which “brought death into the world, and all our woe.”  He enticed Eve to sin, partly by denying that her offence would be visited with the punishment of death.  “Ye shall not surely die,” was the lie by which he contradicted and defied the God of truth, and induced the woman “to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”  And so, he was “a murderer from the beginning.”  “God made man to be immortal, an image of his own eternity; nevertheless, through envy of the devil came death into the world.”  In this sense, then, as the author and introducer of that sin whose “wages” is death, Satan “had the power of death.”

(iii.)  Moreover, it is the work of Satan to invest death with its chief terrors.  We shrink indeed from the humiliating prospect of corruption and decay; we cling fondly to those companionships, associations, and pleasures, from which death for ever separates us; we deprecate and dread the blighting of our earthly hopes, and the ruthless frustration of our schemes.  These are very painful accessories of death; but they are not its sting; they do not make it a poison for the soul as well as for the body.  “The

sting of death is sin.”