Chapter 9

How able Satan is to work upon that third principle — the passions and corrupt affections — and bring home his false conclusions with terrors.

We have seen how able Satan is to work upon those two aforementioned principles of carnal reason and abuse it with false premises, and also upon conscience in laying our sins to our charge with misrepresentations of our spiritual state. It remains only to show how he can stir and work upon the passions and corrupt affections in us, make use of them, and so press home all those false conclusions — that we are hypocrites — with hideous and horrible fears and terrors.

And as he is called a Serpent for his cunning reasonings, wiles, and craftiness, so likewise a Lion — of all beasts the strongest. A roaring Lion, of all beasts the most terrible, and most terrible in his roaring, whose roaring is therefore often in Scripture put to express dreadfulness and horror: 'The lion roars, who will not tremble?' (Amos 3:8). As some have observed, and the Psalmist intimates, by his roaring he strikes such horror and amazement into all other beasts that they stand still as if lifeless, and so he seizes and preys upon them as he pleases. In this respect those darts aforementioned are principally called fiery — namely, for the pain, anguish, inflammation, and combustion they cause through distemping the affections. Those fears which our own hearts had generated within us were but as smoke; these darts of his put a fire into them and cause them to flame and blaze. The allusion is to the poisoned darts which the Scythians of old, and other nations now, use in war, dipped in the blood and gall of asps and vipers, the venomous heat of which, like a fire in their flesh, killed the wounded with torments most like to hell of any other. Job also alludes to this: 'The arrows of the Almighty are within me; the hot poison of them drinks up my spirit, even as fire preying upon moisture' (Job 6:4). And what were those arrows but terrors? So it follows: 'the terrors of God.' Thus that Corinthian was in danger of being swallowed up — as the word signifies — with excessive sorrow, when Satan had to do with him (2 Corinthians 2:7). And the same word is again used of the devil: 'seeking whom to swallow up' (1 Peter 5:8). So as Satan inflames other members and the inordinate lusts in them with a superadded natural vehemence and violence — as the tongue, which though of itself full of poison, is said to be set on fire from hell, that is, from Satan, who inflames men's tongues with an excess of venom and malice to wound men's reputations — so in like manner he can and does put fire into those darts with which he wounds the conscience, and thereby increases our fears and griefs, causing such disquiet and pangs that hell fire, as it were, begins to flame in a man's conscience. As Christ is that bronze serpent, so Satan is that fiery serpent who can sting us through the guilt of sin.

Here I must bring in the same caution I used in the former chapter — namely, that he works not these terrors by immediate impressions upon the conscience, which in that respect is subject to God's stroke alone, as to his knowledge alone. This, as I intimated, I take to be that other principal part of the drift of those words in Hebrews 4:11-12: 'The word of God is quick and powerful.' For there he sets forth Christ to us as a judge completely enabled for vengeance against us — not only with respect to an omniscience to find us out in all our shiftings, but also (because a judge would not be much feared if he had only skill and knowledge, however great, to search out the guilt of offenders, if he were not armed with power to avenge and punish them) the apostle's aim is to strike terror into their hearts with respect to that vengeance he can execute. Therefore the apostle exhorts them not to trifle with God or with his word, in which he had warned those who believed not that they should not enter into his rest, in the former verses. So the purport of the words must necessarily also be understood as showing the dreadful power of God and of his word in avenging itself upon the contemners of him and it — not merely to describe his omniscience and knowing of the heart, but as joined also with power to pierce as deep in the wounding of the soul as in the knowing of it. Indeed, that so large an illustration of his knowledge is brought in serves as a clearer demonstration of his power to punish — who can dive so deep into our hearts. From this we might argue and fear the stroke of that hand whose eyes are so piercing. Accordingly, to set forth the dreadfulness of this power, all his expressions tend as fully to this as to express the other. He uses such a comparison as, both in the nature of the things and according to the more usual phrase of Scripture, more properly and abundantly intimates this slaying and wounding of men's souls by the word than that other point of searching the soul and spirit. This word, says he, is 'quick' — not merely in respect of duration as abiding forever, but in respect of working and execution. Things that are exceedingly operative, though inanimate, we call quick: so quicksilver, which runs through a man's bowels like shot. Oppositely, drugs and drinks that have lost their virtue and are ineffectual we call dead. In respect to this energy and power to work upon men's hearts is that saying in John 6:63: 'The words I speak are spirit and life' — that is, full of an operative principle. For an active working principle we are accustomed to calling 'spirit,' as the spirit of wine. So in saying the word is quick, he points out that it is inspired with a most quick, spirited, and active principle fit to work as occasion demands — the Holy Spirit as the internal form of it. Having thus intimated this internal form of working, he adds the word 'powerful' and 'mighty in operation,' noting out that power which flows from it — that ability to produce strange effects upon the soul. These expressions carry more than merely skill and dexterity to search and know the heart. Then third, he further instances in such operations of it as the effects of that power which are most dreadful, as the comparisons he uses make plain. 'More piercing than any two-edged sword.' Now as elsewhere the word is compared to an armory of all sorts of weapons and instruments for war and vengeance — 'the weapons of our warfare are mighty' (2 Corinthians 10:4) for pulling down strongholds and subduing to Christ those who turn effectually to him, and also having readiness to avenge all disobedience (verse 6) in those who do not submit — so also here he resembles it to a sword, the most usual and most terrible of all instruments of death then in use. The brandishing of a sword strikes paleness and horror into a man before the stroke comes. This is generally used in Scripture to express vengeance, more especially in the prophecy of Ezekiel. So also in Psalm 7:13: 'If he turns not, God has whetted his sword and prepared his instruments of death' — to inflict torments, and eternal torments also, as Deuteronomy 32 implies. Indeed, whatever causes torment or anguish is in Scripture called a sword, and piercing with a sword is used to express the most exquisite sufferings, as in Luke 2:35: 'A sword shall pierce through your soul also' — spoken to the blessed mother of Christ, of that anguish with which she would be cut to the heart when she beheld her Son upon the cross. Of his sufferings on the cross the same expression is used in Psalm 22:21, when he prays: 'Deliver my soul from the sword.' In this respect the word in Christ's hand, when he is spoken of as a judge, is compared to a sword. To strike the more terror into their hearts with respect to the wounds and torments it inflicts, he goes further to exaggerate its dread. He says not only that it is as sharp but more sharp — not than a sword of one edge but than a two-edged sword, nor than some but than any two-edged sword. Further, to show that he speaks in relation to the wounding, anguish, and torment it causes in the soul, he mentions the division of such parts as are not only most hidden and inward (such as the marrow, covered by the bones, and the ligaments covered with flesh) but which are also of most exquisite feeling, the wounding of which causes the greatest agony. He says it pierces even through the bones — which must be supposed when it is said to reach to the marrow. Now the breaking of the bones is consistently used in Scripture to express those exquisite and insupportable terrors and agonies of conscience — woundings of the spirit which a man cannot bear or sustain. For when the bones are broken, a man cannot stand or support himself. And similarly the cutting of the ligaments, nerves, sinews, and arteries — those that knit the joints, which are the organs of sense and motion. Again, he says it divides not only the soul — that is, the sensitive part, the passions of the mind, as wounding them, which creatures such as men and angels can torment and afflict — but the spirit also, which is expressed with emphasis. His meaning is not so much that it divides the soul from the spirit as that it pierces through both the soul and the spirit. It is a two-edged sword and can at one blow strike through both. This axe strikes at the root — at the spirit, which when wounded, who can bear it, as Solomon says? So he concludes in verse 13 that as before him all things are laid open, so if he but strikes them with his word they lie with their throats cut, dead and speechless at his feet, as Theodoret expounds that word. Now to this spirit in man no created sword can reach — they turn edge at it. But even this the word reaches, and that alone. The summary drift of all herein is the same which Christ expressed elsewhere in other words: to exhort them to fear that God whose sword and powerful word is able thus to wound, and who alone is able thus to do — and not to fear those who can only wound and kill the body, reaching only to the sensitive soul immersed in it, but cannot wound or kill the spirit. This God alone can do, and no mere creature whatsoever. Therefore in all our thoughts and fears of Satan's power of knowing our sins, or troubling or disquieting our spirits — throughout this whole discourse — we are to set such bounds as that this incommunicable royal prerogative of God and of his word may be reserved and not encroached upon: namely, that he alone knows and can immediately wound the spirit and conscience. Both of these at once this passage held out to us, which made me the more at length in opening it.

Yet although Satan cannot immediately wound the conscience and make impression of God's wrath upon it — for as no creature can shed abroad God's love and cause the creature to taste the sweetness of it, so neither the bitterness of his wrath; God is his own reporter of both —

Yet, first, when the Holy Spirit has lashed and whipped the conscience and made it tender once, and flayed off the skin, Satan may then fret it more and more and keep rubbing upon the sore by horrible suggestions.

And second, he can by renewing the experiential remembrance of those lashes which the soul has received, amaze the soul with fears of an infinitely sorer vengeance yet to come, and so paint out and flash representations of hell fire in their consciences from those real glimpses they have already had, as to bewilder the soul into vast and unthought-of horrors.

And then third, he can bring home all the threats that are thundered forth in the word against hypocrites and unregenerate men, and discharge them all with much violence and noise upon a poor doubting soul. He can and does present and show his prisoners those terrible threats, chains, racks, and other instruments of death — as the Psalmist calls them — which God has prepared against sinners and has stored up in that great armory of his word, which 'has in readiness to avenge all disobedience' (2 Corinthians 10:6). With the rattling of these chains, Satan can make a noise in the conscience of a poor sinner to frighten him. He is the more enabled to do this out of experience of such terrors in himself, being 'bound in chains everlasting, under darkness, to the judgment of the great day' (Jude 6). And as a son of consolation and child of light is enabled to comfort others the more by the comfort with which he himself has been comforted of God, so this Prince of Darkness is the more powerful to terrify weak consciences that are ensnared with the cords of their own sins, by reason of the terrors he has received from the Lord. And therefore in Scripture, as a power in sin is attributed to him, so also the power of death (Hebrews 2:14). By this 'power of death' is meant not so much bodily death as that eternal death to which, as the proper punishment of sin, its guilt binds us over. This power of his is not that of the Judge in sentencing to death or casting men to hell, which is Christ's own royal prerogative — who holds the keys of hell and death (Revelation 1:18) — nor is it as if he were the chief tormentor and executioner of men's souls after the great day. Rather it refers principally, first, to that power and advantage he obtained over sinners when he had seduced them, so as to come boldly as a pleader against them, enabled with authority to urge God's righteous law and word and to call upon and provoke his justice to condemn poor sinners — until Christ that righteous advocate stripped him of his pleas and power by his satisfaction, which before the law had put into Satan's hands, and so 'destroyed him who had the power of death.' And second, the meaning is that as he has this power in God's court, so also in our consciences — to urge the law upon us, to plead all that the law says against those under it, and to increase in us the fears of that death by presenting the terrors of the law to which natural conscience makes men subject all their lives. And as far as slavish fear remains, so far they may be subject to being terrified by him who has the power of death over those who are in any degree subject to the fear of it.

And fourth, he can immediately by his own power stir the passions of fear and grief, exciting them beyond their natural level, as the winds can raise billows in the sea and make the floods roar. So can he raise a tumult in the affections and put all the soul into a violent perturbation. He is the prince of the airy part of the little world in man, as well as of the elemental region in the great world, and so can raise unnatural storms and vapors that shall darken reason, and cause such thunders and lightnings as shall hurl all into black confusion — such that it feels as if hell and the soul would presently come together. Though it is true that he cannot turn the stream and current of our affections backward — God alone can turn this Jordan back — yet he can drive them faster and cause them to swell above their natural channels, so that the affections blown up by him shall have the strength of ten men, as that man in Luke 8:29 did. As we may see in David, how strong a disposition we find in him needlessly to number the people (2 Samuel 24) — against all reason as well as religion, and the persuasion and opposition not of Joab only, but of others of his counselors — a man would wonder that one so holy and wise should be so transported to do an act so foolish (as he himself afterward saw, saying, 'I have done very foolishly,' verse 10), and so grossly sinful that it was abominable in the eyes of Joab. But the devil was in it: 'Satan provoked David to number the people' (1 Chronicles 21:1), by raising up such an affection and inclination in him. And as he can raise up other passions, so also fears and terrors, jealousies, and distrusts — to fear where no fear is. Thus he handled Saul when God left him to him: 'An evil spirit from the Lord troubled him' — or, as most read it, 'terrified him' (1 Samuel 16:15). And in raising up these affections of fear and the like, he works not merely by proposing objects that shall move them — which men only can do — but physically also, by stirring such humors in the body as such passions act upon. He can selectively work upon those humors in the body which will put a man into a fearful and trembling disposition. He can also disturb the mental images in the head, the organs of the understanding, as in the man of Luke 8:35 who through Satan's working was implied to be not in his right mind. When he has thus disordered all within a man and put him into such dispositions toward fear, he then comes with his suggestions and speaks nothing but of wrath, terrors, threats, the heinousness of a man's sins, and the fearfulness of God's wrath to the troubled conscience. And then — just as when a man's anger is up every small thing provokes him — now when fear and melancholy are excited, every suggestion, every surmise strikes the soul through and through with horrible fears and jealousies. Thus, though not immediately, yet through the means of these mists and vapors and fogs raised, which surround and darken this sun, he works upon the conscience. We see by experience that he prevails most in this sort of temptation with melancholic temperaments, who dwelling in dark shops he much deceives with false colors and glosses. When affections are up and cloud the mind, then multitudes of troublesome thoughts arise, and every suggestion suited to that passion takes hold and prevails with a man's spirit — as appears by Christ's words: 'Why are you troubled and why do thoughts arise in your hearts?' (Luke 24:38). Passions, like heavy weights hung upon a clock, do not only make the wheels — the thoughts — move faster, but also pervert them and twist them the wrong way, so that to a heart thus disordered all things come to be presented amiss, even as to a bloodshot eye all things seem red. In a word, as he deludes his enthusiasts by setting on and backing their false opinions and illusions with joys and ravishments of spirit — which differ as much from the joys of the Holy Spirit, which are unspeakable and glorious, as heaven from earth — so he can and does back his false reasonings and accusations to holy men about their spiritual state with abundance of terror and disturbance, which also differs as much from the impressions of God's wrath made immediately by the Spirit upon the conscience.

How able Satan is to work upon that third principle — the passions and corrupt affections — and drive home his false conclusions with terror.

We have seen how able Satan is to work upon the two principles already discussed — carnal reason, abusing it with false premises — and also upon the conscience, laying our sins to our charge with misrepresentations of our spiritual standing. It remains only to show how he can stir and work upon the passions and corrupt affections within us, make use of them, and press home all those false conclusions — that we are hypocrites — with frightening and overwhelming terror.

As Satan is called a serpent for his cunning reasoning, schemes, and craftiness, so he is also called a lion — the strongest of all beasts. A roaring lion — the most terrifying of all beasts, and most terrifying in his roaring, which Scripture frequently uses to express dread and horror: 'The lion has roared; who will not tremble?' (Amos 3:8). As some have observed, and the psalmist implies, his roaring strikes such horror and paralysis into all other creatures that they freeze as if lifeless, and he preys on them at his pleasure. It is in this respect that the darts mentioned earlier are chiefly called 'fiery' — for the pain, anguish, inflammation, and burning they cause by distemping the affections. The fears our own hearts had already generated were like smoke; his darts put fire into them and cause them to flare and blaze. The image is drawn from the poisoned darts that the Scythians of old, and other peoples still, use in warfare — dipped in the blood and gall of asps and vipers, whose venomous heat, like a fire burning in the flesh, killed the wounded with torments most like hell of any other. Job also alludes to this: 'For the arrows of the Almighty are within me; their poison my spirit drinks; the terrors of God are arrayed against me' (Job 6:4). And what were those arrows but terrors? The text confirms it: 'the terrors of God.' Thus the Corinthian was in danger of being 'swallowed up' — as the word signifies — with excessive sorrow when Satan had to do with him (2 Corinthians 2:7). The same word is used again of the devil: 'seeking whom he may devour' (1 Peter 5:8). Just as Satan inflames other members and the disordered desires within them with a superadded natural force and violence — as the tongue, which though of itself full of poison, is said to be set on fire from hell, that is from Satan, who inflames people's tongues with an excess of venom and malice to wound others' reputations — so in the same way he can and does put fire into the darts with which he wounds the conscience. He thereby intensifies our fears and griefs, causing such agitation and anguish that the fire of hell, as it were, begins to burn in a person's conscience. As Christ is the bronze serpent, so Satan is the fiery serpent who can sting us through the guilt of sin.

Here I must bring in the same caution I used in the previous chapter — namely, that he does not produce these terrors by direct impressions upon the conscience, since the conscience in that respect is subject to God's strike alone, just as it is subject to His knowledge alone. This, as I suggested, I take to be the other principal thrust of the words in Hebrews 4:11-12: 'The word of God is living and active.' There the apostle sets forth Christ as a judge fully equipped for vengeance — not only regarding omniscience to find us out in all our evasions, but also in power to punish. A judge would not be greatly feared if he only possessed skill and knowledge to discover guilt, however great, without the power to avenge and punish. Therefore the apostle's aim is to strike terror in their hearts by pointing to the vengeance He can execute. The apostle urges them not to trifle with God or with His word, in which He had warned those who disbelieved that they would not enter His rest. So the thrust of the words must necessarily be understood as displaying the dreadful power of God and of His word to avenge itself on those who despise it — not merely describing His omniscience and His knowing of the heart, but joining with it the power to pierce as deep in wounding the soul as in knowing it. Indeed, the extended illustration of His knowledge serves to heighten the demonstration of His power to punish — for who would not fear the hand whose eyes see so deeply? Accordingly, to express the dreadfulness of this power, all the apostle's expressions speak as fully to this as to the other point. He uses a comparison which, both by the nature of the things involved and by the more common scriptural use, most fully and properly expresses the slaying and wounding of souls by the word, even more than the searching of them. This word, he says, is 'living' — not merely in the sense of enduring forever, but in the sense of working and executing. We call things that are extremely operative 'live,' even when they are not alive: so 'quicksilver,' which runs through a person's body. Conversely, medicines and treatments that have lost their potency we call 'dead.' Regarding this energy and power to work on people's hearts, John 6:63 says: 'The words I speak are spirit and life' — that is, full of an active principle. We commonly use 'spirit' to describe an active working principle — as in the spirit of wine. So in calling the word 'living,' the apostle points to it being filled with the most active, vigorous, and operative principle fit to work as needed — the Holy Spirit as its internal animating force. Having pointed to this internal principle of operation, the apostle adds 'powerful' and 'mighty in working' — indicating the power that flows from it, the ability to produce remarkable effects upon the soul. These expressions convey more than merely skill and knowledge to search and know the heart. Third, the apostle then points to the operations of this word as the effects of that power — and they are most dreadful, as the comparisons he uses make clear. 'Sharper than any two-edged sword.' Elsewhere the word is compared to an armory of every kind of weapon for war and justice — 'the weapons of our warfare are mighty' (2 Corinthians 10:4) for pulling down strongholds and bringing people to Christ, and also having 'readiness to avenge all disobedience' (verse 6) against those who do not submit. Here it is likened to a sword — the most common and most terrible instrument of death in that day. The brandishing of a sword strikes a person pale with horror before the blow ever falls. This is how vengeance is regularly expressed in Scripture, especially throughout the prophecy of Ezekiel. So also in Psalm 7:13: 'If he does not turn, God will sharpen His sword; He will bend His bow and make it ready — He has prepared His deadly instruments.' Whatever causes torment or anguish is called a sword in Scripture, and being pierced by a sword expresses the most acute suffering — as in Luke 2:35: 'And a sword will pierce even your own soul' — spoken to the blessed mother of Christ, of the anguish that would cut her to the heart when she saw her Son on the cross. The same expression is used of His sufferings on the cross in Psalm 22:21, where He prays: 'Deliver my soul from the sword.' In this light, the word in Christ's hand as judge is compared to a sword. To intensify the terror with respect to the wounds and torments it inflicts, the apostle goes further. He says not only that it is as sharp, but sharper — not than a single-edged sword but than a two-edged sword, and not than some but than any two-edged sword. Further, to show that he is speaking in connection with the wounding, anguish, and torment caused in the soul, he points to the dividing of parts that are not only most hidden and inward — such as the marrow, covered by bones, and the ligaments, covered by flesh — but that also have the most exquisite sensitivity, so that wounding them causes the greatest agony. He says it pierces even through the bones — which must be assumed when it reaches to the marrow. The breaking of bones is consistently used in Scripture to express those acute and unbearable terrors and agonies of conscience — wounds of the spirit that a person cannot sustain. When the bones are broken, a person cannot stand or support themselves. Similarly the cutting of ligaments, nerves, and sinews — those that bind the joints, which are the organs of sensation and movement. Again, he says it divides not only the soul — that is, the sensitive part, the mind's passions — wounding them in the way that created beings such as people and angels can wound — but also the spirit, which is stated with emphasis. His meaning is not so much that it divides the soul from the spirit as that it pierces through both. It is a two-edged sword that can at one blow strike through both. This is an axe that strikes at the root — at the spirit, which when wounded, who can bear it, as Solomon says? He concludes in verse 13 that just as all things are laid open before God, so if He strikes them with His word they lie as with their throats cut, dead and speechless at His feet, as Theodoret interprets that word. To this spirit in a person no created sword can reach — they turn edge against it. But the word reaches it, and only the word. The whole point of all this is the same that Christ expressed elsewhere in different terms: urging people to fear the God whose sword and powerful word is able to wound in this way — He alone is able to do it — and not to fear those who can only wound and kill the body, reaching only to the sensitive soul immersed in it, but cannot wound or kill the spirit. God alone can do this; no mere creature can, whatever its power. Therefore in all our thinking about Satan's power to know our sins and to trouble or distress our spirits — throughout this whole discussion — we must set limits so that this incommunicable royal prerogative of God and His word is preserved without encroachment: namely, that He alone knows and can directly wound the spirit and conscience. Both of these the passage establishes at once, which is why I have opened it at some length.

Yet although Satan cannot directly wound the conscience or impress God's wrath upon it — for just as no creature can pour out God's love and cause a soul to taste its sweetness, neither can any creature cause it to taste the bitterness of His wrath; God alone is His own messenger of both —

Yet, first, when the Holy Spirit has already lashed and whipped the conscience and made it tender, and stripped off the skin, Satan can then chafe it further and keep rubbing the wound with horrible suggestions.

And second, he can by reviving the remembered experience of those lashes the soul has already received, overwhelm the soul with fears of an infinitely more terrible vengeance yet to come — flashing representations of hell fire into the conscience from the real glimpses it has already had, bewildering the soul into overwhelming and unimaginable horror.

And third, he can bring forward all the warnings thundered in the word against hypocrites and unregenerate people, and discharge them all with great force and noise upon a poor doubting soul. He presents and shows his prisoners the terrible warnings, chains, instruments of punishment — what the psalmist calls God's instruments of death — which God has stored in that great arsenal of His word, which 'has readiness to avenge all disobedience' (2 Corinthians 10:6). With the rattling of these chains, Satan makes a noise in the conscience of a poor sinner to terrify him. He is the more capable of this from personal experience — being himself 'bound with everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day' (Jude 6). As a comforting person and child of light is the more able to comfort others through the comfort with which God has comforted him personally, so this prince of darkness is the more powerful in terrifying weak consciences bound by the cords of their own sins — drawing on the terrors he has himself experienced from the Lord. Therefore, as Scripture attributes to him a power over sin, so also 'the power of death' (Hebrews 2:14). By 'the power of death' is meant not so much physical death as that eternal death to which the guilt of sin binds us over as its proper punishment. This power of his is not that of the judge who sentences to death or casts people into hell — that is Christ's own royal prerogative, who holds the keys of death and of Hades (Revelation 1:18) — nor is it as though he were the chief tormentor of souls after the last day. Rather it refers primarily, first, to the power and advantage he obtained over sinners when he seduced them — giving him standing to come boldly as a prosecutor against them, empowered to invoke God's righteous law and word and to call upon and provoke His justice to condemn poor sinners — until Christ the righteous advocate stripped him of his grounds for accusation by His satisfaction, which before the law had placed in Satan's hands, and so 'destroyed him who had the power of death.' And second, as he has this power in God's court, so also in our consciences — to press the law upon us, to plead everything the law says against those under it, and to increase in us the fear of that death by presenting the terrors of the law to which natural conscience makes people subject all their lives. And as far as slavish fear remains, so far people may be subject to being terrified by the one who has the power of death over all who are in any degree under the fear of it.

And fourth, by his own power he can directly stir the passions of fear and grief, exciting them beyond their natural level — as the winds raise billows on the sea and make the floods roar. In the same way he can raise a tumult in the affections and throw the whole soul into violent turmoil. He is the prince of the aerial dimension of the little world within a person, just as he is of the elemental region in the greater world, and can therefore raise unnatural storms and vapors that darken reason and cause such thunders and lightnings as to hurl everything into black confusion — so that it feels as if hell and the soul are about to collide. Though it is true that he cannot reverse the stream and current of our affections — only God can turn this Jordan back — yet he can drive them faster and cause them to swell above their natural banks, so that affections inflated by him gain the strength of ten, as the demon-possessed man in Luke 8:29 did. We see in David how powerful an urge there was in him to number the people (2 Samuel 24) — contrary to all reason as well as religion, against the urging and opposition not only of Joab but of his other counselors. One might wonder that a man so holy and wise could be so driven to commit an act so foolish (as he himself afterward recognized, saying, 'I have acted very foolishly,' verse 10), and so grossly sinful that it was repulsive to Joab. But the devil was behind it: 'Satan provoked David to number Israel' (1 Chronicles 21:1) by stirring up that affection and impulse in him. And as he can stir other passions, so also fears and terrors, jealousies and distrust — bringing fear where there is nothing to fear. This is how he handled Saul when God gave him over to him: 'An evil spirit from the Lord troubled him' — or as most translate it, 'terrorized him' (1 Samuel 16:15). In stirring up these affections of fear and the like, he works not merely by presenting objects that naturally move them — which is all a person can do — but also physically, by disturbing the bodily humors in which those passions are seated. He can selectively work upon those humors in the body that will put a person into a fearful and trembling disposition. He can also disturb the images in the mind, the organs of the understanding — as was implied in the case of the man in Luke 8:35, who through Satan's working was not in his right mind. Once he has thrown everything within a person into disorder and put him into such a state of fearfulness, he then comes with his suggestions and speaks nothing but of wrath, terrors, warnings, the seriousness of the person's sins, and the fearfulness of God's anger to the troubled conscience. Then — just as when a person's anger is up, every small thing provokes him further — so when fear and melancholy have been excited, every suggestion, every suspicion strikes the soul through and through with overwhelming fears and distrust. So although not directly, yet through these mists, vapors, and clouds he raises — which surround and darken this sun — he works upon the conscience. Experience shows that he prevails most in this kind of temptation with those of melancholy temperaments, who dwell in dark chambers and are easily deceived by his false colors and illusions. When the affections are stirred and cloud the mind, multitudes of troubling thoughts arise, and every suggestion suited to that mood takes hold and prevails with the spirit — as Christ's words show: 'Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?' (Luke 24:38). Passions are like heavy weights hung on a clock — they not only make the wheels (the thoughts) run faster, but twist and pervert them so that to a disordered heart all things are presented wrongly, just as to a bloodshot eye everything appears red. In sum: as Satan deludes his enthusiasts by inflaming and backing their false opinions with surges of joy and spiritual ecstasy — which differ from the Holy Spirit's joy, which is inexpressible and glorious, as far as heaven differs from earth — so he can and does back his false reasonings and accusations against holy people regarding their spiritual standing with an abundance of terror and disturbance, which also differ as far from the direct impressions of God's wrath made immediately by the Spirit upon the conscience.