• Home
• Services at Saint Peter’s
• Theology
  • What We Believe
  • The Pulpit
  • The Caversham Lectures
• News
  • News and Opinion
  • The Rock Archive
  • News Archive
  • Our Printed Heritage
  • Photo Gallery
• People
  • Friends of Saint Peter’s
  • External Links
• About
  • Music at Saint Peter’s
  • Saint Peter’s Character
  • Our History
  • Church Groups
  • Staff and Contacts
  • How to Get Here
• Login
  • Parishioners’ login
  • Vestry Members’ login
• Search Saint Peter’s

The Prince of Darkness and Father of Lies

14th Sunday : 7 July2013  : Luke 10: 1-12, 17-20

Mention the name C S Lewis and the first association most people will come up with is the children’s Narnia stories, recently made into films. Press harder, and others will come up with his book "Mere Christianity," the most popular work of Christian apologetic in the 20th century. Lesser known, but equally worthy of attention, are the Screwtape Letters, a satirical collection of fictional letters from the senior demon Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, giving advice about how to secure the damnation of a recently converted Christian, referred to as "the Patient."

In one particularly interesting letter Screwtape refers to one of their greatest recent successes, the convincing of most contemporary people, including many in the Church, that the Devil, whom he refers to as "Our Father below," does not exist. This leaves the deceived ignorant of and vulnerable to the constant destabilising operations of personified radical evil.

C S Lewis had a point about how embarrassed some mainline Protestant churches have become about the one whom one of my priest friends refers to as, "Old Nick." One place where it might have been thought that it is hard to dodge the issue is the opening section of the baptismal liturgy where the candidates, or parents and Godparents, are asked to make a renunciation. In our 1989 Prayer book they are anodynely asked, "Do you renounce all evil influences and powers that rebel against God," to which they reply, "I renounce all evil." The Roman Catholic Easter renewal of baptismal vows, which we use at the Vigil, lays it on the line rather more directly:

Do you reject the glamour of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin? I do.

Do you reject Satan, father of sin and prince of darkness? I do.

All of this might seem a matter of differing liturgical taste and theological speculation were it not for the words of Jesus that conclude today’s gospel reading:

I watched Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Yes, I have given you power to tread underfoot serpents and scorpions and the whole strength of the enemy; nothing shall ever hurt you. Yet do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you; rejoice rather that your names are written in heaven.

The disciples have just returned from their first two by two missionary tour, and are elated at how well things have gone. Just to proclaim the good news, and to use the name of Jesus, gives them the power to overcome many forms of human oppression and misery. Maybe, "treading underfoot serpents and scorpions," is dramatic, figurative language, but what it refers to is the ministry of deliverance aimed at invisible spiritual forces that are the real cause of human hindering in the lives of the people the disciples have been ministering to.

Of course today we have access to medical science and our growing knowledge of the human brain to deal with a number of the clinical issues the disciples had to tackle. So Screwtape, Wormwood, and the other workers in what C S Lewis called "the Lowerachy," have shifted tactics to try and prevent the sons and daughters of God from making their way back to their true home with God in heaven.

A particularly effective tactic has been the manufacture of what I call "the lie," the remaking of the Christian religion from within using influential advocates inside the Church to shift its core beliefs to something that seems utterly reasonable to contemporary secular opinion, but which sells the gospel short in important ways. As I attended the funeral of a church-going Christian at Knox Church last year, and heard the Minister unable to bring herself to use the phrase, "the resurrection of the dead," during the commendation and committal I was aware of having experienced just this phenomenon. Another example is the churches in our own denomination that have abandoned using Trinitarian language in worship. When we invoke the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit at the start of a Service we make it clear that we are worshipping the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and not some other deity of our convenient manufacture. To invoke the Triune persons, using their proper names, which they have offered us in the Scriptures is to sum up the content of the New Testament, all that Jesus did for us, in a concentrated and condensed form. It is for this reason that Screwtape and Wormwood’s co-workers hate to hear the names of God, because these names have the power to send them packing. And that is why it is a good thing to do to invoke the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit whenever we feel that we are in a situation of spiritual danger.

A particularly pernicious way the Prince of Darkness has of getting at Christians is through discouragement. Each one of us has a vulnerability, an opening, through which an inner voice can begin to whisper that our gospel walk is in vain, that past failures are the real plot lines of our biography, that the Church is finished, and that we are hypocrites who are pretending to be something other than we really are. When we are under attack in this kind of a way it is important to remember that we are dealing with the father of lies, who is skilled at rearranging our memories, and presenting a distorted version of reality that will erode our sense of hope, that wonderful virtue that leads out our courage and our perseverance. At such times we should remind ourselves that our accuser is someone who wants us to despair and give up, and that this is not the truth about our lives. The truth about who we are is located within God, who is both unflinchingly honest and resolutely hopeful about how things will turn out for the Church and us.

There is a prayer that talks about "the empty promises of sin," a phrase that I have found helpful in dealing with temptation. Not only is the Prince of darkness a liar, but he also has no positive content in his personal existence, because evil is parasitic on good, it feeds of it just to exist. So the temptations, usually tailor made to fit our personalities and vulnerabilities, that allure us so much are always based on illusions and hollow rewards that leave a bad taste afterwards. The father of lies always operates through smoke and mirror tricks, he has nothing of substance to offer, and must rely on spin-doctor techniques to tempt us into folly.

In advising us to exercise vigilance against "Old Nick," there is one final warning that I will leave you with. Having become convinced of the existence of the Prince of darkness it is a mistake to become so interested in him and his supernatural tricks and skills that we become fixated on them, and thus are drawn into the kingdom of darkness through an unhealthy curiosity. This is a particular temptation for exorcists. We can note Jesus’ final words to us in the gospel passage this morning, "do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you; rejoice rather that your names are written in heaven." We have no power to cast Satan down – it comes from God. We should avoid the false attractions of supernatural glamour and the weird and perverted twists and turns of the occult world. All that maters is that our name is written in the book of life. Our interests and attention and curiosity will be much more productively focussed in reading the New Testament, learning all we can about the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying to him daily, worshipping him regularly, and generally living within the protecting force fields of Christian practice and the community life of the Church.