The Living God And The Battle For Life

God has one thing in view finally, and that is life. He intended from the beginning that that which issued from Himself, represented Himself, bore His mark, should be that which lives with His own life.

Satan has determined just the opposite, that that which comes from him bears his mark, and that is death, not because he wants to have death to gratify himself, but he wants God to be deprived of that upon which His heart is set.

Satan's heart is a heart of malicious spite against God. 

Remember that! He has, deep in his very being, this spite against God.

God has done something to Satan which has turned his heart with the bitterest malice and deep abysmal hatred for God and spite against God, and he wants to deprive God of His end - that is, a universe marked by God's own life.

And so anything whatever that has the mark of God upon it or is in the way of having that mark, that seal, is the objective of Satan's bitterest hatred.

It becomes a sharer with God in the spite of Satan. Remember that!

Wherever there is divine life, then that becomes part and lot with God in the animosity of the devil.

The one thing is to bring that life to an end, to spoil that life, to bring in death; where life is, to surround that and try and engulf it in death again.

There is only one way in which he can do it and that is to corrupt, but, strangely enough, it is to get the mind or the heart of the believer accepting corruption.
 
My conviction is this, that today Satan is standing at nothing in the wholesale slaughter on this earth in order to get at one corporate man, that man child of Revelation 12, that company with whom the heavenly and eternal interests of God and the testimony of Jesus are bound up, and this is it - life or death? 

And the pressure to corrupt will be intense, the pressure to destroy faith in the living God will be terrible, the pressure to move us away from our ground of confidence in God will be unspeakably great in order that that testimony of the living God, that life over which Satan has no power, shall be brought, so far as the instrument is concerned, into a neutralized state. 

God must have an instrument. He has done this thing again and again. The whole generation of babes of a certain age destroyed in Israel in order to get one - that Babe of Bethlehem.

It is this thing that is my conviction. I am not thinking in physical terms now - our destruction physically included in this that is going on today.

That is a mere incident; whether we live or whether we die is not the question just now.

I hope that we have got over that, that we can sing from our hearts, "The fear of death has gone forever" in so far as the physical side is concerned.

That is not the point. It is our faith, beloved; if we lose faith, we have lost our life.

If we lose our confidence in the living God, we are engulfed in that spiritual death; that is, we are put out of our functioning place for God, with God.

The true sons of God by faith in Jesus Christ, those who share God's life through regeneration in virtue of the Blood of Jesus which has dealt with the sin question, those who have become sharers with God in His life through His righteousness, are the objective of Satan today.

It seems a terrible thing, but then what is going on on the earth after all may only be limited to Europe.

And we say, all of us, is it not a terrible thing to think that one man in a continent will bring millions to death just to get his own end?

But take the whole world, and not only the whole world, the whole course of time, and Satan has repeated it again and again to get his own end.

It does not matter to him if he throws all the nations into the fire of destruction if he can get his end.

What is his end? It is that elect instrument, God's elect, with which all the purposes of God are bound up, to get at that, to get at the faith of that, not to destroy it physically, but to get at its faith.

~T. Austin Sparks~