God's unstoppable

(Chistian in Complete Armour, p 110)

Unbelief fears Satan as a lion, faith treads on him as a worm (/Increduli timent diabolum quasi leonem, qui fide fortes despiciunt quasi vermiculum.--Bern/)

Behold therefore thy God at work and promise thyself that what He is about will be an excellent piece [Eph 2:10]. None can drive Him from His work. The pilot is beaten from the helm, and can do little in a storm, but lets the ship go adrift. The architect cannot work when night draws the curtain, yea is driven off the scaffold with a storm of rain. Such workmen are the wisest counsellors and mightiest princes on earth. A pinch may come, when it is as vain to say, "Help, O king" as "Help, O beggar." Man's wisdom may be levelled with folly, but God is never interrupted. All the plots of hell and commotions on earth, have not so much as shaken God's hand, to spoil one letter or line that he has been drawing. The mysteriousness of his providence may hang a curtain in front of his work, that we cannot see what he is doing, but even when darkness is about him, rigteousness is the seat of his throne forever.

Even if you ee a Babel going up instead of a Babylon being pulled down, yet believe God is making his secret approaches and will clap his ladders suddenly to the walls thereof.

Is truth a prisoner with Joseph and error in the king's courts, to have its head lifted up by the favour of the times? Dost thou not remember that the way to truth's perferment lies through the prison?

Is the church like Jonah in the whale's belly, swallowed up to the eye of reason by the fury of men? Remember that the whale had not power to digest the prophet. Be not too quick to bury the church before she be dead. Stay while Christ applies his skill before you give it over. Bring Christ by your prayers to its grave to speak a resurrection word.

Joseph pawned his bones that God would visit his brethren, willing them to lay him where he believed they should be brought.

Jeremiah purchases a field from his uncle, and pays down the money for it, and this when the Chaldean army is quartered about Jerusalem, ready to take the city and to carry him with the rest into Babylon. And all this by God's appointment, that he might show the Jews how undoubtedly he did believe--even in that sad juncture of time--the performance of the promise for their return out of captitvitiy.

God is exceedingly disparaged in the thoughts of his people, though at the lowest ebb of his church's affairs, if his naked word, and the single bond of his promise will not be taken as sufficient security to their faith for its deliverance.

How does God outwit Satan's wiles?

Question: How does God defeat Satan and outwit his wiles in tempting His saints? (p. 102)

God accomplishes His own, gracious, ends for the good and comfort of His people out of the very temptations Satan intends to ruin them. God wounds the devil's head with the devil's own sword! Example: Joseph's brothers helped fulfil Joseph's dream by trying to get rid of him.

1. Satan aims to defile the Christian's conscience and disfigure the image of God within. But God uses the temptations to sin into the black soap with which God washes His saints white.
   
   
   
   1. God uses Satan's temptations to one sin as a preventive against another. E.g., Paul's thorn in the flesh to prevent his pride. By allowing the devil to tempt a soul to blasphemy or atheism, the internal trouble of spirit drives the Christian to humble duty.
      
   
   
   2. God purges out the sin Satan tempts us to, even through the temptation. Peter had said, "Though everyone else should be offended with Christ, I never will be!" After his fall, he did not again make such a claim. But he did become an undaunted confessor of Christ and the gospel. When we fall, we discover the prevailing corruption within us, so that the temptation stirs us up to drive out the malady. Paul would not have taken such pains to buffet his body (1 Cor. 9:27) if he had not found Satan knocking at that door.
      
   
   
   3. God uses the temptations to advance the whole work of grace in the heart. One spot causes the whole garment to be washed. In Ps. 51, David, overcome with one sin, renews his repentance for all. This trait distinguishes a true convert from a hypocrite. Judas cried about his treason, but there was not a word about his thievery and hypocrisy.
      
   
   
   
   


2. (p. 109) By tempting one saint, Satan works on those around him. He encourages others to sin by the example of the one. And he discourages them to live holy lives by his fall. Here God fools him again.
   
   
   
   1. When a real Christian sees the fall of another, it causes him to look more carefully to his own ways. When we see Moses provoked to anger, how we're driven to keep watch over our own unruly heart! The wicked may be hardened by a man's sin, but the sincere have their fomality and self-security purged.
      
   
   
   2. Are you in doubt about your own salvation? God uses the sin of others to comfort you in your own faith. David's sin was awful, yet he found mercy. Peter fell horribly, but he's in heaven. Don't despair! Call on God for mercy who has pardoned the same sin in others.
      
   
   
   3. God's design in allowing Satan to trounce some of his saints by temptation, is to train them up to give help to their fellow-brethren who are going through the same things. Mere knowledge of the Scriptures is insufficient to train a man to comfort another who struggles against temptation. Even Christ was perfected through suffering. None will handle poor souls so gently as those who remember the smart of their own heart-sorrows. None are so skilful in applying the comforts of the Word to wounded consciences as those who have lain bleeding themselves. The saints' experiences lead them to a powerful treatment made of the scorpion's own flesh--which they through Christ have slain--and that has the virtue above all other to expel the venom of Satan's temptations from the heart.
      
   
   
   
   

Gurnall thoughts

Gurnall, The Christian in Complete Armour. Banner of Truth. p. 9.

Paul was Nero's prisoner, but Nero was much more God's. Let persecutors send the saints to prison, God can provide a jailer when it's their turn.

In prison, Paul's not railing against his persecutors, or writing letters to politicians to get himself out--he knew he was heaven-bound regardless of what his enemies could do. His main concern: to help the churches of Christ.

There's no better way to defeat the devil and his instruments, in face of their spite against us, than by doing what good we can wherever we are.

The devil would've been better off if he'd left Paul alone instead of throwing him into prison: guards converted, Onesimus converted, letters to churches. Ephesians!