- 153 - Weinel, p. 11-12: “Thus, people witnessed and experienced the phenomena, and through them received proof of the existence of a mysterious world of spirit beings, beyond the things of this world – spirit beings mightier, wiser but also more ruthless than people. Beyond and above the Roman Empire there arose the realm of the one who was the true ruler of the world: Zeus, the Devil. It was precisely in this Roman Empire, whose governing classes so stubbornly resisted Christianity, that that spirit kingdom seemed to have established its most mighty bulwark.” The Christians experienced the horrifying workings of the invisible ruler of the world and his instruments on their own persons. What then was the end that the Devil and his demons tried to achieve with all their attacks on the Christians? He wanted to lure them away from God, into the error of polytheism, to tear them out of their spiritual lives and to plunge them into spiritual death. Justin 1, 58: “For the demons, as they are called, desire only to lead people away from their God and Creator, and from His first-born, Christ. And those who proved unable to rise above worldly matters they have fettered to manmade objects (statues), and they do so to this day.” Justin 1, 56: “The demons have accomplished this end by inventing myths and mysteries, thus aping God’s plan for the salvation of humanity. They have, by means of their imagery, offered those who sought communion with God a pleasant but soul-destroying substitute for the true Revelation.” The evil spirits that spoke through the idols at the pagan ceremonies produced speech audible to human ears by employing the od at their disposal to create so-called “direct voices”. It was, in fact, an imitation of the speech of God through the cloud of od above the Ark of the Covenant in the Tabernacle, for that speech also came as a “direct voice”, as has been clearly shown in my earlier explanations. Just as during God’s speech the required cloud of od was produced by the blood of the offerings and by the smoke of the sacrificial fires, so the blood of the pagan offerings to the idols and the smoke of their fires were the source of the od for the “direct voices’ of the evil spirits. Weinel, p. 24: “In view of the great danger that threatened Christians from the Devil and his hosts, there was a very widespread fear of these Powers of Darkness. It was neither a question of shadows and fantasy images, as it seems to most people in modern times, nor one of tenaciously held unproven doctrines, such as Christians of today have in their denominations. On the contrary, the evil spirits were powers that people experienced daily; they communicated with them and interfered in people’s lives at every turn, mysteriously, but potently. Weinel, pp. 24-25: “We must picture a Christian, stared at from the walls in the house in which he lived by the laren and penates (images of the idols), seemingly threatened by the images in the streets and public squares, passing temples in whose gloomy recesses behind the rows of bright pillars the mysterious powers carried on their work, attracting crowds of people. Among these images were many whose dreadful shapes, with their strangely grotesque combination of human and animal bodies, were repelling; they gave those the creeps who knew that a living, effective, personal spirit power lay behind them. Far more dangerous still were the demons, when they breathed life into softly shimmering marble, when the joyously lovely bodies of the Greek gods and goddesses became the magic that seduced the senses and through which the Devil enslaved mankind. Christians realized with horror that all this beauty, full of life, had been stolen from God to be used for sinful purposes, that all the majesty enveloping these deities was a theft of God’s grandeur and of His sovereignty over the hearts of men. And when, at family festivities or at municipal or provincial celebrations, Christians experienced in horror the immense power of defection from God; when they saw the foulest crimes of demons and heroes enacted on the stage at such festivals; when the passions of men and gods, like greed, hatred, vindictiveness and sensuality – and their consequences: war, murder, adultery – were displayed with magical seductiveness before the eyes of old and young, mature and immature, then their hearts were stirred by a shudder of contempt and hatred for those who had lured people’s souls away from the true
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjI1MzY3