Satan's great skill is to present to mankind the tempting bait and to hide the hook. His craft is the artful one of dressing up evil in fine clothes. He has long experience of making virtue nauseous to men and of advertising vice as virtuous. He sells lies for truth, puts evil for good, offers shadows for substance and mocks poor mankind to death with the promise of pleasures which end only in pain and torment.

Our first mother Eve, perfect as she at first was in holiness, and happy as she was in her knowledge of God, was no match for the devil's wiles. The evil spirit, now fallen and forever lost himself, fished cunningly for her soul and caught her with a hollow promise. The bait was equality with God – a thing she grasped at. The hook which she did not notice was the penalty of disobedience to God's Word, 'Thou shalt not eat thereof' (Gen. 2:17).

To catch an Eve on his hook was a fine prize. But to catch Adam was far better. On Adam's obedience hung the destiny, not of one soul or two, but of the entire human race. This fiendish temptation, master-minded by the 'father of lies', caught Adam on his tenderest feelings. He was 'not deceived' as the woman had been (1 Tim. 2:14) but ate presumably because he allowed his love for his wife to overpower his duty to God.

The quality of any action is to be measured by the character of the motive behind it. Satan's deliberate and calculated intention was to draw all mankind to hell. He well understood that if he could seduce our first parents he could ruin the whole creation and drag mankind under the wrath of God. His motive was murder, the murder not of man's physical life only but of his soul. The devil's intent was the destruction of souls. His work of man-fishing began with fair bait. He flatters us with hope of attaining to equality with God. By first concealing the penalty of sin which he now knows for himself by experience, he set about to woo our first parents to their death by a lying promise.

The biblical account of man's fall reveals a method which Satan has used to terrible effect in this world ever since, a promise of some supposed good presented to the mind on condition of disobedience to God's explicit Word. The good which is suggested is painted in exaggerated colours so as to fascinate man's mind and blind him to the fatal consequences which must follow. This is the archetypal lie which has been in constant use all through history to the present day. 'Let me point you to this pleasure', says Satan. 'I promise you it will be delightful in experience; and the way to obtain it is by ignoring anything to the contrary which God may have spoken'. Thus the bait conceals the hook.

Satan's lie is twofold. He suggests what is false; and suppresses the truth. He therefore hides the real consequence of our actions. He knows that God's character is inflexibly truthful and that he will do all that he has both promised and also threatened. The devil well understands that the way to God's blessings is by obedience to his Word. Hence he labours to ruin men and rob them of all their blessings with a ceaseless propaganda war. In this way, he keeps up a pretence of obtaining good by committing sin.

Since the above is true, it is not difficult to see why Satan hates the Bible and attempts to keep men from reading it. The Bible is the one book that unmasks Satan's lie and exposes him as the supreme enemy of our souls. Where the Bible is read and known, Satan's lie is detected. When the Bible is neglected, Satan's lie is irresistible and all-prevailing. Without Bible-light men go for the bait every time and are caught on the hook beneath. The Bible is the one thing in this world that Satan hates and opposes with might and main.

With unwavering consistency the Bible tells us that man's blessedness is always and only to be had by believing and obeying God's Word. To obey God's Word is to live 'by faith'. Faith is the corollary to God's spoken revelation. It takes God's Word as true and refuses to believe that good can come by any other means than by obedience to Him.

Faith is an activity of the soul by which we both reject the lie of Satan and are persuaded of the truth that our happiness is to do what God says.

The preacher's task is to show men the fallacy of Satan's lie and to point them to the way of obedience as their path to blessing and life. The skilful preacher aims to warn and teach his flock that not far behind his bait of temptation lurks the hook. The pulpit's work is to lay bare the devices of Satan and to expose all the cunning machinery by which he ensnares and ruins men. To do his work truly the preacher must know and be thoroughly acquainted with the Bible. Whatever other learning he lacks he must not be unskillful in God's Word.

It is probably an aspect of Christ's work and ministry which has not received sufficient attention, but we must not forget that our Lord came to 'destroy the works of the devil' (1 John 3:8). Our Saviour, as the Last Adam rejected the devil's lying promises: 'Cast thyself down ... his angels ... shall bear thee up' (Matt. 4:6); 'All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me' (Matt. 4:9). Christ sees and exposes the half‑truths in the devil's specious offers of good. All the devil's lies are answered in the phrase, 'It is written'. The Word of God exposes the hook beneath the surface.

The mark of the unreliable preacher is that he is unwilling to expose the dangers of compromise with Satan's lie. He wishes to look in two directions at once. He will praise the good and not condemn the evil. The unreliable preacher is too genteel to call a lie by that name. He finds 'something good' in every opinion. He loves his reputation too much to expose the hook by which men are caught and enslaved to sin.

If one thing more than another strikes us about the preaching of the true prophets and apostles of Christ it is their forthrightness in affirming truth and denouncing error in its many forms. Whether it be Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah or Paul, the biblical preachers all ripped away the mask from Satan's suggestions and laid bare the whole truth. To a man, they and their fellow-preachers made explicit the consequences of disobedience to God's Word. Moses speaks for the Old Testament men as a whole: 'If thy heart turn away ... I denounce unto you this day, that ye shall surely perish' (Deut. 30:17-18). Similarly Jesus Christ speaks for all the true preachers of God's Word in every age: 'Every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man' (Matt. 7:26).

The folly of disobedience to God's Word is that it chooses a lie rather than the truth. It reaches out the hand for a supposed good and shuts its eye to the sure and certain judgment which must follow.

The great sorrow and tragedy of the modern world is that the great bulk of mankind is bent on chasing the lie and risking death on Satan's hook. The greater the lie appears to be, the blinder men are to it. 'Let us all turn our back on the dull old-fashioned religion of our grandparents and enjoy ourselves.' So runs the lie. But the more people have forgotten God, the more miserable they have become. 'Let us all divorce our wives and enjoy ourselves', says the lie. But as the divorce rate has gone up so has the number of moral, psychiatric and emotional sufferers. 'The way of transgressors is hard' (Prov. 13:15).

The lie will play on till the very end of time. Even at the eleventh hour of history men will be saying, 'Peace and safety' (1 Thess. 5:3) when the hour of judgment is about to strike. The love of sin exercises a gravitational pull which overcomes all other impulses and instincts in fallen man. To the great sorrow of all true believers, worldly men will pursue the way of death in spite of all that God has said in his Word. The lie has in it a fascinating appeal:

Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither: as for him that wanteth understanding, she saith to him, Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he knoweth not that the dead are there; and that her guests are in the depths of hell.Prov. 9:16-18

If society today is to find its way out of the labyrinth of lies it will need a generation of preachers who are committed to telling the whole truth of God's Word with clarity and conviction. The flock too will need to be told from God's Word where the safe pastures are; and warned not to stray on to enchanted ground.

At the present hour there are many evangelicals who are becoming fascinated with the old traditions of Rome. The former defensive attitudes are coming down. The day used to be when evangelical Christians would not entertain the claims of Rome for one moment. They took Paul's forthright warnings seriously: 'Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness' (Eph. 5:11); 'But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed' (Gal. 1:8).

We cannot explain this phenomenon in any other way than as an example of' how Satan's great skill conceals from men the lessons of the past. Shoals of fish are bent on examining the bait while near at hand, but out of sight, is the deadly hook.

O Lord, open the eyes of men.