Mankind, all of us, are the lawful captives of Satan, the original slave master and reigning prince of viruses, masks, balls and chains, and ever increasing governance, most recently ostensibly warranted by a virus you can’t even see but at the thought of you are required to panic.
Lawful captive? I knew from my recently increased reading of Ellen White that she is the authority for that wording. So I checked the EGW online search engine, the EGW equivalent of Google, and found 47 references for “lawful captive/s.” No question, we are, alas, Satan’s lawful captives.
Ironically, law is on the lawbreaker’s side. God’s own immutable law. His overriding fundamental, cosmic law. His own nature is that law, He is that law.
So it’s legal. Legally, all your unconscious inclinations, instinctive cravings, and natural bent; your mind and heart are born Satan’s. He leads you by a ring implanted in your nose. Left to your own and Satan’s devices, you just naturally sin and stage black-tie galas to award sin’s most creative promoters.
On this evil earth, sin can flourish like viruses, COVID19 is just one among all the others, in any toxic atmosphere, despite masks (even Russell Wickham’s military gas mask). In any soil, any condition, sin thrives like rank weeds and thorns and fungi and black mold after a flood. It explodes like a California wild fire.
Though you don’t know it, it’s already in you, embedded in your DNA, RNA, mitochondria, and every synapse, built in, deeply rooted and sprouting, already taken over and out of control, smothering out everything else. Just sit back and let it happen, like the natural man ball-and-chained to his TV and sofa and beer.
Is it even natural for us captives to fall in love with our kidnapper? Alas, yes. That perversion even has a technical name, the “Stockholm Syndrome,” or, as is better known to us old timers, the “Patty Hearst uTurn” from captive to bank co-robber.
Yes, and too easy to write about. Writing these rather entertaining paragraphs is as natural as skidding on iced-over pavement in Ohio where we used to live.
So sin is like falling off a log. But it’s desperately hard in this sinful, unwilling earth to grow precious seed. It requires unremitting stoop labor, tedious tilling, fertilizing with just the right proportions of components applied at the right time and in the right amounts, the right amount of atmospheric humidity and the right amount of root watering, the right butterfly or hummingbird for pollination, and to top it off severe pruning.
Under our sinful condition, grace and godliness thrive only in the heart that is being, daily, daily-daily, morning by morning and morning and evening, continuously and endlessly; diligently, actively, and conscientiously, and sweatingly, cultivated. And necessarily painfully, even agonizingly so; by our own will, impossible. While sin is natural, effortless, built-in, conversion is altogether beyond our power.
We must tearfully and constantly turn over to Christ our sinful hearts, even those deep mysterious subconscious depths. Only by complete, and constant surrender to God may easy submission to Satan be conquered.
But while we naturally, even eagerly, submit to our lawful owner Satan, it is against fallen human nature to want to submit to God at all. How on earth does submission happen? By nothing on earth, only from heaven. From heaven we hear the Father, through the mouth of Jeramiah, proclaiming that ‘with mercy and loving-kindness have I drawn thee,’ using the same words as Christ spoke to us, “no man cometh unto Me except the Father, who hath sent Me to save mankind, draw him.
Christ showed us how. In our behalf and as our example of obedience, Christ the Son of God took on our fallen nature and captivity. Thus handicapped, even He had to spend many whole nights in prayer to His Father pleading for guidance and strength. In Gethsemane upon the rock, He shed tears and sweat, and on the Cross, blood.
With Christ as his example, the apostle Paul, O wretched, yet blessed, man that he is, declares that he dies to sin daily and is daily crucified and buried with Christ. Compared to this, risking his life to wild beasts and rioting mobs is nothing.
God so loved sinful mankind that He gave His only begotten Son to die as ransom while we were yet sinners, in order to receive us unto Himself as brothers and sisters to be where He is and to have everlasting life. And this is life eternal, to know God and Him whom He sent as savior, bidding us, “let not your hearts be troubled. He that cometh unto me I will in nowise cast out. Fear not, My peace I give unto you, not as the world giveth give I. I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”
But, BUT – here he is again, Satan, right on cue, demanding, “Did God tell you THAT? God knows you are incontestably MY completely lawful captive. He cannot legally redeem you from me, your lawful master, regardless of how grandly He says He can. I know every mushy millimeter of you inside and out, and I know that captivity is YOU. If you were redeemed, a silly thought, you would be a stranger to your own skin. You could even be in love with me, your captor.
“Truth to tell —trust me — you’re terrified of God and His oppressive law, and rightly so. Anyway, you are not capable of accepting Salvation from God or His designated driver, Christ, any more than you are of keeping His commandments.”
And, alas, he’s absolutely right on every last count.
But Satan is wrong, on all counts. He’s right so long as enslaved, feeble man struggles by his own vaunted inner power to wriggle loose from Satan’s captivity. It is indeed impossible, utterly. But with God all things are possible. To Christ, Christ only, all power is given in heaven and earth to create quarks and galaxies with black holes, and to release frail fallen you from your Satanic ball and chain. “At the sound of man’s fervent prayer to God, Satan’s whole host trembles.”
Our Ellen White rebuts Satan far better than I. The last sentence in the above paragraph is hers. In my old age I am so deaf I must use hearing aids, but I hear EGW louder and more clearly than ever.
I hear her saying (in Heavenly Places), “When we are in terror of God, and overwhelmed with the thought of His glory and majesty, the God as our heavenly Father points us to Christ as His representative. The cross of Calvary, even more than the wonders of His creation, reveals to man both the love of God and the immutability of His commandments. The God of justice did not spare His Son. The whole debt for the transgression of God’s law was demanded from our Mediator. A full atonement was required. In the words of Isaiah, ‘It pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief.’
“God’s love is expressed in His justice no less than in His mercy. Justice is the foundation of His throne, and the fruit of His love. They are indissolubly joined together; the one cannot exist without the other. Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.”
May I suggest that when God’s Law, an immovable object, met an irresistible force, His own love for mankind, God through Christ found a divine workaround?
At this point it must be noted that while only Christ of all beings in the universe can free man from captivity, mankind does have an exceedingly active roll. Of course, to initiate the process, we must submit totally to his offer of salvation, after which salvation is still a mutual contract, or, as known in the OT, covenant. When man proceeds with his part, he is undergoing sanctification.
Man’s part of the contract is twofold. First, to have faith that salvation has indeed occurred. The promised blessing we must believe we do receive.
Second, to be accordingly joyful, and to joyfully and unceasingly proclaim it to the world, as Paul exhorts the Philippians in triplicate: Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice. Finally, Brethren, rejoice in the Lord. To the Ephesians Paul’s epistolary salutation is exuberant praise, thus: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.”
Having created us and then lost us to Satan, Christ has purchased us again by His own life, and taken us as wholly his. His covering merits are not virtual. Your sins are not photoshopped out, coated over by an extreme makeover, botoxed flat, or face-lifted for a holier upward gaze. Through Isaiah God says, I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and putteth them out of remembrance.
If lawfully doomed to eternal death, we die daily and shall lawfully live eternally.
No, my friend, we are not our own. We are either Satan’s lawful giddy captive or Christ’s ransomed joyful servant. Those are our only choices. And aren’t we glad that being in Christ we are new creatures. Never cared much for the old hand-polished natural me, fit only to be dumpstered.
Dr. Kime was born in 1929, in Los Angeles, California.
Kime pursued dual careers in art (since childhood) and medicine (physician; specialties in internal medicine and pathology; clinical and academic). He studied the principles of art, chemistry of paint, and the works of master artists as assiduously as medicine. After retiring from pathology at Kettering Medical Center in 1994, Dr. Kime has concentrated on his art, producing portraits, seascapes and figural work mainly in oils, and urbanscapes predominantly in watercolor. Dr. Kime currently lives in Redlands, CA.
