# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1863_S140
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

140 What the Apostles Say, and What Christ the Lord Says, to Our Catechism Controversy.

...altogether be senseless? Will not envy, wrath, arrogance, and similar tempestuous stirrings surge far more violently there, and thus be able to stir up a vast sea of intellectual powers and cloud the transparent clarity of its flood? Does there not exist, quite apart from the biblical doctrine of a fall of man, many a self-incurred evil that testifies to a willful transgression of the holy laws of the universe? Do these not also stand in contradiction with the privilege of our race, or with the perfection of Him who has bound all well-being to conditions grounded, at the very highest, in His will alone?

If angels have indeed fallen in this way, then it is also possible that they persist in the unbounded willfulness into which their freedom turned. As with higher endowment, so also among the inhabitants of the earth, energy and tenacity stand in the same proportion, by which someone pursues his purpose, whether he be good or evil. If we add to this the concept, already suggested above, of a fellowship of a realm, then the sad truth opens itself to our understanding: that in that sphere of being, at the instigation and under the leadership of a princely head, a rebellion has taken place against the Lord of all lords, which he is no longer able to check. And this is revealed to us in the biblical doctrine of "the devil and his angels" (cf. Matt. 25:41).

That the Bible so extends the power of that prince as to hem in, so to speak, the holy God and His kingdom is an unfounded accusation. Never is the devil in any way made equal to God, as is the evil principle of the Persians and Indians. It is a sheer mystification that any Christian system of doctrine has ever ascribed omniscience to the evil enemy, as has recently been claimed. He knows and is able to do more than a man: that is true. But even he must, in order to learn anything, "go to and fro in the land"; it is not the case that all things are immediately present within him and to him, as the world lives and moves and has its being in God. God alone searches the heart of man. The devil can learn only so much (and that in part not without the help of his servants) as is also discernible by men. Thus the Satan of the Bible everywhere appears in such a way that he cannot hinder the care of God, which extends even to the very least things (cf. Matt. 10:29–30), but can only bring it more into the light. Even when he is permitted to harm a Job, the divine permission has gone before. Moreover, the prophecy of his complete overthrow (cf. Rev. 20:10) causes everything that he has undertaken in time against God to appear in such a way that it likewise serves to glorify the divine honor — just as also the wickedness of men in the end heightens the splendor of the eternal Majesty. For it is not the plus and the minus that occur in the reckoning, but the sum total that decides.

How the realm of spirits may be able to act upon the children of men must always remain something of a riddle here. The possibility, however, explains itself from the relation in which all created beings stand to one another. As the visible heaven serves the earth and exerts manifold influence upon it,