Timothy to Hebrews - The Preterist Archive

Hebrews II. 14-18, 357
instruments. The workman, who lets himself be persuaded to join
in a rebellion through the false representations of insurrectionary
communists, commits hioivingly only the sin of covetousness and of
disobedience to the law ; the citizen who allows himself to be drawn
by the prevailing spirit of the time into unlawful actions, commits
only the unconscious sin of folly ; neither the one nor the other has
discovered the great plot against the kingdom of God which they
are helping to advance ;
nay, they are often surprised when they see
the fruits which ripen on the field that has been wrought by them.
The blinded man often aims at the very opposite of that which the
prince of darkness, whose instrument he is, strives and manages to
accomplish by him ; in the hands of that prince of this world, parties
professedly opposed to him often unwillingly help forward
the same cause, and bring about the same victory. In short,
there is actually a providence of evil, only relative, it is true, and
in the end always subject to the absolute providence of God, which,
however, stretches far beyond the conscious aims of its human instruments.
Now, the man who has not attained to freedom in Christ, or has
fallen back from this freedom into the hondage of sin and death, is
not merely a slave of his individual sins and sinful infirmities, but
becomes, at the same time, a slave and tool of the prince of darkness
; he has a price at which he is saleable, and for which the
wicked one gets possession of him. He becomes a slave of that
power which is at once a seducing, a conscience-accusing, and a corrupting
power (corrupting the body as well as the soul, destroying
all happiness, recompensing with poison and death).
It is the prince
of darkness who holds in his hands the power which death exercises
over us ; who employs the power of spiritual death, of sin, to make
man his tool ; who employs the power of bodily death to spread
death and murder and destruction ; who employs the power of guilt
to accuse us before God, and, above all, before ourselves, to rob us
of rest, to quench in us the hope of the possibility of grace ; who
insultingly rejoices to see us condemned before the judgment seat
of God. He has, indeed (as Anselm of Canterbury has already
shewn in opposition to a false theory of his time), no legitimate claim
as the seducer to the possession of the seduced ; but he exercises a
real objective power over those who, through their own sin, have
surrendered themselves to his power. From him must the Messiah
redeem men—and he shewed that he achioivledged the guilt in the
manner in luhich he removed it. Men seek to redeem themselves,
either by not at all achioivledging the guilt and the necessity of a
real atonement for the sin, but by trifling away and disowning this
last remnant of truth in the sinner—the deposition of an evil conscience—and
thus putting a self-invented idol in the place of the