The Challenger of Darkness (Adventures in Religion #6)

By John G. Lake
July 2, 1935

Jesus Christ came on the scene as a Challenger. We have almost come to believe in our day that He was a sentimentalist and an easy type. He was King. He was the Prince of God. He was the Glory of Heaven! He was the representative of the Eternal Father! He had a mission. He declared the Father. He stepped among the religions of the earth as the Challenger.

Jesus said there was real sin, that there was real sickness, that there was real death. He was not dodging the issue. He met it foursquare, and He said, I am bigger that it all, I am the Prince of Life. He destroyed sin and obliterated it from the souls of men. He blasted sickness and dissolved it from their system. lie raised the dead to life. He challenged the devil who was the author of death to destroy Him if he could. He went into the regions of death and conquered and came forth triumphant. So that it became necessary for the Lord to have a new vocabulary. He said after coming forth from the grave, “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Matt. 28:19.

Sin and sickness and death, the triumvirate of darkness, that Jesus met and overcame were the original forces of evil in the world; the manifestation of the Kingdom of Darkness. There never will be a heaven, there never could be one, where these exist. Their destruction is necessary. Jesus realized that and He came to do what man could not do for himself. That is one of the reasons why men can not save themselves. All the good works that man may perform from now to the day. of his death will not save him. Sin is of the heart, It is in the nature. Jesus came to reconstruct man’s nature and give him instead of his own evil nature, the nature of God. Sin has made the nature of man vile. Christ came to give him deliverance from this nature and give him a new nature, the divine nature.

“Through sin death entered into the world.”

Death is not a servant of God, nor a child of God, nor a product of God. SIN is the ENEMY of God. The New Testament declares that “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” Not the last servant or friend, but the last enemy. Death is doomed to destruction by the Lord Jesus Christ. Sin and Sickness is incipient death.

That is the reason we do not speak of the things of the Lord and His salvation in moderate tones. We are shouting them to mankind. The spirit of a real child of God challenges darkness, challenges sin, challenges sickness. The Lord Jesus came to destroy sickness and wipe it out of the lives of men, to make possible the heaven of God in their hearts and lives now. There could be no heaven where disease and sickness are found. Sin and sickness and death must be blotted out. That is the reason, dear friends, that Christianity is always a challenger. Christianity is a thing of strength. Real religion is a source of power. It is the dynamite of God. The Holy Spirit gives the overcoming grace and strength essential to destroy sin, to destroy sickness, to overcome death.