We will have a little talk about Satan’s Handkerchiefs.
Here is one which Satan often uses to blind people with—the pleasures of sin, which hides the guilt of it.
Many years ago there lived in Egypt a man who had many advantages. He was strong and handsome, gifted, learned and well educated. He was prominent among the king’s advisers, and stood a very good chance of becoming King or Prime Minister of Egypt. But when he was forty years of age he made a very important choice: a very foolish one in the eyes of his worldly friends, but a very wise one in the eyes of God. He decided that he would no longer “enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season” (Heb. 11:2525Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; (Hebrews 11:25)), and so he left the palace, with its honors and riches, and threw in his lot with the people of God. Moses is one of the greatest men we read of in the Old Testament.
The “pleasures of sin.” Has sin any pleasure in it? Of course it has.
Why does a boy play truant? Is it not because of the pleasure he gets out of his stolen holiday?
Why does a girl take something that is forbidden? Because of the pleasure that comes from possessing it. And the pleasure that conies, blinds them to the guilt of the wrong they do.
Satan has another handkerchief: the profit to be had from the sin, that hides the loss of it from the eyes of the mind.
A man does something wrong, let us suppose, in business. He is not at first found out. On the contrary, he gains, by the wrong. He repeats the wrong time after time, and still he seems to prosper. And all the time the profit he is gaining is blinding him to the sin he is doing. Poor man! Satan has his handkerchief over his eyes. Let us hope that before it is too late he will face. the question,
Boys, be long-sighted; girls, look right ahead. Don’t play into Satan’s hands. Don’t let him put his handkerchiefs over your eyes. Look right into the future, past the time when you are grown up, past old age, past death, right through into the next world. You can’t see through death without the help of the telescope—the Word of God.
Death seems to you like a great mass of black rock in the distance, stretching from earth to heaven. You can see nothing that is on the other side. If you look through God’s telescope, you will see that what you thought was a mass of rock, is really a thin, half-transparent curtain, through which you can make out some of the things that are going on, on the other side; you will see that what is on the other side is real. God calls some of these things “pleasures for evermore,” which will be enjoyed by every boy and girl that comes to Jesus.
And even in this world, you will have both pleasure and profit, for you will belong to the Lord, and will possess every real blessing in Him.
ML 03/31/1940