616 The Spiritual Man
working conditions. Although some Christians may not specifically
choose suffering or weakness, they nevertheless unwittingly allow
themselves to sink into passivity, thus ceding place to the enemy and
falling into a perilous situation. Let anyone who has the above
experience ask himself whether he has fulfilled the operating
requirements of the evil spirits. This will save him from many
counterfeit occurrences and unnecessary sufferings.
We know the enemy makes use of the truth, yet he overextends it
beyond its bounds. Which of the following is not of truth: self-denial,
submission, waiting for God’s ordering, suffering, and so forth?
Even so, evil spirits exploit the believer’s ignorance of the principle
of spiritual life to divert him into fulfilling their operating
requirements. If we fail to judge the underlying principle of any
teaching, as to whether it meets the conditions of the Holy Spirit or
that of evil spirits, we shall be deceived. Any overextension of the
truth is most precarious. Let us be Very cautious in this regard.
By now we should be acquainted fully with the basic distinction
between the working of God and that of Satan: (a) God wants the
believer to cooperate with Him by exercising his will and using all
his abilities in order that he may be filled with the Holy Spirit, but
that (b) to facilitate his work the evil spirit demands the believer to
be passive in his will and to deny the use o f either part or all o f his
abilities. In the first case, God’s Spirit fills the spirit of man and
imparts life, power, release, enlargement, renewal, and strength to
the man that he may be free and unshackled. In the second case,
Satan occupies man’s passive organs and, if undetected, proceeds to
destroy his personality and will by reducing him to a puppet,
subduing his soul and body, and leaving him bound, oppressed,
ravaged and imprisoned. The Holy Spirit enables the believer to
know the will of God in his intuition so that he may understand it
afterwards with his mind and carry it out later by freely exercising
his will. The satanic spirit, however, so puts the person under the
oppression of an external power that it appears to him to represent