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Daily Devotionals
Music For the Soul
Devotional: January 18th

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THE MARK OF THE BEAST

Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. - Galatians 6:7

Wherever a human nature is self-centered, God-forgetting, and therefore God-opposing (for whoever forgets God defies Him), that nature has gone down below humanity, and has touched the lower level of the brutes.

Men are so made as that they must either rise to the level of God or certainly go down to the level of the brute. And wherever you get men living by their own fancies, for their own pleasure, in forgetfulness and neglect of the sweet and mystic bonds that should knit them to God, there you get "the image of the beast and the number of his name."

And besides that godless selfishness, we may point to simple animalism as literally the mark of the beast. He who lives not by conscience and by faith, but by fleshly inclination and sense, lowers himself to the level of the instinctive brute-life, and beneath it, because he refuses to obey faculties which they do not possess; and what is nature in them is degradation in us.

Look at the unblushing sensuality which marks many " respectable people" nowadays. Look at the foul fleshliness of much of popular art and poetry. Look at the way in which pure animal passion, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the love of good things to eat, and plenty to drink, is swaying and destroying men and women by the thousand among us. Look at the thin veneer of culture over the ugliest lust. Scratch the gentleman, and you find the satyr. Is it much of an exaggeration, in view of the facts of English life today, to say that all the world wanders after and worships this beast?

Sin is like a great forest-tree that we may sometimes see standing up in its leafy beauty, and spreading a broad shadow over half a field; but when we get round on the other side, there is a great, dark hollow in the very heart of it, and corruption is at work there. It is like the poison-tree in travelers’ stories, tempting weary men to rest beneath its thick foliage, and insinuating death into the limbs that relax in the fatal coolness of its shade. It is like the apples of Sodom, fair to look upon, but turning to acrid ashes on the unwary lips. When we come to grasp the sweet thing that we have been tempted to seize, there is a serpent that stands up amongst all the flowers.

The message of love can never come into a human soul, and pass away from it unreceived, without leaving that spirit worse, with all its lowest characteristics strengthened, and all its best ones depressed, by the fact of rejection. If there were no judgment at all, the natural result of the simple rejection of the Gospel is that, bit by bit, all the lingering remains of nobleness that hover about the man, like scent about a broken vase, shall pass away; and that, step by step, through the simple process of saying, " I will not have Christ to rule over me," the whole being shall degenerate, until manhood becomes devil-hood, and the soul is lost by its own want of faith.

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