motive of every enterprise which he undertakes. And Jesus,
the Son of God, the vindicator of the divine honour, is necessarily the
sworn eternal foe of the devil; and He has come into our world as into
the arena of a supreme conflict for the defeat and overthrow of Satan;
has assumed the very nature which the foul fiend seduced and degraded, in
order that, in that same nature, he might avenge the wrong done to the
being and government of God, and put an eternal end to the usurpation and
tyranny of his enemy.

2. _The devil_ "_had the power of death_."

(i.) We must not understand this as meaning that Satan has direct,
independent, and absolute control over death, inflicting it how, and
when, and where, and on whom, he will. The later Jewish writers taught
the horrible doctrine that the fallen angels have power or authority
generally in reference to life and death. But this never was the case.
Death was the sentence pronounced by God upon man, and it could only be
inflicted by his appointment and concurrence. The power of life and
death is necessarily in God's hands, and his only.

(ii.) But Satan had the power of death, in this sense; namely, that he
tempted man to commit the sin which "brought death into the world, and
all our woe." He enticed Eve to sin, partly by denying that her offence
would be visited with the punishment of death. "Ye shall not surely
die," was the lie by which he contradicted and defied the God of truth,
and induced the woman "to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil." And so, he was "a murderer from the beginning." "God
made man to be immortal, an image of his own eternity; nevertheless,
through envy of the devil came death into the world." In this sense,
then, as the author and introducer of that sin whose "wages" is death,
Satan "had the power of death."

(iii.) Moreover, it is the work of Satan to invest death with its chief
terrors. We shrink indeed from the humiliating prospect of corruption
and decay; we cling fondly to those companionships, associations, and
pleasures, from which death for ever separates us; we deprecate and dread
the blighting of our earthly hopes, and the ruthless frustration of our
schemes. These are very painful accessories of death; but they are not
its sting; they do not make it a poison for the soul as well as for the
body. "The sting of death is sin." That sting has been drawn for the
Christian, and death hath no terro