We all know the sad story. Before the glorious God came into man’s spirit, Satan, the enemy of God, came into man first. The devil came into the human body through Adam when he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Consequently, sin, personified as a person, is dwelling in the members of our body and rules as an illegal master, forcing us to do things that we dislike. This is the sin mentioned in Romans 6, 7, and 8. This sin is none other than Satan, the evil, sinful one in the universe. He is the enemy of God. When he came into our body, our body was transmuted, or changed in nature, and thus became the flesh. The flesh is the corrupted, ruined, and damaged body, in which the evil one dwells. This flesh threatens to dominate the soul.
The human spirit has become a base from which God can spread Himself. In the same principle, the corrupted body, the flesh possessed by Satan, has become the base from which he can do his devilish work. Satan takes his place in the flesh to influence the soul, and then through the soul to deaden the spirit. The direction of all satanic work always begins from the outside and works toward the inside. But the divine work always begins from the center and spreads toward the circumference. We may illustrate this by the following diagram.
The soul cannot stand against Satan, who is much stronger than the human soul. Our condition before we were saved was that our soul was poisoned by Satan through the flesh. When we heard the gospel and were enlightened in our mind and in our conscience, we became contrite and broken in spirit, repented, and opened ourselves to the Lord. Consequently, He gloriously came into our spirit to be our life in the Holy Spirit. Although Satan, the enemy, has taken the flesh as a base from which to fight inwardly toward the spirit, the glorious Lord uses the spirit as a base from which to fight outwardly toward the flesh.
We are very complicated because we have become a battlefield. We are the universal battlefield for the universal battle. Satan and God, God and Satan, are fighting one another within us day by day. Satan is fighting toward the center, while God is fighting toward the circumference. What is our attitude toward this battle? We cannot be neutral; we must take sides. In the outward part of man is the enemy of God, and in the inward part is God Himself. Between the two, in the middle, is the soul. Satan is in the corrupted body, God is in the regenerated spirit, and we are between, in the human soul. We are very important persons. We can change the whole situation. If we take sides with Satan, God, in a sense, will be defeated. Of course, God can never be defeated, but by our taking sides with Satan, it seems that God is temporarily defeated. But if we take sides with God, the situation will be glorious, and Satan will be utterly defeated.
With whom will you take sides? This is the problem. We need to listen to the Lord’s words in Matthew 16:24: “If anyone wants to come after Me, let him deny himself.” We must deny the self. In other words, we must put the soul to death on the cross, for the soul is the self. We must always deny the self, always put the self to death, always cross out the self. What will happen when the soul has been crossed out? When the soul has been put to death, only God and Satan are left. By crossing out the soul, we have burned the bridge for the enemy.
Satan is in the flesh, because he is sin incarnated in the flesh, and the self is in the soul. Both sin and the self are illegally married to each other; in fact, they had their wedding day long ago. All the trouble within us is due to the fact that the self is married to sin, and the two have become one. But when we were saved, God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit came into our spirit as the divine life. In the flesh, the corrupted body, there is sin; in the soul, the threatened soul, there is the self; and in the regenerated human spirit there is the divine life, the eternal life, which is the regulating life and power. To live and walk by the soulish life means to live and walk by our self, which involves us in marriage with Satan. This marriage means that we are not a free person but are under the bondage of the evil one as sin. The evil one in our flesh will rise up to snatch and defeat us and bring us under his captivity, making us a most wretched person (Rom. 7:24). If, however, we deny the soul, the self, and live and walk by the spirit, Christ as life will regulate and saturate our whole being.
After we have been regenerated, we should not live and walk and do things by our self anymore. As long as we live by our self, we will be under the bondage of Satan. Perhaps you may say, “I don’t think I live or do things by my self.” However, you need to discern your spirit from your soul. If you do this, you will see how much you are in the soul. You say that you are not living or doing things by your self, but I would ask, By what are you living? By the flesh? Probably you will answer, “No, I am not living by the flesh.” Then, are you living by the spirit? You may say, “I doubt it.” If you are living neither by the flesh nor by the spirit, by what are you living? The answer is that you are living merely by the soul. You may say, “I don’t like to commit any sin; I don’t like to be fleshly; I don’t like to cooperate with Satan. I love God. I like to follow the Lord and walk in the Lord’s way. I like, I like, I like...” This indicates that you are still in the soul. You need to tell the Lord where you are. You yourself doubt very much that you are in the spirit. If you are not in the flesh or in the spirit, you are in the soul. Praise the Lord that you are not in Egypt, for you have experienced the Passover. You have been delivered out of Egypt, but you have not yet entered into the good land of Canaan. You are still wandering in the wilderness of the soul.