Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 107:425 (Jan 1950)
Article: Reflections of an Industrial Chaplain Part 2
Author: Ernest L. Chase

BSac 107:425 (Jan 50) p. 95

Reflections of an Industrial Chaplain
Part 2

Ernest L. Chase

(Concluded from the October-December Number, 1949)

Since the Fall

Man is badly out of adjustment with God, society and himself ever since the fall. He is actually at enmity with God. The devastating effects of the fall were seen first in the innermost part, man’s spirit. Spiritual death set in at once, separating man from God. The power of God the Spirit which once had operated within Adam was withdrawn. Man’s spiritual decease was a falling out of correspondence with the springs of true life, though not any obliteration or annihilation which would forbid a new birth. For death, the opposite of life, is just another condition of existence according to the Scripture, rather than non-existence. As life is a condition of true unity, so death represents one of disunity and separation from God. The original sin, certainly, brought judicial ruin and privation—privation of original righteousness.

A careful appraisal of unregenerate man in connection with Scripture, history and present conditions will suggest that the capacities of his pneuma are inactive, crippled, debilitated, diseased, enslaved, dormant and well-nigh atrophied. Being dead in the spiritual sense he cannot find or know God unless aided. Nevertheless there remain within him an ineradicable need for communion with or worship of God, an awareness or unreasoned appreception of Him and a consciousness of moral values and of responsibility to heaven. In these capacities lie the possibility that he may be saved or reborn from his deadly condition as respects God.

BSac 107:425 (Jan 50) p. 96

The urges left in the human spirit may explain why man can be very religious, refined and cultured while still unregenerate. Scripture, however, includes even such characters as these in the category of unsaved men, along with the atheistic, debauched and licentious. They are all but “natural” men, having not the Spirit of God and so without spiritual life or understanding (1 Cor 2:14). Void of the Spirit they have no means of communication with God or of receiving His revelation of truth in the Bible.

Although, in the fall, the Spirit of God was forced out of His original seat in the control room of man’s being, his pneuma is still capable of receiving, of entertaining and being controlled by either the Holy Spirit or a Satanic power. Under certain volitional conditions, indeed, the fallen spirits allied with Satan will enter and exhibit supernatural powers by the way of the emotions, mind and will of the soul and likewise through the members of man’s body. Demon possession is an authenticated fact, and some “psychic ...