PRECIOUS REMEDIES AGAINST SATAN’S DEVICES
By Thomas Brooks
Banner of Truth. 253 pages. £5.75
ISBN 978-0-85151-002-6
Every so often I become an evangelist for a book I’ve just read. But usually I find I’m doing this for the latest book from the pen of Tim Keller or Julian Hardyman or Paul David Tripp — not for a book that’s been around for 350 years or so.
Then a colleague and I read Thomas Brooks’s Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices together and discovered that C.S. Lewis’s wonderful Screwtape Letters had been surpassed centuries before they were written. For, although Brooks lived and preached in the 17th century, he fought the same spiritual battles against sin, the world and the devil that you and I do, and his biblical wisdom and godly insights from that same battlefield leave even the insights of Lewis in the shade.
To illustrate Brooks’s brilliance, let me take you to the fourth chapter of his short, readable book entitled ‘Satan’s Devices to Keep Saints in a Sad, Doubting, Questioning and Uncomfortable Condition’. It was one of those chapters you read and have that uncanny feeling that the author somehow knows you better than you know yourself — even the chapter’s title summarised pretty well my common experience of the Christian life. But then the contents expertly (if embarrassingly) showed me both why I’m so often such a sad, doubting, questioning and uncomfortable Christian and how I can change.
For Brooks both exposed the devices Satan uses to keep me in this state and then pointed out the many remedies available in God’s Word. Device after device I found myself cringing at how readily and regularly I have fallen into the traps Satan has set for me — in particular in causing Christians like me ‘...to be still poring and musing upon sin, to mind their sins more than their Saviour; yea, so to mind their sins, as to forget, yea, to neglect their Saviour’.
Sound familiar to you too? Your preoccupation with a particular sin which leads you to wallow in despair rather than enjoying the hope offered you by the Cross of Christ. Well Brooks comes up with six remedies for me and for you — each rooted in God’s Word.
His remedy number six helped me most: ‘....believers must repent for their being discouraged by their sins. Their being discouraged by their sins will cost them many a prayer, many a tear, and many a groan; and that because their discouragements under sin flow from ignorance and unbelief. It springs from their ignorance of the richness, freeness, fullness, and everlastingness of God's love; and from their ignorance of the power, glory, sufficiency, and efficacy of the death and sufferings of the Lord Jesus Christ; and from their ignorance of the worth, glory, fullness, largeness, and completeness of the righteousness of Jesus Christ; and from their ignorance of that real, close, spiritual, glorious and inseparable union that is between Christ and their precious souls. Ah! did precious souls know and believe the truth of these things as they should, they would not sit down dejected and overwhelmed under the sense and operation of sin’.
Just what a sad, doubting, questioning and uncomfortable Christian like me needed (and needs) to hear — a gospel-centred remedy to a Satanic trap that I have been constantly falling into without realising it: that of letting my life be more dominated by my sin than by my Saviour. And just how I needed to hear it too: from a pastor who knows the trap well and who wonderfully preaches the gospel solution into my life in fresh and moving ways. Who could fail to become an evangelist for a book like that?
Ed Shaw,
assistant pastor, Emmanuel, Bristol
http://www.emmanuelbristol.org.uk
