A treatise on Satan's temptations - Gilpin - X - Chapters 11, 12 and 13.

Required reading
A treatise on Satan's temptations by Richard Gilpin (Available from Amazon or free here) - Read Chapters 11, 12 and 13.

My summary
This week Gilpin demonstrates that Satan blinds and darkens our minds by the power of lust.

Firstly Gilpin shows that Satan does indeed blind us by our lusts.

Secondly Gilpin teaches us the various ways by which our lusts do blind us.  They blind us by:
(i) preventing the use and exercise of reason;
(ii) perverting and corrupting our reason;
(iii) diverting and withdrawing our reason;
(iv) distracting and disturbing reason in its work;
(v) a bold precipitancy.

What grabbed me
I appreciated Gilpin's comments on practical atheism: 'Something of atheism is by most divines concluded to be in every sin, and according to the height of it in its various degrees, is reason and consideration overturned. There are, it may be, few that are professed atheists in opinion, and dogmatically so, but all wicked men are so in practice. Though they profess God, yet ' the fool saith in his heart, There is no God,' [Ps. liii. 1,] and in ' their works they deny him,' [Titus i. 16.] This is a principle that directly strikes at the root : for if there be no God, no hell or punishment, who will be scared from taking his delight in sin by any such consideration? The devil, therefore, strives to instil this poison with his temptation. When he enticed Eve by secret insinuations, he first questions the truth of the threatening, and then proceeds to an open denial of it, ' ye shall not surely die ;' and it is plain she was induced to the sin upon a secret disbelief of the danger. She reckons up the advantages, ' good for food, pleasant to the eye, to be desired to make one wise ; ' wherein it is evident she believed what Satan had affirmed, ' that they should be as God,' and then it was not to be feared that they should die. This kind of atheism is common. Men may not disbelieve a Godhead ; nay, they may believe there is a God, and yet question the truth of his threatenings. Those conceits that men have of God, whereby they mould and frame him in their fancies, suitable to their humours — which is a 'thinking that he is such a one as ourselves,' Ps. 1. — are streams and vapours from this pit, and 'the hearts of the sons of men are desperately set within them to do evil/ upon these grounds ; much more when they arise so high as in some who say, ' Doth God know ? Is there knowledge in the Most High?' [Ps. Ixxiii. 11.] If men give way to this, what reason can be imagined to stand before them ? All the comminations of Scripture are derided as so many theological scarecrows, and undervalued as so many pitiful contrivances to keep men in awe. '

Whenever we sin, we demonstrate our atheistic longings.

Next week's reading
Read Chapters 14, 15 and 16.

Now it's your turn
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.