"Can it be positively asserted that the Lord Jesus Christ has destroyed the works of the devil?"
Not according to the scripture which states, "For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy (or loose) the works of the devil." (1 John 3: 8.)
The word here rendered from the Greek into English, "destroy," occurs forty-two times in the New Testament, and is commonly and correctly rendered "loose" in most places, as in Matthew 21: 2, "Loose" the ass tied; John 11: 44, "Loose" Lazarus from his graveclothes; Luke 13: 16, "Ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound eighteen years, to be 'loosed'?" To "loose" a shoe string; "loose" the seven seals; "loose" the four angels, etc. etc.
The One that wrote this was God the Holy Spirit; and, naturally enough, as God, the range of His view was God's glory. Men that have got away from God until God lays hold of them measure everything by its bearing upon man down here. If, however, individually God meets them, that stops, and the thought that supplants it is certainly, I am ruined, lost, and undone; what can I do to be saved? The hard, careless souls go on, arguing against the word of God as unintelligible, untrue, very difficult; but they seek not to receive from God the explanation of what is difficult.
To me the meaning of the passage is very simple. Satan's works in the garden of Eden (and the same has been true ever since) have been to make God appear to man as niggardly -- refusing to man, and, as a tyrant, seeking to reap where He had not sowed, and to gather where He had not strawed. God had made the world by His Son and for His Son, and Eden with everything in it suited to man's enjoyment was there; given it all freely, all to be his, until he set up in independence of God. (Gen. 3.) Satan begins with the weaker vessel, suggesting that what struck him most in the whole matter was prohibition on God's part. "Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?" (v. 1.) The woman replies -- not carefully, answering according to what God had said to Adam. Satan suggests that God had told a lie. "Ye shall not surely die" (v. 4), and then as a reason for it insinuates that God wanted to keep from man the privilege of full intelligence and of being as God, knowing good and evil. (v. 6.) Eve, turning to think of herself, falls under his power.
Here was the first work of Satan as to man -- presenting God as a God of prohibition, untruthfulness, and jealousy of man, lest he should get what pertained to God alone.
The gift by God of His Son, and that Son going down to death, the death of the cross, that He might break the bands of Satan's forging, and that whosoever might be free to follow Him, and share His throne and home, spoiled the work of Satan. The same thing has gone on over and over again, on Satan's part against God's character, and on man's part to his own deeper ruin; and so the interference of God through Christ and the Spirit have been renewed times out of mind. And is it a hard thing, or contrary to free gift, if God who knows that the blessing of every one depends upon
His maintaining His own glory as the first thing to be thought of, and working thereunto by His Son and Spirit, if He leaves to man to choose whether he will be of the seed of the woman, fight against Satan, and go to the glory in the end, or of the seed of the serpent? From the fall to the final doom of Satan "my Father worketh hitherto, and I work," said the Lord; and truly if Christ had not made you and me willing in the day of His power, we should both have been under Satan and the world, and in ourselves still.
Adam and Eve's stock were sold by them under sin and Satan; and they cannot say, while they talk of innocency, of not being worse than others, of doing God's will, of the value of souls, etc., that they subserve God's glory. But a Saul turned into a Paul, and an active agent in the war between God and Satan is so, and can say so. To measure everything by man's advantage is sin. I am sure you will say so. God's honour and character Christ came to vindicate. And men will to go down; He needs, and will have, and loves to draw to Himself for heaven. G. V. W.
Christian Friend, vol. 9, 1882, p. 189.
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At Oxford he met John Nelson Darby and Benjamin Wills Newton. Dissatisfied with the established church, Wigram and his friends left the Anglican church and helped establish non-denominational assemblies which became known as the Plymouth Brethren.
Wigram had a keen interest in the original Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible, which was of great interest to the emerging Brethren assemblies. In 1839, after years of work and financial investment, he published The Englishman's Greek and English Concordance to the New Testament, followed in 1843 by The Englishman's Hebrew and Chaldee Concordance to the Old Testament.
With Wigram's help, Darby became the most influential personality within the Brethren movement. Wigram is often referred to as being Darby's lieutenant as he firmly supported Darby during moments of crisis. He also helped Darby fend off accusations of heresy, also in regards to the sufferings of Christ, in articles written in 1858 and 1866, which some considered were very similar to Newton's errors two decades earlier.
George Vicesimus Wigram was converted whilst a subaltern officer in the army, and in 1826 entered at Queen's College, Oxford, with the view of taking orders. As an undergraduate he came into contact with Mr. Jarratt of the same college, and with Messrs. James L. Harris and Benjamin Wills Newton, both of Exeter College, who were all destined to take part in the ecclesiastical movement with which Wigram's name is also prominently connected. This connection was strengthened from about the year 1830, when these friends, all Devonians, were associated in the formation of a company of Christians at Plymouth, who separated from the organised churches, and were gathered to the Name alone of Jesus, in view of bearing a testimony to the unity of the church, and to its direction by the Holy Spirit alone, whilst awaiting the second coming of the Lord.
Wigram was active in the initiation of a like testimony in London, where by the year 1838 a considerable number of gatherings were formed on the model of that at Plymouth.
In 1856 he produced a new hymn book, "Hymns for the Poor of the Flock," which for some twenty-five years remained the staple of praise in the meetings with which he was associated. Ten years after the first appearance of the hymn book edited by him he stood by J. N. Darby once again at a critical juncture, when the question of the doctrine maintained by the latter on the sufferings of Christ some further dissension occurred, though the teaching was vindicated. During the rest of his life he paid visits to the West Indies, New Zealand, etc., where his ministry seems to have been much appreciated. He passed away in 1879.