When I was a boy, I had a paper route. Along that route there was a very vicious dog that often tried to ambush me in the early morning darkness. One day the dog’s owner invited me into his house and assured me that his dog was not that bad. He wanted me to pet the dog. Yet the dog was snarling at me! Then he said, “He’s not a bad dog, but I will tell you this: He was trained in the army to kill people.” Now I was in fifth grade when this happened. That’s when I first realized that some people in this world are not well in the mind. I told me dad about this incident, and he decided to help. He took me around on my route with the family station wagon. When we got the house of the vicious dog, he said he would take care of it. He grabbed a paper, from the back seat he grabbed a four foot 2x2, and he started walking toward the house. It was dark as usual. The vicious dog was waiting, and he made his aggressive move. The next thing I heard was very loud yelping as my dad wacked him very hard. From that day on this dog would bark and growl from the porch, but he never came after me again. Martin Luther said this about the devil:
Why should you fear? Why should you be afraid? Do you not know that the prince of this world has been judged? ... Therefore let the prince of this world look sour, bare his teeth, make a great noise, threaten, and act in an unmannerly way; he can do no more than a bad dog on a chain, which may bark, run here and there, and tear at the chain. But because it is tied, and you avoid it, it cannot bite you. So the devil acts toward every Christian. Therefore everything depends on this that we do not feel secure but continue in the fear of God and in prayer; then the chained dog cannot harm us. (Luther, Sermon on John 16.5-15).
For more on how we resist the devil, see my sermon: "Are God and the Devil Real? How Do We Know Which One We Serve"
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