Book Corner
Satan: His Person, Work, Place, and Destiny. By F. C. Jennings, Neptune, N. J.: Loiseaux Bros., 1975. 254 pp. Paper, $2.50.
Back in 1951, in a classroom at Dallas Theological Seminary, Dr. Lewis Sperry Chafer told us that had he known F. C. Jennings had written a book on Satan, he would not have written his on Satan. He also shared the fact that, up to that time, he knew of more people who had come to know Christ through reading his book on Satan than through any of his other published works. Surely, we are both glad and grateful that both these men of God were led to write on this important theme.
First published over fifty years ago by Our Hope, F. C. Jenning’s book on Satan is still very much up-to-date in this present time of Satanism and Satan worship. Combining sound Biblical exposition and thoroughness, the author divided his study into three main parts:
1. Satan — the Person
2. The Devil’s Work amongst Men
3. Satan’s Place and Destiny
Writing at the beginning of Part 3 on the subject, “In the Heavenlies,” Jennings made these interesting and instructive comments:
The holy convocations in Israel, when the Lord’s people were gathered around Him, seem to have had their counterparts in the heavenlies, when these ministers of His that do His pleasure’ were assembled, as ‘Sons’ who had been about their Father’s business in the various fields of His universe, to give account of their ministries.
This would suggest, at least, other worlds than ours as affording scope for such angelic ministries or governments; and this suggestion would be further confirmed by, and would harmonize with, the plain fact in Scripture that the term ‘Host of Heaven’ is applied to both those starry worlds we see on high, as in Deuteronomy 4:19, etc., and to the unseen spiritual angels (1 Kings 22:19), as if there was a close identification between them.
Further, and it is well worthy of consideration, the stars are not, strange as it may appear, all stars of light, though they seem so to us. Comparatively recently heavenly bodies have been discovered that can only be appropriately described as Stars of darkness, paradoxical as it may sound. It appears that there is one star, Argol, that gave astronomers a great deal of perplexity, for they could not account for the phenomenon which it displayed. It would, at regular intervals, gradually decrease from a star, say of the first magnitude, to about the apparent size and brilliancy of one of the fourth; and then, like one of those revolving lights along our coasts, it would regain its former brilliancy, Astronomers could not account for it, until at length, by the intense delicacy of modern photography, they discovered that a dark mass — a mass always dark — passed at regular intervals before the bright one; and partially obscured it; and was, in fact, a dark star. How perfectly, then, if sorrowfully, do those heavens now picture the unseen heavens, since they, too, contain not only spirits, or angels of light, but also spirits or angels of darkness; and how suggestive of unseens verities is this term Host of Heaven — for thus, by the visible creation would God teach us as to things unseen (pp. 174-75.)
This extended quotation is a good example of the in-depth thought and study which the author has given to his subject, his book having earned a prime place among all the books which have been written in the field of angelology.
— W. R. R.