Lucifer’s Secret Weapon
Claude de Praet spent five long days in prison before he got the chance to know the charges against him. He thought a great deal about his wife and children—who didn’t know whether they would see him alive again.
Finally, on the morning of the sixth day, the jailer opened Claude’s cell and escorted him to the interrogation room. Three judges sat solemnly on high-backed chairs. A clerk waited with pen and paper to take down the prisoner’s statements. The court bailiff began the questioning; he asked Claude his name, where he was born, and where he’d been staying.
And then they proceeded, amazingly enough, to try to find out Claude’s views on a variety of complicated religious issues. They wanted to know about his church affiliation, about the people he fellowshipped with. They were very curious about whether he’d been baptised after being christened as an infant. They wanted to know if he thought Christ was really present in the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper. No word of what we’d consider a crime ever crossed anyone’s lips. No-one asked Claude about a robbery or a mugging or a murder. No-one even accused him of disturbing the peace.
And yet this was a prison, and these were real judges, and this was an accused man trying to fend off execution.
When Claude kept evading questions about others in his church, the bailiff finally asked him grimly, “You do it so as not to bring anyone into trouble?”
Claude answered with these chilling words: “Yes sir, bailiff, for we well know that our blood is much sought.”
The incredible fact is that Claude and his fellow believers faced the death penalty because of their religious opinions. They had the misfortune of being Anabaptists in a time when the established church strongly disapproved of this sect. And those weren’t madmen sitting in the judge’s chairs. They were sober churchmen who thought they were defending the true faith.
This interrogation occurred in the city of Ghent, Belgium, in 1556. It wasn’t unusual; it wasn’t considered a miscarriage of justice. It was part of a long tradition of enforcing the faith, of punishing heretics, tragically, in the Christian church. But how could that happen? How did Christians get it into their heads that burning heretics was a way to serve God?
To understand the long, painful story of religious persecution, you need to understand the long conflict between Christ and Satan.
At the cross, Christ had won a great victory over His antagonist, Lucifer, the fallen angel who became Satan. Jesus showed that God could love and forgive to the uttermost. Satan was exposed as a cruel, destructive being. And furthermore, Christ founded His church, a body of believers that was to go on spreading His love and grace.
Satan seemed to be completely defeated. His way of manipulation and coercion had failed. Christ’s way of making human beings free through the gospel had succeeded. The church was starting to turn the world upside down.
Satan wanted more than anything to destroy that church. The book of Revelation tells us this very clearly. In chapter 12, it pictures Satan as a great dragon or serpent that tries to drown the church in a flood of persecution.
Satan first used the cruelty of several pagan emperors of Rome. Many believers were burned or devoured by lions in the Colosseum. But, as history shows us, the blood of the martyrs served as the seed of the church. Believers kept multiplying.
Then Satan came up with his most diabolical scheme. What if the church itself could become the persecutor of the faithful? It sounds outrageous. The church became very powerful in the Middle Ages. It acquired absolute authority. Church officials came to see themselves as protectors of the truth.
The book of Revelation pictures for us this sad turn of events and the force behind it. In chapter 12, it says: “Now when the dragon saw that he had been cast to the earth, he persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male child” (v 13, NKJV).
The dragon represents Satan, the angel Lucifer, who rebelled against God and was cast out of heaven. The woman represents Christ’s true church—His true believers. And it’s Satan who persecutes them. He’s the one behind the scenes whenever religious authority turns into religious oppression.
This stands out sharply in the interrogation of Claude de Praet. We learn about it in the letters he managed to send out of prison.
One day, two monks came to question him. They asked, “What is your faith?” Claude testified simply: “I believe only in Christ Jesus, that He is the living and true Son of God, and that there is no other salvation either in heaven or on earth.”
That didn’t satisfy the men. They wanted to know what else he believed—especially about the church they called the true apostolic church.
So Claude asked them, “Did the apostles persecute and maintain their church with fire and sword as you do?”
To this they didn’t have a very good answer. That’s because the strongest thing the New Testament says about heretics is to avoid them—a far cry from burning them at the stake.
On another occasion, a scholarly man, known as the Dean of Ronse, came to interrogate Claude. Claude asked him where he got the authority to seek the blood of those whom “no-one could accuse of any crime.”
The Dean managed to point to one passage, Deuteronomy 17:12, which describes those who defied priests in Israel being put to death.
Claude reminded the dean that we are now under the law of grace, not the law of revenge. And he pointed out that Jesus had stated in a parable that we shouldn’t try to pull up the weeds in our midst because we’d end up yanking out a lot of good wheat in the process. To this the dean could only answer that he was wise enough to pull up a few bad weeds without harming the wheat.
But, of course, he wasn’t. Claude and his fellow believers were some of the most loving, most sincere Christians, far ahead of their time in choosing simple devotion to Christ over church tradition. But these people were imprisoned, tortured and burned at the stake. And the established church lit the fire. There’s an evil angel behind such madness. He’s behind the long agony of religious persecution in the Middle Ages. He’s behind the religious intolerance that continues even today.
Claude de Praet, and others like him, did one thing in that prison: He bore witness to his devotion to Christ. He laid out what he believed was the truth and hoped that it would prevail, that it would persuade.
That’s how the church makes progress. It bears witness. People talk about what Christ has done for them. That’s God’s way.
But that’s not Satan’s way. He tries to force people to believe correctly. He tries to coerce people into the right allegiance. This strategy taps into something very deep in human nature: the need to control other people. That’s one of our flaws. We feel compelled to control others to get our own needs met.
It’s not hard to turn someone who needs to control others into a persecutor. People who have to control turn into persecutors when they’re given power and authority. Those judges interrogating Claude, the judges who eventually sentenced him to death, aren’t that different from some of us who have to make someone see the light, who have to impose our beliefs on others.
We may start out on the right side of the battle—but end up on the wrong side in the war.
Satan has been warring against the church for a long time. And tragically, some of his greatest allies have been people sitting in the pews. In the Middle Ages, people with a compulsion to control killed countless believers; they burned thousands who didn’t quite fit into the established church. Sometimes it seemed genuine faith would be wiped out.
Interestingly enough, persecutors have even used that fact against the persecuted. Claude de Praet had to face it in prison. During one of his interrogations, the chief judge told him: “Christ promised His church that He would be with them unto the end of the world. But I can find none among you that can tell me of a longer existence of your church than about 30 years.”
In other words, the judge was asking, If Christ promised to preserve His church from the time He founded it, how can yours be legitimate if it has existed only three decades?
Claude’s answer shows that He had a wider perspective on the body of Christ. He said, “I doubt not that He has been the preserver of His body, and is yet, and will be long as the world will endure, according to His promise . . . although she was sometimes exterminated in some countries, through bloodshed and persecution, . . . she was . . . not annihilated throughout the world; for the world is great, and she could linger in some corner . . . without perishing utterly.”
The fact is, God always managed to preserve a people through the ages. He has always kept the flame of devotion to Christ burning. Sometimes it was Waldenses in the mountains of Southern Europe who kept it going. Sometimes it was Anabaptists in the Netherlands.
God had His champions who wouldn’t be controlled. People like John Huss who lifted up the authority of Scripture in Bohemia. People like John Wycliffe who cried out for church reform in England. And sometimes it was lonely, almost anonymous voices like that of Claude de Praet.
Adapted, with permission, from Angel Wars.
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