And in Proverbs, there’s a single verse that says this: “A wise man scales the city of the mighty and brings down the stronghold in which they trust.” A wise man scales the city of the mighty and he brings down the stronghold in which they trust.

In the passage in Zephaniah, we see a time in which the mighty of the earth will be set down by the wrath of the Lord in the earth. Whatever they’re trusting in will so manifestly be brought to ruin that they will know that the wrath of God is poured out upon them. But until that time, until God’s judgments are in the earth in the form of wrath, what is there to bring down? The things in which the mighty trust. What is there to make them despair of their own strength and turn to the Lord? And there’s nothing in the natural setting of the earth whatever to make them do this. And it’s by no ordinary preaching of the gospel either that this may be done.

And yet the Lord says that it is possible for a wise man to scale the city of the mighty and to bring down the stronghold in which they trust. In the King James version of that same verse, Proverbs 21:22, it says this: “A wise man scales the city of the mighty, and casts down the strength of the confidence thereof.” Casts down the strength of the confidence thereof.

And we see all throughout this land today that there are men who believe still somehow that men by their own means, men by the application of money and by the development of new programs and by organizational whole new forces can put down the evils in our midst. And yet we see the more the millions they pile on, and the more institutions they create, the more times that they form government agencies specifically to go into these things, that the problem doesn’t get any smaller; the problem gets larger and therefore the agency has to go.

If the agency began with a hundred people and $5 million dollars, it has to have up to five years, because the problem under its own administration has gotten so much worse, it has to have 500 people and $50 million. And none of these things, none of the social problems of America, which we’re hearing so much, will yield in any way to the application of any of these forces on any long-term basis. Perhaps on a short-term basis. And yet a wise man in the Lord will scale the city of the mighty and bring down the confidence in which they trust.

The contest between the Lord (the will of the Lord) and the devil (the will of the devil) as it affects men is waged, as I think most of us realize or have some grasp of, largely with words. This began in the very Garden of Eden. When the Lord said a very simple thing into the midst of the people: “There’s a certain fruit that you shall not eat of in any way. You shall leave that alone, because in the day that you eat of that, you should surely die.” And the consciousness of that first person spoken to in this way, the first persons spoken to in this way, were fully penetrated by the truth of the Lord and they were made conscious that they must not partake of that tree.

And then in the same place where came the serpent and he said exactly the opposite thing. He said, “In the day that you shall eat of it, you shall not surely die.” And the consciousness of the people in that garden were then fully informed by the contrary word, the word of Satan saying that you would not die. And they had the choice then of obeying the word of the Lord and having the consequences thereof, which were altogether good, or obeying the word of the devil. But in each case, it was the word that went to them.

And ever since then, all through history, the Lord and the devil have made their contest upon the consciousness of men by words. And in this, it would seem as though the devil has been more able to activate, to thrust forward, to propel forward those who possess his word or his counsel on a thing and to overwhelm the public consciousness in a nation or an area of the world and a society with his counsel. And you look at America today and you say it’s overwhelmed in every way with the counsel of the devil.

You switch the radio on and you will hear everything contrary to the saving truth of the Lord. You will hear encouragements, subtle encouragements to more libertinism. You’ll hear subtle encouragements to more sliding down with the prohibition against marijuana to soften up the nation for a vaster yet takeover of drugs. You find people of the lowest, cheapest kind to mediums who will give out this stuff. And you find people of the highest sort of culture and learning, supposedly very wise men, and they have a very similar word, because behind it all is the devil’s counsel to a generation.

Early in the history of this nation, the books in the schools, such as McGuffey’s Reader would have in them, in the very process of learning, they would have in them the essence of the gospel, the trust in the Lord. And so that young people being brought up in America at that time were subject in the very ordinary course, because so much of the truth of God, it’s the [food] to our society, that they couldn’t escape it even in the school. Praise God.

Satan is aware of the critical importance of the possession and control and especially the mass distribution of his word and his counsel. And Christians in America at this time are failing in any significant way in keeping the circulation of the word of God up in any sense with the circulation of everything else, including all the contrary counsel to it.

And this is because there has been a failure in two respects. One, a failure of vision, a failure to believe that it is possible that Christians to conquer on any level, to rise to any height, to possess as much of the means as necessary for the accomplishment of all this. A setting that we heard this morning of somehow the [lower go], and therefore having faith for no more than that, there can never be a fulfillment of more than that. There can never be a possession of the communications of the nation in a higher level on a vaster and more common, more monthly, more weekly, more daily level.

About two years ago I think it was, a young man became somewhat demon-possessed, possessed in certain areas of his life at the paper. A young Jew, a most energetic, a most intelligent young man. And after a nervous breakdown and other troubles because of his involvement in occultism, he had a crisis one night, and I saw him briefly that night. And he had been driven crazy by the demons that had him, though a year before that, he hadn’t been in any such condition at all. And he was just speaking things out into the air. And he spoke a variety of things, but he hit toward the end of what he was saying, he hit on communications and about the taking over of the newspaper, or failing that, taking over of the telephone company. He was all about communications. It was all disjointed, crazy talk.

And yet he had expressed as he was letting the demons speak through him freely, he went off at the mouth and expressed their sense and their desire to control the communications. Because if you control the communications, you control the word that strikes the consciousness of the public all the time, every single morning, every single afternoon, every single evening. You give them a diet of half at best or of destructive counsel at worst. And as those words continue to pour out and to hit people every day, they have hardly anything they can ever get a hold of that would give them a handle on rising above the dead level of the devil’s desire to keep a society under all kinds of sins.

Now it is not that there is not counsel available in our nation at all against all these things, or even counsel that would penetrate. For that counsel hardly ever gets onto the air, it hardly ever gets mass public circulation. That is, it is contained in corners, somewhere in some auditorium or hall, a man gives out the counsel and wisdom of the Lord. And it’s contained. It may hit the audience there, it may be repeated by some of them. It may go out in some tract form or something like that to a small degree. But it is largely contained. It does not ever strike the whole consciousness of the whole nation or as large a part of that as it is possible for it to strike.

And so as the means of communications are possessed, actually possessed, by those who are in the Lord, they are able to change the diet of words and to counsel. They are able to set down the persons who are advocating witchcraft and indulgence of various kinds and seánces. They are able to set them aside and say, “No entrance here. You don’t have this microphone, you don’t have this printing press.”

On the other hand, they’re able to reach out in various places and to bring forward. And just as Stokely Carmichael was made famous and Rap Brown was made famous for speaking the devil’s counsel into the midst of the body politic in the society at large, so other people can then be raised up and made known, because that person at a certain time gave the following prophecy or gave the following message from the Lord, or the following miracle was done.

We saw last night slides of a moment when the work of the Lord came to the surface above everything else in Caracas, Venezuela, when somehow at an appointed time, with people acting in faith, with Hannah going forth and with the young evangelist going forth, taking the bullring in Caracas, with all kinds of voices in that nation saying this or that or the other thing. And yet at a certain time, the Lord was pleased to lift up those who were not mighty. There were many mighty people down there, there were mighty people in government, mighty people in communications, mighty people in society, mighty people in business and wealth.

And yet at a certain time, the Lord brought up above all the might, above all the establishment, His work and made an open display of His miracle power with the gospel being preached. And it was not possible at that time for a nation or for a city at least to ignore what was going on. And for a while there was a breakthrough in public consciousness. The public knew that a man was preaching the word of God in a bullring, that people were being healed, that there was a testimony for Jesus above all the powers at that time.

Then, many are saved and the thing the event itself precedes. And then is there any continuity, any major mass continuity in that society of the going forth of the truth of the Lord against every lie? Because the truth of the Lord applied at the critical moment to a particular lie can knock that lie out. Some demagogue or some demon-filled person gets up and speaks a lie. It shouldn’t be caught six months later or two years later; it’s too late then, because it has begun to work in people, begun to take them over, begun to persuade them that they should believe that lie. And not only believe that lie, but that they should conform their lives to that lie.

There’s a very common phrase that we’ve all heard as a cliché and because it’s a cliché it doesn’t have much power. And it says this: The pen is mightier than the sword. The reason that’s true is that the pen or the word precedes the sword. The sword is sent forth only after the word of the commander is given to send the sword forth. Therefore the first cause is the word and the second cause is the striking of the sword. This is even true of nuclear power. Which is more powerful: the word as an instrument or nuclear power? Well, nuclear power comes after the word. The word, the conception, the idea, the belief that it could be done, all came before nuclear power was in any way manifested. And it’s still leashed and unleashed, chained and unchained, by the word of men.

The word is the most powerful instrument in the universe. The Bible says, “In the beginning was the Word.” In the beginning was the Word. It says, “By the word of God, the heavens were fashioned long ago.” And all that we see, everything in the universe, all came about because the Word of God brought it into being. Life from the dead comes about because the Word of God speaks even into death—that’s a miracle. We heard someone pray that this morning. I think Larry prayed about it, that the Lord went to the tomb of Lazarus and spoke words into the tomb of death, and life came on that tomb of death. It’s an awesome thing. Only words. The word, the authority of God.

So that as we handle words, we’re handling that that can change the whole scene. Words can change a person’s life. Words changed my life. Words that changed the lives of everyone here in more than one way. First, it brought us out of spiritual death into spiritual life, it changed our lives in that way. And then all the way through, the Lord has directed us and channeled us and checked us by His word.

The nation is entitled. We cannot compel the nation to believe. We cannot compel any person to accept the word of God. The Lord Himself did not compel them in the Garden of Eden to take His word against the word of the serpent. But He gave them His word and they had the full opportunity. And we can never compel our people or the society or our city or anything else to believe God’s word. But we can make sure that God’s word gets out to them in the most regular way.

To do this, we have to begin obviously small. You don’t begin in some major way. But rather you begin in some minor way and you set that wedge out into the midst of communications. And then see how the Lord will enable that initial thing, that first investment of faith for scaling the city of the mighty and raise that up in this generation and enlarge it continually until it is able to minister on a regular basis, periodical basis, monthly or perhaps weekly and eventually I believe daily in various places. The nation’s entitlement is a little less than that now.

The last month or so as I have looked out, occasionally glanced across at Columbia University in the evening at these very windows that we see across the way, I have seen something in the last few months I had never seen before and I have not understood what it was. It’s a square light, highly colored light, and it looks as though there’s a scene in there. I thought, well, perhaps that’s an intensely—there are two or three of them—an intensely lit-up aquarium. Then I thought, no, that’s not an aquarium, it’s a more sure picture than an aquarium would give you from that distance. Well, what is this?

Well, I had no idea. It wasn’t color television, it was too bright it seemed for that, or too steady, I should say. It was too steady, not too bright. It was just one picture pretty much unchanging. I believe I have seen what this is.

This is a magazine that was sent to me in the mail about three months ago called Print Project America. It’s a very handsome, well-printed on costly paper, big magazine. You can see rather large type and quite a few pages to it. And I read to my surprise that this magazine is published by two students from Columbia University and two students from the University of Chicago, who last summer went around the nation and raised $50,000 that they could put this out as an expression of the youth movement, the youth culture, the street people, everything else that you could imagine.

And the theme of this is the communications media. You look here on this page, you see the big word. The theme word of the whole issue is the word video. And about a third or a quarter of the content of this paper is an expression of the ambition of these young people, who have no position in society, nothing but the ambition to get big in video. And they talk about how you can get a little video station in a local neighborhood going. It doesn’t cost a lot. You just get a station that’s able to broadcast in its very own area, perhaps to one building or a dormitory. Perhaps to half a campus, perhaps to a whole campus, perhaps to a neighborhood, depending upon how much power it has.

And in this, I saw pictures that suggested the rather eerie quality of this light that I saw coming over. It leads me to think that perhaps there is some very minor broadcasting on top of pictures over television boxes across the way that someone is doing this. That since this very publication came in front of Columbia, I rather believe that they are doing that.

And they make full of their program. And they say, “The new generation will not tolerate the miniaturized Vaudeville, that radio with a picture, that is television at its presently employed in America. We will not tolerate this.”

Now, they’re looking at CBS and NBC, because those are the ones that put out the miniaturized Vaudeville, as they call it. And they’re saying that we will not tolerate this. And so they take three tools and a microphone and they begin moving progressively in and they set forth their program. I of necessity am going to change the words, because they’re unspeakable. But they say that they will play a tape of young people in intercourse in the outdoors and will alternate that with an interview with Abbie Hoffman about the Chicago Seven trial and will intermix the sound tracks so that President Nixon on another monitor seems to be speaking Abbie Hoffman’s words.

And they go on with all these series of things that they desire, that their own [x], the demons in them desire to bring forth across this nation. To plunge communications into the sub-basement of human indecency. And perhaps the measure of their capacity of their instrument is the fact that they were able to print a magazine such as this and [win] such as that.

And then I think these key words of all: “We will seize.” “We will seize the media.” Now whether they will indeed do this or not remains to be seen. But they have declared their intention. 

And we can say at least this, that what these young people, who are possessed by demons, say they will do, they will at least attempt to do; they will attempt to seize the media. So that puts us on notice to some extent of what the intention of the devil is in our society, unless someone gets there first.

It’s a quite staggering fact, I think, that there has never been a Christian newspaper in America. There was one brief attempt to bring forth one back in 1967. A man of some wealth took over the Sunday School Times, which had been published in Philadelphia for about 80 years. And he with some young editors revamped the format and brought out what they call the Sunday Times, a weekly Christian newspaper; he incorporated the Sunday School Times. And for about a year or a little over a year, this publication attempting to cover the news of the nation from at least a gospel perspective came forth.

I knew a young man working on this paper, he told me how it died. It happened to die about three weeks before the Six Day War. This publication is May 20, 1967. I believe that the Six Day War was in June, early in June of that same year. Well, with this publication coming forth and some things of some quality in it indeed. The man who put this out had counselors around him.

I was told by a man at this newspaper that some of those counselors felt that the money he was putting into this, into communications, was ill-spent. And that he should be taking that very money and putting it into something else that was more their pet project. And they worked on him enough so that he finally came to believe this, and so he sunk this newspaper by cessation of publication apparently two or three weeks before the Six Day War, which would have given a paper like this a tremendous basis for additional circulation and for additional coverage. So strategically it would seem that it was just sunk at that time. That there exists no such thing in America. Not that it was the ultimate attempt or a perfect attempt, but it was at least an attempt and it was sunk and finished. And there has not been an attempt since.

I believe the Lord desires us finally to do nothing less than to scale the city of the mighty in this nation. I believe steps toward this have already been taken, with the foundation as Dan said this morning of Thomas E. Lowe, Ltd. It’s a very small step, not impressive at all to man, obviously impressive to the devil, because he has already intensely attempted to choke it off at the source, to make it less than viable even economically if he could. And it has barely survived these early months, month by month, paying this little bill for box number rent and answering phone rent and sending out a few books. It has survived, and I think we have about $600 more now than we had two or three months ago, this small publishing venture that the Lord I believe will enlarge in amazing ways.

I believe the going forth of The Yale Standard this time, brought forth by the cooperative effort of the Body and by the persistence of the young men at Yale was the beginning of perhaps at first periodical publication with less than a promised regularity. That is, we don’t say, well, every two weeks or every three weeks. What we say is as often as we possibly can if we see the need and have the time to do that. I trust that very soon the revised edition of The Yale Standard will go out, be published and printed and be ready to go out in the places where I can assure you it is right now needed.

I saw in Chicago this week a documentary of the so-called Jesus movement on the West Coast. And it would just make you hold your breath, because you know the Lord has moved there. You know that people who have…they’ve come through to the Lord and they’ve had the experience of salvation. And yet you have no idea of what will enable them to get stability through all the things that have to assail them. Because wherever the work of the Lord is, especially a supernatural work of the Lord, there or very close by or, if possible, in the midst, there is a supernatural work against it of the enemy. And there needs to go into this midst not another psychedelic newspaper. There are plenty of these around now. They have the psychedelic newspapers that are published by the psychedelic crowd. And then we have the psychedelic newspapers that are printed by the Christian crowd. And we don’t need to thrust into that another psychedelic newspaper.

But we need to thrust into that the Word of the Lord, printed with a clarity of format, that will make it easy to read. The Lord commissions us to do this when He says, when Paul said, “I speak to the public consciousness wherever I am words easy to be understood.” Paul didn’t ever try in proclaiming the gospel to fancy it up with anything current, to fancy it up with any kind of ornamentation of the present fad. It’s always thought, well, if you do that, then you will get an access to people you’d never get before. Well, maybe so many [nod], that’s quite beside the point. The word of God does not need to be fancied, ornamented, or to be conformed to any present trend in society whatever. It needs to be spoken through clarity and purity and relevance—that is the right word at the right time, into the midst of every situation.

The youth situation on colleges, praise God if there will be a paper next year, that is, if that is the Lord’s will, for next fall at Harvard. If there should be at some time a paper that could circulate, an Ivy Standard paper or an Ivy League paper or even a collegiate paper that would circulate widely.

And then stepping up from there as the Lord gives us the opportunity beyond that into periodical publication. Not only periodicals that we would have to subsidize—we will put those out, I believe—but also periodicals and books that will earn a return, which return can be used not for yachts, not for a place with three swimming pools and for bartenders to wait on weekends, that’s how the people who run these media take what they have by and large and invest it. But rather taking it as the Lord Himself enlarges us, taking that profit, that excess, and putting it right back into the subsidized going forth of His Word, things that will not pay themselves to put out.

Reprints of books perhaps. Frank has mentioned a number of times the desire to put out a reprint of Jessie Penn-Lewis’s whole, the whole text of War On the Saints, the unabridged text. Many other such projects. So that before any of us have finished the course of our warfare, we can say at the least this, we have been as ambitious for the Lord as the two young men across the street have been ambitious for the one who is being led around by the nose.