The Disciplines of the Father

Readings

Rev 12:1-17     [] = unspoken in address   *= used in presentation

5. Jesus’ Enemies  https://youtu.be/pc8bIq8PWFc

Introduction

When first planning this series, I thought it would be natural after a session on the disciples as Jesus’ friends to do a teaching on his natural opponents, especially the scribes and Pharisees. Praying further into this, I decided this would have been a mistake, and in a series on the human trials of God the Son, I have been reoriented tonight to speak about Satan. He is the primary opponent of God’s plan for his glory to come to humanity in Christ. Hence tonight’s reading from Revelation of what John was enabled see “in the Spirit” when he was taken up into heaven (Rev 1:10; 4:1-2). Likewise, Paul reminds the Ephesian Christians, many of whom were once occult practitioners[1], “Put on the whole armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. 12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood (like politicians or “woke” people), but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Eph 6:11-12). In discussing the work of the devil[2], we must speak with sensitivity and wisdom. Whilst affirming Luther’s testimony that “Even the devil is God’s devil.” (Luther) and believing his actions fall within the wisdom of God as our Father*[3], speaking about the demonic world requires, not great fear[4], but vast wisdom[5]. C.S. Lewis famously said, “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils ( i.e. demons). One is to disbelieve in their existence[6]. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”[7] Testifying that the whole creation exists for the glory of God revealed in Christ[8] we need to look beyond all satanically induced pain, struggle and temptation to Jesus and his death-and-resurrection as the final wisdom of God as to why a diabolical universe is held together by his Word (Heb 1:3) [9][10]

The Birth of Jesus

Tonight’s reading from Revelation pictures the devil desiring to devour Jesus at the moment of his birth (Rev 12:4). Whilst there is no mention of this satanic action in the Gospel accounts they record that soon after “an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” (Matt 2:13). After this we read, “Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men.” (Matt 2:16-17). Behind Herod’s “fury” we can see the “great wrath” of Satan (Rev 12:12) at the birth of the Saviour[11]. The slaughter of the infants and the flight to Egypt would have been a story Jesus knew from childhood, for without continued divine assistance, his life was always in mortal danger. As someone said, “We must always bear in mind the purpose of God, in training his Son, from the commencement, under the discipline of the cross, because this was the way in which he was to redeem his Church.” (Bayly)[12] From infancy Jesus was absolutely dependent on his Father’s ability to get him to the crisis of the cross[13].

The Temptations in the Wilderness

The adult phase of Jesus’ trials is easier to understand. Whilst God called Israel his “firstborn son” in calling them out of Egypt[14] via the Red Sea, Jesus as the nation’s “leader and saviour” (Acts 5:31) must go through the saving waters of baptism (Luke 3:21-22 etc,1 Pet 3:21), symbolising his own coming death-and-resurrection (Rom 6:1-6), then be led into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil (Matt 4:1)[15]. On the threshold of the land of promise God had once reminded Israel, “remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. 3 And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut 8:2-3). Israel’s history shows that humility was not embodied in her heart for she repeatedly refused the prophetic Word. Jesus however was the embodiment of humility*[16], “the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.” (John 5:19)[17]. Whilst the devil threw all he had at Christ in the wilderness, he refused to fail, both like Adam on the verge of moving into the world, and like Israel on her way to the Promised Land. The faithful Son of God[18] refuses the lures of Satan to become an all-conquering Messiah apart from sacrificial death and emerges from the wilderness in the power of submission which will take him on to victory through suffering[19].

Even though he was starving (Matt 4:2) in this testing there is not the slightest evidence that Jesus was inwardly tempted to sin[20] in the wilderness. His later words to the disciples when he was wearied with hunger and thirst in Samaria explains why, ““I have food to eat that you do not know about….My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.” (John 4:31-32, 34). No matter how strong his hunger pains, until the trial of cross, Jesus never felt emptied of the presence of his Father[21]. The ever-growing presence of the Father was the source of all the victories of the Son in mortal flesh! Our problem with sin in the Church today is that it is filled with people who have never been instructed how to feed on the Word of the Lord*[22]. When I started to go to Church 50 years ago everyone walked in with a big black Bible in their hands. Converted through reading the scriptures, it was hardly surprising that in my earliest days of faith I summarised the whole Bible by hand, recorded various important passages on a tape cassette, made a file card system of key scriptures and so on. A Church that is not full of the living Word can never resist “the schemes of the devil” (Eph 6:11).

C.S. Lewis makes an important point about the value of a tempted life, “bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means[ — the only complete realist.]”

The Scribes and Pharisees

Jesus refused to be distracted by the scribes and Pharisees in endless debates over the application of the Law. In his conversation with Nicodemus about being “born again”, he spoke out with passion, “Are you the teacher of Israel [the preeminent authority amongst the teachers of the time whose shameful ignorance of spiritual things is now exposed[23]] and yet you do not understand these things? [11 Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. 12 If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?] the problem with the Pharisees wasn’t their logic, they knew the Bible by heart, but, as Jesus puts it “my word finds no place in you.” (John 8:37)[24]. Jesus operated in the power of the Spirit from a heavenly sphere[25] completely inaccessible to natural/fleshly humanity, so the fallen powers from this sphere were his most dangerous opponents.

After provoking the Pharisees by healing on the Sabbath and testifying about God as his own “Father”, to the point where they were regularly plotting to kill him, (John 5:18), Christ exposed the underlying issue. “Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word*[26]. 44 You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” (John 8:44).  These antagonistic legalists were the people described by Jesus in his parable of the sower/soils, which is the (hermeneutic) key to all the parables, “When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart. This is what was sown along the path.” (Matt 13:19). Totally persuaded about the rightness of their own interpretation of scripture they were blind to the words and works of Jesus as compelling evidence that he was Lord of all (Acts 10:36; Rom 10:9). Incited by the very spirit they said possessed Jesus[27], they had committed “the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit” and their eternal fate was certain[28]. Blinded by the devil, they had no natural hope of enlightenment[29]. That’s the spiritual darkness of the upper echelon of Jewish religious society, but how was the devil working amongst the ordinary people?

The Demoniacs

Jesus sometimes encountered a person in a synagogue with an unclean spirit, who “cried out, 24 “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God.” (Mark 1:23-24). These episodes (cf. Mark 1:34; Matt 8:29; Acts 8:7; 16:17) are not insights into the clairvoyant ability of demonised people, but the actions of stubborn, proud, resistant unclean beings trying to reduce Jesus to helplessness by their supernatural knowledge of his name, hometown, calling and title[30]. In exercising immediate authority over these powers Jesus’ distinguished himself from the exorcists of his day in their lengthy elaborate stylised rituals of deliverance. His fame spread far and wide, not only as a teacher, but as someone with power over the demonic domain (Mark 1:27). These encounters with spirits were for the Lord encounters with a realm that was totally repulsive, abominable and sickening to his holy life[31]. Fascination with the dark supernatural world is a deception.

The Lord saw the work of the devil in people in ways that exhibited complete discernment; after healing a woman bent over with a physical disability, he declares “And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?”” (Luke 13:16). This isn’t so much a comment on the interconnection between the medical and spiritual worlds, but an insight that Jesus saw everything broken as a sign of a cosmological (universal) disorder[32]. [The revelation that the universe is broken puts the current crisis about global warming into a perspective from which God’s priorities can be properly discerned.] Jesus recognised that no amount of teaching, mighty works or deliverances could never break the cosmic power of Satan in this “present evil age” (Eph 6:12; Gal 1:4 cf. Eph 2:2; 1 John 5:19).

The Cross[33]

As Jesus drew near to the end his soul was so overwhelmed with distress*[34] that he needed to hear the audible voice of the Father encouraging him, ““I have glorified it (my name), and I will glorify it again.”” (John 12:27-28). The voice of God drew out of his Son a deep and profound testimony, “Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world[35] be cast out. 32 And I, when I am lifted up from the earth[36], will draw all people to myself.” (John 12:31-32). The devil will be exorcised from this fallen order by Jesus being lifted up on the cross into the glory[37] of the Father through his limitless self-abasement[38]. Only when Jesus is stripped of the visible and tangible glory of being the only Son of the Father so that he loudly cries out, “My God…why have you forsaken me?”  (Mark 15:34), only when Christ “descends into hell” (Apostles Creed)[39] can the grip of Satan on fallen humans through guilt and shame be absolutely broken. Only by this climaxing of his despising of the cross’s shame (Phil 2:7; Rom 8:3; Heb 12:2), only by the God-man being handed over into limitless self-sacrificing lowliness, can the Person of the Redeemer be brought into a sphere where no room is left “in him” for any sort of satanic influence[40]. As Jesus prophesied, “The rule of this world is coming, but he has nothing in me.” (John 14:30). Through his completed temptations and through physical afflictions Jesus now occupies a vicarious-substitutionary position on behalf of a fallen universe that is the precise opposite of the satanic-anti Christ claim to be “like God” (Gen 3:5; Isa 14:14; Ezek 28:2; 2 Thess 2:4). Jesus has emptied hell in himself, so that all who receive him as Lord can share in his universal triumph, forever.

Conclusion and Application

We live in an age dominated by fear, whether it is the viral social anxiety amongst a younger generation through fear of public shaming (via Facebook etc.), or the fear generated by cost of living rises amongst the middle class…through to the fear of dying amongst the elderly, “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.” (1 John 5:19 cf. Rev 12:9; 16:14). There are no special terms for “fear in the Bible which would help us distinguish between the fear generated by the devil and the fear created by the Holy Spirit (Acts 9:31). The iron grip of Satan on the human conscience can only be broken[41] by a revelation that the decision of Jesus in Gethsemane[42] was to accept from his Abba Father (Mark 14:36) that the will of God be done in submitting to the will of Satan in handing him over to the death and destruction of crucifixion. (In this God and Satan agree!) This absolute resignation to death is Jesus’ “despising” the public shame of crucifixion and it is the faith that overcomes the world (Heb 12:2; 1 John 5:4). Such absolute trust in God casts Satan out of God’s new creation once and for all (John 12:31).  Hence Paul’s bold exclamation, “But far be it from me to boast/glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Gal 6:14).

Only a church that accepts the radical indispensability of the devil for her perfection will join in the great triumphant heavenly cry, “the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. 11 And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death” (Rev 12:10-11). As the people of God lay aside their pretensions to significance in themselves[43] the devil is cast down again and again*[44]. This solemn divine promise (James 4:10; 1 Pet 4:6), realised in us as we willingly embrace more and more of the purposes of the Father in disciplining our lives, no matter how painful this might be[45]

Usually, I am happy for the musicians to choose the songs as they feel led, but tonight I have asked them to conclude with Luther’s famous “A Mighty Fortress is our God”[46], because his emphasis on the conflict between the Christian and the devil comes from a time when to follow Jesus meant putting your life in danger. The demonology of the hymn seems archaic and  medieval, but it is much closer to the Bible[47] than we are.