Preached on Sunday, April 22, 2018
Scripture readings: Genesis
3:1-15; Revelations 12:1-12; John 8:31-59
The first time I remember
almost stepping on a snake in the wild was when I was about ten years old. My
family was on vacation and we were staying in a campground at Lake Shasta.
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| Walking near the Columbia River, Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA March 2018 |
I was just coming out of
the restroom, and there was a little gully that I had walked through, from our
camp, to get there. I took the same path to get back to our camp.
Something near my feet
caught my eye. It made me jump. A rattlesnake lay stretched out in that gully,
and I realized that it must have been there when I came that way in the first
place. I had almost stepped on that snake twice.
Since then, I’m sure I
have almost stepped on a snake at least once every year. I know it was three or
four times just last summer. Of course, they weren’t all rattlesnakes. So, by
my guesstimate; I may have almost stepped on about 120 snakes in my adult
lifetime. That tells me, all in all, that I must be pretty lucky when it comes
to snakes.
There’s
one mean serpent, though, that I haven’t been so lucky with. That serpent has
been around for a long, long time. It’s about as old as the creation. It’s one
of those snakes that never stops growing as long as it lives. It’s been around
so long that it’s even grown extra heads. It’s even grown horns.
The Book of Revelation
gives us a pretty good snapshot of this serpent. “Then another sign appeared in
heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns
on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them
to the earth.” (Revelation 12:3-4)
If you wonder what the
numbers mean (the seven heads, and ten horns, and all that), It means that it’s
got plenty. It means that the dragon has more than enough fight in him and more
than enough brains in him to do a lot of harm, if he can.
Sometimes, in the Book of
Revelation, and a few other places in the Bible, Jesus is a Lamb: The Lamb of
God, wounded, bleeding, the perfect sacrifice for all the sins of the world.
Sometimes, in the Book of Revelation, Satan (the Devil) is a reptile: snake,
serpent, dragon.
This doesn’t mean that the
Devil really has become a reptile or that the Devil has horns or anything else
that pictures show. In the same way, Jesus isn’t really a lamb. He doesn’t have
wool or hooves. But if you had a special dream, or some such thing, with a
reptile or a lamb in it, the stories of the Bible could give you a clue about
what they are, or what they mean.
Why was Eve talking to a
serpent in the Garden of Eden? The
common answer is that Satan took over the body of a living snake in order for
Eve to see and talk to something that didn’t scare her. No creature would be scary
in those days and in that place, where God’s harmony and peace protected
everything and everyone from each other.
Why did the Lord punish
the innocent snakes for something the Devil did by forcing them to crawl on
their bellies? I think the snakes already crawled on their bellies. It was no
punishment for them. But that fowl spirit, Satan, and his team, were humiliated
in some way that we cannot imagine. Some power or some dignity, or else the
ability to deceive themselves about what their own sins had done to them, was
taken from them, and they would never get that back. And Satan would never be
able to destroy his own future destroyer.
In all three of the
scriptures we have read, we meet some of the same results. First (in God’s prophecy
in the garden), we are told of the world as it has become. Next (in the
gospel), we meet the same current world as it is resisting the love and peace
and freedom of God. In Revelation, we meet the invisible spiritual warfare that
goes on in this world, where Jesus has died and risen from the dead, and yet where
the Kingdom of God hasn’t been fully installed yet.
In each of these scenes,
we meet the snakebite of the world. We meet the Devil and the power of sin as
conflict, as deceit, as poison, as the use of ourselves against ourselves. We
meet the reason why so many people hate snakes.
Until the final judging
and healing come, in a new heaven and earth (heaven and universe), there will
be war. That war will be spiritual. The war will also be physical: flesh and
blood, and weapons, and killing. In between the war of the spirit and the war
of bombs and bullets, we have our own potential for war on the personal
level. This war will be bad attitudes,
broken relationships, pride, blame, guilt, resistance, invasion, abuse.
We see and feel this every
day. We are all part of it.
It’s poison, it’s
sickness, it’s human will, and choices, and habits. It’s lurking there like a
snake, so well disguised, so easy to step on, or to step into.
Genesis and Revelation
have so much in common. God provides a garden of grace and healing at the
beginning of the world and, in the end, when the long war is over, we will all
come home to a garden of grace and healing provided by God.
The main difference
between the gardens is that the Tree of Life in the first garden will be
replaced in the eternal garden by the Tree of Life that is the Cross, and the
fruit and the healing leaves will be Jesus, and all the nations (and all of us)
will come home to the garden and walk with him, and talk with him, and never
need to hide, and never need to ever be afraid again.
All of the conflict and
poison of this world, as we see it in the Bible, comes from one sin. It’s been
said to be a kind of pride, but it’s also a deep desire for something we don’t
have. It comes from a decision to disapprove of what God has made us to be.
We want to redraw God’s
design of us in a way that gives us more of an advantage. We want control. We
want to be Gods. Eve and Adam wanted to be wise, but this was no trick of the
Devil.
The Devil knew that they
loved and worshiped what they saw in God, when God walked with them, and when
they were tending the garden designed for them. They were created to begin a
family of the human sons and daughters of God, but they could be drawn in to a
temptation to take it for themselves, without partnership with God. They could
just eat the fruit that would give them the knowledge of everything.
They would know the pros
and cons of everything. They would know that if you did “A” and “B”, you would
get “C”. The value on the other side of the equations wouldn’t be “X”. It
wouldn’t be unknown. They wanted to be Gods not by being created in God’s
image, but by self-creation and self-design.
The Devil himself had
started his devilry with the same motives. That’s what the war in heaven is
about. The Devil is in an agony of envy, to become God of a creation of his own
making, even if it means creating a dead and poisoned and starving and hating
creation.
The poet Milton was wise
when he put these words into the Devil’s mouth: “Better to reign in Hell than
serve in Heaven.” That is the philosophy and motivation of the Devil and his
kingdom.
This is not so far from
us. Jesus called a crowd of people who were believers (people who had chosen to
follow Jesus and listen to him) . . . Jesus called them “children of the
Devil.” (John 8:44)
They were still ready to
turn on Jesus if he disappointed them.
It didn’t take much. Jesus
poked at them a couple times and the truth came out. They wanted to create a
kingdom of themselves in their own image, and Jesus wouldn’t play along. He
never does.
We all see this in the
end. Following Jesus, “we die daily.” (1 Corinthians 15:31) We die to ourselves
to be recreated in Christ’s image. That is what the kingdom of God is for.
How do we beat this? How
do we beat the Devil himself?
We do this by prayer:
prayer without ceasing. We do this by knowing and understanding the Bible:
learning from our heart the mind of God through the word of God.
We beat this by
internalizing a reality of Jesus that we call “the full armor of God.” We find
this armor spelled out in Ephesians 6:10-18.
Something more is hiding
in our reading of the Book of Revelation. There is a song of victory. Someone
is singing about the victory of God’s people over the Devil, and how they did
it: “They overcame him by the Blood of the Lamb and by the word of their
testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.”
(Revelation 12:11)
Let’s take the last phrase
first: “They did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.”
We give our greatest gifts
when we give the fullness of our own lives. Soldiers do this. Husbands and
wives in mutual devotion and thankfulness do this. Parents do this for their
children. Sometimes we do this for our brothers and sisters in Christ. We do
this for Jesus.
When Adam and Eve tried to
hide from God, they lost themselves by trying to save themselves. The step they
took, in which they ate the forbidden fruit, led to the next step of self-preservation
to rob God of the gift that he had given to them: the gift of his creation and
his love.
They robbed God of his
created family, because they (along with all of us) were to be God’s family in
flesh and blood. The fear of losing what we want to claim for ourselves is a
kind of fear of death that can never stand up to the Devil.
Our defense against the
dark arts is to love others more than we love ourselves. Our defense is
ultimately to love God more than ourselves. We are not afraid to die to
ourselves. Fear of anything less is defeat.
For the soldiers of Jesus,
the second defense against the Devil is “the word of their testimony”. Another
way Revelation phrases this is to call it, “the testimony of Jesus.”
(Revelation 12:17) There is a very strange use of the same phrase later on: “The
testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” (Revelation 19:10)
It’s a phrase that means
two or three different things at the same time. It a sword that cuts both ways.
The word of their testimony and the testimony of Jesus is what you say to
others about Jesus. It’s also what Jesus says to you. It’s also what the
scriptures tell you about Jesus. It’s also the over-arching story of what the
gospel (the story of the good news of Jesus) tells you.
Our weapon against the
dark arts is to know what Jesus has done for you and what he is still doing for
you: to know it, and to share it with others, and to talk to Jesus about it in
prayer and thanks.
This weapon against the
dark arts is what the Word of God tells us, but it must do more than this.
The Word of God must feed
you Jesus. The Word of God must be Jesus knocking on the door of your heart.
The Word of God must be a picture of a baby in Bethlehem, and a man teaching
and healing others in the desert. The Word of God must be a picture of that same
man nailed to the cross, dying for you, and rising from the dead in order to
raise you up and to give you life.
Here, again, beating the
Devil requires you to make your life into something about more than yourself.
Your life is for others. Your life is for the Lord.
The third weapon against
the Devil is “the blood of the Lamb.” Again, you have the victory if your life
is not about you, but truly a gift designed and shaped by the bloody hands of
the one who died for you and for the whole world.
Here is what Jesus means
when he started poking at the ones who thought they believed him when they
didn’t really believe at all. “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my
disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
(John 8:31-32)
The freedom of reigning in
Hell instead of serving in heaven is no freedom at all, in the end. Jesus died
in order to give birth to us as sons and daughters of the Living God, and to be
brothers and sisters to each other, all around the world. Lesser loves bring
the venom of conflict and separation. Freedom is love in Jesus, and in his
family.
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