The Battle Primeval - Our Captain in the Wars

Preached on Sunday, September 23, 2018

Scripture readings: Isaiah 53:1-12; Romans 8:28-39; Luke 10:1-9, 17-20

We Christians often think that the term “spiritual warfare” applies to Christians being attacked by invisible, evil, spiritual forces, for purposes of defeating us. We are told to fear their power to demoralize, or tamper with, or pollute our faith and our safety.

Tall Timber Ranch
(Presbyterian Church USA camp and conference grounds)
Above Leavenworth, WA
September 2018

When we want our lives to be in harmony with the love of Jesus (and of everyone else who loves us) we may find ourselves in a hard place. We meet a strange and troubling disruption or resistance, or a powerful attraction that pulls us and pushes us in directions that will harm our own lives, and disappoint those who trust us and love us. We feel pushed or pulled in directions that may hurt them, even if no one ever found out about it.

There is this strong tug or push in the wrong direction that we call temptation. We might very well think of temptation as a spiritual attack upon our integrity as a friend of Jesus. This is only a part of our spiritual warfare.

Even worse than that, we may actually want to go along with the push and pull of temptation. To our shame, our desire is there.

Not only are we defeated, but the face of Jesus in our souls gets mutilated in a terrible way that makes us look very different from Jesus. With this mutilated face of Jesus, we may say or do something that causes Christians, or potential Christians to be spiritually injured. We can become part of Satan’s spiritual attack on someone else.

This must be true because the Christians most aware of spiritual warfare sometimes feel that the behavior of others is a part of a Satanic ambush against them. So, if others can do it to us, we can do it to them. We might hold a spiritual sword in our spiritual hand that isn’t the word of God at all, but a word from hell. This is part of our spiritual warfare.

Paul was very aware of this side of spiritual warfare. He had found that unforgiveness within the church, and between Christians, was part of Satan’s spiritual warfare against us. Paul writes: “Anyone you forgive, I also forgive. And what I have forgiven—if there was anything to forgive—I have forgiven in the sight of Christ for your sake, in order that Satan might not outwit us. For we are not unaware of his schemes.” (2 Corinthians 2:10-11)

Paul brought this problem of unforgiveness to Christ, because it is one of our battles in the spiritual warfare, and Jesus is the captain of our spiritual warfare. Jesus wants to see forgiveness go forward because he wants to see Christians go forward. Jesus wants Christians to go forward because his kingdom is made of Christians. And, back to the beginning again, Jesus wants his kingdom to go forward because his kingdom is about the power of forgiveness. Jesus and his kingdom are all about the healing and eradication of all sin and evil. Forgiveness is one solid step in this direction. It’s one of his weapons in our spiritual warfare.

Jesus is fighting a war against the world-as-it-is, in order to replace it with the world as he had created it to be. The truth is that we, as Jesus’ friends, are captives in his victory parade just as much as we are his fellow soldiers. Our story is that we were enemy soldiers who let ourselves be caught by Jesus.

The world-as-it-is has turned God’s children into slaves on sin-drugs, and so Jesus has had to fight us and defeat us. Being caught by Jesus has really saved us from the other side, and has put us in training, and in rehab, so that we can serve as his soldiers in a war to set the rest of creation and all its people free.

Satan and the mind-altered forces of evil hate the kingdom of Jesus and his Father and the Holy Spirit. They hate faith, because they rule by betrayal. They hate hope, because they are bullies who thrive by enslaving us. They hate love because they want to receive everything, and consume everything, and take, and take, and not give back.

For Jesus, and for us, spiritual warfare means fighting all of that, on and on, until the battle is done and all is set to right again. All the attacks of the dark side are only counterattacks against the spiritual warfare being waged by Jesus and those of us who are in his army.

When Jesus was tempted by Satan in the desert, it was Satan who offered the world-as-it-is to Jesus, if only Jesus would change sides, and kneel and acknowledge Satan’s rule over him. It was the only straw he could grasp at (and he also liked it because it made him look big, which is what the Devil is all about) and because he suspected that Jesus was a dangerous invader, and Satan was right, there. Jesus had come to invade and liberate a world that Satan had defeated and claimed as his own.

He’s the father of lies and he can’t help himself. He wants us to react to him as if he were our greatest fear. The truth is that we are his greatest fear: well, us and Jesus together.

His war on us is a continuous counter-attack based on his own desperation and fear, because our invasion is progressing on many battle fronts. Each one of our three readings from the Bible, this morning, is directed to a separate campaign in our invasion with Jesus.

In the Gospel of Luke (10:1-24) Jesus sent seventy of his disciples out on a mission to demonstrate that “the kingdom of God” (“the rule and authority of God”) was coming, invading, conquering. In the little farming and fishing towns the disciples gave a new lease on life to those in the deepest need. They reversed all the bad stuff they found in those towns. They reversed sickness into health. They reversed handicaps into new muscles, nerves, bones, and cartilage. They reversed blindness and deafness into seeing eyes and hearing ears. They also reversed the domination and oppression of people by devils. They reversed that evil into freedom, and victory, and safety, and hope, and the power from God to live their own lives in fullness. They replaced weakness with strength.

Outside of the kingdom and the authority of God there is no life lived to the full, there is only weakness, and struggle, and worry.

Sometimes amazing things can be done and enjoyed in spite of this. (Great goodness lingers in God’s creation.) But the freedom that comes from God making all things right, and in harmony with him, are what life is all about.

Outside of God all things come to an end eventually. All things share in a kind of death.

Only in God is there eternal life, eternal joy, eternal love. Only in God can we truly and forever thrive. That is one point of invasion where we are sent to fight under the command of Jesus. The invasion of spiritual healing. Under Jesus, ordinary people invaded these towns and Satan fell with a flash.

I want to read something old. Here are words from a commentary written by Ephrem the Syrian in the fourth century. Here it is: “I was looking at Satan, who fell like lightening from the heavens.” It was not that he was actually in the heavens…. but he fell from his greatness and his dominion. “I was looking at Satan, who fell like lightening from the heavens.” He did not fall from heaven, because lightening does not fall from heaven, since the clouds create it. Why then did he say “from the heavens”? This was because it was as though it was from the heavens, as if lightening, which falls suddenly. In one second, Satan fell beneath the victory of the cross. Ordinary people were anointed and sent out by reason of their mission and were highly successful in a second, through miracles of healing those in pain, sickness and evil spirits. It was affirmed that Satan suddenly fell from his dominion, like lightening from the clouds. Just as lightening goes out and does not return to its place, so too did Satan fall and did not again have control over his dominion. [Jesus said]: “Behold I am giving you dominion [to tread upon snakes and scorpions.]” (Commentary on Tatian’s Diatessaron10.13)

Serving under Jesus, we are invading the dominion of everything that robs the world of life. We are sent on a mission to bring the power of Jesus in healing, and in love, and in faith to the sick, and to those in pain, and to those in the grip of sin or the grip of the devil.

There are many kinds of sickness, pain, and deadly grips; physical, mental, moral, emotional, spiritual. You can lay hands of prayer upon them. Lay hands of your love, hands of your life touching their lives, hands of your time touching their time.

In the spiritual warfare of Jesus, life invades the darkness. The kingdom of God is the kingdom of life, and we are sent to fight for everyone whose life is stifled and controlled and hurt by the evil of this world. Even before Jesus was crucified, his cross reached backward through time to give his friends power to be life-givers to the world. His cross reached forward through time to fight with us, now, to bring the good news of life, and the fullness of life, to the world, now.

In Paul’s Letter to the Romans we find another point in Jesus’ invasion where he fights for us and by our side. Here, we invade the future and hope. “in all things God works for good,” Paul writes.

John writes the same thing in other words, in his first letter: “Beloved we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.” (John 3:2-3)

To hope in Jesus is not to have Jesus as a goal somewhere up ahead. In ancient Greek, the parts of speech that we call “prepositions” (words like in, on, of, from, and so on) are not abstract.

To hope “in” someone is to have your personal hope located inside that person. To hope “on” someone, is to be like having your hope riding piggy-back on someone’s shoulders.

Essentially our hope (according to the Biblical way of thinking) is riding piggy-back on Jesus, or inside of Jesus, some way or another. It’s not an idea: it’s real. Ancient Greek works this way.

In Romans, Paul lays down a challenge that is also a promise: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” (8:35) We are attached to Jesus: nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (8:39) “In all things God works for the good of those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the first-born of many brothers and sisters. And those he predestined he also called; those he called he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.” (8:28-30)

Once, before the beginning of time, we were all only a gleam in God’s eyes. Forever in the new heavens and the new earth we’ll all be the apple of God’s eye. God fights for our future and our hope.

Our experiences of spiritual warfare, when we’re under attack from the Enemy’s side, make us doubt our future or the future of others, because the Enemy is a liar, and the father of lies. He wants to create doubt, and worry, and fear to stifle our faith and our trust in the ability of Jesus to love anyone to the end, and through the end of time to all eternity.

We can only have doubt, and worry, and fear if we forget the faithfulness of God. God holds our future in faithfulness. We can see what this faithful grip on the future looks like when we look at Jesus.

What God does in Jesus is guarantee our future and our hope. He does this by becoming human and taking our life into himself, and by dying for our sins and in order to defeat the spoilers of life within us. He guarantees our hope and future by rising from the dead to give us heaven and resurrection.

This is a front in his invasion of the world-as-it-is. With Jesus as our captain, since he has already invaded us to give us hope and a future, it’s our calling to fight with him for the world he loves. We take our fight to where someone has no hope. We see our fight where people seem to lack a future, and we fight for them on the side of Jesus. How do you give another person hope? How can you give them a future? Pray to find the way.

The mentoring ministry we are trying to start in our school district is just one way. You may see a completely different calling that no one else, here, can see yet, but it’s a ministry to give hope and a future. All of that comes from the fight of Jesus for us on his cross and in the tomb.

There are all different kinds of loss of hope and future in all areas of life. Wherever you see this, that may be your calling and maybe your calling includes calling others to help you. Prayer is part of God’s armor in this warfare, and we are supposed to use it.

Back in the book of the prophet Isaiah, in chapter fifty-three, there is this wonderful chapter about the servant of the Lord, who is also the arm of the Lord. This doesn’t mean that God has arms. The same way that the law doesn’t have arms but some people get caught by the long arm of the law.

God’s arm is God’s power. God’s power is the servant who “was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.” (53:5)

God, in Jesus, is the captain and the fighting arm of God in our battles against our own sins, and he has won. He has conquered us first by dying. Then he goes further. Our captain, both dies and lives again. In Jesus, God battles our sins by both dying and by living again. He rises again: “Though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days.... After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light of life and be satisfied.” (53:10-11)

Sin and evil are conquered by death and resurrection. That is the point where the invasion of Jesus makes landfall. Captain Jesus has already armed himself for this battle. He has died and risen from the dead. We are his soldiers and we must be armed the same way.

The only way for us to function in the world-as-it-is-now, as invaders with Jesus, is to learn how to die and rise.

One of the lessons that Jesus taught his disciples, in the ninth chapter of Luke was the business of dying and rising. “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23) In Galatians, Paul writes: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who life, but Christ who lives in me. The life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

Jesus has invaded us, and conquered us, but there is still guerrilla warfare going on inside us. Our human nature, as God created us, designed in God’s image to enable us to fulfill our purpose in this world as easily as a bird flies, was altered by the sin of Adam and Eve. You might say that our spiritual genetics (if there could be such a thing) was altered, and that we have a hybrid nature. We are composed of what seems like the remains of the image of God, but that image has been deformed by our double allegiance to God, on one hand, and to sin and the Devil on the other. We are by nature double agents. The enemy is within, as well as on the outside. The two agents in us are so mixed together that to free us from sin and the devil requires an invasion by Jesus. This invasion is like an injection of something that reacts with sin and feels like death. When we see sin reappearing in us, we have to go to Captain Jesus who is also Medic Jesus for another injection of him into us. It’s another death and another rising. Someone recently told me about a sin of mine that I need an injection for. I don’t look forward to it. But I look forward to the life that is possible afterward.

We are called to battle on the same front in this-world-as-it-now-is. But we are that injection. We go from our nice bright beaker and get under the skin of the world and the people in it. We have to do this as those who no longer live but who have become the Christ living in them. We succeed by being like the Jesus who fought sin, not only by the cross, but by welcoming sinners and traitors of all different kinds. Besides, it was due to Jesus’ welcoming everyone (absolutely everyone) that got him crucified in the first place. Those are his arms for battle. We present these same arms to others. We die, and live, and welcome others in Jesus. We do this so that they might live as well and pass it on. That’s how we fight the world-as-it-now-is and fight for the day when our world, and we, will all be made new by Jesus.

The Battle Primeval - What's at Stake?

Preached on Sunday, September 16, 2018

Scripture readings: Genesis 3:1-15; Revelation 12:7-12; Matthew 4:1-11

In my studying I found out that there was an excuse that Adam gave to his children for the reason they weren’t living in the Garden of Eden anymore.

“Your mother ate us out of house and home!”

Along the Columbia River, Desert Aire/Mattawa, WA
August and September 2018

That’s true, but there was a deeper failure on Eve’s and Adam’s part, and a deeper issue than disobedience at stake.

The truth is that it was all a matter of love. The issue was their failure to choose love. Their failure was their sad choice of something that was not love.

Spiritual warfare is ultimately the struggle to make the right choice and carry it through to the end. The right choice is the choice of love: love for God and love for others.

Adam and Even trusted knowledge more than love. Trusting is the nitty gritty factor of faith. They didn’t love because they didn’t trust. They didn’t trust because they didn’t love: at least, they didn’t love nearly enough.

The Victory of Jesus over the Devil was the power of love in the heart of Jesus: his love for the Father and his love for us.

In the Book of Revelation, in chapter twelve, the picture chosen to depict the people of Jesus on earth fighting and resisting temptation, sin, and evil is the picture of an Angelic Army defeating a great Dragon and his army in heaven. The victory in that battle is also a matter of love.  Part of that love is the love of Jesus, the Lamb, lovingly shedding his blood for our sins, and the sin of the world, on the cross. Another part of that love is the loving testimony that the people of Jesus are able to give about the faithfulness Jesus at work in their lives. The caliber of their love that turned the tide of the battle was powered by their willingness to lay down their lives for Jesus, and for each other. They could lay themselves down this way in death, because they knew how to lay their lives down for Jesus and each other in life.

Adam and Eve did just the opposite. They defeated, or deflated, the power of love in the human race, in the human heart. Since God had designed them (and us) to love and to be loved, they couldn’t destroy God’s design for them, but they could mess with it, and distort it, and infect it. They could turn it from a gift into a gamble. Well, that’s what love often becomes in the world as it is.

They couldn’t harm God’s love. God’s love has remained what it has always been. Their only victory (if you could call it) that was to vandalize their own heart’s capacity for love.

The Devil in the snake told them that God had withheld from them the real meaning and power of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Satan Snake told them that God had not given them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The Ruthless Rattler implied that God was deliberately maintaining a false advantage over them by keeping the secret of the fruit to himself. The Snake suggested that God must not love them.

God must be a liar. The snake didn’t use that word, though, because Adam and Eve might not have known what it meant.

God had designed the woman and the man with the gifts that they needed for learning and maintaining the knowledge and the gifts that they needed in order to be beings of reason, and sense, and discernment, and good judgement.

They were God’s image. They already had this. They had learned to do their thinking from God himself. Most of all, they had known the loving care of the Lord all their lives.

They had the gift of fellowship and communion with the Lord. The Lord would come to the Garden of Eden, near the time of rest in the cool of the day. The Lord would walk with them, and talk with them, and tell them that they were his own. They hadn’t known the Slippery Serpent for very long, and the extent of the knowledge he claimed to have should have surprised them.

The man and the woman had never heard a lie before and maybe they didn’t even know the definition of the word. So, you might think that their lack of experience with lies had tricked them into believing the snake. But, then, if they couldn’t recognize a lie when they heard one, why were they able to believe that God had lied to them?

They were designed to understand things and have dominion over the earth. In a sense, at that time, Eden was their school, and maybe they hadn’t the time to graduate yet.

The snake was offering them the chance to graduate early, and to be grown up. And knowledge and wisdom are such wonderful and desirable things. Maybe God would even be pleased that they had learned so much so quickly and they might even bless him by saving God from trouble when he was at risk for making a mistake.

This could make them into an enormous help to God, if they only they took some initiative on their own. Even though that would mean doing the very opposite of what God had told them.

Everyone knows that if you allow a child to do absolutely anything he or she wants, except for one forbidden thing, the child will do that one forbidden thing.

But even if that is true on this side of Eden, we don’t see it being true then and there. When they ate the forbidden fruit and gained the forbidden knowledge, they were not smarter than they had been. They were much dumber than they had been.

They became afraid of looking at each other when had hadn’t been afraid before. The forbidden knowledge made them afraid of knowledge. They were afraid of what they now saw in each other.

They forgot that God knew everything, which is part of what knowing good and evil means, and so they thought they could hide from God in the trees, and they thought they could hide what they had done.

The forbidden knowledge made the first people unable to know each other, and to know themselves, and to know God. They forgot that they were each other’s beloveds. They forgot that they were gifts from God to each other. So, they blamed each other, and they denied their own responsibility for their own actions, which is another way of not even knowing yourself. Adam even blamed God for giving him the woman who had given him the forbidden fruit.

The truth is that sin makes us stupid. Anyone with a bit of sense knows this. When we make a mess of our lives, we make ourselves stupid. But never call another human being stupid, or you’ll make Jesus mad at you.

It’s worse than being stupid to make a choice that deprives you of the wisdom and understanding of love. It’s the worst choice in the world to make your love generator, and your love transmitters, and your love receptor break down.

The poet John Milton thought that the only knowledge of good and evil that came from the forbidden fruit was the knowledge of good lost and evil gained. I think Milton was much too generous in his opinion of them.

Now, in a world where the knowledge of good and evil is the rule, and where we pray to be delivered from evil, we must know both good and evil in order to pass muster for the battle between them. The use of the knowledge of good and evil must go like this, as the apostle Paul told us: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:21)

If the man and woman had chosen to love God instead of doubting his integrity, they might have found a way, by using the power of goodness, to stomp on the snake Devil. If Eve and Adam had used the power of goodness that they had at their disposal, they wouldn’t have got bitten.

If they had used the power of the goodness that they had learned from their daily walks with God, they might have passed their graduation exams. They would have had a much wiser knowledge than the stupidity of sin that they got from the forbidden fruit.

Adam and Eve stupidly wrecked their own love, but they couldn’t wreck its source. They couldn’t change God’s love.

And, so, God loved them by kicking them out, but this wasn’t because he couldn’t live with them, or vice versa. In love, God simply didn’t dare to let them live forever without a cure for sin and evil. That would make them worse than mortal. Sin kills the beauty of God’s design for life just as it kills the purity of love. To live forever in the clutches of that poison is to become, more and more, like some creature that could be called the living-dead. A loving God would not leave them to that fate worse than death.

The future of our fallen race had to be disciplined by living faithfully and lovingly toward God and each other in our choices. Those choices required a tougher life that Eden could give them. They and we somehow need the discipline of hardship, and pain, and a life-long battle with the Devil and his minions.

God lovingly prepared Adam and Eve for the tough world to come by giving them tough leather clothing to go through it all. God lovingly prepared Adam and Eve for a tough life giving them a promise. God promised that generations of mothers giving birth would win the prize of victory over the snake, and over our own fallen nature. The pain of childbirth would finally receive the prize of a savior whom we would call Jesus.

Men work hard. So do women. But women are the ones whose work gives birth to life.

If you think that it is God’s order of things for the man of the house to rule his wife, guess again. Man’s lordship is a thing that happens, and it doesn’t have to happen. Men have a choice. A man must be very full of the forbidden fruit indeed, and made very stupid by that fruit, if he wants to be the punishment that his wife must bear for the rest of her life.

Remember that the forbidden fruit makes us stupid about love. Don’t be the lord of your house and lord of your wife unless you want to be stupid about love. You have a choice.

Paul says that men owe their wives love and women owe their husbands obedience. I think this is because men need to learn to express tenderness and love, and women need to learn to respectfully listen to people, like men, who aren’t quite as perceptive as they are. Both of these are humility things.

In one church I served, I lost one of our families because I refused to do a wedding when I found out that the woman was abusing her man. Someone else did their wedding and they were divorced in a month. The woman was lording it over her fiancee in a terrible way. She knew nothing about love, and she had nothing worthy of that name to give. Hopefully she’s better now. Lording it is never good.

I think that is why the glorious archangel Lucifer became the Devil in a snakeskin. The legends tell us that he decided that it was better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven. The kingdom of God is where Jesus is King. and he is a servant who died for the sins of his people. He died for us. We serve a King who has served us to death.

We need to train and develop our skills and strength if we are going to take our place in the part of life called spiritual warfare. We see how it started in the beginning, in Genesis, in the Garden of Eden.

There can be a lot of participants in the spiritual warfare: a lot of voices sharing the battle. Even at the start, there was the snakes voice, the woman’s voice, the man’s voice, and God’s voice.

Adam and Eve lost the battle. So did the Satan Snake. The war would go on; who knew how long? God knew, and God won, and God will win, and so will we. We will win if we die to our bad knowledge from the forbidden tree, and live by the faith that has love for its foundation.

We see what spiritual warfare looks like from the start. It’s not possession, per se. It’s a conversation and it’s a process of discernment, or the lack of it, in faith and love.

In the end, God is in command and God promises victory. God gets the victory by humbling himself to do what only God could do by becoming human, and using our human gifts, including the ability to die. God, in Christ, became a human servant to the human race, so that he could send and receive love on our frequency and on our level. Jesus, the eternal Word that is God who became flesh, became human and died for our rescue and our rebirth, and to be our captain in the fight.

Jesus fought the battle that Adam and Eve lost. Jesus won the battle of the temptation. The reason why the Lord Jesus did not fail is because he refused the easy way, the compromise. The forbidden fruit was presented to Adam and Eve as the easy way to be wise and independent.

Jesus took the hard way. Jesus was hungry but would not eat. Jesus had a great ambition to save us, but it was an ambition based on love. It was a love that couldn’t take the easy way of winning hearts by putting on a display: leaping from tall buildings and getting rescued by angels. Jesus’ ambition was based on love and so his work could not be built on gaining the world (such as it is) by the easy way of kneeling to evil. Because of love, Jesus’ work could only be built on gaining the world (such as it will be) the hard way. Instead of taking a bow Jesus took on himself the cross. The power of his cross, and his sacrificial death for us, and his resurrection defeated the old world and made it new.

The Devil’s temptation of Jesus had the attraction of easy self-fulfillment, which is clearly what our present world tries to sell us. Jesus tells us that self-fulfillment isn’t the way. The way is servanthood in love. That wins the victory.

When we fight the dragon, in our own spiritual warfare, the victory comes from letting Jesus return us to our original design. We are made for love and to be loved. Living marked by the blood of the lamb named Jesus returns us to God’s design for us to know that we are made to be loved. The testimony we give is one half of that love, and the other half of that love is what we give back to Jesus, and to Jesus through others. Our lives and our words bear the testimony and the evidence of this victory.

The blood of Jesus sets us free by making us like Jesus. Jesus didn’t shrink from, or let himself be held back by, the worst this world could do to him and neither do we. Living like Jesus (to love and be loved through faith) gives us the victory. That is the spiritual warfare.

The Primeval Battle - A Confrontation

Preached on Sunday, September 9, 2018 (a second edition of a sermon preached 6-9-13)

Scripture readings: Acts 13:4-12; Ephesians 6:10-20

Paul and Barnabas were honored to be invited into the presence of the Roman governor of Cyprus to tell him the message about Jesus. They found that he was, in so many ways, the perfect audience for the good news.

He was intelligent; which didn’t mean that he was merely very smart. Being merely smart can cause so much trouble. Intelligence meant that he could understand, and sort things out, and see what was really there, and come to the right conclusion. And this intelligent audience had a wizard, a sorcerer, right by his side.

Walking Near Crab Creek, North of Mattawa/Desert Aire
August 2018

We can’t be sure that Barnabas and Paul knew from the very start that the man standing beside the governor’s chair was a sorcerer. They seem to have argued with Elymas as though he was merely an influential man, like others they had met. There was some shifting in what they understood was going on in front of them. There was some shifting in what they realized they had to do about it.

There was a kind of inspiration involved on Paul’s part. We read that he was, “filled with the Holy Spirit, looked straight at Elymas (the wizard)” and spoke judgment upon him. (Acts 13:9)

While Barnabas and Paul were trying to share their faith and lead the governor to faith in Jesus, the sorcerer “opposed them and tried to turn the governor from the faith.” There was this growing conflict, until the Holy Spirit opened the eyes of Paul to who this man named Elymas was, and what he stood for. The conflict was an outbreak of what has been called “spiritual warfare.”

I know, from my own experience that such warfare is real and that it is going on all the time. There is the Kingdom of God and there is the Shadow Kingdom of this present darkness. There are armies of these kingdoms fighting some kind of war that we can’t see, but that war involves us and has an effect on us.

At the same time, I want to avoid obsession. C. S. Lewis said, "There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them." (C.S. Lewis, “The Screwtape Letters”)

I think our human race can fall into the same pair of opposite errors related to angels: either to disbelieve in them or to have an unhealthy interest in them. Angels almost never make their presence known unless they have a special mission that requires them to communicate with us.

Elymas the wizard probably would never have called his familiar spirits devils. They were just spirits, and maybe even gods to him. Or he thought they were angels at his service. As Paul says, “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.” (2 Corinthians 11:14)

Paul, in his thoughts on our struggle against “the spiritual forces of evil”, doesn’t tell us much about either devils or angels. The angels may well be working or fighting all around us but, for Paul, the main point is all about living inside of the spiritual realities that come to us through Jesus: truth, righteousness, the good news of peace, faith, the Spirit and word of God, and prayer. He calls this our armor, or our defense. He calls it our means of standing through it all; standing up in resistance and going forward. (Ephesians 6:11)

I have seen angels, myself, a few times. One summer night, when I was sixteen, I struggled with an invisible devil until I was able to say, “Go away, in Jesus’ name, and don’t come back.” And that came as quite a surprise to me because, at that time, I really didn’t believe in the devil or in demons. But I know what the Bible told me to do about it.

That is one way of being aware of a spiritual warfare but there is no need whatsoever for any kind of experience like that. In fact, if you tried looking for experiences like this it might get you in a lot of trouble. I know this from personal experience. I would solemnly warn you that there are much more important and necessary ways to be aware of such a warfare.

Paul said for us to be aware of it in the form of things like truth, and peace, and faith, and prayer. Our hold on the truth, and the peace that comes from the good news, and a faith and loyalty toward God in our heart, and all kinds of prayer make us part of the warfare.

Seeing these in others is also a way in which we take part. We see the armies of the kingdom of God when people live out the truth, and bring peace to others, and patiently cope by faith and prayer; trusting and communicating with God.

At such times, you see and feel the unseen. You see and feel the power of God living in others and living in you. You see it in the love and integrity of families. You see it in the baptism of babies, and children, and adults. You see it in weddings. You see it in holy funerals.

You see the glory of the armies of the kingdom of light. You see people living out what God is putting into them, but you also see it as a sign of the march of a whole kingdom (a whole new world) on the move; holding out and advancing against the darkness.

On the other side of the war, it is easy to see the sadness and the badness lurking in human nature; but sometimes you see something much worse. You see self-fulfilling fears. You see self-destructive behavior. You see the irresistible and irrational descent into misunderstanding and misinterpretation between people who should be working together; people who should be friends, or who should love each other.

You see something beyond human weakness. Sometimes you hear the cackling laughter of the spiritual forces of darkness. You may not hear it with your ears but you feel it in a shudder down your spine.

Paul was aware of something strange in his meeting with the governor. There was this other man. His name was Bar-Jesus (bar-Joshua, son of Joshua, a common name) Elymas (a Jewish and a Greek combination). In this way he was just like Saul who was also Paul (Saulus Paulus, a Jewish and Roman combination). One was a Jew who had turned into a sorcerer. The other was a Jew who had turned into a Christian. They had parted ways. They had been swept apart by the forces from the dark side of the spiritual warfare.

The Romans were so much about mastery and control, and this Roman governor was being mastered by the sorcerer every time Paul tried to share Jesus with him. The governor was “intelligent”, meaning that he had a gift for putting things and ideas together. He had the skill to see where and how things added up, and he was oddly not able to hold on to anything Paul said.

In the governor’s oddly disabled intelligence Paul saw something more than the work of a man who simply posed as a sorcerer. He saw that Elymas was more than a poser. He saw that the spiritual forces of evil were there, and at work.

The power and the wisdom of God, in the form of the Holy Spirit, filled Paul. So, Paul could speak for God and put his finger on exactly what was going on. Paul saw the hand of God was at work in this moment of time. God himself was there with Paul to face the spiritual forces.

The interesting thing is that, as far as we know, nothing worse happened to the sorcerer than what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus where Paul had met Jesus. Paul, too, had been blinded for a time by Jesus himself, and had to be led by the hand, just like Elymas. (Acts 9:8 and 13:11)

Paul’s blindness and having to be led by the hand were the mercy of Jesus. They were part of the story of Paul’s salvation. They could be part of the salvation of Elymas. We simply don’t know how the story of Elymas ended. When it all happened to Paul, it was a matter of salvation and hope. The salvation and hope that come through Jesus are the power that created the armor of God.

They come to us not as a feeling but as a fact. Jesus, and everything he has done for us, almost forces itself upon us in a way that leads us to repent and surrender. We see Jesus. We see the cross and the one hanging there. We see an empty tomb and death and all our fears and defeats defeated by Jesus and the resurrection. When we see it, how can we say “no” to what he shows us? How can we escape?

We see the truth of it; and it is that truth (that factuality) that serves like a belt that holds our lives together: the belt of truth. However much we may struggle, Jesus has made the fact of his love, the truth of his love, just as great a reality as any of our struggles.

There is the “breastplate of righteousness” where everything is set right. Jesus is the righteousness of God and our righteousness too. He is the justice of God who sets us right with himself and with ourselves.

In the cross of Christ, we die to ourselves. From the tomb of Jesus, we rise as new people who can stand against the devil, because Jesus has made us right before God, and Jesus stands with us.

We are still sinners, but Jesus stands up for us against all accusers. The word “devil” means accuser. The spiritual warfare seeks to accuse us and make us give up. The grace of God in Jesus enables us to stand up.

There is “the shoeing of your feet with the gospel of peace”. Paul almost never says anything in a simple way. The gospel means good news. The good news of Jesus gives us peace with God, but it also gives us peace in every way. In Hebrew, the word peace is shalom and it is all about relationships. It doesn’t mean an absence of conflict. Peace means all relationships are healthy and flourishing, especially our relationship with God, in Christ.

The spiritual warfare attacks us when we are not nurturing our most important relationships. Or the warfare tempts us to mess with our most important relationships. The gospel of peace prepares us to stop and pay attention to people. The peace of Christ teaches us how to nurture our relationships, and this protects us, and it protects them, from the spiritual forces of evil.

There is “the shield of faith” and faith is a kind of loyalty and trust in God, in Jesus. Loyalty listens to Jesus instead of listening to our doubts, or despair, or weariness, or weakness, or our strongest desires and temptations.

Loyalty and trust help us to listen to Jesus, who forgives our sins, and so we have another way to defend ourselves than by proving ourselves, or by justifying ourselves, or by pretending we are something other than what we are. True faith saves us from pride as well as from fear.

Then there is the “helmet of salvation”. When I was seventeen I drowned, but I was saved from the lake. I was rescued from the water by Charlie Lucas.

I was rescued, then I was resuscitated, then I was safe and alive. Salvation is our rescue by God, in Jesus, and we are safe. Knowing we are safe in Christ is how we stand up to the struggle of the war.

Then there is “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”. In Isaiah chapter eleven we can see the power of the Lord working through the Holy Spirit, and through the Messiah. Isaiah wrote like this, “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him; the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of power, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord; and he will delight in the fear of the Lord. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears; but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.” (Isaiah 11:1-4)

This would tell us that the sword of the Spirit is the word that Jesus speaks in healing, mercy, and judgment. In this way, Jesus himself, in the Spirit, spoke from Paul’s heart and mouth to the sorcerer Elymas. Or we could say that Paul spoke in the Spirit, and Jesus spoke with him.

The Spirit put his sword in Paul’s hands, or the Spirit put his sword in Paul’s mouth. The Spirit gave him God’s word to speak God’s truth. It sounded like judgment, and yet it had the potential for mercy.

In spiritual warfare, we can see things as they are, and name them for what they are. At the same time, we can also leave the door of mercy open. We know that the sword of the Spirit has been given to us with an end in view; to make all things new.  

We have many powerful swords of the Spirit in the Bible. When we recall or speak these words of God, the voice of God speaks again from the words we have read from the Good Book, and works with power.

Then there is prayer. Prayer isn’t given a name as a part of the armor of God. Yet, maybe it is also part of the sword of the Spirit. In Romans chapter eight, Paul says, “We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” (Romans 8:26)

In the spiritual struggle we may be too tired, or confused, or frustrated to know how to pray, but God’s own words and thoughts (what we would pray if we were faithful, and loving, and wise) gets said. Through the Holy Spirit praying in us, the word of God gets said, in prayer; and that prayer changes things.

What God does for us in Christ is the real armor that we wear. God is our strength. The Lord’s Supper tells us this. Here is the gospel set upon a table. “Eat and be strong,” it says. “Be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power.” (Ephesians 6:10) “O taste and see that the Lord is good.” (Psalm 34:8)

Wonderful World of Wisdom - The Mighty-Wise and the Wannabes

Preached on Sunday, September 2, 2018

Scripture readings: Romans 11:33-12:8; Proverbs 10-31; Luke 10:38-42

When you were a kid, did you want to be a cowboy? Raise your hand! I did.

When you were a kid, did you want to be a circus animal trainer? I did. I was one, and I think my cousin Donny was the lion.

Walking near Crab Creek, August 2018

When you were a kid, did you ever want to be an artist? Did you ever want to race cars? Did you ever want to be a fireman, or a policeman? Did you want to be a sailor, or a soldier? Did you ever want to be a scientist, or a space alien, or a zombie killer, or a zombie? I did!

How many here became what you wanted to be when you were a kid?

Did any of you become all of the things you wanted to be?

Now the woman in the grand finale of Proverbs never wanted to be any of these things. But she seems to be good at doing absolutely everything that she must have played at being and doing, when she was a little girl, living three thousand years ago in the ancient Middle East.

Who is this good, virtuous, noble wife? The creator of these particular proverbs doesn’t name her.

She isn’t the wife that the mother of King Lemuel advised her royal son to choose for himself.  It was rare for kings to be able to choose their wife (at least their first wife). The mother’s advice ends with verse nine.

Our verse ten, where we started reading, is the first line of an alphabetical poem. Each verse begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, in the correct order. The poem lists the qualities of the superior wise wife from “A” to “Z”; except that the Hebrew alphabet doesn’t end with “Z”. But, if you want the “A” to “Z” on the perfect wife, this is the closest you can get.

This woman is the perfect choice in a wife for a man who isn’t royal, because she does work that no queen would do. She’s not a wife for a poor man, because they have servants and part of her job is bringing out the best in those servants. She’s probably able to keep them cheerful, and willing, and busy enough to earn their pay (or their room and board), all the time. The family isn’t rich or else they would buy slaves to be their servants.

The family has servants who come in for the day, or who work for room and board. They were probably like the old middle class of over a hundred years ago, who might have someone come in to do the cleaning and cooking and other chores.

This reminds me of a guy named Vernon, who was born around 1910. He was the youngest child in a huge German farming family in Central Washington. From the stories Vernon told, I figured out that he must have been the “Spare Boy”.

When he got old enough to do some chores and work around the stable and the farm, Vernon’s family would loan him out for room and board (for days or weeks at a time) to different families who needed a little extra help. The perfect woman in proverbs might have married into a family who benefited from the work of “spare kids”.

Just how would you know that a girl you chose to marry would be the perfect wife after you married her. Don’t they say that when a man and woman marry, the woman has a plan for changing her man, and the man hopes that his woman will never change, but what they forget is that men never change and women are always changing. So how can a man find the perfect woman, or the woman of wisdom?

And then we might wonder how to turn this whole chapter, or this whole book, around, in order to show how a woman can find the perfect man, or the man of wisdom?

We can start to answer both of these questions when we remember what the Book of Proverbs was for, in the first place. Proverbs began as a textbook for the Wisdom Class at the Palace School in Jerusalem, and then for other schools around the kingdom.

Girls didn’t go to school. If they learned their reading, and writing, and arithmetic, they learned privately, at home.

Remember, that this last chapter teaches the alphabet. Proverbs was a textbook (and maybe even a copybook) for teaching boys how to be wise when they grew up. (How exciting that must have been for them!) It would be like telling a kid launching into their hyperactive phase to be serious and listen for a minute.

Now, think of a slightly older boy. When I was thirteen we took a couple of weeks in our Phys. Ed. classes to have boys and girls together to learn ballroom dancing.

There was this girl named Peggy. I would watch her a lot. She seemed to look back at me in a friendly way. Then we started this ballroom dancing class. I think we started with the fox-trot. I asked Peggy to be my partner. I put my hand around her waist and the earth moved under my feet and my body almost turned to Jell-O. I didn’t say anything about this to anyone, but the very next day the other guys were teasing me about being in love with Peggy. They just knew.

Think of Proverbs as a textbook for boys like that. It doesn’t say that Lady Wisdom was beautiful. It tries to be serious. The next to the last line says: “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting, but the woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” (31:30) But think of a thirteen-year-old imagining a certain girl wearing a fine purple dress like Wisdom wears. Purple was expensive, and rare, and hot.

The writers of that culture would want all their leading and successful boys to fall in love with wisdom. After all, no one should hold any public office unless they have fallen and remained in love with wisdom ever since they were thirteen years old.

So, the good wife was a picture of Lady Wisdom made to look like a real human woman for some boy to love. Think of her interest in food: why she would feed you just as well as your mom did. And she could work to make you some spending money. And the word that means good, virtuous, and noble also means Valiant and the boy would pounce on valor and think, “Here’s a woman who would never be afraid to do anything possible with me.” This boy might dream about falling in love with Lady Wisdom.

In Jesus’ ministry, Martha was in love with a clean and orderly house that looked and smelled like hospitality. Her sister Mary was different. Mary had fallen in love with the wisdom of Jesus. Falling in love with the words of Jesus is not only wisdom, it’s the fear of the Lord, which reminds us that fear (in the Bible) can be a love-word: the deepest in-love word of all. And wisdom is not a brain-word. Wisdom stands with fear as one of the greatest love-words possible, from A to Z.

Paul tells us that you cannot live the Christian life with other Christians unless you fear the Lord and love his wisdom: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgements, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen!” (Romans 11:33-36)

Here is fear and love: the fear that comes from love. It was like my fear of Peggy and my fear of my feelings for her: Terrified of her smile and her smiling blue eyes.

No human being (woman or man) could do all the things that Lady Wisdom would be able to do, if Wisdom were a real woman or man. Wisdom (in the Bible) is not a brainy thing. It’s a life-skill. And it comes from God who can do anything he wants.

I don’t even think that wisdom is a serious thing. Lady Wisdom is a lesson in enthusiasm: as if she had the gift for turning you into a child in her presence. That’s another resemblance that Wisdom bears to women for men: that is, if the man would fall for her.

There is an age where children want to do everything. They want to wear cowboy boots and vacuum the living room floor. They want to be the fire inspector grading your house for fire safety, and find everything that you’ve got wrong, and they also want to mow the lawn and pull the weeds.

Along with showing their children the fear and love of God, the wise parents will let their children do almost everything to make sure that they grow up to fall in love with doing everything. Then their children will grow up to be wise.

Now, I want us to notice how practical this love of everything should be. Just as wisdom is a life-skill, as well as a brain-skill; in the same way love, itself, is a life-skill, just as much as it is a heart-skill. Wisdom is skillful because it knows how to take good care of others. Love is skillful because it knows how to take good care of others. You don’t know how to love skillfully unless you love wisdom. You don’t know how to be truly wise, unless you know how love constructively.

This is never about falling in love with love. It means loving to love others well and take care of them in a way that is good for them, and in a way that will help them to be loving and wise, in turn.

Another thing about love and wisdom is that both are life-skills that are required equally, together, in order to take good care of yourself. Let’s hyphenate Lady Wisdom’s name. We’ll call her Lady Wisdom-Love. So, Lady Wisdom-Love keeps her own room attractive (as with the bedding) and Lady Wisdom-Love wears a purple dress. While her loving and taking good care of other people dwarfs her apparent self-care life-skills, those self-care life-skills are at work every day, every night, to prepare her for whatever comes and to laugh at the future.

I’ll tell you right now that I don’t understand this balancing act very well. Without understanding it, I will put the balance of love like this. Somehow, you must care for yourself if you are sincere about taking care of others, and you must take care of others if you are sincere about loving yourself. And the love of God, and your love for God, and your listening to God for wisdom, are the only way that you can be wise and loving for yourself and for everyone else.

There is a danger for Christians who are so in love with the responsibility for doing everything that they leave the wisdom of their love for others out of the picture, and out of the church. They don’t let their brothers and sisters in Jesus do anything. They aren’t letting their sisters and brothers know the very joy that they have be found in wanting to do everything.

Of course, Proverbs teaches us that we can’t do everything. Somewhere or other, we are going to be foolish. Like wisdom, we may want to try everything (but only if we have a good supply of wisdom). But the Lady Wisdom clearly sets her bar too high for us. Wisdom does come from God, and we want to share in what God is doing, and we are meant to be God’s children, just as we are meant to be Wisdom’s children. But we are not God, and we are not wisdom in the flesh, we are only to be in love with them and be the child who loves to do everything with their God and with his Wisdom.

Paul tells us to learn some wisdom about God’s special gifts, and to have our greatest faith and love and joy in those special gifts, most of all. Christian can be children who love the chores that God has given them; but, also, they can be children who love and thrive in some chores more than others.

In my growing up, I did have favorite chores. I had the good fortune to develop a skin allergy to dish soap and rubber gloves, so dish washing wasn’t my gift. Now it is, and I’ve turned allergic to different chores.

There were two chores that I always loved. One was burning the trash. The other was shooting tomato bugs with my B-B gun.

“A good woman, a virtuous wife, a noble woman, a valiant wife who can find?” There is a proverb like that one for the men. It’s in Proverbs, chapter twenty, verse six: “Many a man claims to have unfailing love, but a faithful man who can find?” (Proverbs 20:6)

Faithfulness and unfailing love are as rare as goodness, virtue, nobility, and valor whether you look for these in women, or in men. This faithfulness and unfailing love in the rarest of men is also found in the perfect woman or wife. It’s like this: “She speaks with wisdom, and faithful instruction is on her tongue.” (Proverbs 31:26) The faithful instruction from the perfect woman and the unfailing love of the perfect man are the same thing. Faithful instruction and unfailing love use the same Hebrew word.

The Hebrew word is “hesed”. It’s almost impossible to translate into English. The word means too much to tell.

It’s like our English word “love”. What does love mean, when you can love your wife or husband, and you can love your dog, and you can love your car, and you can love your pizza and beer? That’s insane. It must be so confusing to people from other languages. “Hesed” means “tender mercies”. It means loving-kindness. It means-steadfast love. No human being can truly, fully give “hesed” to anyone, not even to God. Hesed is much too big. It really only comes from God. Receiving hesed is just as much a miracle as finding a perfect woman, or a perfect man.

Hesed means “covenant love”. Covenant means promise. It’s the love that always keeps its promises. A vow is a solemn promise. C. S. Lewis says, somewhere, that love loves to make promises.

God promised in the Garden of Eden, at the place of the original rebellion of the human race, when humans ate the forbidden fruit in order to have the power to set their own standards for good and evil. God promised that a child would be born in the human race who would save us all from sin, and evil, and death. Then God went on making more and more promises and vows, all the while reminding us of that human child who would deliver us from evil.

Who know how old that original promise is by now. But, in the fullness of time, only a mere two-thousand years ago, after a million years or so had passed, God kept the promise: not by sending a child, but by becoming that child; not killing a snake, but letting the snake kill him on the cross, and only then destroying the power of that snake; and yet the final death of the snake is still yet to come.

These long aeons of time roll on and the faithful love, the covenant of God, the promises of God, are alive and well in Jesus. Jesus is both God and us. And because he is both, we can know him truly, if not completely.

In the cross and the resurrection from the dead, true wisdom is found, if you will accept it. The life-skill of wisdom and the life-skill of love can come together into us, grow in us, show itself in us for others.

The cross and the resurrection were very scary things that teach us the fear of the Lord. The wisdom and love of the Lord are ours in Jesus as we live with him. And through that love and wisdom we can be for others, what they need most. And we can be, for our own selves, what we need most to be. And we become the creatures of God who are now the true children of God, in a home that will never come to an end, and where the best wisdom takes the best care of everyone and everything.