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.