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.