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.

Things Invisible - Don't Go to Hell

Preached on Sunday, April 29, 2018

Scripture readings: Isaiah 57:14-21; Revelation 20:11-15; Matthew 25:31-46

Walking near the Columbia River, Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
March 2018

What is God like?

Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) So, what is God like?

Sometimes we read that God is like a hand.”

David said this to God, “My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.” (Psalm 63:8)

Hebrews says this about God, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrews 10:31)

What does it mean that God is like a hand?

Sometimes we read that God is like fire.

When the prophet Isaiah received his calling to become a prophet, he had a vision of God enthroned in glory surrounded by flaming angelic creatures called Seraphim.

The name seraph means burning one. They are all fire, and wings, and eyes.

Isaiah was in agony with the fear of his own sinfulness, so God sent a burning seraph to do something important with fire. “One of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth, and said, ‘See, thIs has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for. “(Isaiah 6:6-7)

After the resurrection of Jesus and his departure to heaven, the disciples were waiting for Jesus to send the Holy Spirit, and this is how it happened: “Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit….” (Acts 2:2-4)

So, the Holy Spirit of God and Jesus is like fire. The Holy Spirit enables us to follow, and serve, and be the witnesses of Jesus. The Holy Spirit enables us, as the followers of Jesus, to demonstrate the love shown by Jesus on the cross to take our sins away. So, this is like fire. Those who follow Jesus are filled with something like fire.

In Hebrews, again, the author wants us to be hopeful and excited in our faith, and so he says: “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.” (Hebrews 12:28) Security in the love of God and his kingdom is like fire.

So, what do we think that God is like, when we are told that God is like fire?

What do we think that God is like when Jesus says, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) What do we think when the apostle John writes that: “God is love.” (1 John 4:8)

We can see the connection between Jesus and love. Then we hear Jesus say: “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Matthew 25:41)

If God is like Jesus, what is God like? If God is like fire, and if God is like Jesus, and if punishment is like fire, then what is God like, and what is Jesus like?

I believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God. I believe that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the Bible always says exactly what God wants it to say, exactly the way God wants it said. And the same Holy Spirit inspires the hearts and minds of those who read the Bible to receive exactly what God wants to tell them, so long as they are ready to hear whatever God wants to tell them, exactly the way God wants to tell them.

I don’t believe there are any contradictions in the Bible. I do believe that it is perfectly possible to understand the Bible and to make sense of it. I don’t believe that anything about the history of the words of the Bible and how it may have been written and passed down to us take anything away from its divine authority.

Jesus, the Living Word, is truly human and truly God, and so he is able to give us everything we need as human children of God. In the same way, the Written Word of God, in the Bible, is truly human and truly divine, and, (because of this) it is able to give us exactly what we need.

There have been many people who have spoken and written about the geography of Hell, and the temperature of Hell. There seem to be many Christians who are perfectly happy to believe that there is a Hell and that some people are going there. There are Christians who have a very clear idea of exactly who is going to Hell, and they can hardly wait for that to happen.

I want to say something about the mentality of Hell and, at the same time, I also want to tell you: “Don’t go there!”

It’s clear that Hell has something to do with punishment. But I don’t know if we even understand punishment that well.

I don’t. But perhaps you understand it on the basis of your experience as a parent, or as a spouse, in family and marriage.

In my experience as a kid, I think kids talk with each other and make plenty of comparisons about how they are being raised. The 1950’s were the years of the final flowering of the spanking. My friends and I were amazed when one of us shared that when he did something wrong, his dad would get out a heavy leather belt, and pull down his kid’s pants and underwear, and whip him on his bare bottom.

We knew that some of our own parents had been raised like that. We were genuinely glad that this was a thing of the past.

Let me tell you about the punishment my dad gave me. My dad, when I did something that I knew I shouldn’t do, would get mad. But my dad wouldn’t scream, or yell, or raise his voice. He didn’t use bad words. My dad spanked me. He spanked me so that it stung, and I would cry.

But by the time I was about eight years old, I realized that although his spanking stung a little, it didn’t really hurt at all. I suddenly realized this right in the middle of getting a spanking.

I realized that it didn’t hurt. This almost made me laugh, right in the middle of that spanking. I tried not to laugh, but I think I snorted and gave myself away. That scared me for a second, because I wondered, in that second, if it would make him madder.

I remember, at that very moment, how my dad immediately stopped the spanking. He never spanked me again. After that, when I did something that I knew I shouldn’t do, my dad wouldn’t scream. He wouldn’t yell. He wouldn’t raise his voice. He wouldn’t use bad words. My dad would simply look me in the eyes with anger and with a terrible, terrible disappointment.

His eyes, that were normally brown, would turn green for a minute. And I couldn’t stand that.

I mean, I wished that he would spank me. In those days I would have rather been spanked so that it hurt, at least a little. I would rather have had a spanking, than see that look in those eyes. I think my behavior improved a lot when the only punishment I got was that look in those eyes like an angry, sad, green fire.

With human beings, I don’t think that plain and simple punishment does any good. OK, punishment may stop bad behavior. But punishment will also open up a whole new world of trying to get away with things without getting caught.

With my dad, that look in those eyes left me helpless and I had no motivation to try to get away with things without getting caught. There were more things in that green fire than anger, there was disappointment, there was expectation, and there was love.

Punishment alone, plain and simple, never touches the heart, and never makes you better. Good parents know that punishment, plain and simple, is never their job.

Their job is to give their children everything in their heart. Their job is to bring children to life, and give their children more and more life, and give their children the capacity to receive more life from God, and from the love and faithfulness of others.

The parents’ job is to teach their children to use the lessons of the love they’ve received to become givers of life and love to others, in their own right. Parents want their children to be givers of life, especially to those who need it most: to give that life and love most of all to those who need spanking, because they may have children of their own.

The Lord says, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.” But this is not about punishment, plain and simple. God is not about punishment and reward.

God is about creating life. God is about giving to his created children the capacity to thrive in a life that is learned from God and gifted by God. God is about creating and raising children of his own.

In the Bible, fire has strong associations with the holiness of God. Fire often appears when holiness is broken and when punishment becomes the order of the day.

We think of holiness as a standard of perfection, and we think of perfection as never making mistakes, and never breaking rules or laws. Holiness is actually an ability to be devoted to a purpose, to have a goal in view and never letting go of it. Holiness means the capacity to focus on your goal and not deviate from it, ever.

God’s goal is not law keeping. God’s goal is life and love. God’s goal is thriving, and joy, and appreciation, and thankfulness, and praise. God’s goal is to say to every one of us, as creatures who have spread the beauty of goodness: “Well done good and faithful servant.”

Holiness is only one characteristic of God that we call an “attribute”. What we might call God’s moral attributes include holiness, justice, and love, and a number of other very fine qualities.

If we say that punishment is part of God’s attribute of holiness, we are right. But God is never just one thing at a time. God’s holiness never exists in the absence of God’s justice and love.

Imagine that you have, in spades, the attribute of intelligence. You would never want that attribute of intelligence to function without the attribute of wisdom, or else you would end up being too smart for your own good.

It’s no good to go around being less than you are. You want to be ready to be everything that you are all the time.

And if you have the attribute of being right all the time, or at least being right more often that other people, do you realize how much harm you can do, and how hard you will make life for others and for yourself. Never let your attribute of being right elbow your attribute of love out of the way. Some people do that. But, you never want to be less than all that you are.

Back to parenthood, and marriage too: you never want to reduce yourself in what you have to give. You never give enough unless you are ready to give everything.

So, when your child goes wrong, becoming The Avenger won’t do any lasting good unless your child can see your hopes, and dreams, and love in your eyes. Even if your husband or wife messes up, never get mad unless your partner can see your hopes, and dreams, and love in your eyes and in your voice.

Justice is an attribute that goes beyond rewarding and punishing. Justice creates a system where goodness is enjoyed, and flourishes, and where badness fails, and breaks the heart of even the guilty.

And love,” Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” (1 Corinthians 13:7-8) And God is love.

And God is a consuming fire. And Hell is an eternal fire. In the Bible, fire is, first and foremost, an image and expression of God. Fire is the expression of who God is and what God is like.

I always loved fire. When I was a kid I loved to build fires. It became my family job. We had a fireplace, and I built the fires. When we camped, I built the fire. When we barbequed, I built the fire. When there was trash to burn I loved to build the fire.

I grew up with incinerators in the back yard and burn piles on the farms. Fires were never about punishment. Except that it feels like you’re being punished, when you’re the one who has to build and manage that fire in the summertime, in the Sacramento Valley, when the temperature is 100 degrees. Fire is light, and warmth, and food, and heating water for washing. It’s for cleaning up the yard or the field. If fire were punishment, it would only be the saddest use of a beautiful thing.

Even Jesus says, in his parable of the sheep and the goats, that the fire of Hell wasn’t made for us. It was made for the Devil and his angels; not for human beings. (Matthew 25:41) It was made for cleaning up the creation of God.

God hates us trying to turn him into something less than everything he is. That’s why the Ten Commandments forbid us from making any image of God. No image can show all that God is. So, when the first and foremost expression of who God is, and what God is like, makes God look like Hell, we can trust that this can never be true.

Something else is true. All of the attributes of God are always present. Everything that is true of God is always at work, all the time. Where we see the fire of punishment in the Bible, there is much more at work than punishment. There is holiness that holds to the devotion of its purpose to make us the thriving children of God. There is justice, that creates a system where what is good grows stronger, and more and more joyful and thankful. There is love, which bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, and never, never ends.

There was a time, many years ago, when I was betrayed. People who knew more than I did told me later that they should have warned me. It damaged me for a long time. But, soon after that betrayal closed in on me, I preached a sermon about absolute forgiveness. At the end of that service, I was told by one of the ambushers, that my sermon about absolute forgiveness was the most negative messages they had ever heard. That same morning, I went to shake the hand of another one of them and, as I reached out my hand, their face got dark and grim and they pulled their hands behind them and backed away from me. I was not being what they wanted me to be at the time.

Forgiveness and grace can be an enormous punishment and pain for those who refuse it. Love can become darkness and fire for those who want to make themselves less, in their attributes, than God created them to be, when they don’t want to combine the fires of holiness, justice, and love.

In the story of the sheep and the goats, neither the sheep nor the goats were aware of doing anything for Jesus. They had only seen the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger (which means alien, like the Samaritan who was an outsider and an enemy of God’s people), the naked, the sick, and the prisoner. These were among the types of people that the God who looks like Jesus tells us to care for. He cares.

The sheep were people who went where Jesus would go in order to love those whom Jesus would love with all the attributes of God. The sheep were the people who shared the attributes of Jesus. They would refuse to be anything less. In a real sense, they had no idea what they were doing, but they did it anyway.

The goats never went near the people with whom Jesus identified. They were content and they led perfectly happy lives being less than what God created them to be. They were never anywhere near where Jesus would be, and so they never really did anything for Jesus.

The sheep must have often found themselves in places where they were very uncomfortable, and yet they were on the road to heaven. The goats led their comfortable lives and never even started up that road. The life of the goats turned out to be all about themselves. Their souls shrank as their holiness, justice and love shrank. In the end, they were held forever in the arms of what they had refused to be. The unwanted fire of love will never end.

If a child is pouting or having a tantrum, the thing they hate most is to see you moving in toward them to love them, smile into their faces, and tickle them. This is the way to make them really howl. Love can be Hell. If you love someone who wants to be less than they were created to be, or love someone who is happy to be less than they were created to be, and if you try to love them into being something more: know that you will make them miserable.

But don’t stop. You want to be careful about this. Never let anything or anyone make you consent to be less than you were created to be. Never dream of being any less than Jesus. To choose to be les is the mentality of hell. Don’t go there!

In the beginning of the Book of Revelation, when John first sees Jesus, among the many details he notices is something about those eyes. The eyes of Jesus look like fire. For those who know Jesus, a different form of fire tells us who God is. This world, and the best institutions and laws, and all the people in it, punished Jesus for being all that he is. The punishing fire took the form of a cross, and nails, and a crown of thorns, and the wounds of a whip, and a spear in his heart.

There was much more hanging on the hell of that cross than punishment. The fire of God burned there. The fire of holiness, and justice, and love burned there and took the punishment and the curse of our sins. As our hearts give way to that flame, we die and rise with Jesus. The light in Jesus’ eyes becomes his power and fire in us to break our hearts for change and a new life. Let’s live in that fire forever.

Things Invisible - Meeting and Beating the Devil

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.

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.