Just playing around with some thoughts. Comments welcomed...
Jesus Christ crushed the head of Satan (Gen 3:15); drove out the devil (John 12:31) and disarmed the rulers and authorities, putting them to open shame and triumphing over them (Col 2:15).
How?
Through dying on a cross.
He didn't come down from the cross to bust out some ultimate fighting moves on the devil. It's not that, as He died, the Spirit went to work on Satan behind the scenes with baseball bats and chains. The cross wasn't Christ's non-violent resistance stunt distracting us while the elect angels went ballistic on the forces of evil.
No, it's all there on Golgotha. The all-time decisive cosmic face-off did not involve hordes of spiritual forces doing battle in the heavenlies. It involved a lonely Man on a lonely hill. The taunts of the devil rang out from the lips of His enemies: "If you are the Son of God, come down now from the cross." The diabolical onslaught did not come through waves of black magic but through the simple appeal to use power and save self.
The greatest ever spiritual battle involved the simple choice of whether this Man would obey His Father or serve Himself. The height and width and breadth of the battlefield was that single cross. The one Victor was that Champion strung up on a tree. Right there this defenceless Man was crushing, driving out, disarming and triumphing over evil once and for all.
What does that tell you about evil?
Well if it was something like an equal and opposite force, then you might expect a heavenly punch-up. But it's not. It's not a created thing but a perversion. It's a parasite, distorting everything good and pulling it down into oblivion. (See these recent Mike Reeves talks on evil for more).
And so the Author of Life enters into this matrix of death. Christ absorbs this evil at its worst and transforms it. He does this, not by taking it seriously as a legitimate opponent but by entering it in simple obedience to His Father's will. As this Man trusts God - even in the jaws of death - He reverses the cycle of self-assertion and self-vindication. This cycle is the very opposite of God's own life and therefore the quintessence of evil. So the Source of good goes to the heart of evil and, by turning the other cheek, overturns the whole thing.
Therefore we get the ultimate Genesis 50:20 moment. Even what Satan intends for evil, God intends for good.
So, again, evil is not granted an existence alongside God and His creation-redemption agenda. It is a perversion which is then taken up into the purposes of God and made to serve Him.
Well then. We stand, clothed in Christ and His victory. And the evil one, thrashing around in his death-throes, fires some flaming arrows our way - some mixture of temptations and condemnations. And both James and Peter tell us "resist the devil" (1 Pet 5:9; James 4:7) and James adds the promise "and he will flee from you."
That's always seemed to me an extraordinary promise. Doesn't it sound a little far fetched to believe that I can send Satan scurrying into the night? Yet that's exactly what "fleeing" means - running scared. And how are we going to make Satan flee from us? Simply by resisting him. That just means 'standing against' him. He wants you to indulge a craving, you simply stand against it. Nothing more, nothing less, just resist. He wants you to wallow in past sins, you simply stand against it. And the devil runs for his life! He has met a Christian - a little Christ - one clothed in the Champion and employing those same tactics.
If that sounds incredible to us, maybe we don't properly understand Satan or his defeat. Recently the devil's been coming at me with some recurring thoughts about myself. Ordinarily I'd get embroiled in an endless round of indulging the thoughts and then condemning myself for them. Either way he wins. I can't explain exactly why but of late I've just known a real freedom to laugh at the temptations - whether I've caught myself entertaining them or not. Whatever. I'm not called to engage Satan mano e mano. That battle's been won. And I don't get to nip his temptations in the bud - that's not an option. My job's pretty simple. Just stand in Christ and refuse to take his temptations seriously.
And maybe to fart at him.
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I LOVE the link! Made me laugh aloud in Starbucks :-D
Nothing to do with the post. But Happy Birthday Glen!
Tim.
Just like Simon Peter, we resist the Devil in vain without intensive discipleship training, recap. and radical change in our thoughts concerning Christ's death on the cross, viz.: the key to his self-revelation as eternal life whom "not even death will ever be able to overcome". (Matt. 16: 13-28; 17: 1-13; 26:64; 27: 50-56; Acts 1: 1-5; 2)