War in heaven

The Biblical record suggests that Satan has three broad powers: the power to tempt (of course archetypically in Genesis 3); the power to trouble and oppress (as we see in the gospel accounts of demonic oppression - the explicit link to Satan is made in Luke 10); and finally the power to accuse.

From Scripture it seems clear that, as terrible as Satan's power to tempt and trouble certainly is, it is his power to accuse which is most terrible.  Zechariah 3 contains a powerful vision of Joshua the High Priest standing before the LORD's angel and being subjected to the accusatory force of Satan.  The terrifying thing about the vision is that Joshua is dressed in filthy rags.  That is to say, Joshua - the High Priest, the one who is to represent Israel before the thrice-holy God, the holy pinnacle of the people - is besmeared with sin and guilt, presumably both his own and the representative guilt of the nation.  Satan accuses him before God, and look: his guilt is apparent.  He is literally wearing his guilt.  The accusation surely must stick.

The terrifying thing about Satan's power to accuse is that it is really just a species of telling the truth.

In the vision, God and his angel (!) intervene: not to deny the truth of Satan's accusation, but to take away Joshua's guilt.  That's the only way he can be a "brand plucked from the fire".  He needs, and gets, new clothes: righteousness, salvation.

The logic of how that happens - and how it can be right - is not explored in Zechariah, except to demonstrate that God is free to be merciful.  In Revelation 12 I think we do see some of the logic, albeit wrapped in apocalyptic.  Here we see war in heaven: Michael and his angels versus "that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan" with his angels.  Michael is triumphant, the devil is cast down.  There is no room in heaven any longer for Satan.

Lest we be tempted to see this as a representation of a primeval fall of the devil, the context is clearly the birth of Israel's Child, the one who is born to rule all the nations, who is caught up to God and his throne.  Here in a couple of verses we have the whole career of Christ, and it is the completion of his great work which leads to the successful assault of Michael and his cohorts on the forces of Satan.

When Jesus went up to his throne, having conquered sin and death, Michael arose (see Daniel 12!) and made war on Satan, casting him down.  Satan can't appear in heaven anymore.

In Revelation, the saints who see this sight rejoice over Satan, and in particular they name him "the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them day and night before our God".  But he no longer has access to our God.  His power to accuse is taken away.

Satan's power to accuse me always rested on my objective guilt.  But my guilt is taken away by the Lord Jesus.  So what accusation can he bring?  The military victory of Michael rests on the sacrificial victory of the Lord Jesus Christ.  And it is a complete victory.

Satan can still tempt and trouble, and he will do so.  But his power to accuse is taken away.  He can act against us on earth, but Michael and all the hosts of heaven stand armed with the proclamation of Christ's victory to prevent him from ever acting against us in heaven.

Demons and Disease

Some notes I pulled together whilst preparing to preach Luke 8:26-56 at CCC yesterday. The bottom line I arrived at was that, in our theological circles, an undisciplined supernaturalism is probably not the main problem; an incipient rationalism is more threatening. We (I!) need to ask for and expect more from God.

The whole Bible gives us a picture of (usually) unseen spiritual powers at work throughout the world, some representing God and working to advance his will, others opposing God. The ‘good’ spirits are generally referred to as angels, and the ‘evil’ spirits are demons. A development through the Bible is that Satan or the Devil is increasingly regarded as the ‘leader’ of the demons. Sometimes pagan gods are called demons in the Old Testament, and the New Testament picks this up in its assumption that demons stand behind the idols of the ancient world.

In the twenty-first century West, there is a tendency not to talk about angels or demons very much, even within the church. That is mainly because our culture is materialistic and naturalistic – that is, what we can see is all there is, and what happens can be fully explained by natural causes. In Christian circles, of course, there is at least a theoretical knowledge that this isn’t so – God is a spiritual being who interacts with the world! But we have absorbed enough from our culture to feel uncomfortable with the idea of angels and demons active around us. It all sounds a bit fairy-tale, and we worry that we won’t be taken seriously.

There’s another reason to feel awkward about talking about demons especially. Increasingly we are becoming aware that in different cultures – and in segments of our own – people who are accused of being demon possessed are abused and mistreated. There have been several horrific stories involving children. Certainly we don’t want to be implicated in things like that.

A few things to say about the Bible’s teaching on demons:

1. Demons are real and powerful. You can’t read the Bible and avoid the reality of evil spiritual forces.

2. Demons are fallen creatures. The spiritual forces of evil – and even Satan himself – are God’s creatures, albeit fallen and horribly twisted. We must say that they were created good, because God does not create anything evil. We can also say that because they are creatures they are not in any sense equal with God.

3. Demons are against humanity. When we see demonic activity in the Bible, it is always geared towards enslaving and dehumanising God’s human creations. The Bible says nothing about human beings colluding with demons; when Jesus casts out demons from people, the people themselves are always seen as victims.

4. Demons are powerless before Jesus. In the storyline of the Bible, by far the most demonic activity is clustered around Jesus. It makes sense that the evil spirits would want to oppose Jesus. But in story after story, Jesus drives out demons with just a word. They can’t stand up to him. Nor can they stand up to his disciples, when they are acting in dependence and faith.

Practically, there are a few helpful things we can say:

1. When we see evil in the world, we should acknowledge that there is a spiritual dimension to that evil. We don’t need to leap too quickly to demons (human beings have a spiritual dimension, and are quite capable of doing plenty of their own evil), but nor do we need to rule them out. They are part of reality.

2. We don’t need to become too interested in demons, either to fear them or to hunt them down. We are not encouraged to engage with demons, but to preach the good news of Jesus – and it is that good news which defeats the demons anyway.

3. If we do suspect we have encountered demonic activity, the thing to do is trust and pray. Jesus is victorious.

The reasons we avoid talking about angels and demons are broadly the same as the reasons we don’t talk much about miraculous healing: we have taken in a big dose of materialism and naturalism from the surrounding culture, and we have seen Christian talk about miraculous healing being horribly abused (for example, by faith healers who make a great deal of money out of sick people, or in churches where people’s expectations of healing have been cruelly raised only to be dashed). But the New Testament is full of healings. What do we do with that?

A few thoughts:

1. Even in the NT, not everyone is healed. In a sense, that’s obvious: Jesus was only in one place, and for every person in Galilee who got healed, there were thousands in the world who stayed sick or died. But even around Jesus, not everyone was healed. And even the Apostle Paul was not healed of bodily ailments.

2. Although sometimes in the NT healing is a response to faith, sometimes there is no mention at all of faith, and the initiative seems to come completely from Jesus or the apostles. It is true that Jesus could not do many miracles where he met with determined unbelief, but it is also true that genuine faith does not always receive healing in the Bible.

3. The best way to see the healings in the Bible – and sometimes this is made explicit – is that they are signs. When Jesus heals someone from physical illness, it is a sign of the resurrection. Even when people like Lazarus were raised from the dead, they would die again; but their raising was a sign of the raising up at the last day which Jesus would bring about through the power of his own resurrection.

4. Because the message of the resurrection is true, and because the Lord Jesus still graciously gives us signs of that truth in the present age, we should not hesitate to pray for healing, with faith that God is able to do this, and the knowledge that it is ‘the sort of thing’ that God does.

5. When people are healed miraculously, we should praise God – this is all his grace – and we should receive the mercy of healing as a sign of God’s greater mercy in offering eternal life through his Son. When people are not healed miraculously, we should still look to the greater mercy: God offers eternal life with him, next to which physical healing is a small thing.