The Evil One

We’re going to read from John chapter 17 just briefly, from verse 11. Jesus says to the Father,

“I am no longer in the world, but they”—that is, his disciples—“are in the world, and I[’m] coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you[’ve] given me, that they may be one, even as we are one. While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me. I[’ve] guarded them, and not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I[’ve] given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.”

As we turn to the Bible, we turn to the Lord:

Father, this is your Word. We want to hear Jesus speak—we just affirmed that in our song—and, beyond the voice of a mere man, to hear your voice and to listen and to believe and obey. Help us as we navigate our way through this material, that we might have clarity and brevity and joy in the Holy Spirit. For we pray in Christ’s name. Amen.

Well, last time in John chapter 17, we finished at verse 15. And when I say we finished, I should really say we ended, because it felt like we didn’t finish—at least, it didn’t feel in that way to me. And that is because we left hanging the final phrase of verse 15, where Jesus says, “Keep them from the evil one.”

This phrase, “Keep them from the evil one,” is such a vital phrase. It’s a reference to Luther in his Great Reformation hymn, when he describes the Evil One as the “prince of darkness grim.”[1] And, of course, we will be dealing with that hymn, God willing, next week, when we share in Reformation Sunday. And in many ways, as I completed this study, I felt perhaps it would have been better to save it for next week, but if I did that, then I would have nothing for this week. And so maybe I’ll just do it both weeks; I don’t know.

But what I want to do is simply this: I want to consider, first of all, the identity of the Evil One; the strategy of the Evil One; Christ’s victory over the Evil One; and then our activity in relationship to Christ’s victory. So, as you can see, there’s quite a lot to get through.

The Evil One’s Identity

First of all, then: the identity of the Evil One.

He is described variously throughout the Bible as “the devil,” which is diabolos, which is the word that gives to us our English word diabolical. Satan is the Hebrew terminology for him. He is, as the diabolical one, a slanderer. He slanders God to us. He slanders us to God. He slanders us to one another. He is the Accuser. He is the adversary, as it were, in the court case of life. He comes in that way.

And he is identified for us in various places, and not least of all in the Gospel of John. So, for example, in John chapter 8, in a dialogue that Jesus has with the Jewish people, who are making much of their religious background and declaring that they don’t need to be set free because they’ve never been slaves to anyone, because they have Abraham as their father—and then, quite dramatically, Jesus then says to them in verse 44 of chapter 8,

[Well], you are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I tell you the truth, you do not believe me.

As you go through John’s Gospel, Jesus then identifies the Evil One as the ruler of this world. I’ll tell you where I am without necessarily turning it up for you every time. For example, John 12:31, where Jesus there refers to the devil as “the ruler of this world”—i.e., our world is a fallen world; our world is a world in rebellion against God; and that world, in rebellion against God, is under the jurisdiction of the devil, Satan, the Evil One.

In chapter 14, he refers to him in the same way when he says, “The ruler of this world is coming.”[2] Fascinatingly there, the ruler of the world is about to appear not in the form of a serpent, as we see in Genesis 3, but in the form of Judas Iscariot. You perhaps remember when we studied that passage that the son of destruction, we read of him, “Satan entered into Judas.”[3] And Jesus says to his followers, “Don’t let your hearts be troubled”[4] and so on, and he says, “but you should know that the ruler of this world is coming.”

Not only in the Gospels but also in the Epistles. So, Paul, writing in 2 Corinthians, uses a very interesting word. He uses a term for the devil that is unique in all of Scripture. The word that is there is the word Belial. You find it in 2 Corinthians 6:15. He’s speaking there about the importance of those who are followers of Jesus not getting themselves entangled with those who are opposed to Jesus, and he uses terminology that is very understandable: “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers,” because we’re talking about two very different things. “For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial?”[5]

And that term for Satan was peculiar to Judaism at the time of Paul. So the Jewish people who were listening to him would be perfectly clear about the reference that he was making. The word actually means “worthlessness,” or it means “destruction.” And so he’s saying, “What possibility is there for any kind of union between he who is absolutely worthless—he who is committed to destruction—and he who is the Lord of life and glory? If you are in Christ, you cannot be unequally yoked in this way.” And, of course, the direction is very straightforward.

When you get to 2 Corinthians chapter 11, the devil—and we’re still talking about his identity—the devil is there described as “an angel of light.”[6] He’s talking about false apostles. We may have time to come back to that, but he says then there’s no wonder about this, because “even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” “As an angel of light.” You remember when he writes to the Galatians, he says, “I’m really concerned that you would depart from the gospel.” He says, “You should be very careful, because even if an angel came from heaven and proclaimed to you a gospel that is not the gospel, you should have nothing to do with that.”[7] An angel that came from heaven? A fallen angel that would come and proclaim a gospel that is no gospel? You don’t have to be a genius to realize how apropos that is.

Fundamentally, the strategy of the Evil One is to discredit the Word of God and to destroy the works of God.

Now, his identity is masterful. He could hope for no better cover than the illusion that he doesn’t exist. That’s the best thing. If you’re going to be a spy, you’re a spy that doesn’t exist. But you do exist. He does exist. But he wants us to believe either that he doesn’t exist, and so we ignore him completely, or that he exists all the time, everywhere, all the time. So, the two dangers of dealing with the devil in terms of his identity: one, that we become preoccupied with him, and we see him everywhere—like in the old Frank Peretti books, called This Present Darkness, which was a good book, but I found that every time I turned around, I expected to see a demon. You know, if you opened your closet, say, “Oh, there’s another one!” wherever it was, and he could see them on people’s shoulders and everything. I didn’t know where they all were. That kind of preoccupation, I think, is unhelpful. But the alternative is equally unhelpful: to walk around as if there is no one. There is. Jesus says so.

That’s his identity.

The Evil One’s Strategy

Secondly: his strategy. What is his strategy? Fundamentally, the strategy of the Evil One is to discredit the Word of God and to destroy the works of God—to discredit his Word and to destroy his works. So when you go through the story of the Bible, you realize that the great opposition to the unfolding drama of God’s purposes is opposed again and again and again: as Goliath against David, who is the Lord’s anointed; it’s in the incarnation, with the response of Herod in his great opposition to this unfolding drama of the arrival of a King and so on.

And the strategy we find from the very beginning of the Bible. So if you turn to Genesis chapter 3, you’ll find it there. And you’ll find that what I’m suggesting is actually there. From the very beginning, from creation, the Evil One is at work: “Now the serpent was more crafty…”[8] The power of evil revealed here in Genesis 3 is in and behind the speaking serpent—so crafty, so crafty. And in that powerful opposition, “his craft and [his] power are great.”[9]

So his opening gambit in speaking to Eve, his initial approach, is kind of deceptively innocent. He says, “Would you mind if I asked you a question?”[10] Well, that’s sort of disarming, isn’t it? Nobody is immediately in the defensive there. But what is the question? “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?’”[11] No, he did not actually say that. He said, “You shall not eat of this tree in the garden.”[12] And so the devil immediately misquotes God. People say, “Well, you know, Mr. So-and-So is a very nice man. I went to his church; he quotes the Bible.” Listen: That’s not the issue! It’s how you quote the Bible. You can monkey around with the Bible a hundred ways, say all kinds of things. You can’t misquote it. No, that’s not what he said.

Verse 4, he then says to her—he’s not only crafty, but he’s cruel—he says to her, “You know, here’s the deal: You won’t die.” “You won’t die.” And then he says in verse 5, “The reason that he’s saying these things to you is because he’s seeking to deprive you of something that would be really good for you.”[13] Verse 5: “For God knows…” Now he’s explaining God. The devil is explaining God! “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Well, the fact is, their eyes were opened. But what did they see when their eyes were opened? They saw that they were naked. They saw that they had a problem. Because they already knew that they’d been made in the image of God. Chapter 1 and verse 26: “God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And furthermore, let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, birds of the heaven, over the livestock, over all the earth’”—notice—“‘and over every creeping thing that creeps on the face of the earth.’”[14] They knew that they were now made in the image of God being been given dominion over everything. This, incidentally, is the social history of humanity. This is the nature of humanity as described for us in the beginning of the Bible.

But what has happened to them? Well, they actually listened to the Evil One. They listened to the serpent—the serpent who is contradicting the maker of heaven and earth. So their ears are filled with the word of the Evil One, and then they go, and they hide from God. And what happens from that point on, to quote my friend Chad Van Dixhoorn, is that the poison of disobedience was absorbed into the root of humanity, was imputed to all who were in the line from Adam and Eve. Remember, when Paul preaches in Acts chapter 17, we have it, where he says remarkably there—I didn’t mention this this morning, but there it is in verse 26. He’s speaking to the Athenians, and he says, “And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on … the face of the earth.” So if he made of that one man, and that one man was a sinner, and the poison of disobedience came through that one man, then we who are in that man… “As in Adam all die…”[15] Therefore, we got the problem right along with him. That’s what the Bible says.

That’s why when the writer of Ecclesiastes is giving us a kind of survey of life, its ups and downs, and trying to make sense of the jigsaw puzzle, he makes this statement in verse 29: “God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.”[16] “God made man upright, but they”—man qua man, men and women. God has made us in his image, upright, but we are crooked. We’re like a broken coat hanger that’s been bent in fifty different ways, and we realize that we’re unable to straighten it.

That is why men and women today, like Adam and Eve, conspire to seek after everything, it seems, that is contrary to God and to his purposes—everything except God, the God to whom we’re accountable. And when, again in Ecclesiastes 7, the writer puts it so succinctly, he says, “Surely there[’s] not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.”[17] Now, just put that in your pocket for a minute. “There[’s] not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.” It’s not saying that man is incapable of good things, but what it is saying is this: that man is incapable of doing anything good in terms of merit towards the God who has made him. He’s completely incapacitated.

If we had time, we’d go to Romans chapter 3, but we won’t. You can, for homework. Left to ourselves, we don’t seek God, and left to ourselves, we are unable to do anything that merits salvation.

The Westminster Confession helps us in section 6, where it says this, speaking in terms of the impact of the fall of man: “Since they”—that is, Adam and Eve—

were the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed to—and the same death in sin and corrupted nature was conveyed to—all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation.

From this original corruption, by which we are utterly disinclined, disabled, and antagonistic to all that is good and wholly inclined to all that is evil, all actual transgressions proceed.[18]

So when people say, “What in the world is up with the world? Why is it that things are the way they are?” this is the Bible’s answer.

Now, his strategy is revealed not only in creation, but his strategy is revealed, as I’ve said, elsewhere. One other place, just to point you, would be to the temptation of Jesus. Because you see his craftiness in full force in Matthew chapter 4. You remember that “Jesus was led … by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted.”[19] The tempter comes, the devil comes, and he says to him straight out of the blocks, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”[20] He says, “If you’re the Son of God, do a miracle. Show everybody.” And what he’s actually doing—he’s trying to seduce Jesus to use his divine prerogative to make his circumstances easier on himself: “You’ve got be hungry after forty days, Jesus. Turn the stones into bread! Do yourself a favor.”

He goes on from there. Jesus answers him, “[If you want to talk about bread]: ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that [proceeds] from the mouth of God.’”[21] Jesus’ answer every time is with the Scriptures.

Then the devil took him to the holy city … set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, ‘He will [give] his angels [charge] concerning you,’ … ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”[22]

Once again, the devil uses the Bible, misquotes the Bible, to try and oppose Jesus. That’s his strategy: to destroy what he has come to do, to discredit the word that he speaks.

And for a third time he “took him”—verse 8—“to a very high mountain … showed him all the kingdoms of the world [in] their glory. And he said to him, ‘All these I will give you.’” That’s a flat-out lie, incidentally, because he couldn’t. “‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.’” So what is he saying? His strategy is this: to get Jesus to exchange his love of the Father for the worship of Satan.

The strategy hasn’t changed. He would rather that you worshipped him, went his broad road to destruction, than that you bow down before Jesus as Lord and King and Savior.

So, it’s no question at all that the Evil One, by identity and strategy, is the father of lies. He is the father of lies. And as the father of lies, he’s very, very capable.

I must keep moving, but 2 Corinthians 4—I find that this is helpful to remind myself of this. Why are things the way they are? Two Corinthians 4:3. Why is it that when we tell people the gospel, this fantastic good news… You say, “Now, here’s the deal. You can’t earn this for yourself. Jesus has done for you what you cannot do for yourself, and he has died in order that your debt might be canceled, that you might be forgiven.” And people go, like, “Hey, talk to the hand. Yeah, sure. Thank you. I can see that it means something you to. It means nothing to me.” Why is that?

Here’s the answer: “The god of this world…” You remember him? The Evil One. “I don’t ask that you take them out of the world. I ask you to keep them from the Evil One,” the god of this world. What is he doing? What’s his strategy? “The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”[23]

And worse still, as you move on through 2 Corinthians and you get to chapter 11—I said we might come back to this, and here we are—worse still, the Evil One is so crafty that he employs people in positions such as my own or positions of significant leadership within the unfolding story of the drama of Christianity, whether in the first century or the twenty-first century: men who are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. Disguising themselves! So, saying one thing but meaning something else—saying that they believe the Bible and it must be upheld, and then saying that it doesn’t matter whether marriage is heterosexual or homosexual. That’s this week from the archbishop of Canterbury and the archbishop of York. He and his buddy have finally concluded that it doesn’t really matter, that it is equal opportunity, irrespective of gender and background. Now, I hate to say to the archbishop… But that is false. And if he is really the archbishop of Canterbury… What about the Bible? What about the Bible? His strategy is disguise. Disguise.

He intimidates. First Peter 5: He roars.[24] The sound of the opposition may seem so loud in the ears of some, they say, “I’m just going to have to go with the crowd, it’s roaring so loud.” He consumes. He devours.

Jesus’ Victory

The only response that we have to that is, of course—thirdly—in the victory of Jesus. In the victory of Jesus.

Eventually, the devil and his forces will be cast down into a lake of fire, and there will be a new heaven and a new earth. And that has been signaled when, in the cross, Jesus has triumphed.

In the passages that I referenced in John already, if you go back down through them, you can glean from them help in different ways. For example, in chapter 12, in that context where Jesus says, “Now is my soul troubled. ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this hour that I’ve come”[25]—he’s talking about the hour of his death. And then he says, “Father, glorify your name.” And “then a voice came from heaven: ‘I have glorified it, and … will glorify it again.’”[26] It must have been amazing to be there! And John says, “And some of the people in the crowd said, ‘Was that thunder?’” And someone says, “No, I think an angel just spoke to him.”[27] And “Jesus answered, ‘This voice has come for your sake, not [for] mine.’”[28] The Father says, “Listen! Listen! I have glorified my Son, and I’m about to glorify it again.” “In this is the Father glorified.”[29] Remember that section? I hope you do.

What does Jesus then say? “Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out.”[30] What is he referring to? He’s referring to the cross. But from a human perspective, if you had come through Jerusalem and saw the bloodied body of Jesus hanging up on a cross, you would have been prone to say, “I guess that exciting adventure with those fellows has come to a horrible halt! Surely this cannot be the Messiah of God, this here in Jerusalem. It appears to be abject defeat.” In fact, it is the abject, total defeat of the Evil One. Because “in the cross of Christ [we] glory, towering o’er the wrecks of time.”[31]

In chapter 14, Jesus similarly says of the Evil One—and I love the phrase—he says, “He has no claim on me.”[32] “He has no claim on me. He can’t force me to do anything.” “No one can take my life from me,” Jesus said. “I have the power to lay it down. I have the power to take it up again.”[33]

“The ruler of this world” is “cast out.” Well, somebody said to me after the first service, “Well, what does it mean that Jesus has overcome the world? If he’s overcome the world, how is it that Satan is the ruler of the world?” Well, he has overcome it in the cross. And eventually, all that has been actualized in the reality of that defeat, if you like, in chess terms—it’s a long time since I played chess, but you can get pretty quickly to checkmate. And if you do, the person that you’re playing, who can’t see how you got there, will want to continue to play the other part of the game. And you can say to them, “Well, you can play the other moves if you want, but you cannot alter the outcome.” That is exactly the story of the cross. And eventually, the devil and his forces will be cast down into a lake of fire, and there will be a new heaven and a new earth. And that has been signaled when, in the cross, Jesus has triumphed over the accuser of the brethren, the one who accuses us night and day,[34] as it says in Revelation 12.

Now, you can see this, actually, in life, tonight, when we have the baptismal services, as we do in every Sunday night. Every time somebody stands up and says in the baptismal service, “I was… but I am…,” what has happened in their life is that Satan has been cast out. I don’t mean that they were oppressed and indwelled by Satan. No. But by nature, we live under the jurisdiction of the Evil One. And when I’m no longer under the jurisdiction of the Evil One, what has happened? I bear testimony to the fact that he has been cast out.

And that’s why I love songs that enforce that reality, of what it means that the victory over the Evil One is ours in Jesus. Jimmy and Carol Owens. I love this. I keep it in my thing so that I can try and memorize it. But if you are in Christ today, listen to this. Absorb this:

You are [a member of] the children of the kingdom of God,
You’re the chosen ones for whom the Savior came.
You’re his noble new creation by the Spirit and the blood,
You’re the church that he has [called] to bear his name!

So what?

And the gates of hell shall not prevail against you!
And the hordes of darkness cannot quench your light!
And the hosts of God,

the armies of God,

         shall stand and fight beside you
Till your King shall reign triumphant in his might,[35]

when the kingdoms of this world are manifestly the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.[36] This is not in question. His identity is clear, his strategy is cruel, but the victory is absolutely secure.

For example, when Paul writes in Colossians, at the beginning of Colossians, and he’s encouraging these people about all that is true of them in Jesus, it’s wonderful. Colossians 1:21: “And you,” he’s writing to them, “you, who were once alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach.” So the security of our position in Christ is revealed in some measure in our own personal activity. Because he goes on in that same verse to say, “if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the … gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed … under heaven [and throughout earth].”[37] That’s why the imperatives of 1 Peter and of James 4, for example, are clear: “Stay awake, stay alert, and resist him, firm in the faith.”

So there is no sense in which we say, “Okay, the identity of the Evil One is this. His strategy is that. There is victory in Jesus. Therefore, we can just relax.” No! There is nowhere in the Scriptures that we’re invited to live a life of dreamy carelessness, that we’re invited to say, “Well, it doesn’t matter. There’s no part that I’m going to play.” We’ll see that when we get back to the next verse in 17: “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.”[38] “Finish what you began in them,” Jesus says.

The Westminster Confession of Faith again helps us by reminding us that we have a battle on three fronts. Number one: the corruption of our flesh—i.e., me. Every sin is an inside job. Don’t come to see me and tell me that the devil made you do it. He didn’t. You did it. So did I. Why? Because although I am set free in Jesus, I’m still a sinner. And there remains within the intrinsic “me-ness” of me the inclination to do wrong things, to choose bad things. And that is the frontline of the battle. The corruption of my flesh; secondly, the malice of Satan; and, thirdly, the influence of the world. And the crafty one, the Evil One, whom we’ve identified, plays his cards straightforwardly. He seeks to bring about our ruin. And what is the weapon that he uses? Sin. Sin. And he employs that to appeal to our fleshly instincts.

I mean, it’s really so straightforward that I’m surprised that we often stumble at this. I mean, again, I can’t get through a Sunday without a little chorus, but we used to sing,

I met Jesus at the crossroads,
Where the two ways meet.
Satan, too, was standing there,
And he said, “Come this way.
Lots and lots of pleasures
I will give to you today.”

“Wouldn’t you like some of this? Wouldn’t you like that? Don’t you realize that he is just trying to destroy you, that he’s trying to keep away from you the things that will make you really you? Come on!”

But I said, “No, there’s Jesus here.
Just see what he offers me:
Down here, my sins forgiven;
Up there, a home in heaven.
Praise God, that’s the way for me!”

Now, here’s the deal: You don’t do that once in your life. Sometimes you do that on a daily basis. Sometimes we’re aware of the impact of the malevolent accusations of the Evil One to the point that we don’t even really know what it is we’re doing or why we’re doing what we’re doing. Romans chapter 7: “The good that I want to do I don’t do, and the bad that I don’t want to do… Oh, what a wretched man I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”[39] If you don’t understand that, the chances are you’re not a Christian

One day, we will see Jesus and be made like him. But it’s not today—at least, I don’t think so, unless somebody died during the last thirty minutes. We live in a world to which we don’t belong, because “our citizenship is in heaven.”[40] We live in a dual reality: the reality of “no condemnation”—Romans 8:1—and the reality of conflict revealed in Romans chapter 7. J. Packer put it marvelously when he said the Christian life is like a house: In the north side of the house it tends to be chilly. In the south side of the house, if you go to the south side, it’s warmer. He says Romans chapter 7 is the north side of the house, where we’re aware of our conflict, and Romans chapter 8 is the south side of the house, where we are secure in the absence of condemnation, because Jesus in his death, in casting out the Evil One, has borne the curse of our indebtedness by nailing it to the cross, as he says in [Colossians].[41]

If you’re in Christ, on account of who he is, his triumph, his casting out of the Evil One, you have love, joy, security, and the promise of eternity in the presence of his glory.

So let me end in this way. Let me end as John ends his letter. If you turn there, you can just see this, so that you can tell it’s in the text. First John 5:18: “We know that everyone who [is] born of God does not keep on sinning.” It’s not the pattern of their life. They don’t just do it and do it and do it and do it. “But he who was born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.” Remember what Jesus says to that lady? “Do not cling to me.”[42] That’s the verb there. It’s not like “He doesn’t tap you.” No. He doesn’t get ahold of you. He may come and oppress you, he may come and accuse you, but he doesn’t get ahold of you. Verse 19: “We know that we[’re] from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one,” or “The whole world lie[s] in [the power of] wickedness.”[43]

What is he saying there? He’s saying that the world is in the grip and dominion of evil. The world! And those who don’t follow Christ are serving Satan whether we realize it or not. And the picture, you will notice in verse 19, is not a picture of men and women struggling actively to be free from the power of the Evil One but rather quietly lying, perhaps even consciously asleep, in the arms of Satan.

We are, this morning, not divided by gender, race, intellect, social status, any of the above. We are, before Almighty God, divided on two fronts. And this is what the Bible says: We are either living under the power and authority of the world rulers of this present darkness and of their commander-in-chief, the Evil One—either that—or, by God’s amazing grace, we are looking to Jesus as our Savior, Lord, “pioneer and perfecter of [our] faith.”[44] Every one of us, in terms of this closing verses of 1 John 5, every one of us is therefore either of God, “born of God”—verse 18—or in the power of the Evil One. Either of God or in the power of the Evil One. There is no third category.

So if you’re in the power of the Evil One, you have nothing at all to look forward to save ultimate destruction, death, and hell—or God’s Word is a lie. Nothing to look forward to. If you’re in Christ, on account of who he is, his triumph, his casting out of the Evil One, you have love, joy, security, and the promise of eternity in the presence of his glory. So why would you not trust Christ after I’ve told you this? Oh, of course, I remember. So do you. Because the god of this age has blinded your mind.

Well, guess what? You can’t unblind it. So are you stuck? No. Because “God so loved the world” that is under the control of the Evil One “that he gave his only begotten Son,” that whoever was at the second service on the 27th of October 2024—that whoever was there—and believed in him would not perish but would have eternal life.[45]

And if you have any inkling to reach out from the recesses of your own psyche and say, “Lord, I need that”… It’s when I understand my helplessness that I cry. Do you know how helpless you are without Jesus? God loves you. That’s why, despite the fact that you’re part of a world that is in rebellion, he came to seek you. He clothed Adam and Eve on the outside of the garden, covered up their shame; and he covers us with all of the blessings and benefits that are ours in Jesus.

Father, thank you for your Word. Thank you that we can study it, we can go and see if these things are true. Lord, I pray especially for some people who are just nuzzling themselves up to the notion that they can rest quite contentedly in the grasp of the Evil One. Lord, help them to see that it is because of your immense love that you come to shake them, to wake them, that you get that light that we were singing about, the “ray” that Wesley talks about—dead in sin, and “I woke; the dungeon” was “flamed with light.”[46] Lord, flame our dungeons with your light, we pray, that our chains may fall off and we might be free in Jesus and let this whole world know that there’s a great story and a great adventure to be had. Bless us as we sing our concluding hymn, which reminds us that although we face the Accuser, our answer is not in a litany of our good endeavors but in looking from ourselves to Jesus, in whose name we pray. Amen.

[1] Martin Luther, trans. Frederic Henry Hedge, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” (1529, 1853).

[2] John 14:30 (ESV).

[3] Luke 22:3 (ESV).

[4] John 14:27 (paraphrased).

[5] 2 Corinthians 6:14–15 (ESV).

[6] 2 Corinthians 11:14 (ESV).

[7] Galatians 1:6–8 (paraphrased).

[8] Genesis 3:1 (ESV).

[9] Luther, “A Mighty Fortress.”

[10] Genesis 3:1 (paraphrased).

[11] Genesis 3:1 (ESV).

[12] Genesis 2:17 (paraphrased).

[13] Genesis 3:4–5 (paraphrased).

[14] Genesis 1:26 (paraphrased).

[15] 1 Corinthians 15:22 (ESV).

[16] Ecclesiastes 7:29 (ESV).

[17] Ecclesiastes 7:20 (ESV).

[18] The Westminster Confession of Faith, Modern English Study Version, 6.3–4.

[19] Matthew 4:1 (ESV).

[20] Matthew 4:3 (ESV).

[21] Matthew 4:4 (ESV).

[22] Matthew 4:5–6 (ESV).

[23] 2 Corinthians 4:4 (ESV).

[24] See 1 Peter 5:8.

[25] John 12:27 (paraphrased).

[26] John 12:28 (ESV).

[27] John 12:29 (paraphrased).

[28] John 12:30 (ESV).

[29] John 15:8 (paraphrased).

[30] John 12:31 (ESV).

[31] John Bowring, “In the Cross of Christ I Glory” (1825).

[32] John 14:30 (ESV).

[33] John 10:18 (paraphrased).

[34] See Revelation 12:10.

[35] Jimmy Owens and Carol Owens, “Children of the Kingdom” (1974).

[36] See Revelation 11:15.

[37] Colossians 1:23 (ESV).

[38] John 17:17 (ESV).

[39] Romans 7:19, 24 (paraphrased).

[40] Philippians 3:20 (ESV).

[41] See Colossians 2:14.

[42] John 20:17 (ESV).

[43] 1 John 5:19 (KJV).

[44] Hebrews 12:2 (NIV).

[45] John 3:16 (KJV).

[46] Charles Wesley, “And Can It Be That I Should Gain?” (1738).