Overall point: The major battle we face in this life is not what is seen, but what is not seen—Satan is intensely and intentionally opposed to what God is doing. AND the greatest defense we have is not our offense, but rather our dependence.
Jesus is prayerful and successful; the disciples are prayerless and careless. First, we must understand from this story in Luke that Satan intensely and intentionally opposes what God is doing in this world. In , we read that Satan enters Judas. We could discuss the views on what this means, but it is not important for our purposes.
This calls our attention back to Luke 4. Satan even actively sought to lure Jesus away from the path that had been laid out for him by the Father. Like a lion in its natural habitat, he sits back and looks for the vulnerable and weak so that he might devour his prey. Ephesians underscores this battle as well. Second, we can note the strategies that are used in this story to prepare for the battle. I want to begin with the disciples.
He announces his willingness to even go to prison or to die, but he will never deny Jesus. We find a similar conviction in all of the disciples in Luke After Jesus announces that one of them is going to betray him, they are speechless.
They cannot imagine being at a place where they would consider betraying Jesus, much less actually doing it. In fact, their discussion turns into a debate about which of them is the greatest. Their questioning turns to arrogance. Grasping a wholistic picture of Satan requires a full canonical scope. These questions force an excursion into the terrain of biblical theology. After building out a stable biblical-theological framework, we will be in position to establish a few conclusive truths—also known as dogmatics.
Due to space limitations, our exegetical motion does not attempt exhaustion. Rather, it is controlled by a mere three questions, which I believe naturally arise from the text:. The answer is found in verse Satan had no record of debt with which to accuse. This is the primary way he was disarmed. That much we can discern from Colossians. The language used describes a parade. Satan was rendered powerless, and then becomes something of a cosmic joke.
He was showcased in the theater of God before his own rebel entourage and before the angels of heaven. Satan is not acting in isolation but seems to have an organized, mobilized, rebel army, perhaps even a hierarchy. But more centrally, the thrust of Colossians is that when Jesus looked to be at His weakest, He was actually putting on invincibility.
Three days after his death, Jesus kicked the hinges off the door of the enclosed tomb outside Jerusalem. On Friday, Satan surely heckled, hissed, and laughed while hovering over the blood-bespattered carcass of our Lord. He never saw it coming. On Sunday, Jesus arose with an indestructible life.
He procured a deliverance for His people so rich, so stunning that even the angels could not heretofore comprehend its immensity. It was a plot twist so beautiful that it satisfied millennia worth of anticipation 1 Pt So, where did Satan come from? When did he rebel? When did his entourage rebel? Why did he rebel? Our brief interrogatory analysis into Colossians unearths nearly as many questions as it yields answers.
We now turn to the realm of biblical theology to resolve leftover questions from our exegesis. At Calvary, Jesus died and Satan received an imagined victory.
But that was neither the beginning nor the end of the story as we saw in Colossians Satan thought he had bested the Son of God and was, thus, at the pinnacle of his pride.
At Golgotha, it seemed the curtains were closing on our humble little story from Bethlehem. In actuality, as rendered in Colossians, it is Satan who was at his weakest point. Satan is a contingent, sentient, and derivative being just as any other created animate creature Gn , Col It is discernible that his opposition took place prior to the fall of man in Genesis 3.
A total of 2,, deaths are specifically enumerated in scripture as either directly orchestrated by God, or carried out with his assistance or approval. Satan, on the other hand, notches up only 10 kills. That means, for example, that we have to omit the Flood of Noah, which Wells says comprises a big chunk of that total. In the flood, God supposedly gives himself a mulligan and reboots the earth, saving one human family and a boatload of animals to repopulate the planet.
One of the most oft-cited books in the Bible is Leviticus, particularly for its two verses condemning homosexual acts.
Leviticus also condemns adultery, tattoos, sleeping with a woman on her period, shaving, eating shellfish and other sins that are popular sticking points for many dissenters of Judeo-Christian faiths.
When it does explain precisely how the Lord slays his victims, we learn his methods are shockingly inventive, and darkly effective. Take, for example, 1 Samuel, in which God destroys three cities, then smites the surviving populations with hemorrhoids to punish the Philistines after they steal the ark of the covenant.
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