ENTER THE DRAGON
The
gospel calls the NT elect to war. To war not against flesh and blood
but against the malignant forces and powers that hold humanity in
captivity. Life in the kingdom of God and his Christ is pictured in
Revelation as a righteous assault against seven-headed beasts, against
overwhelming numbers and humanity-hating "Orks". To offer less than that
call to bright, brave, gallant young men and women is to risk boring
them and having them walk away from the Body of Christ in search of
righteous war and engagement against the enemy in some other place and
way.
As presented in scripture, in prose and poetry, in
narrative and apocalyptic literature Satan is the implacable enemy of God and
all that God cherishes. I take it that Satan is a spiritual being, a malevolent
spirit that has earned the reputation as leader of all that opposes God and his
Lord Christ. But he’s more than that. Beyond his own personal hatred and spite,
his name stands for any other form of rebellion or corruption arising at any
time in any quadrant of God’s creation. So if we say this act or that is
“satanic” we don’t mean that Satan personally did it or personally commissioned
it; we mean it is of his character, it accords with his spirit, it moves in the
direction of his own agenda. He sets the tone for whatever is anti-God,
anti-life and pro-death.
The scriptures present him as a personal being who
seduced mankind into sinful rebellion against God and brought on them the
judgment of God. In urging them to sin he was seeking their pain, their loss
and their death and the curse of God did fall on us in response to that
pride-filled disobedience (see Genesis 3:16-19 and 6:1-7:24). In bringing this
pain and disease and loss down on us Satan meant it for evil but God meant it
for good because his wrath against sin is only another face of his mercy and
grace. Since Satan encouraged the original human apostasy it won’t surprise us
to find that in some texts disease and loss and even death are laid at Satan’s
feet.
The Dragon’s Agenda
Satan’s agenda is to wreck and ruin. There are suggestions
in scripture that Satan rebelled against God. There is explicit mention of
angelic rebellion in places like 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6 and while there is no
express mention of Satan in those texts they open the door for the
reasonableness of a satanic apostasy. We presume Satan was created by God and
since God cannot create what is inherently (by creation) evil we presume that
Satan made himself God’s enemy.
There’s no reason at all to think that Satan thinks he
can dethrone God! In the movie Gladiator
a Roman officer surveys the ranks of the enemy who are about to engage in a
battle they can’t possibly win and wonders why they won’t admit it. His general
asks him, “Would we?” We continue to pursue lost causes for a variety of
reasons fed by numerous motivations and if you hate a man savagely enough you’d
be willing to bring the house down on yourself if you thought it would do him
an injury. In light of his looming defeat in World War II Hitler made it very
clear that whether the Nazi regime would win or lose:
We shall
not capitulate…no, never. We may be destroyed
but if
we are, we shall drag a world with us…a world in flames…
But even
if we could not conquer them, we should drag half
the
world into destruction with us and leave no one to triumph
over Germany.
There will not be another 1918.
The apocalyptic visions of Revelation show the Dragon,
who is identified with the great Serpent and Satan (Revelation 12:9; 20:2, and
see Romans 16:20 with Genesis 3:14-15), at war with the Lamb and his armies. He
seeks the destruction of the child born to be King and when thwarted in that he
turns on the children of God (Revelation 12:1-5, 13-17). And he makes it his
business to deceive the nations so that they will worship the beast and the
Dragon who gives power to the beast (Revelation 13:4-14) rather than God.
In the poetry of John Milton we’re given a
spellbinding description of Satan’s fanatical hatred and opposition to God.
Early in Book I though racked with deep despair Satan smolders in “immortal
hate” and hisses to Beelzebub, his chief ally, that his mind is fixed and that
he will never bow to knee to God or sue for grace. Beelzebub wants to know the
point of continuing a battle they can’t win when all they’d get is more defeat
and Satan rebukes him for weakness and tells him:
Fallen
Cherub, to be weak is miserable,
Doing
or suffering: but of this be sure
To
do aught good never will be our task,
But
ever to do ill our sole delight,
As
being contrary to His high will
Whom
we resist. If then His providence
Out
of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our
labour must be to pervert that end,
And
out of good still to find means of evil.
He looks around at the desolation and gloom that has
now become his kingdom and he insists that the farther from God he is the
better. And with a tone of finality he sets his awful course,
Farewell,
happy fields,
Where
joy forever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail,
Infernal
World! And thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive
thy new possessor one who brings
A
mind not to be changed by place or time.
The
mind is its own place, and in itself
Can
make a Heaven out of Hell, a Hell out of Heaven.
What
matter where, if I be still the same…
Here
at least we shall be free…
Here
we may reign secure; and, in my choice,
To
reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better
to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.
With
this he goes off to build his capital, the great city Pandemonium, to which he
gathers his despairing host of followers to, “Consult how we may most offend.” Finding
them whimpering and beaten he so rages that with words without substance he
raises their courage and dispels their fears. Flags are raised, trumpets are
blown and the vast host begins to shout in unison, and with swords and lances
beating on their shields they frighten the Night as they swear eternal hatred
against God and all he loves.
This is what drives the
Dragon’s agenda!
In Book 2 the satanic council admits they can’t harm
God directly but rather than sit and nurse their eternal wounds in the dark
Beelzebub tells of a new world where God’s darling children live and advises
that the evil hosts should attack him by attacking them. It would even be
better if the inhabitants of the new world were seduced into joining ranks with
them since this would add bitterness to God’s pain when he punished the
newcomers for their satanic rebellion.
Though
Heaven be shut,
And
Heaven’s high Arbitrator sit secure
In
his own strength, this place may lie exposed,
The
utmost border of his kingdom, left
To
their defence who hold it: here, perhaps,
Some
advantageous act may be achieved
By
sudden onset either with Hell-fire
To
waste his whole creation…or, if not drive,
Seduce
them to our party…This would surpass
Common
revenge, and interrupt His joy
In
our confusion…when his darling sons,
Hurled
headlong to partake with us, shall curse
Their
frail original, and faded bliss
That is Satan’s agenda and so he works to seduce humans to turn against God
because from his own experience he knows full well, “Who overcomes by force
hath overcome but half his foe.” In seducing the humans he gives grief to God
and interrupts God’s pleasure in the satanic defeat. If he, Satan must suffer,
then God will suffer also by the loss of his children as they join in the
satanic rebellion. This is the Dragon’s agenda.
“But I
am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds
may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ.” 2
Corinthians 11:3.
That
agenda is driven by his ceaseless and rabid hatred of God and he means to
seduce us into betraying the Holy Father. John Milton pictures Satan spying on
the humans in the garden and taking delight and pleasure from their innocence
and joy that he says just melts him. Satan even feels sorry for them, says he
isn’t really their foe and wishes he wasn’t going to do what he has in
mind. Still, whatever it might cost the humans he purposes to ease his spleen
on God by hurting what God loves and by using those God dearly loves he means
to grieve God. The humans are tools and nothing more. Satan makes it clear it’s
God he’s raging against and not the humans. So though he says he isn’t their
foe and that he’s feel sorry that they will lose so much, he means to use them
against God by making a pact of mutual friendship with them and give them hell
instead of Paradise (midway through Book IV).
To
you whom I could pity thus forlorn,
Though I unpitied.
League with you I seek,
And mutual amity, so strait, so close…
Hell shall unfold,
To entertain you two…
Thank him who puts me, loath, to this revenge
On you, who wrong me not, for him who wronged.
Though I unpitied.
League with you I seek,
And mutual amity, so strait, so close…
Hell shall unfold,
To entertain you two…
Thank him who puts me, loath, to this revenge
On you, who wrong me not, for him who wronged.
And for
all his evil he blames God! He wouldn’t want to conquer this new world or rob
the humans of their innocence and bring them eternal loss if God hadn’t forced
him to do it.
I find
Milton’s point here especially revealing. He has God’s arch enemy refusing to
take the blame. Though he earlier talks his hellish followers into a frenzied
rage against God, swearing that they will do no good but only harm and will
even work harm out of all the good that is—despite all that impenitent swearing
he claims the higher moral ground and blames God for the whole calamitous
result. And because that’s his nature it is his agenda to lead the humans in
the same path blame everyone else! Especially blame God!
Luke 9
twice tells us that Jesus had set his face top go to Jerusalem to meet his
destiny in this phase of God’s will.
But it wasn’t only a moment of crisis for Jesus when he got to Jerusalem
it was a moment of crisis for Jerusalem when Jesus got there. What would they
do with him when he forced them to make a choice?
Something
similar happens if we turn the cry of dereliction around and put it in God’s
mouth. Jesus in truth represented not only humans before God but God before
humans. In Jesus Christ humanity could look at the judgment their sins had
brought down on them and in agony ask their Holy Father why he had forsaken
them. But there, looking down at them from the cross is their God who asks them
in return, “My children, my children, why have you forsaken me?”
Astonishing
truth this, that God was prepared to spill his blood to gain our good will
while the Dragon with hissing lies talked us into notions of godhood, of
self-reliance and self-actualization. With arrogance and insolent ignorance we
told God we had had enough of him and would take care of ourselves! “Freedom”
tasted so good but it was a shameful freedom and a destructive liberty. Hugh R.
Mackintosh, brilliant Scots theologian and preacher, preached a sermon he
called Love’s Refusal. In Exodus 21
Israel was told to let the fellow-Israelite slave go free in the seventh year.
Many of them must have eagerly counted the days but there were times when the
one who came as a slave (due to debt or some such thing) learned to love the
master and to develop ties in that home; ties he didn’t want to break. So he
would refuse the freedom saying, “I love my master and my wife and children and
do not want to go free.”
At this
Mackintosh responds, “Freedom is good and Christ gives it abundantly; but
freedom without Christ, freedom rather to put Christ away is evil through and
through. Freedom is sweet, but what are all its joys if to taste them we must
leave our best friend behind? Whatever we must renounce is as nothing to that
which we have found in Him.”
The
freedom offered by the sinister one could only be gained by base ingratitude,
by a thankless and stupid heart that was blinded by corrupt and corrupting
visions of false grandeur. It’s foolishness, of course, to pity God for he
doesn’t need our pity, but isn’t it legitimate to see his brazen rejection as
the foulest kind of treachery? Had he been a tyrant, had he tormented and
narrowed us, had his treatment of us made us rue the day he made us—if any of
that had been true would we not now look back on our rebellion and think of it
with pride? But it wasn’t a brave insurrection; it was mean treachery. It
wasn’t a gallant assault against an arrogant and harsh deity it was an
arrogant, self-serving and stupid desertion.
Betrayal
is so hard to take. You only have to read the story of Absalom’s treatment of
his father David to sense the ugliness and shudder at it. Perhaps you came
across the painful story some years ago of the woman who married an ex-con and
loved him devotedly. A few years later he was accused of a very serious crime
he didn’t commit but as a result of poor defence work he was sentenced to
something like thirty years without parole. His wife was assured that if they
had the money to get a top-notch lawyer he could get a retrial and be released.
She took on extra jobs, scrubbed floors in office buildings at night, took in
laundry, kept up her day job and lived on too little. Some years later,
exhausted, looking much older and very thin she had enough money to get the
lawyer. She hired him, they got the case reopened, he was set free and a few
months later he went off with a younger and prettier woman. Betrayal is so hard
to take.
Psalm 41
tells a sad story. The psalmist is ill, worn out with the struggle against the
affliction and what’s worse he hasn’t treated God right. His enemies watch him
in the throes of his agony and pretend to care. When they come to visit it’s
really to see how quickly he’s sinking so that they can go and spread their
good news about his bad news and to insinuate evil about him. Naturally that
filled him with pain but what hurt him most was this (41:9), “Even my closest
friend, whom I trusted, he who shared my bread, has lifted up his heel against
me.” There it is! And if the sufferer is king David, insult has been added to
injury when the hero of the nation, the one to whom they owe so much, is
despised.
Lord Byron, poor man, who knew what it was to turn to ruin by turning
from God had this to say:
So the struck eagle, stretch'd upon the plain
No more through rolling clouds to soar again,
View’d his own feather on the fatal dart,
And wing’d the shaft that quivered in his heart.
Keen were his pangs, but keener far to feel
He nursed the pinion which impelled the steel;
While the same plumage that had warmed his nest
Drank the last lifedrop of his bleeding breast.
So the struck eagle, stretch'd upon the plain
No more through rolling clouds to soar again,
View’d his own feather on the fatal dart,
And wing’d the shaft that quivered in his heart.
Keen were his pangs, but keener far to feel
He nursed the pinion which impelled the steel;
While the same plumage that had warmed his nest
Drank the last lifedrop of his bleeding breast.
Whatever
mystery there is hidden in Christ’s cry to God, “Why have you forsaken me?”
there’s mystery too when he turns his eyes on us and, speaking for God, wants
to know from us, “Why have you forsaken me?” Can you explain it?
It is God who comes to our rescue, saving us
from our sins (Matthew 1:21). He isn’t our enemy; he’s our redeemer. He and
Satan are on opposite sides. It is Satan
who would condemn the world and it is God who sent his Son into the world,
we’re told expressly, not to condemn the world but to save it (John 3:16-17).
It didn’t seem to matter to God that it was sinners he came to save; in truth,
it was precisely because we were sinners and he knew it that he came to save
us. It didn’t seem to matter to him that we didn’t want him—he wanted us! It
didn’t seem to matter what we felt about him; what mattered was what he felt
about us. It didn’t seem to matter that we didn’t want to be saved or that we
wanted him out of our lives; he wanted to save us and to enter our lives.
Wouldn’t
you think God would have more respect for himself? Wouldn’t you think he would
prize his honor more highly than to come looking for a race that has treated him
so insolently? Has he no shame? Is that why we forsook him—because he loved us
too much? It’s from that God that
Satan works to cut us off.
To be continued, God enabling
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.