[Machine transcription]
And I heard a loud voice in heaven saying, Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom
of our God and the authority of His Christ have come.
For the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down.
Amen.
You may be seated.
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints, we’re going to consider this text from Revelation 12.
It’s fantastic.
It’s one of my favorites.
It’s just the best.
But before we do, I think it’s good on St. Michael’s Day to review what the Bible
says about the angels, at least a few things.
We have a lot, actually, of information about the angels in the Scriptures, these heavenly
beings that we cannot see, that we learn of through the Lord’s holy words.
So a couple of things by way of review, and then we’ll consider the text.
First, we want to remember that the word angel refers to the vocation or the office or the
calling of these spiritual beings. The word in Hebrew, malak, and in Greek, angelos, means
messenger, and it can refer to human messengers as well, to the pastor or to the person who delivers
the news or the mail. It’s a messenger, an angel who comes to bring it, and this refers to the
work that the Lord has set these angels to do, that is to deliver and to preserve the Lord’s work.
So, the angel is what they do, but when we talk about what they are, we use the word
spirit.
That refers to the beings that we refer to as the angel.
In fact, here’s the definition, angels are finite spirits without bodies, complete in
their spiritual nature, personal, rational, and moral beings of great but limited wisdom
and power, and of various ranks and orders.
The angels were, like everything else in the universe, created by God at some point in
the six days of creation, probably very early because we are told at the end of the book
of Job that the morning stars rejoiced as they saw the Lord creating the world and the work
of creation unfold.
There are a fixed number of angels.
They are neither married nor given in marriage so that there are no little angel babies
Even though they show up on the cards all the time. It’s always baby angels. No, they’re no baby angels
No families of angels and neither do the angels die
The classic attributes assigned to the angels are one
Indivisibility because they are spiritual
2. Invisibility, they cannot be seen. 3. Immutability, they don’t change, especially
they don’t get old. Immortality, they don’t die. Endless duration, that means that they
had a beginning but they have no end. Illocality and agility, those are two interesting ones.
Illocality is trying to sort out how the angels relate to space without actually having a
body. So that’s the theological word that the church uses to describe that. It is to
say that the angels do not take up space. They do not, they have no bodies to actually
locate themselves in space and yet they are present at a certain place. They are not omnipresent
like the Lord is in every place. So they are illocal. They are present at a place but they
they don’t take up space.
And also, being limited to a particular place,
they have to move from one place to another,
and this has to do with what the old theologians
called their velocity, or their agility,
or what one theologian called,
this is one of my favorite theological phrases,
extreme locomotion.
That means that the angels can get
from one place to another very quickly.
That’s amazing to think about.
Now at some point early in God’s work of creation, perhaps even before the six days
of creation were finished, there was a rebellion amongst the angels, amongst the spirits, led
by the devil himself and one-third of the angels fell and we call these fallen angels
the demons.
These angels, fallen angels, maintained their strength and their intelligence, but now they
have a will that’s bent on the destruction of God’s work.
Here’s the work of the evil angels.
I’ll quote again from the theologians, the evil angels, being since their fall enemies
of God and of His children, are under their princes ever bent upon destroying the works
of God, counteracting His purposes, doing and promoting evil, and though subject to
God’s supreme dominion and control and confined within the bounds of His permission, they
are in various ways occupied in strengthening their kingdom and exerting their power in the
minds and bodies of men.
So there are angels and there are demons, and they are all around us.
We simply cannot see them.
It’s an amazing thing simply to pause and reflect on that and that in this space, in
this place, there is a cosmic battle taking place between those who are supporting the
preaching of the Lord’s Word and His kindness coming to us and those who are opposing it
constantly and trying to stop it.
Now in regards to the work of the demons, the Bible teaches us about demonic possession
possession, and this in two ways, both spiritual possession and physical possession, as well
as demonic oppression.
And these are categories brought to us by the devil that we want to also assert in our
own time.
I got an email just from someone yesterday asking, hey, does the Lutheran Church believe
in exorcism?
And the answer is yes, indeed.
And we believe that the devil continues to work as he has worked from the beginning and
will work in the end to overthrow all that the Lord has done, and he does this by taking
possession of all those things which he ought not to possess, the souls, hearts, and minds
of humanity, and this is true for all unbelievers, and even in some cases the physical bodies
of people.
So we read in the Scriptures of the demons taking a young boy and throwing him into the
water and the fire, or another one causing him to shake and foam at the mouth.
We hear of one man who was living in the cemetery and had so many demons that when Jesus asked
their name, they said, we are legion, and that this man lived amongst the graves and
had the strength even to break chains.
And we say, yes, these are possibilities and not something to be treated lightly.
There’s also another category which we want to call demon oppression, and that is that
the demons can simply get after individuals, that the devil can put his thumb on someone
and exert a special kind of energy to try to oppress them and afflict them.
And I suppose in one way or another all of us face this demonic oppression.
When it’s time to come to church, when it’s time to trust the Lord’s word, when it’s time
to bless one another in the Lord’s name, the devil comes and tries to stop this over and
over.
So the demons are doing their work.
But on the other hand, the Lord’s good angels also are doing their work to support and uphold
the Lord’s word and His work in the world, especially the church and the Christian home.
Now the angels are also, like the demons, involved in the general affairs of state and
also society, as we sang in the hymn, that’s the one Melanchthon hymn that I think we have
in the hymnal, that the devil wants to overthrow church and family and state.
All three estates are under attack by the devil and all three are being protected by
the Lord and His holy angels, especially the state in so far as it supports the Lord’s
gift of this life and also the gifts of the life to come.
Now it does seem, and this is an interesting thing to note
as we just are making a list of some of the things
we know about the angels.
It does seem like, according to the words of Jesus
in Matthew 18, that the children
are appointed guardian angels.
Jesus talks about the little one and he says,
they’re angels behold the face of God in heaven.
Now if, so that’s a true thing that the Bible teaches.
What we don’t know, I wish we did,
but we don’t have enough information
to know from the scriptures.
If those angels are reassigned
when we reach a certain age,
or if they stick with us our whole life,
kind of hope so, but we don’t know.
Now, a couple more things on the angels.
The angels, both the good and the evil angels,
are confirmed in their condition.
It’s one of the differences between humanity and the angels.
The angels, it seems like, had one moment where they were either going to be for God
or against God.
And at that moment, after that free choice, they were locked in so that the good angels
were confirmed, the theologians say, in bliss, while the evil angels were confirmed in their
malice.
And there is no converting or redeeming the fallen angels.
They are and will remain fallen.
Neither is there tempting the good angels from the office that they have.
It is a locked in moment, so that’s good.
So we thank God for the ministry of the angels, remembering that He sends them to serve us.
Now this is an amazing thing and maybe the last thing to remember about the angels.
The angels are greater than we are.
Just on the chain of being, the angels stand above us as the beings of light that stand
right next to God, and yet the Lord has determined in His mercy that these great and powerful
beings, these holy and righteous spirits, would spend their energy and their wisdom
serving you and me.
And we thank God for that gift, it is a tremendous gift, and we pray every morning that the Lord
would send His holy angels to watch over us, that they would bless and keep us.
Now, with all that in mind, that’s a lot, but with all that in mind, I want to turn
our attention to Revelation chapter 12, where we hear of St. Michael, we hear of St. Michael
just three times in the Scriptures, in Daniel twice, and then in Revelation chapter 12,
and Daniel has a unique job or office that he’s given to do, and that is, in Revelation
12, Michael is to remove the devil from heaven.
Now, what is going on here?
This is the story.
The vision that God gives to St. John in Revelation chapter 12 is really a vision that covers
the whole of human history.
It starts at the beginning of chapter 12 with a pregnant woman in labor to give birth, and
this is a way that the Lord is picturing for John Israel in the Old Testament.
Ever since the promise that God gave to Adam and Eve in the garden that her seed would
crush the head of the serpent, Israel has been a pregnant woman waiting for the birth
of the Messiah, the promised Messiah.
And there is a second vision that’s there, the devil appears and he’s there waiting
to devour the child that’s born.
This is an incredible and quite stunning picture that you can see it in your imagination, this
woman laboring to give birth and a fiery red dragon waiting to eat the baby as soon as
it’s born.
It’s really quite a horrific picture, but that’s a way of understanding all of the
trouble of the people of God all the way through the Old Testament.
When we see Pharaoh having the babies thrown into the Nile River, or Herod killing all
of the babies in Bethlehem, or all of the enemies of God’s people always trying to
destroy Jerusalem, we are seeing the dragon sitting there ready to destroy the baby.
He wants to bring to nothing this child who was to rule the world with a rod of iron,
but he fails, and the child is, the text says, caught up to God in heaven.
So in one verse it goes from the birth of Jesus all the way through his life, his suffering,
his death, his resurrection, his appearance, and his ascension just like this.
I’ll read you the text.
Revelation 12 starting with verse 5, she gave birth to a male child.
One is to rule the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God into
his throne and the woman fled into the wilderness where she had a place prepared by God in which
she is to be nourished for one hundred, one thousand, two hundred and sixty days.
That’s three and a half years, the time that the Revelation uses to describe the trouble
that we have in this life.
Now what happens then?
And here’s the thing, I mean this utterly compelling picture.
What happens when this child, when your Jesus, ascends into the heavenly throne room?
What happens to that place?
Remember the throne room of God we’ve seen all throughout the Scriptures, in fact that’s
That’s where the prophets stood to hear the Lord’s word.
You’ve got to imagine it.
I don’t know how your imagination is, but you have to imagine this huge, big sort of
place that’s crowded and in the middle of it is a throne.
And in that throne room or in that chamber room, there’s probably five or six things that
happen.
There’s conversation between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and there’s praises that
are offered to God, and there’s petitions that are heard, and there’s people who are
sent forth from that room.
But the main thing that happens in that throne room at least as far as this revelation 12 is concerned the main thing that happens
there is a court case over the righteousness of
Individuals so remember just to put it in our mind remember how it was in Job chapter 1
it’s we see this throne room and
And and the devil comes and the devil apparently has a chair with his name on it
For the devil’s use only or something
He has a reserved seat in the heavenly throne room, and he comes and he takes his seat,
and the Lord says, okay, now we’re going to talk about Job.
Have you considered my servant Job?
He’s going to be on trial.
And the devil starts to bring accusations against Job.
Well, he’s only righteous because you give him so much stuff.
He’s only righteous because you give him so much health.
He’s only righteous because, because, because.
and the devil starts to bring accusations against Job.
And then the devil goes down to see if he can make those accusations come true.
If he can make Job curse God and die.
But here’s the point, that there’s a court case happening in heaven
over your righteousness.
Now that is frightful.
And maybe even more frightful is that the person,
the prosecution against you is none other than the devil himself.
That’s what the word Satan means.
it means accuser.
He is, remember we read it in the text,
he is the one who accuses our brothers
day and night before the throne of God.
So that the picture of heaven,
now imagine, because all of us think,
man, how we’d long to go to heaven,
but imagine if, this is the vision that we have of heaven,
is that heaven is the place where there’s a trial
being held over your righteousness
and the devil is there presenting evidence against you.
And he doesn’t have to lie.
He doesn’t have to make stuff up.
You know your sin, you know what you’ve done,
and the devil is keeping track of it.
You know the commandments that you’ve broken.
You know the love that you have failed to show.
You know how you’ve sinned
and fallen short of the glory of God
so that the devil doesn’t need to lie.
He has plenty, you and I have given him
plenty of evidence to work with
and he is there carrying it before the throne of God.
Now that is terrifying.
Imagine standing there when you finally reach that place,
when you breathe your last and you now die
to stand before the Lord, and there you stand,
and the Lord says, okay, now it’s time for judgment,
and there is the devil who has a list
of all of the things that you’ve done wrong.
Now that’s the picture in the background of Revelation 12,
but Revelation 12 is gonna tell us what happens
when your Lord Jesus, who has died for you,
who has shed his blood for you,
who has suffered on the cross for you to win
your atonement, to win your forgiveness, what happens when he goes to heaven?
When he goes into the court? Hebrews tells us
that he carries his blood inside the veil
so that Jesus now enters into the court as your defender
the word that we have in the Bible is advocate
we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus
He is Christ the Righteous One and He is going to come into this court and He is going to
argue His case.
But He does not bring the evidence of all that you’ve done good, all the good works
that you’ve done, all the things that you’ve managed to accomplish, all of your good intents.
He does not bring that into the heavenly court, no.
No, He brings as evidence on your behalf His blood, His suffering, His cross, His resurrection,
His body broken.
He brings that before the judge and that evidence prevails.
I don’t know anything better to tell you guys than this, the blood of Jesus prevails before
the throne of God, so that the Father sees the evidence of your sin brought by the devil
and He sees the evidence of His Son brought to Him in His suffering, death, and resurrection,
and you are acquitted, you are declared to be innocent, righteous.
That is what the word justification means, that you are declared holy and perfect and
without sin, that the righteousness of Christ belongs to you, that the price for your sin
has been paid and now you are set free.
So can you imagine, this is how I like to imagine it, I’m standing there before this
throne of God shaking to my boots because Lord knows how guilty I should be before the
throne of God and the devil comes along and says, we see how scared he is, he should
be, look at these things he’s done, here’s one, here’s evidence of Brian’s sin and
And he brings it and he presents it before the throne and Jesus says, Jesus says, objection
your honor, my father, that sin is died for.
And the devil says, well that’s not the only one, I’ve got more, I’ve got a whole list.
Look at this sin that he did.
And Jesus says, objection your honor, that sin is covered by my blood.
And the devil says, well that’s okay, I’ve got more and more and more.
And the devil continues to present the evidence of our sin and time after time.
time, Jesus stands there with His blood and His death and His suffering and His cross
and His atoning work, and He objects to every single sin, every single accusation, every
single attempt at your condemnation, it all is drowned by His blood.
That sin is covered.
That sin is atoned for.
That sin is died for.
I suffered for that sin already.
I paid for that sin already, not with gold or silver, but with my only precious blood.
My innocent suffering and death covered that sin as well.
No, every single one of them, everything, everything.
Now is there sin?
Look, is there sin bouncing around in your conscience that still seems like it’s accusing
you?
Jesus says the same thing about that sin, it’s covered, it’s done for, it’s forgiven,
He took care of it.
You cannot out-sin the saving work of Christ, He covers them all.
And what starts to happen in this heavenly courtroom is that now that Jesus stands there
as our defender and our great advocate that the demonic work is all of a sudden out of
order.
In fact, at some point the Lord says to the devil, look, you’re in contempt.
As you sit there and argue against the blood of Jesus, as you sit there and try to argue
that sin should prevail, you are out of order but the devil won’t stop and so the Lord says
to his bailiff, St. Michael, get rid of him.
And it goes like this, verse 7, now war arose in heaven.
It’s kind of the last place you’d think there would be a war, right?
War arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon and the dragon
and his angels fought back but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them
in heaven, a little chair for the devil only, it’s wrecked, it’s thrown out, it’s gone.
And the great dragon was thrown down, the ancient serpent who was called the devil and
Satan the deceiver of the whole world, he was thrown down to the earth and his angels
were thrown down with him.
And I heard a loud voice in heaven saying, now the salvation and the power and the kingdom
of our God and the authority of his Christ have come for the accuser of our brothers
has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God, no longer.
Listen, you do not have an adversary, a Satan, an accuser in heaven.
You do not.
You have an advocate.
The devil no longer stands before God bringing to him all the things that you’ve done wrong.
Instead, the Lord Jesus stands there pleading for you, for God’s mercy.
And God hears the prayers of Jesus and forgives you your sins.
Now this is good news.
You are declared righteous and holy and acquitted in heaven.
But the text says that now that the devil can no longer do his work in heaven, he comes
down to do his work on earth.
And this is really what we have to deal with, because the devil can no longer accuse you
before God the Father in heaven, but he can accuse you now to yourself.
The devil can no longer stand in the heavenly court and accuse you, but he can come down
to the courtroom of your own conscience, the courtroom of your own heart, and he can accuse
you there, and he does, that’s where he does his work.
He knows that his time is short, and so he comes to each one of us to try to condemn
us to try to kill us, to try to deceive us, so that we would not trust in the heavenly
verdict.
Now how does he do it?
There are a thousand different ways.
He is the master of a thousand arts, so the devil is always trying to pry his way into
our conscience like a snake into the tent.
One of his main tricks, now this is an interesting thing to observe, St. Paul says we are not
ignorant of the devil’s devices.
One of his main tricks is he confuses the preaching of law and gospel.
He does it something like this.
You know the Lord would intend for us to look back on our lives through the lens of the
gospel and forward in our lives through the lens of the law.
In other words, when we look back and we see all the things that we have done wrong, we
want to say, God be praised that all of my sins are forgiven.
And then when we look at what we’re supposed to do today and tomorrow, we say the Lord
has told me to love my neighbor and to serve my neighbor and to love God and to trust in
him, so we go forward with the law and we look back with the gospel, but the devil wants
to switch that around.
He wants us to look forward with something like the gospel, especially when we’re tempted
to sin.
Oh, go ahead and do it, no big deal.
Jesus loves you, he doesn’t care if you sin, do whatever you want, etc., etc., and he wants
us then, once we’ve sinned, to look back with the law.
I can’t believe what you’ve done.
Look, you call yourself a Christian, and look at that that you’ve done.
Look at the sin you’ve committed.
It’s just horrible.
Or the devil comes along and he tries to tempt us into these kind of patterns of sin so that
we fall into these repetitive sins, and he uses this to cause calluses to grow in our
own conscience so we don’t even feel the pain of our own sin.
But it turns out that everything that the devil does is calculated to support what St.
Paul calls, in 1 Thessalonians, the lie, the lie.
And what’s that lie?
The truth of the scripture, I think this is the only way to understand the lie, the truth
of the scripture is Jesus is Lord, Jesus is the Savior, and the lie is anything that tears
at this truth.
I don’t need saving, I’m good enough, I don’t need saving, that’s the lie.
I can save myself by my own efforts and by my own good works, that’s the lie.
I have a different Savior, I don’t need Jesus to save me, that’s the lie.
I’m too terrible. I can never be saved and loved by God. That’s the lie
Whatever it is. The devil will tempt you away from this saving truth that Jesus is the Savior
But even on earth he’s overcome
Now this is what the text says. It’s really quite amazing if you want to underline a part of the text
Revelation 12 tells us that the devil is overcome
depending on how you count by two or three unique things.
It just tells us this is how he’s overcome.
Verse 11, and they have conquered him
by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony
for they have not loved their lives even to death.
The blood, the word, and the not loving your life.
life. These overcome the devil. Do you see that the devil comes into your ears and into
your heart telling you that your sins are not forgiven, that Jesus is not your Savior,
that you don’t need saving or whatever it is, but the Lord overcomes him and throws him
out with the blood and the word and you’re not loving your life unto death. In fact,
In fact, the Lord wants the same preaching that Jesus is now preaching before God the Father in heaven.
He wants that same preaching to echo in your own heart and in your own mind,
so that the devil not only is cast out of heaven, but also cast out of your own heart,
so that he finds no longer a place there as well.
He tries, and he tries to get in there,
But by the blood and the word, he’s overcome.
I want you to have this confidence.
Jesus says it in Luke chapter 10, the gospel text.
He says, I give you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions, and you will not be
overcome by them.
And this is highlighted in the scriptures.
There’s a lot of things in this life that we are told that we are to flee.
Flee, for example, sexual immorality, 1 Corinthians 6.
Flee idolatry, 1 Corinthians 10.
Flee youthful passions, 2 Timothy 2.
Flee the love of money, 1 Timothy 6.
But we are never, you are never told to flee the devil, to be afraid of him, to run from
him.
No, in fact the opposite is the case.
James 4 says submit yourself therefore to God,
resist the devil and he will flee from you.
You belong to Jesus.
His righteousness, his blood, his death and resurrection,
these belong to you.
So who will bring a charge?
Who will bring a charge against God’s elect?
It’s God who justifies.
Who will condemn?
Him.
Christ Jesus is the one who died and more than that was raised and is at the right hand
of God and He intercedes for us so that we are more than conquerors through Him who loves
us.
Dear saints, this is our confidence.
Romans.
This is our hope and our peace, that the devil has been thrown down from the throne of God
and that Christ now sits there at the Father’s right hand with His mercy for you.
Amen.
Please stand.
Romans 16, verse 20 says this,
the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.
Amen.
