Sermon manuscript:
The bible presents us with a tremendous either/or. Either we
are a child of God or we are a child of the devil. Either we are on God’s side
or we are on the devil’s side. Either we are obedient to God or we are obedient
to the devil. Either we are receiving the Holy Spirit or we are possessed by
one or more evil spirits.
We’ve never liked this either/or very much. In our modern
times we seem to have been given a powerful argument against it. There is a
widespread belief that somebody somewhere discovered that there are no such
things as evil spirits, nor is there a devil. These are just relics from a
previous time in human development when people were too stupid to know any
better.
There is a variation of the same argument that is used with
God’s existence. Supposedly somebody somewhere discovered that God doesn’t
exist. It is believed that ancient people had to make up the existence of God
because they were too stupid to explain the world in any other way.
This mindset obviously fosters a feeling of superiority over
our ancestors. That is where the greatest strength lies in that line of
reasoning. We are able to do things that they couldn’t. We can move mountains.
We can make the deaf hear and the blind see. These signs and wonders are taken to
be incontrovertible proofs that God can’t exist.
The logic runs like this: Ancient people didn’t have modern
technology. With modern technology we are able to do seemingly god-like things.
Therefore, if ancient people would have had modern technology, they never would
have had to believe in gods.
But there has never been a need to resort to logic for
anyone to be convinced. We have run away from this either/or from the start,
that is, from immediately after the fall into sin. Before the fall into sin
Adam and Eve knew with all their heart, soul, and mind that God existed.
Immediately after the fall they could no longer bear this thought. After all,
if they brought that thought to mind, then those words would immediately float
to the surface: “In the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.”
Just to keep their sanity they needed to put some distance between themselves
and God. They got busy making clothes and storing up some food. They started to
make a living for themselves. They had to put their mind on other things
besides the thought of whom they belonged to.
This busyness allowed them to think they were independent,
not subject to the either/or. That was as refreshing to them as air is to a
drowning man. Plus it was even plausible. The devil had wisely went away. They weren’t
obedient to him were they? Sure, they obeyed him that one time, but now they
could make up their own minds.
With God, they knew that they hadn’t been obedient to him.
But that didn’t seem to matter. After all, the punishment that was threatened
didn’t come. Plus isn’t that the very thing that the serpent had said, “You
won’t surely die…”
So, they thought, there must not be any either/or. Let’s
just get busy making the most of our lives. They did not need modern technology
to teach them that there is no such thing as gods or devils. They wanted to
believe that. They wanted to be deceived. And, if you believe in yourself, and
never give up, you can usually get what you want.
You might think that God coming to Adam and Eve in the cool
of the day and preaching to them would have put a stop to this delusion. Adam
and Eve became aware of the consequences of their obedience to the devil, but they
also learned from God that one would come who would crush the serpent’s head.
But sin sank deeply into Adam’s loins. While Adam and Eve believed, probably
with as much difficulty as anybody else, all his descendants are predisposed to
reject the thought that either we are obedient to God or obedient to the devil.
I think you can easily see that this is true in our day. You can already see
the same thing with Cain and his children and grandchildren.
Genesis chapter 4 shows how unbelieving Cain and his unbelieving
descendants lived like Adam and Eve did in their unbelief. They got busy. They
made some businesses. What was important for them was improving the quality of
life. They were tremendously successful. They invented all kinds of things.
They became powerful. The brief history culminates in a man named Lamech. Moses
tells of how he boasted to his two wives that he had killed a man who had wounded
him, and if anybody else might get any ideas, they better have another thought
coming.
This self-absorption and self-aggrandizement put other
thoughts to the side. They were busy running the rat race. The great either/or
of life was not on their radar. Who cares about holiness or evilness so long as
the good times keep rolling? We might think that our people are so advanced,
but we see the exact same mindsets in the mighty men of old who lived before
the flood.
Paul says in 1 Cor. 1 that the preaching of the cross is
foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the
wisdom of God. I’m sure that there are many dimensions to why the world thinks
that the preaching of the cross is foolishness, but I’m also sure that what we
have been talking about today lies at the very heart of it. The cross is the
way that the devil, even though he be fully armed, is overtaken by Christ, who
is stronger than he is. Christ ties the devil up and plunders all his goods.
That is to say, Christ, by his sacrificial death, takes away the human beings
who used to belong to the devil, used to be obedient to him, and makes them
children of God.
The cross of Christ is right at the heart of the either/or
of we human beings either being a child of God or a child of the devil. It is
an undoing of the curses in the Garden of Eden. It works reconciliation between
God and sinners because justice was carried out on Jesus. But in order for the
cross of Christ to make any sense life must be understood in terms of being in
a relationship with either God or the devil.
Life is about being exorcised from the devil and all the
evil spirits and being given the gift of God’s Spirit. The thought that was
totally unbearable—that is, how we stand with an almighty God whose
commandments we have not kept—can be brought back to mind. We can confess how
dreadfully we have sinned against God because we have a better justification in
Jesus than we could ever have otherwise in ourselves. Adam and Eve, in their
innocence, were once happy at the thought of being together with God. There was
nothing they liked better. That same joy and peace is yours now too in Jesus.
We don’t belong to the devil anymore. Jesus has purchased and won us with his
holy precious blood and his innocent suffering and death.
Our life as a Christian, then, is a matter of receiving and believing
in the justification and holiness that God continually gives us. It is a return
to the innocence and hopefulness of the Garden when all things were new. The
apostle John speaks of our lives as Christians this way: “We are children of
God now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. But we know that when
Jesus is revealed we will be like him, and we will see him as he really is.
Everyone who has this hope purifies himself just as Jesus is pure.”
In our Gospel reading we heard about Jesus casting out a
demon. According to what we’ve looked at today, this is not something strange.
This is at the very heart of what the Son of God came to earth to do. It is the
very thing that he does with us by baptizing us and by absolving us. He sets us
free from our bonds to Satan and makes us children of God. Furthermore he feeds
us with holy food and holy drink, so that we do not remain empty houses, just
waiting to be haunted again, but are filled more and more with the Spirit of
God. The great either/or are the terms in which Jesus does his work. He moves
us from being under Satan to being under God, together with Jesus our brother.
But, as I’ve spoken about at length, we do not like this way
of looking at our life. That was true at Jesus’s time too. And so you see how
the church of that time opposed Jesus, even though he is operating with the
very heart of what God would have us be about. They dismiss Jesus as being
weird. “He’s probably just casting out demons by Beelzebul,” which means means,
“lord of the flies.” That’s the name they give for the devil. He’s just the
buzzing lord of the flies. No big deal. This stuff that Jesus is doing is all a
dog and pony show. He just doing some silly cable TV stuff. Meanwhile, these
Jewish authorities have much more important things to do than cast out demons.
They have to carry on negotiations with government officials and rob widow’s
houses and make names for themselves.
The real task to the church is very different. It is the way
that Jesus, through his Word and Sacraments, deals with individuals. He
exorcises people who were born in sin. He exorcises those who have returned to
their bondage in sin. He sets them free. He is engaged in the great either/or
scenario that every single person, without exception, is engaged in. And it is
a battle. The kingdom of God fights against the powers of darkness.
You can see that these are the general terms of the struggle
in Luke chapter 10. Jesus sends out seventy two men to preach wherever the
message might be received. When they return they are filled with joy, and this
is what they say, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name!”
They do not talk about how nice Grandma Schmidt is, or even about how many
people they reached. They go right to the heart of our existence: Demons were
cast out. People were set free. By believing in Jesus’s name they were given the
right to become the children of God.
These terms of the struggle have not changed. Insofar as we
are actually doing the work that Jesus gave his disciples to do, we continue to
cast out demons by baptism and absolution and distribute the Holy Spirit by
God’s Word and Sacraments. That this is our true task is very important for us
to learn, because it has always been unpopular. It was unpopular in the Garden
of Eden. Folks would rather just not think about being either under God or
under the devil, because they are afraid. They are afraid that they might end
up finding out that they are under the devil. They are afraid that if they are
under God that they won’t be able to do the evil things that they want to do.
This is why it is important that we Christians understand
that we have been given the authority to deal with people in God’s Name. Jesus
says “He who hears you, hears me.” When we are speaking according to
God’s Word, what is said has just as much validity and power as if God himself
spoke from heaven.
And the message that we Christians have been given to speak
is not terrible or frightening. It’s a message like the one the angel of the
Lord spoke to the frightened shepherds on Christmas night: “Do not be
afraid! I bring you glad tidings of great joy that is for all people, for unto
you is born this night in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord.”
The Stronger One has come, bound up and defeated the devil (even
though he was fully armed), and he has taken away the right of the devil to
hold on to even a single soul. Jesus purchased everyone. The only way that the
devil has any power whatsoever is by lying, and by tricking people into
believing those lies. The truth is that atonement and justification have been
worked for all people. All are set free to become children of God. Only by
clinging to lies can people foil God’s tireless efforts to save them.
I can’t think of a more helpful thing that we can do for
people than to help them see this, to understand it, and thereby be victorious
over the devil, the world, and their own flesh. The outcome is never in doubt,
for Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. There he rules at the
right hand of God the Father. He rules by the preaching of the good news, the
Gospel.
Today we will close with a different blessing than the one
we’re accustomed to:
May the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and
may your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless at the coming of our
Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful. He will do it.
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