Revelation 12 Overcoming the Accuser(2-Apr-2006)

April 2, 2006

Revelation 12 Overcoming the Accuser

(The sermon can be heard online at: http://www.tenth.ca/audio.htm)

Last year while flying back from Japan, I ended up sitting next to a person who worked as a scout for the Seattle Mariners baseball team…
This guy was the person who had recruited Ichiro, the star lead off batter for the Seattle Mariners.
I asked the scout how was it that Ichiro became such a great batter. He’s very disciplined about practice, apparently his biggest complaint about the Mariner’s is that he can’t find anyone who is willing to practice as early on game day as he wants to. Ichior never looks at computer screen or watches TV expect with special glasses to protect his eyes, at games in between he goes to a video room and watches how he’s doing against the pitcher… he asks what is the pitcher doing against me and how am I responding?
As a batter there’s something about knowing what your “opponent” the pitcher might do, that can give you an advantage.
The Bible teaches that we have an opponent of the soul that seeks to strike us out—called Satan.
We battle against our personal shadow side, what the Bible calls the “flesh,” and against the darkness in our social environment, what Bible calls the “world” and against transcendent spiritual forces of evil, which Bible describes as Satan or the spiritual forces of evil.
As we look at our text this morning and continue our mini-series on spiritual warfare, we want to examine how this evil one does battle against us… If you have your Bibles please turn to the last book of the Bible Revelation and go to chapter 12.
The Woman and the Dragon
1 A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. 2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. 3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. 4 Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. 5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who "will rule all the nations with an iron scepter." [a] And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. 6 The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
7 And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. 8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. 9 The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.
The woman here is the one clothed in sun, is the one who’s son will rule the nations with an iron scepter, a quote from Psalm 2 referring to the Messiah… Jesus Christ
The woman is Mary… (and in the view many scholars may be metaphor represent the people of God).
A dragon is attacking the pregnant woman. From vs. 9 we know that the dragon is the devil.
In vs. 9 the text says the dragon has been hurled to the earth, and in vs. 12 we read he is filled with fury because he knows his time is short…
vs. 17 Satan is making war against the rest of her offspring, namely the people of God…
The Bible teaches that the dragon, Satan… was defeated by Christ on the cross… when Christ died, bearing our sins in his body so we could be forgiven.
Some commentators have compared this defeat of Satan to D day—the day when the Allied Forces landed on the beaches of Normandy in June 1944. With that invasion, the enemy was “in effect” defeated, but there would a lot of fight until the final VE-Day victory day in May 1945.
So Satan has been defeated but there is a still a lot of fight in him knowing because as vs. 12 points out, he knows that his time is short.
How does Satan wage war against the people of God?
One of the ways he does his by accusing us…
In Vs. 10 we read that Satan is the accuser of our brother and sisters the people of God.
10 Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
"Now have come the salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down.
The name Satan in Hebrew means accuser.
The name the devil in Greek means slanderer.
He’s hurling a lot of what may be technically true or partially true statements about us, with the intent of “strikc us out” before God.
Satan also loves to accuse us to God’s face.
He also loves to accuse us directly so our lives are full of shame.
As teenager and as a young person, I felt almost no guilt.
I remember my sister saying, to me, “You never feel guilty do you?”
I remember thinking that’s true (the only time when I’d feel guilt being when I failed to do something bad—I did experience some remorse then).
When you feel no guilt it really expands your possible extra--circular activities…
As I’ve shared with many of you before, one of favorite hobbies was shoplifting… and reselling goods to kids at school or giving them away…
I never felt any guilt over what I did.
My parents were concerned about me, ending up taking me on a field trip to prison, my dad later said I wanted have a chance experience a open so you could see your future home, that didn’t phase me, so he took a Christian conference and where I met and Christ and asked him to forgive my sins and become my life guide…
After giving my life to Christ, I swung over time, to the other extreme and developed in some ways an over-sensitive conscious.
Having no conscious is obviously bad.
But having a hyper-sensitive conscience is not good either…
I ended up making restitution for the things I had stolen: i.e. approaching store managers, giving money back for things I had stolen and asking forgiveness…
But I felt this hazy guilt… and shame…
I went to my then minister in Balfour Jacobsen and he gave me a passage to read in old book by SD Gordon called Quiet Talks. S.D. Gordon said this is how you can recognize whether the voice is from Satan or not… if the voice tends to convict you of sin and then leads you closer to God, it’s God’s voice, if the voice tends to condemn and drive you from it’s likely the voice of Satan, the darkness…
If it’s the voice that convicts and draws us to God, it’s the Spirit’s voice.
If it’s the voice that condemns and drives us from God it is the voice of the accuser…
In Revelation 12:9 we’re also told that Satan deceives the whole world.
Satan is an accuser and he is also deceiver.
Jesus in John 8:44 calls him the Father of lies…
Satan will often try to deceive…
In very first temptation of our ancient forebears, Adam and Eve Satan said…
Did God really say, you could not eat of any tree in the garden?
Satan deceives Adam and Eve, by twisting God’s words and making them seem more prohibitive than they were. God never said, as Satan suggested, you cannot eat from any tree in the garden, he only prohibited them eating from one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil… God never said you cannot touch fruit of that one particular, just don’t eat…
And Satan says, if you eat that fruit, you won’t die, you’ll become like God… not true… but powerfully alluring…
Satan deceives, seeks to twist God’s words to make them seem more burdensome than they are and whispers if we follow God’s way we will miss out, we won’t really be living…
Adam and Eve, eat the fruit believing that they will miss out if they don’t and what happens? Instead of being become more fully alive, for the first time they are filled with a sense of shame…
Satan uses this deception… as a kind of jab… to tempt us…
Come just do it… why are you being so uptight! you’re such a stick in the mud…you can handle it… you’ll miss out if you don’t, God will forgive you… You do it…
and “bam Satan” comes the guilt of shame and self-loathing comes on you… and you call yourself Christian… your, low life and you think God forgive you now?
So the Satan will try to deceive and tempt us so he can in turn accuse us…
(*This is his character and his way, and as side by note if we find that we are getting caught up in spirit of accusations and slander and/or tempted to deceive people… we are mirroring the work of Satan and the darkness—we at least a moment an instrument of darkness)
So how do we overcome Satan?
The text says they overcame him by blood of the lamb and the word of their testimony and they did not love their lives unto death…
What does this mean?
The blood of the lamb…
When Satan we hurls slander and accusations at us and a lot of what he says is technically true or partially true…
Satan can try to strike us out by accusing us of sins and failure that are true or at least partially true of us…
How do we overcome? Vs. 11 Tells us that the people of God overcome Satan through the blood of the lamb…
The blood of Christ… shed on the cross washes away our sin…
Martin Luther talked about the difference between active vs. passive righteousness…
Active righteousness is that righteousness we develop by laws of God, like the 10 Commandments…
Passive the righteousness that’s attributed to us by God, based on what Christ has done.
Active righteousness might be defined by something we did (or participate in).
In active righteousness, we play a key role in becoming righteous.
Passive righteous is righteousness, we receive from God.
We say might “active wealth” is wealth you’ve earned through work.
Passive wealth you receive from someone else… say an inheritance…
We experience this “passive righteousness” in Christ…
Bible teaches when Christ died on cross he bore our sins on the cross…
When we give our lives to Christ, God regards our sin as having been paid for by him and Christ’s perfect record in credited to our account… it’s the “great exchange.”
We are to seek “actively” to be righteous, but we will fail…
If we rely primarily our active righteous to be accepted by God, we will be filled with all kinds uncertainties and anxieties, because we can never be fully sure of our performance.
What helps us overcome the accuser is the knowledge that we have received a “passive righteousness” from God through Christ.
A typical “conservative religious” approach to guilt, would say try harder morally, reform yourself and you’ll feel better.
A typical liberal secular psychological approach to guilt might say, don’t worry about it, you’ve accept yourself as you are, you’ve got read to treat yourself with “unconditional positive regard.”
The Gospel does NOT just say, not try harder…. Not just God loves as you are, but something even better God loves you as you are in Christ, cleansed and made pure…
We overcome by the blood of the lamb…
And vs. 11 we overcome by word of our testimony…
We must declare our forgiveness.
Some of you have heard me say, whether we have a collar or an office or not we are all ministers… in that we all have a gift that we to use to serve God and the common God.
We are also all preachers… in that we are to preach if to no one else at least to ourselves.
I’ve people say, I wish I could carry you on my key chain… Every time I need a word, I could push a bottom on you and you’d say something helpful.
You don’t need me on your key chain! You can learn preach to yourself!
When I was dealing with accusations from the enemy as teenager… and new Christian, I memorized Psalm 103…
8 The LORD is compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger, abounding in love.
9 He will not always accuse,
nor will he harbor his anger forever;
10 he does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities.
11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;
12 as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
13 As a father has compassion on his children,
so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him;
14 for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust.
Know this book, commit some it to memory… and preach to yourself… overcome by the word of your testimony…
Lamentations: 3:23
22 Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
23 They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
How do we become people who will not overcome by the darkness?
How do we become invincible?
Vs. 11 They overcome through the blood of the lamb, the word of their testimony, and because they did not love their lives unto death.
When we understand that we have been made pure by the blood of Christ and proclaim the word of our testimony back to ourselves… we will come to the conviction… as Darrell Johnson has pointed out that death is not the last word, but only the second to the last word.
If we realize that our sins are forgiven and that we have been received by God and will spend eternity with God… we will know that death is not the last word, but only the second to the last word…
And that is why people who have overcome by the blood and of their testimony can put their lives “on the line” and not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.
I have a “hero” who after graduating from college, along with some of his friends, sensed God calling him to serve as a missionary to a group of Auca Indians of Ecuador.
They went to Ecuador with their wives and young families studied the language of Acua’s, after several some months of trying to establish rapport with Auca by dropping gifts by plane by communicating at a distance through loud speakers saying we are your friends and, they felt they were ready to have a first time face to face meeting…
These young men went in to meet with Acuas and they were speared to death…
The secular press cried “Why would the church allow this to happen to such gifted young people?” The answer was found in the journal of one of the young men, Jim Elliot, who wrote, “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose…”
People who have overcome through the blood of the lamb and the word of their testimony, knows that she is no fools who gives what she cannot keep—even that something is her life on earth—and gains a prize she can never lose…
How is that Canadians James Loney and Harmeet Singh and their Christian peacemaking teams colleagues Norman Kember and Tim Fox members were willing to lay down their lives for God in Iraq? And Tim Fox literally did that as he was killed.
Because they believe in peace, but also because they knew death is not the final word, it is only the second if you’re believe in Jesus Christ…
But, how do we become who can live like that.
Because even if we believe in the blood of Christ to make us clean, proclaim that to ourselves through the word of our testimony, death is still a loss. Jim Elliot left behind his wife, Elizabeth. Tim Fox left behind his family.
I think when come to know how much God has loved us, we become people who able to live and die like this…
The fact is some people are easier to love and sacrifice for than others…
Last week, I was with a man in the Carolinas who’s been a mentor and friend. Through his foundation he has helped me pay for part of my education, he’s opened doors for me, introduced me to some of my closest friends, and has been present for in success and failure, in joy and pain…
This past week, I and some of his closest friends met in South Carolina to talk about what his vision will look like after he fully retires and dies…
Each of us gathered around this person is willing to sacrifice and to give something to continue this person’s vision, because we’ve been loved by this person.
When you know you’ve been loved by someone, whether a parent, a friend, it’s not such a big step to give yourself for that person…
The Bible we says love God, because he first loved us…
Knowing that God loves laid down his life for us in Christ, we can those who overcome in over by the blood of lamb, the world of our testimony, and by laying down our live for God…
When we look at the cross, we see this love with such clarity…
On the night Jesus Christ was betrayed, he took bread…
Communion…
(Alpha…)