We have spoken of where Jesus was true, exposing the devil's lies; we have spoken about Jesus life and death of love, counteracting the devil's murderousness; but in one way we have thought about it backwards. It was by his death that Jesus struck the decisive blow against the devil, and so unravelled all his works.
As Paul once said, the sting of death is sin. What makes death so appalling, what gives the devil his power, is sin and its consequences. That is death's real horror. But on the cross the Son of God made of himself a sacrifice for the sins of the world; he made atonement for sin so that the devil had nothing left with which to accuse us. By his death, Jesus disarmed death, so that for the children of God death is a bomb that explodes with no charge.
The cross was the scene of Jesus' great triumph: for finally there a human person did what Adam failed to. Finally there, a human being - in his flesh and blood, with all the difficulty that would have meant - in obedience to God, met the devil with all the worst that he could do, and overcame him. It would be easy for us to see the cross as a defeat, and the resurrection as the overturning of that defeat; but that would be to miss the way the NT talks about the cross as itself a victory - as Paul does in Colossians 2, and as the author to the Hebrews does in the second chapter:
Hebrews 2:14 Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death-- that is, the devil-- 15 and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.
That Jesus rose from the dead confirmed that he had in his death destroyed the devil and his works.
No comments:
Post a Comment