From Jim McGuiggan... ENTER THE DRAGON

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.                            

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.

 

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.