Imagine that it’s Sunday afternoon. You are on the turf at FedEx field. You have been assigned to play defense for the Deadskins ... er, I mean, the Redskins. Yes, you. You have been assigned to play defense; why not? Nobody else is doing it! Spurrier says to you, “When one of them gets the ball and starts running, you are to stop him. You are to keep him from scoring. Pick your own strategy, select your own technique, but just stop that guy. You are now our chief defensive player. We are counting on you to stop the enemy!”
So what do you do? What is your plan? You have several choices. When you look up and see 250 pounds of muscle heading your way, you have several options.
You can say to yourself, “That’s more than I want to deal with. I’m not ready yet. Let me go back to the locker room and study some more. Maybe in a few years I’ll be ready for this challenge”. Suppose you did that. What would happen? Touchdown for the opponents!
So you need a different plan. You are the key defensive player, and so what’s another possibility? Aha, I know. There are a bunch of us out here, and so I’ll say to my chums, “You all need to get busy. You all need to take this on. Come on over here.” So all your teammates gather, they huddle and they talk, some whisper and some shout. A few are for doing something, anything, right now; most, however, feel that we should plan carefully and should not do anything that will get our nice uniforms dirty. The debate goes on in the huddle; but meanwhile, what is happening downfield? High-fives and the chicken strut, because the enemy has scored again!
Okay, now we know what the problem is. The problem is that we have focused too much on ourselves. We’ve been dealing with our own issues, and meanwhile the enemy is romping along. We need to forget about ourselves and engage the enemy, don’t we? We need to get in his face and do something to directly. So how about this strategy? Here he comes, trotting downfield; I’m going over there. I’m going to get right in his path. “Excuse me. Uh, excuse me, mister running back? Can I have a word with you? I just wanted you to know that we are kind of unhappy about your scoring so often. Do you think you could keep it down? Would you mind just letting us have a few points too? And by the way, we do care about you, you know. If you ever need us, just give us a call.” Get real! Maybe when the score is about three hundred to nothing, they’ll do that. But the game is not about politeness, it is not about making nice, it is not about sidestepping the challenge, it is not about taking our own sweet time. The game is about winning. It is about the defeat of the enemy. And there is only one strategy that will work; there is only one plan that makes sense. Are you ready for it?
When the enemy is racing toward the goal, tackle him! Throw him down! Do not leave him standing, do not spend time wondering how he feels about it. Tackle him, throw him down, take him out! That is the only way.
You and I have been assigned places on God’s team. You and I have been given the task of confronting the enemy for the Kingdom. And if our thing is to go sit in the prayer room or the classroom and prepare, well, that’s fine. But to spend years and years behind stained glass and never engage the enemy – that’s pointless. Or if our thing is to play church, arguing about what the stadium should look like or what the choir members – er, cheerleaders – should shout, then we are going to put all our energies into the wrong things, and the enemy is going to romp right past us. If we do screw our courage to the sticking place and get out there on the field with a witness, but it’s a half-hearted, apologetic, witness, nobody will pay us any attention, and the day will be lost. More to the point, souls will be lost, the culture will be lost. The world in which we live will be lost to the enemy.
The only answer is to engage the enemy. When the enemy is racing toward the goal, step in and tackle him! Throw him down! If we are to be on the battlefield for the Lord, we are to take arms against this sea of troubles, and by opposing end them. We Christians have a responsibility to deal with this world and its evils head-on.
In this wonderful, strange, and mysterious passage about some angel named Michael and his companions fighting the Satan dragon, there are some clues for us. Remember, now, what I have been saying about the Book of Revelation. It’s full of symbols and word pictures. It’s not to be read as if it were a map or a dictionary. Don’t get hung up on who Michael is or when this takes place. Feel this for right now, for us, for our time. We are on the battlefield for the Lord, right now. What do we learn from this picture of the angel Michael and his battle against Satan?
I
First, we learn that there is warfare. There is such a thing as spiritual warfare. The battle of God’s will against the powers of evil. We learn from the simple, straightforward opening statement of this passage of Scripture that we are not talking about little disagreements or short-term skirmishes. It says, “War broke out in heaven”. War broke out. Not minor disagreements, but all-out war.
We need to be very clear that we are not in some little incidental argument that will all blow over. We are involved in a battle that has been going on since man became a living soul and learned how to raise his fist against his brother. Evil is a huge thing. Paul tells us elsewhere in the Bible that we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of darkness in high places. Evil is more, a whole lot more, than petty peccadilloes and funny foibles. The Bible says that the heart of man is deceitful above all things, perverse and twisted. Make no mistake about it; we are engaged in spiritual warfare. It is not a little skirmish, nor is it something we can ignore. It is warfare, demonic, deep, and damaging.
My father-in-law, like many Christian young people of his generation, took a pledge back around 1930 never to support war. He declared himself a pacifist and vowed that he would not go to battle for his King and his country, Great Britain. But as the decade of the thirties wore on, and as Hitler in Germany took on more and more of the face of profound evil, my father-in-law reversed his stand. He saw that the time comes when you can no longer just let evil do whatever it wants. Too much is at stake. You have to stand up and fight. You have to throw evil down. You have to get in its face and do something.
Today we don’t have Hitler and we don’t have Stalin. We do have Osama and we do have Saddam. We do have terrorism and we do have militants bent on world domination. While I certainly am not in the President’s pocket -- did not vote for him, and may not vote for his re-election -- I can see why we must draw a line in the desert sand and stop Al Qaeda and its sympathizers. I can understand why we must invest in extensive security measures; evil does not play by the rules. Evil does not give us breathing room. There is spiritual warfare, and as Christians we really cannot stand idly by while Satan runs rampant. We are called to thrown him down.
IIBut this passage of Scripture rushes on to direct our attention to God’s militant messengers. To Michael and his legions, who take up arms and fight against the powers of evil. “Michael and his angels fought against the dragon.” The messengers of God went to work.
I believe that in every age, God appoints His Michaels, His archangels, His leaders. But God appoints also His ordinary angels, His everyday messengers. Does the text say that Michael fought Satan single-handedly? One-on-one combat? No, it does not. It says that Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. Legions of angels.
You and I are God’s angels for today. We are angels. Now don’t go all gauzy-winged on me. Please dismiss from your minds those pictures of delicate, effeminate creatures with white robes and huge feathery wings out their backs. You will not find that anywhere in the Bible. That is a fiction of sanctified imagination. The word “angel” means “a messenger.” It does not necessarily refer to some sort of heavenly creature. You could be an angel; I could be an angel. We can be God’s messengers, appointed to fight as those who, with courage, labor for Kingdom causes against the powers of evil. And that is important. That is crucial – that we see ourselves gathered up in the causes of God, ordinary foot-soldiers though we may be, but doing something for His truth.
We are approaching the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. It was the climax of a mighty struggle against the entrenched evil of segregation. God sent Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston to make magnificent oratory in the courtroom. But isn’t it also true that there were scores of grunts, doing the tough behind the scenes work? Researching cases, finding witnesses, influencing neighbors? It’s not just the Michaels, it’s the ordinary angels, whom God uses. Isn’t it true that for every Martin Luther King, preaching and leading, there were legions of people, whose names were never recorded, stuffing envelopes and making phone calls and distributing leaflets to make the bus boycott work? God has called us to be militant messengers; some, a few, are standouts, they are Michaels. But it is Michael and his angels who fight against the dragon. It is ordinary, garden-variety Christians, who must do something to turn evil back. And they are effective.
Oh, you may not be a Michael. You have not reached the rank of archangel! No, “you may not preach like Peter, and you may not pray like Paul; but you can tell the love of Jesus and say He died for all.” And you can vote, you can write letters, you can influence others, you can join in the battle for truth, as an ordinary angel.
III
Now let me show you from this passage what we are doing when we tackle evil. Let me interpret the meaning of being God’s messenger, working to throw down Satan. When it is done, when you have defeated the evil one, that’s called salvation. Salvation. The Kingdom of our God and of His Christ. What we are doing is not just winning the church game. What we are doing is bringing to our redeeming Christ an opportunity for Him to be the savior, to give salvation.
Listen to this magnificent text: “The great dragon was thrown down..the deceiver of the whole world, he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.” Wonderful picture! The whole team thrown down, tackled. And then this: “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ.” Now has come salvation.
I’m afraid we have weakened the idea of salvation so much that it hardly evenly exists any more. If somebody says to you, “Are you saved?”, generally they are asking about whether you will go to heaven when you die. If you just got saved, that is supposed to mean a one-way ticket to eternity. Well, yes, it does; but there is so much more to it than that. So much more.
Salvation means wholeness. Salvation means completeness. It means the mending of our brokenness and the healing of our diseases. Just as the Psalmist spoke of how God forgives ALL our iniquities and heals ALL of our diseases, we ought to think about salvation as something broader than what happens when somebody walks down the aisle and takes the pastor’s hand. Salvation is about bringing all of life under the control of Christ. Salvation is about making Him Lord of all things. Let me see if I can illustrate.
Let’s suppose that I have with me a man who is in desperate circumstances. He is out of a job, his home has broken up, his children are alienated, he is an alcoholic, and he is wanted for several crimes. He is looking at a whole lot of trouble, isn’t he? We’d all agree that he needs salvation.
So I sit with him and I explain the plan of salvation, and he says, “Yes. Yes, I am sorry for my sins. Yes, I want to turn my life around. Yes, I want Jesus to forgive me, and yes, I accept His sacrifice on the cross. Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.” So now are we going to pronounce him saved? Is this all he needs for salvation?
Well, yes and no. Yes and no. Yes, it’s the most basic thing he can do. It’s fundamental. I do not believe that you can just clean a man up and pat him on the back and put him out on the street without changing his heart. You will do nothing more than give him another chance to fail. But I also do not believe that it’s salvation if you do not help him work through his life issues and move toward what God wants him to become. It’s not salvation, it’s not wholeness, if I just get him to a spiritual commitment and then abandon him there.
Salvation means that I fight right alongside this man so that he can overcome the powers that are out to destroy him. I have to help him find an alcoholic recovery program, so that that demonic bottle can be stopped. I have to help him find job training, so that he can put his energies into something positive. I have to help him with family therapy, I have to see what resources I can find for his children. I may even have to buy him so ordinary a thing as a Metrobus pass so he can keep his appointments. Do you see? If I am really interested in this man’s being a conqueror through Christ, I’d better stick with him all the way, I’d better wade into the issues in his life.
And, in fact, I even need to attack some of the things that got him there in the first place. I need to see what I can do to push the liquor industry out of business. I need to prod the city government to provide job training. And if he goes to jail, I know I need to scream to high heaven about how we have sold our correction system to the highest bidder and want to put as little as possible into helping people change their life directions!
All of that, brothers and sisters, is salvation. All of that is Kingdom business. And until we have taken on this broader agenda, we have not done what God wants His messengers to do. Someone has said that we may get people saved one by one, but the world destroys them a hundred by a hundred by a hundred. So until we have dealt with persons and all their needs, and until we have tackled the principalities and powers that destroy, we haven’t done what we are called to do. But, oh, my friends, when we do it; when we deal with needs, from basic to complicated, then we are going to hear the loud voice proclaiming, “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God.” Our agenda is salvation; it is wholeness.
IV
This is quite a task, isn’t it? This Michael thing. Imagine – we are called to be God’s warriors, in spiritual warfare against demonic powers. Imagine – that there is a place for every one of us, whether we are Michaels or just one of the also-ran angels. Imagine – our task is not just a witness that gets someone to the baptismal pool, but it’s about redeeming a life and reclaiming a society. These things are awesome. These things will not be easy.
And the Bible recognizes that. John in his vision speaks of those who “did not cling to life even in the face of death.” John sees that it is never going to be easy to face down the enemy. It is always going to be costly. It will cost us time, it will cost us energy, it will cost us money. It may even cost us our very lives. We have to ask if it is worth it. Is it worth the cost to battle things that seem so huge? Is it worth the trouble to take on racism and what it does to young people? Is it worth the risk to speak out against corruption in government, against laziness in the schools, and, yes, against scandal in the churches? Is it worth it?
Here is the answer: “The accuser has been thrown down”. Thrown down, not just reprimanded. Thrown down, not just pooh-poohed. Thrown down. “The accuser has been thrown down .. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death. Rejoice then ... for the devil ... knows that his time is short.”
The time is short. I do not profess to know the future. I cannot predict how evil will show up in the days to come. I only know that if we do not fight it, it will destroy us. But I also know that if we do fight evil, if we do accept our assignments, if we do bring salvation wherever we can – I know that victory is ours. It is ours. We will win this battle.
I know that because one day they flung my Jesus up on a cross against an eastern sky and pronounced him done for and defeated. But on the third day He arose a victor from that dark domain, and He lives forever with His saints to reign. Hallelujah! It was Satan who was done for and defeated, thrown down. Satan may fight on, but he is finished.
Oh, the hymnwriter says, “Shall I be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease, while others fight to win the prize, and sail through bloody seas?” And the answer comes, No: “Sure I must fight, and I must reign. Increase my courage, Lord; I’ll bear the cross, endure the pain, supported by Thy word.” The fight against evil is worth it. The struggle against injustice can be won. The risen Christ guarantees it.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, says, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”. I think not. I know not. We beat on, boats against the current, but we are not borne back ceaselessly into the past. No, we are moving forward. We are sailing into the rising sun, where everything is possible, for the Son has risen indeed.
Michael, row that boat ashore. It will not sink. Michael, row the old ship of Zion; it is a vessel that is worthy. “Fight the good fight with all your might, Christ is thy strength and Christ thy right; lay hold on life and it shall be thy joy and crown eternally.” Take on crime; take on poverty; take on racism and sexism; take on addiction and disease and suffering and all sorts of pain. Take on even the dragon and his angels, let them do their worst. I say that victory is ours, victory is ours. Michael and all of Michael’s everyday angels, row that boat ashore. You’ll reach the other side. Victory is ours!
