In today’s posting, I want to finish what we started last week; the spiritual
history of humanity as incorporated by the Tale of Two Trees. We saw that those trees are, first, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, where mankind chose independence from God in Adam, and second, the cross upon which Jesus died, our Tree of Life!
This second tree also includes the resurrection, making it the “cross event.” This is the “centerpiece of all history, the watershed event that forever changed the world, and the lens through which we must look to have any understanding of the meaning of life,“ as I said last week.
We saw that the results of that cross event were first, GODWARD; God’s divine justice was forever satisfied as Jesus died for the sins of the world, and He now has nothing but grace and love for all mankind. The second result is MANWARD; we too have been crucified, raised, ascended to heaven, and we are currently seated there, in Christ, at God’s right hand. The third and final result of the cross is SATANWARD, our topic of discussion today.
For some thirty years after I became a Christian, I constantly heard and read that “Satan was defeated at the cross,” but so what? Out there in the word It looked a lot more like a then-popular book proclaimed, “Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth?”
I then ran across Paul Billheimer’s book, “Destined for the Throne,” and suddenly “Satan was defeated at the cross,” made perfect sense to me. In this little book (134 pages) Billheimer gave an excellent explanation of how, at the crucifixion, Satan, whom John 8:44 tells us “was a murderer from the beginning” in his heart, became a legal murderer in God’s court of Divine Justice, at the cross!.
Jesus, born of a virgin, was not Adam’s progeny, as were all other human beings. As such, all mankind became Satan’s slaves when Adam obeyed Satan rather than God in the Garden: “Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one’s slaves whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness? (Romans 6:16). From that fateful day at the 1st Tree, all mankind lived or died according to Satan’s wishes. He had legally taken Adam’s right to rule over the earth from him!
But Jesus, not a descendant of Adam and not a part of Adam’s posterity, was not Satan’s slave, living or dying at Satan’s pleasure, as did all other humans who had ever lived. Furthermore, all of Satan’s attempts for 3½ years to get Jesus to yield to Satan’s wishes—acclaim, rejection and persecution—were rejected, as Jesus, just like a little child, only did exactly what His Father told Him to do!
“Then Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do, for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner’” (John 5:19). “I can of Myself do nothing… I do not seek My own will but the will of the Father who sent Me” (John 5:30). “Then Jesus said to them, ‘When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and that I do nothing of Myself; but as My Father taught Me, I speak these things’” (John 8:28).
The cross event brought to an end all of Satan’s ineffective attempts to sway this “perfect man” from His task of being a Little Child who always obeyed His Daddy. They had been unsuccessful time after time, even after the rejection of the Jews, His own people He came to save. In a fit of rage, Satan and his minions finally killed Jesus in a bloody death on a Roman cross.
Listen to Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:7, 8 referring to that cross experience: “But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew; for had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”
Do you see it? For 3½ years, Satan tried every trick in his playbook to get Jesus’ eyes off of the goal to always do exactly what His Father told Him to do. There were no, “Yes, but’s,” or “Why, Daddy’s?,” always only “YES; whatever you say, Daddy!” This includes even bearing all the sins ever committed in the whole world in His own body at the cross, and then going to Hell for it
The 2nd Tree, the cross, was a beautifully planned and orchestrated divine sting operation. After failing miserably at getting Jesus to yield to his will as Adam had done, Satan, in a fit of blind rage, killed Jesus, who was NOT UNDER SATAN’S RULE. He killed an innocent man and became a legal murderer in God’s court of Divine Justice for the first time.
So, the results of Jesus’ death on the 2nd Tree Satanward are that Satan has been finally and forever defeated at the cross, as he is now physically powerless in terms of what he can do on the earth. As a murderer, he has forfeited his life in God’s divine court. He now has only lying and deception as weapons to use against us!
We, on the other hand, as followers of Jesus Christ, are called by God to rule (Genesis 1:26-28), equipped by the church (hopefully) to do so (Ephesians 4:11, 12) and energized (Galatians 2:20) to attack our task, including finishing off our defeated foe, Satan himself. He is fighting a desperate, delaying, guerilla action through lying and deception, using the false, Satanic religions of Islam and Marxism. How do we “take up arms?” Are you surprised when I say, “naturally, spontaneously and unconsciously?” Next week!
