Someone not to forget - Midweek Message 18th November 2020

Dear Friends,

One of the benefits of taking part in another Christianity Explored course is it affords the opportunity to  read through the Gospel of Mark again and though you may have read it countless times before, as I have, there are always new things to see or old things which strike you with new force. For me, this time round it has been the reality of the spiritual forces of evil.  

Imagine someone who has never before read either the Bible or Mark and who is totally unfamiliar with a biblical worldview, submerged as they have been all their lives with our contemporary 21^st century secular culture. You wonder what they make of the fact within a few verses of the opening of Mark you meet Jesus in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan (1.13). Then a few verses later (vs23-27) in the synagogue in Capernaum he confronts a man with an unclean spirit  which Jesus casts out of him. Next, outside the home of Simon Peter, as the sun sets on a busy day of ministry, we’re told he healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons. And he would not permit the demons to speak (v34)  Finally v39 sums up the thrust of Jesus ministry at this early stage: And he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons. That’s all within the first chapter and the new reader with their secular 21^st worldview must be wondering what kind of world they have entered in Mark. Yet the answer that Jesus and the Bible gives back is – the real world! Jesus, the New Testament and the Bible as a whole would want to say to us that we will never understand our world, or indeed our lives, if we don’t take seriously the reality of evil and the spiritual forces of evil.  

I’m reminded of CS Lewis’ words in his Preface to The Screwtape Letters: ’There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.’¹  However apart from what Lewis calls the materialist (disbelieving in the spiritual forces of evil) and the magician (over-preoccupied with them) I wonder if there is not a third category into which the Christian believer can readily fall, namely, the amnesiac. That is the person whom if you asked, Do you believe in the devil and the spiritual forces of evil? would answer’ Yes’ but then in their daily life and witness  fail to take account of his hidden but real power and influence.

Let me simply focus on one area of life: the role of the devil in people’s rejection of Jesus and the gospel. Paul alludes to this, for example, in 2 Corinthians 4 where he speaks about those who responded sceptically and negatively to his ministry of proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. He describes their case and condition in this way: The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God (2 Cor 4.4). The god of this world  is a reference to the devil. It is not just Paul who sees the devil as active in this manner. To return to Mark,  Jesus likens his own preaching ministry to a famer sowing seed and the responses his word meets being similar to that of the seed as it falls in a variety of soils. In the first place, there are those  who are like the seed that  fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. (Mk 4.4) Later to his disciples he explains what he means: Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. (Mk 4.15) Or later in Mark consider what Jesus says to Peter when having confessed Jesus as the Christ, he then fails to see why Jesus could possibly have to go to the cross and suffer and die and tries to dissuade him from it:  “Get behind me, Satan!" he (Jesus) said “You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men." (Mk 8.33) Again, Jesus sees through human unbelief to the malevolent influence of the devil.

These verses are an important reminder that when it comes to witnessing to Jesus and his Gospel as in seeking to live true to Jesus and his gospel  we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6.12 ESV)  We, therefore, need to be constantly praying for ourselves and for others in the manner Jesus taught us in the Lord’s prayer: Deliver us from evil or the evil one  (as Matthew 6.13 can be translated).

At the same time, as his ministry in Mark  reminds us and as his death and resurrection secured, we need to be assured that all that is required to liberate us and others  from the grip of the evil one has been done for us by the Lord  Jesus. Our calling is therefore to appropriate and apply that victory  to ourselves and on behalf of others through faith and prayer. There is of course an ongoing struggle involved in that appropriation and application, but the ultimate  outcome is secure.

In memorable fashion, a couple of verses from an older hymn expresses the enduring victory that Jesus in his life and death  has won over the evil one on behalf of all his people:

O wisest love! That flesh and blood

which did in Adam fail

should strive afresh against the foe

should strive and should prevail

 

O generous love! That He who smote

in Man, for man, the foe,

the double agony in Man,

for man should undergo.²

 

Yours in Him,

David

 

¹   CS Lewis in The Screwtape Letters, Collins 1965  p9

²  from Praise to the Holiest in the height – John Henry Newman