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Jesus says, “Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the Spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” Amen. You may be seated. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.
Dear saints, we’re in a funny spot this morning with this text because Jesus is warning us to not be too happy about something that we have that we don’t even know that we have. It’s like, I was trying to think of a good example; I’m not sure if these are good examples. Let me try this on for you though.
So let’s just pretend that you think that you’re terrible at math. If you are terrible at math, you don’t have to pretend; it should be how you are. And you think that you’ve taken a class and you’ve failed all the tests. You’ve gotten every problem wrong; you’ve turned in the homework, but you’re sure you’ve got a zero. And your teacher comes to you and says, as they’re handing back all the last grades, “Now, I don’t want you to be too proud or too happy that you’re the best in the class. I don’t want you to be too proud that you’re the best math student that I ever had.”
You see, you’ve got two problems. Number one, you have to go from thinking that you’re miserable at math to coming to grips with the fact that you’re a math genius. And then number two, you can listen to the warning of the professor to not be so happy about it.
Or think of it like this; let’s just say that you are wealthy beyond your imagination, but you just don’t even know about it. Like you’ve inherited some estate or some huge ranch or something like that, but the word hasn’t gotten to you about it. You’re going along, and you’re working and struggling to pay the bills, making life work; and someone comes to you and they say, “All right, now look, I don’t want you to be too happy or too boastful that you’re never gonna have to work a day for the rest of your life.”
Now, that’s news that you’re not going to have to work, that all of a sudden you’re a billionaire, but you have to come to grips with that first before you can heed the warning not to be too happy about it.
Well, something like that is happening in the text when Jesus says to you and to me that we shouldn’t be too happy, that we shouldn’t rejoice too much, that we shouldn’t be proud that the spirits are under our authority, that the demons are under your authority, that you have authority over the devil. This is something that we didn’t even know, most of us, that we had. Jesus is warning us not to be too happy about it, but we’ve got to first come to grips with the fact that we have this authority.
“Don’t rejoice in this,” says Jesus, “that the spirits are subject to you.” Or the verse before it, Luke chapter 10, verse 19, Jesus says, “Behold, I have given you authority to tread on scorpions and serpents and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you.” You, dear saints, have authority over the demons.
Now let’s think about this, because there’s a lot of confusion about this. A lot of people, you know, Jesus will even call the devil the king of this world, and a lot of us mistake that by saying that Jesus is the one in charge. This comes up, at least it’s come up for me a lot of times whenever I’ve been talking to people about the end of the world. Whenever you talk about the end of the world, you have to talk about Revelation chapter 20. That’s where John sees the vision of a thousand years, and at the beginning of that thousand years, the devil is bound by a great chain and cast into the bottomless pit.
And the key question about the end times is, where are we in relation to that one thousand years? Is the thousand years yet to come after the rapture and some sort of second coming of Jesus where He’ll set up His rule and reign in the millennial kingdom? Or is the thousand years coming as the gospel spreads throughout the world, and we’re right on the edge of a sort of divine blessed age? Or, and this is what we believe, are we in the one thousand years right now?
Is the one thousand years a description of the church and how it is that Jesus rules and reigns? Well, that’s the testimony of the Scripture. Whenever, at least in my own experience, whenever I try to explain that to people who aren’t Lutheran and don’t understand it and think that a thousand years is off in the future, some distant thing that hasn’t come yet, they’ll say, “Now, Brian, how can you possibly think that we’re living in the millennium now? How can you possibly think the devil has been bound?”
Look around. Look around you. Don’t you read the newspaper? Don’t you watch the news? Don’t you live in Austin, Texas? How can you possibly say the devil is defeated when it looks like the world is going to hell in a handbasket? It looks like things are bad and getting worse. Every day they’re getting worse. How can you possibly say that?
Now, I have a name for this theology. I don’t know if it will stick or not, but this kind of argument I call look-aroundism. It’s getting your theology by looking around. The devil can’t be bound; look around.
Now we are Christians; we’re not look-aroundists. We do not get our theology by looking around. It’s particularly important because there’s a danger to look around. The chief danger to look-aroundism is the idea that we can figure out how God thinks about us by looking around, by seeing how things are, how things are in the world, how things are in our lives, how things are in our hearts or our consciences, how we feel, stuff like that.
If things are good, then God must love me. If things are bad, then God must hate me. That’s the deadly cycle of the look-aroundists, and we are not on that pendulum. We’re not on that roller coaster. We believe what the Bible says, that it is true, that even—this is important—even when we feel like God is far from us, we hear the promise of the Scripture, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age. I will never leave you or forsake you.”
Even when we feel like we’re stained with sin and we’re making God angry with every move that we make, we hear the words of the promise, “I forgive you all your sins,” and we believe that those words are true no matter what we see, no matter what we feel, no matter what we think, no matter what happens to us in this life. No matter how good things are or how bad things are, we know that God loves us. And we know it because Jesus died on the cross.
If you want to be a look-aroundist, I suppose you can as long as you look to only one place. It’s to Jesus on the cross. And if you look there, then you can know what is true, that God loves you. And you can undo—listen, you can undo the love of God just as well as you could build a time machine and go back to the cross and peel Jesus off the cross and give Him mouth to mouth and bring Him back to life and put Him in a cage so that He can’t go back on the cross.
In other words, you cannot undo the love of God for you in Christ. God loves you. I do not care what you see in your life. I do not care what you feel. I do not care what the devil whispers into your ear about God’s anger and hatred for your sin. It is all lies. None of it is true. God loves you with a love that cannot be destroyed or assaulted or diminished. He loves you absolutely, purely, perfectly. And He will love you forever, all the way from this life to the life to come.
Now part of the love of God in Christ for you is that on the cross He destroyed the devil. Now we want to confess that clearly from the Scriptures, that on the cross, Jesus destroyed the devil. Here’s a verse to start: 1 John chapter 3 verse 8 says this, “For this reason, the Son of God was manifest, that He might destroy the works of the devil.”
Now, if you want to be a look-aroundist and argue with me and say, “Hey, I know the devil can’t be destroyed because I look around all the time and I see how bad things are,” well, I’m going to say that you must deny that verse and say that Jesus did not accomplish that for which He came to do. Because the verse says, “For this reason the Son of God was manifest, that He might destroy the works of the devil.”
Or even more clearly, and this is I think quickly becoming one of my most favorite texts in all of the Bible, Hebrews chapter 2 verse 14 says this: “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself, Jesus, likewise partook of the same things so that through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.”
Now, I think we could spend a lifetime just on this verse; I mean it’s just so much there, so incredible. I mean number one, it says that just like we have flesh and blood, just as we partake of flesh and blood, Jesus partook of the same. He became a man, a human being; He was incarnate, and it tells us why. He was incarnate so that He might die.
The eternal Son of God cannot die; He has no flesh and blood until He takes up our humanity in the womb of the Virgin Mary so that now He has flesh that can be nailed to the cross. Now He has blood that can be spilt. Now He has a human body and soul that can be crucified and die for us. So that the reason why Jesus takes upon Himself a body is so He can die. That’s the first point.
But then the second point is that that death is not without purpose or without reason, but in fact, His dying overcomes death. His dying destroys the curse. His death forgives sins because Jesus, when He’s dying, is dying for you. I mean, remember that when Jesus is on the cross, He’s bearing your sins, like John preached, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” so that all of your sins, all of your failings, every commandment that you’ve broken, every good work that you’ve failed to do, all of it is on Jesus and that’s why He’s suffering.
That is precisely why He’s dying, so that now you can die without fear. I mean, look, the reason why death is frightful is because on the other side of death is a judgment. Hebrews itself already says that it’s appointed for man once to die and then to be judged, but Jesus on the cross takes that judgment, the judgment of God.
He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him, St. Paul preaches, 2 Corinthians chapter 5, so that the perfect one bears our sin, so that we sinners can bear His perfection, that His holiness is accounted to us, so that when you die, you will be judged as if you lived as perfect a life as Jesus lived. Can you imagine that?
When you go to stand before God, God won’t judge you for your sins because they’re forgiven. They’re gone. They’re covered. They’re washed away. They’re gone by the blood of Jesus. And then Hebrews 2 tells us that because of this atoning death of Jesus on the cross, now the devil’s power is destroyed.
Hebrews 2 says that all of us were born in a bondage, a bondage to the devil. If you can picture it, like chains wrapped around you, and on the end of the chain is the devil himself, and he’s got you locked up. He’s got you in this kind of cage. And what is the bondage? It’s the fear of death. But when Jesus dies for your sins, when Jesus bleeds on the cross in your place, those chains are broken, and you are in bondage no more. You are set free.
The power and the dominion and the authority that the devil has over you has to do with the fear of death, and it has been broken. Listen again: “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, Jesus likewise partook of the same things that through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.”
So you are free—free from the devil’s tyranny. You’re free—free from the fear of judgment. You’re free from worrying about death. For us, to live is Christ, to die is gain. So that when Jesus dies for the sins of the world, He destroys the devil.
Now this is not all, because not only is the Lord Jesus pleased to crush the devil under His own feet, He also wants us to crush the devil under our feet. I’m going to read you a verse, and you would not believe these words unless I was reading them to you from the Bible. These words are so unbelievably stunning that you’re going to go home and look to see if I’m making it up or I’m actually reading it from the pages of the Holy Scripture.
It’s Romans 16 verse 20; it’s right at the end of Romans, and Paul says this: “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet, your feet.” Jesus has already crushed the head of the serpent in His death, making a public spectacle of the devil, triumphing over Him in the cross, but now it’s your feet that are crushing the head of the devil.
And this is getting to what Luke 10 is talking about. Jesus sends out these 72 disciples, and they cast out the demons, and they can’t believe it. They say to the demon, “Hey, leave him alone,” and the devil and the demons leave him alone. They say to the demons, “Go out of this place,” and the demons go out of that place in the name of Jesus, and they can’t believe that they have this authority. So they come back to Jesus, and they say, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name.”
Well, right, of course, that’s what happens when Jesus comes and lives and dies. In Christ, the devil is destroyed, and in Christ, then, you have authority over the—let me say this as clearly as I can. In Christ, you, you the baptized, have authority over the devil in the name of Jesus.
Now we want to know the limits, right? We want to make sure that we get this right because this authority is not in ourselves. It’s not our own strength; it’s not our own merit; it’s not our own works. It’s not like if I was to stand up mono e mono against the devil that I could somehow overcome him. No, that would end very badly. We would be crushed if that was the case. You do not have authority on your own, but you have the authority that comes from the name of Jesus.
You are clothed with His righteousness. You are dressed in what St. Paul calls the armor of light. Can you imagine if you were some sort of medieval knight and you had to go out in some sort of jousting contest and you came out? You were pretty pleased with your—I don’t know what kind of armor those guys wore—but you were pleased with your armor, and then around the wall comes some sort of knight, and he’s shining like the sun.
I would quit right away. Now that is, jump off the horse and run for the woods. Because that is how it is. That is how the devil sees you. You are equipped; you are dressed in the armor of light. Oh, that would just—I mean, could you imagine if the Holy Spirit opened our eyes to see it and we would look at each other, and we would be dressed in this radiant glory of the righteousness of Christ?
Again, we can’t see it; we walk by faith and not by sight, but you have it; you’re clothed in His righteousness. When you were baptized in the name of Jesus, you became spiritual royalty. You were given a throne. In fact, you were seated with Christ in the heavenly places, and you were granted authority over the devil and the demons.
In Revelation 12, for example—and we’ll have to take this text apart someday in Bible class and really dig into it—but in Revelation 12 we have this beautiful picture of the devil being thrown out of heaven. He doesn’t have a place there any longer, and he comes down to earth, and he’s angry because he’s lost his place in heaven, and he wants to destroy the church. The text tells us that they are the saints—that is you and me—that they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives unto death.
If you have those three things—if you have the blood of the Lamb, and if you have the word of the testimony, and if you do not love your life unto death, if you’re not afraid to die—then you have all that you need to overcome the devil. He has nothing on you. He can’t touch you. He can’t reach you.
And not only can the devil not reach you, but you actually have authority over him, that he submits to you. Here’s one more verse to prove the point: James chapter 4 verse 7—a stunning text. James says, “Submit yourself therefore to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”
I mean, the Bible tells us—it’s amazing—the Bible tells us how we’re supposed to think about the devil, that we’re not supposed to be afraid. Jesus says, “Don’t be afraid of the one who can destroy your body; be afraid of the one who can destroy your body and soul in hell.” In other words, you see the devil; you should not be afraid of him. He loves it when we’re afraid of him, but we should not be afraid of him.
He has no authority over you, but not only does the Bible tell us how we should think about the devil, the Bible tells us how the devil thinks about us, and it says here that the devil runs afraid from you. From you! Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
If you’ll let me, I’ll tell a silly story. When I was 17 years old, I was working for a company called Rustic Pathways, and we did student adventure trips in the outback of Australia. There wasn’t much to do in the outback, so we had to entertain ourselves, which was mostly seeing how big we could build the fires and see how tall the cliffs we could jump off of, and we also were chasing pigs.
Now there are all these wild boars that live in the outback. The big ones are dangerous and they got tusks and everything, and you don’t want to mess with the big ones. But the babies—well, they’re just little baby piglets. So the game was we’d try to chase them down and grab them. I don’t know what we would actually do if we ever got one, but that was the game.
So we’re driving along one time, and I’m there in the car, and we’re driving through the bush that scares up these piglets. The Australian guy stops, and he says, “Oh hey, Wolfie! Get the piglet!” So I jump out of the car, and I start running through the bush chasing after this little pig, and it’s squealing, you know, like pigs squeak.
I’m chasing it; I’m gonna get you, little piggy! I’m closing in on it, right? I’m getting closer and closer and closer to it. I’m just about on top of it, and so I could pounce on it and grab it, and it knows it’s done for, so the pig stops and it turns around. It squeals at me and jumps at me, and I stop and jump in the air and yell. And then the pig charges at me!
What do I do? I start running away from it. Now I would have preferred to be in the car watching this happen than actually being there. So the pig is chasing me a little bit, and I’m running for my life until I look around and realize it’s not chasing me anymore; it’s started running away again. So what did I do? I turned around and I started chasing it.
Now this is the point, right? I wasn’t gonna get the pig. I was afraid. I mean, I didn’t know what it was gonna do. It was gonna bite me or give me some sort of Australian disease or who knows? I was pretending like I was gonna get the pig, but when it came right down to it, I wasn’t going to do it.
As soon as the pig stopped running, afraid, and as soon as it stood its ground, I stopped running, chasing it, and ran away afraid. Now, it’s kind of a bad illustration when I’m the devil in the story, right? But this is how it is. This is what James says: resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
As long as we’re running around afraid of the devil, he’ll keep chasing us. He’ll keep bearing down on us like he’s going to destroy us, like he has the authority to pounce on us at any minute. As long as we’re running afraid, he’ll continue to pretend like he has authority over us, but he does not.
He is destroyed by the death of Jesus. You have authority over the spirits. You resist him, and he will turn and flee from you, afraid. When you stand in the name of Jesus, in the forgiveness of sins, in the blood of Christ, when you stand in the name of Jesus, the devil is afraid of you.
When you stand in the Word of God, you have authority over Satan and the devil. When you live a life that’s free from the fear of death, knowing that when we die, we pass from death to life—that to live is Christ, so to die is gain—when you live as a king and priest of God, then you send the demons away.
In Jesus’ name, you send them away from your home. In Jesus’ name, you send them away from your church. In Jesus’ name, you send them away from your conscience, and they cannot resist—they leave; they flee. They are afraid. They know the devil probably better than we know ourselves.
The devil knows that we have eternal life, that you will not be judged by God. The demons can see it maybe even better than we can see it—that you are clothed in life and light and joy, and that the peace of God rests upon you, that you are the sons and daughters of God, that you are the brothers and sisters of Jesus, that you are the children of light.
“Behold what manner of love the Father has given unto us, that we should be called the children of God.” The devil sees it, and he’s afraid—it’s true—of you. And Jesus says don’t be too happy about it. Now that’s the point, isn’t it? Jesus says don’t rejoice in this that the spirits are subject to you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven.
You have authority over the devil and the demons, but this is not your true joy. Your true joy is this: that Jesus loves you, that Jesus died for you, that Jesus forgives you all your sins, and that you will live eternally with Him. Amen.
The peace of God which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.