"We are wrong about everything else but we are right about the Gospel." It's a pretty good one liner and I have kind of been using it as the unofficial motto of our church. "We are wrong about everything else but we are right about the Gospel." What I mean to imply by that is that the Gospel is the only thing that matters. The Gospel, quite literally, justifies all of our other mistakes, errors, and failures. So, I don't know how far our little look into Revelation will get but the key that I intend to use is something like this. "I am wrong about eschatology. I am wrong about numerology. I am wrong about symbolism. But I intend to be right about what the Revelation says about Christ." Where it is necessary to try and interpret John's visions to tell my story, I don't intend to seek a coherent system of symbolism, I don't intend to offer any opinion on the chronology of the "End Times", not even in the most general of ways. Instead, I will shamelessly use all of the imagery and mysticism to try and illustrate the Christ of Revelation. If that is how John intended it to be used then it might work out pretty well. If it isn't, "Oh well."
Before we get to our text for today I want to say that when dealing with dreams and visions, it is definitely possible to be overly analytical. Such poetry is not aimed at the rational mind, but at deeper and more primal parts of us. So, at least to begin with, let's not focus on identifying the characters or significance of the story. Not worry about the timing of the events. But try and feel the story.
From Revelation 12:
Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a garland of twelve stars. Then being with child, she cried out in labor and in pain to give birth.
And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great, fiery red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads. His tail drew a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to give birth, to devour her Child as soon as it was born. She bore a male Child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron. And her Child was caught up to God and His throne. Then the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, that they should feed her there one thousand two hundred and sixty days.
And war broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail, nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer. So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
Then I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, “Now salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our God day and night, has been cast down. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death. Therefore rejoice, O heavens, and you who dwell in them! Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea! For the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time.”
Now when the dragon saw that he had been cast to the earth, he persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male Child. But the woman was given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness to her place, where she is nourished for a time and times and half a time, from the presence of the serpent. So the serpent spewed water out of his mouth like a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away by the flood. But the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed up the flood which the dragon had spewed out of his mouth. And the dragon was enraged with the woman, and he went to make war with the rest of her offspring, who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.
War in Heaven, the very idea touches something deep inside of us. It feels like the Heavens should be perfect, that the wars and difficulties which trouble mankind should not reach to Heaven. I guess the first thing that strikes me when I hear this story is, "Who would dare to bring war to Heaven? and Why?" We aren't given a lot of background for this story, but the first thing that I would say is that the text we just read is the only source of information about this war. There are other passages of Scripture that are sometimes thought to refer to Satan's fall, or to him as an angel, but the only time that this story is deliberately dealt with in Scripture instead of sort of a passing reference is right here before us, so this is where we need to look for our answers, we shouldn't build a story with inferences from somewhere else and then try and fit this story into our prebuilt scenario.
So, in the text, "Michael" is the aggressor. Telling this story, for me at least, begins with a whole lot of caveats and here is the next one. "Michael" is a rather mysterious character. He appears I think a total of four times in the Bible and on his rather unknown shoulders a lot of angelology has been built up. Books have been written about who he is, what armies he commands, his history, his future. He has been represented in countless artworks and prayed to by almost every branch of the church. On the other hand, going back to Calvin's Commentary on the Prophet Daniel and extending through various arms of the faith, there is a suspicion that perhaps this is another name for Christ. To me, there is only one reason to spend as much time as I already have on the question of his identity. I simply bring it up to make the point, that it doesn't matter. In the long run the question of whether something is done by the physical body of Christ or some member of the mystical Body of Christ, the Church, is meaningless. Whether something is done by Jesus of Nazareth or by Dennis Darnell, in whom the Spirit of Christ dwells, is for all intents and purposes the same. Whoever Michael is personally, what we need to know about him is simply what spirit is within him. Whether he is Christ personally or he is Christ sacramentally is irrelevant. Those who are in communion with Christ are One with Him just as He and His Father are one. So the main point, and it is to me at least a bit of a curve ball, is that the aggressor in the War in Heaven is Christ. I realize that before the war started the dragon made some threatening gestures towards the Child's mother, his intentions were clearly hostile, but as soon as the Child ascended to His Father's throne, His angels, fired the first shots. So, is Christ righteous when He makes war?
So, why does this war happen? The classic answers about Satan arrogantly challenging God, or being jealous of man, are probably on the right track but I think that they leave out the part of the story that is most important for us to know, that neither of those theories is really indicated by the text in any way supports my abandoning them. But the text does give us a reason.
The one who was cast out, spent all of his time accusing the Saints.
Then I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, “Now salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our God day and night, has been cast down.
So Satan answered the Lord and said, “Does Job fear God for nothing? Have You not made a hedge around him, around his household, and around all that he has on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But now, stretch out Your hand and touch all that he has, and he will surely curse You to Your face!” Job 1
From Zechariah 3: Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the Angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to oppose him. And the Lord said to Satan, “The Lord rebuke you, Satan! The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is this not a brand plucked from the fire?”
Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments, and was standing before the Angel.
Then He answered and spoke to those who stood before Him, saying, “Take away the filthy garments from him.” And to him He said, “See, I have removed your iniquity from you, and I will clothe you with rich robes.”
And I said, “Let them put a clean turban on his head.”
So they put a clean turban on his head, and they put the clothes on him. And the Angel of the Lord stood beside him.
When Judah came back from captivity in Babylon, they were led by two men. Zerubbabel, the heir to the throne of David, and this Joshua, the high priest. He is called here a brand plucked from the fire, and we have a picture of him being clothed in the righteousness of Christ. He was a lost soul, lost in his sins pictured by his filthy clothes, born in Babylon the epitome of a place under the curse of God, this is the fire that he was in. But he was plucked from that fire, taken from a poor, enslaved, exile to be the Priest of the Living God and to dwell in His House, and clothed in pure linen, clean and white, the righteousness of the Saints given to him graciously. Satan's accusations against him aren't recorded but they don't really need to be do they? We can easily imagine what we would accuse him of and that must be the sorts of things Satan accused him of. No doubt he had broken the law in many points. He was born and raised in Babylon, all of his notions of righteousness would have fallen far below our idea of what the Law requires, far below Satan's idea of what righteousness is.
And now I need to break off a little, because I need to dispose of our cartoon supervillain notions of Satan. God has no opposite. There is no personification of evil. Everyone acts out of what they believe is good. Evil comes from wrong ideas of what is good. All sins come from wrong ideas of what is good. Selfishness, to take a simple example, is simply equating what we want with what is good. So, what is Satan's wrong idea of what is good? His idea is that people and things that aren't good should be quarantined from the righteous, especially from God. And that quarantine which can never make the sinners clean turns into a giant garbage dump, the never ending tire fire, landfill outside of Jerusalem which is the prototype of Hell. Which sounds a lot like the Law or at least with the way that I have always understood it. The Accuser goes hand in hand with the "handwriting that was against us", and his being cast down with the erasing of that handwriting.
I suspect that angels and heavenly creatures are not personal and separate in the way that we think that they are. If we are members of Christ and members of one another then that at least suggests that existence is not the disconnected, individual thing that we think it is. I guess what I am getting at is that it seems to me that a lot of angels are what we call Ideas or Beliefs or Dreams or Hopes or Fears. And The Law must be a very chief sort of angel, an archangel if you like that term, exactly as the rumors suggest the Devil once was. How can I equate the Law which is holy, and just, and good with the Devil?
It doesn't say that humanity was subjected to futility, or that Earth was subjected to futility. Our text today is the obvious proof that heaven and the celestial beings have been subjected to futility. "The Creation" was subjected to futility, the whole creation. Just to be clear, "the creation" means everything that was created, which is another way of saying everything except God Himself. Which includes angels and drumroll please, The Law. However good, and holy, and just, however perfect the Law is, we have one question that we have to ask about it. Is the Law God? If the answer is no, then it has been subjected to futility, the Law as we know it, even the Law as delivered by a man inspired by the spirit of God, even the Law as written on tablets of stone with the burning finger of God, is in the same sinking boat as the rest of us, which strongly implies that it is not the solution to our problems. And what is true of the Law is also true of its angel.
From Romans 9: For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
But how is the Law, which is true, equated with the Liar? We often assume that the way things are now is the way that they have always been. And it is generally believed that Satan fell before the creation of man. But that isn't what the Revelation of Jesus Christ says. It places the war as occurring shortly after the Lord's ascension, the Child's ascension to the throne of God. And to understand this text and understand our world, we must realize that the very foundations the world was built on were unmoored when the Child put His little flock of the last, the lost, the little and the least in possession of the whole kingdom of Heaven. In Job and Zechariah, there is no suggestion that Satan is at all unwelcome in Heaven or before the throne of God. When he accuses Joshua the high priest we hear a very restrained reply, "The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you." Civility might be strained but it is maintained. Satan has a place and a role in Heaven, or at least he did. The Angel of the Law must have had a rather depressing life. He went out going to and from upon the earth, searching, hunting for a righteous man and he never found one. He jealously protected the purity and righteousness of God by keeping all sinners far from Him. He kept us in our filthy clothes out of the clean, bright City of God. But the whole time he was a liar, although no one could see it.
Satan is the accuser. And all of his accusations against us are true. Everytime he calls me a sinner, he is dead on. He is a liar, but no one knows that he is lying, because the things he is saying happen to be true. It seems confusing. But what it all comes down to is that he doesn't accuse me of being a sinner because it is true. It just happens to be true. It all went fine until he accused the Innocent Man. Keeping sinners like you and me separate from God seems eminently reasonable, but the Law condemned Christ and demanded that His Father forsake Him. That is the legal theory of purity, of holiness, to keep all of the sinners locked up, and it marks us all as sinners. But when the Accuser accused Christ he tipped his hand. Although his accusations against us are true, he never made them because they were true, if it was about truth he wouldn't have accused the Righteous Man. The Law has become futile. It can make us conscious of our failure, it can mark us as sinners, but that is the extent of its power. It cannot make sinners righteous. The Law should be a happy thing, keeping good people on the right track, but having no good people to work with and being unable to help people like you and me, it became sick, it became darkened, and it had to go. So the whole concept of keeping sinners away from God has been rejected. The purity which avoids all contact with the impure has been replaced with a purity which makes the impure pure, with a Messiah who touches lepers and makes them clean.
When Adam sinned, it wasn't just him and his children that fell. Everything fell with him. Maybe the angels and the better natures understood what was happening and submitted willingly to this strange prelude to the Revelation of Divine Grace and maybe they didn't. But they fell either way. The Law is called holy and just and good, but no created thing can be holy and just and good in and of itself, and when a part of creation thinks that it is good on its own then it is a wicked liar. The Father of Lies is the one who thinks he is righteous apart from Christ. I proved earlier that the Law is fallen and become futile by the fact that it is not the Creator, that all things besides Him are fallen, but when everything else had fallen, He Himself descended lower than any of them. He placed Himself under the Law, under the self-righteous ones, under the criminals, even under the earth so that He might place all things on His shoulders and bear us with Him when He returned to His Father and Our Father. However good and holy a thing is, like the Law or however evil and dirty a thing is, like the Devil all must come to the One who is full of Grace and Truth and all are called. The angel flies over the whole earth crying out the Everlasting Gospel, "the Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let him who hears say, “Come!” And let him who thirsts come. Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely."
Finally, let's look at how the war was fought and won. They, identified earlier as Michael's angels, overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and the Word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death. I don't know a lot about angels but that sounds like the Apostles and Martyrs of the Church Militant, the church on this earth at war with the world, the flesh, and yes the Devil. Satan has been defeated and cast out of Heaven by the exact same weapons and tactics that we are given that are called mighty for casting down strongholds and everything that exalts itself against the knowledge of God. What is the flaming archangel's sword that wins the war? It is the Word of God, the truth that Christ is righteous though not according to our ideas of righteousness, righteous when He judges and when He makes war. The great weapons of our warfare are our testimonies. The testimony that though we are sinful men still, that we are Michael's Angels, messengers of the Heavenly Prince entrusted with the ministry of gracious reconciliation. Our testimony is that we are brands plucked from the fire, like Joshua. Still liable to all of the accusations of the futile interpretation of the Law that our minds and Satan's produce, but righteous by the Divine declaration of the Angel of the Lord who clothes us in His own righteousness. And as usual with Revelation, the instrument of our glorification is our death, and acceptance of that death, to not love our lives to the death, unites us with the death of Christ, to hate our lives and welcome the Return, the Presence of the God who kills and makes alive is our victory. Woe to the inhabitants of the Earth and the Sea because Satan has cone to them in great wrath. But the good news is that though we appear to be inhabiting Earth it isnt true. Your reality and mine is that we are hidden in God with Christ, a reality that we can't see with our eyes, but can hear in the preaching of the Gospel and feel and taste in the Communion of the Saints.
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