Ancient Anglican

Spiritual warfare is the battle between the self-emptying, self-sacrificial love the Cross signifies and anything that tempts us away from taking up our Cross. It is the battle to maintain a cruciform shape in a world that presses a very different pattern upon us.

Our response to suffering and evil must be behavioral, not philosophical. God is at war. The question is not the “why” of the enemy, but its ultimate defeat. A defeat in which we are called to participate.

It is within the Church that we practice sharing and forgiving, and extending mercy and grace. The Church is also where our own brokenness and sinfulness are revealed and healed. The Church is where we learn to accept and celebrate our differences, discard our old selves, and grow into our new selves.

Our goal is not to score political points or even win the political arguments. Rather, our goal is “liberating human beings from their slavery to this spiritual power.”

In telling his story, Beck invites you to tell your story. I think the Spirit meets each of us where we are so that the Spirit can take us into a deeper spiritual reality. The question I want us to explore on Tuesday night is where did/does the Spirit find you? Where is God very real and present in your life?

Penal Substitution works very well in a disenchanted world because it only requires a belief in God. We sin, sin needs to be punished, and Jesus takes that punishment. The Christus Victor model, however, requires a robust belief in the reality of Satan. We are imprisoned and overcome by Satan, and he must be paid off and destroyed. Christus Victor requires an enchanted understanding of the world.

And at the end, the spiritual forces of evil, the wickedness that rules this world, are defeated. John’s vision is of Christ’s victory . . . John now has the vision we read about today in Chapter 21.

Beck’s point is that we cannot understand the Jesus of the Bible without also understanding the Satan of the Bible. From the Temptation Narratives in the Gospel to the Last Battle at the end of Revelation, Jesus’ identity and the church’s understanding of who Jesus is cannot be separated from Old Scratch.

Modernity is like an episode of Scooby-Doo. We begin with a supernatural evil. However, Suspicious doubt leads to investigation and reason. This reveals that the evil is not supernatural but simply a person doing bad things. Disenchantment sets in.

We must recognize the spiritual force antagonistic to the Kingdom of God is real and active in the world, and must be fought and resisted. This resistance is known as “spiritual warfare.”

Two angels appear and tell the disciples to quit staring into the sky. Their message is that the disciples are to quit looking for Jesus in the heavens and get to work preparing to be his witnesses in the world.

John describes for us what the earliest church looked like. It was a church characterized by two things – love for one another and an apocalyptic orientation.