Bible Text: Matthew 18: 1-11 | Preacher: Pastor Christian Preus | Series: 2020, St. Michael and all the Angels | Jesus told his disciples that he saw the devil falling from heaven like lightning. God created the devil a good and beautiful angel in the beginning. But the devil rebelled and God cast him from his presence along with all the other angels who followed him. The Bible doesn’t tell us exactly how the devil rebelled. Jesus tells us he’s a liar and the father of lies, that he’s infested with pride, but how he fell he doesn’t say exactly. There’s a tradition that the devil fell only after God created man, that he fell because he didn’t like the attention God gave to Adam and Eve, why God would so love and bless creatures made of dust. And whether or not that was the specific occasion, it perfectly captures why the devil despises us and God so much. We are dust, we are made of stuff, of fluids and beating heart and pulsing blood. We take in pain and joy and pleasure through our bodies. That’s what animals do. Why would God exalt us, breathe in us the breath of His life, create us in His own image? The devil watched and listened as God created man and woman and then told them, Be fruitful and multiply. That was a command he never gave even to the highest of the angels. We confess every Sunday that the Holy Spirit is the Giver of life, this is who God is, the life-giver, and here in man and woman, in marriage, He gives a woman’s womb to bring forth life. God is the Father who begets His Son in love, and here he gives to a man to beget life in love and to be father to his children. God gave to man and wife to participate in creation, to continue it.
The envy of the devil was intense. Angels can’t be fruitful and multiply. They can’t participate with God in the creative act and bring new life into the world. They stood aside in wonder as God created the world and life, but now God joins Adam and Eve together in marriage to continue creation. This is the beautiful wisdom of God. And there is nothing gross or weak about it. The devil scoffed at the stuff God created, but God made it very good.
And so the devil decided to show God the fault of his ways. He decided to show God what a pathetic creature man was, how through looking at the fruit of a tree they could be persuaded to throw away God’s image. It tasted good, looked good, felt good in the hands, and so they picked it above God and everything spiritual. This was God’s great mistake, the devil contends, that he would create and honor and befriend a creature made of stuff. That he would allow this creature made of stuff to have honor higher than angels.
This is the devil’s constant taunt. He did the same thing with Job. You remember Job. He was a rich man with thousands of cattle and camels and sheep, happy with his wife and children. And Job worships and loves God. And the devil sees this and he finds Job’s worship of God all too convenient. Job loves God why? Because God gave him stuff, that’s the devil’s claim. You take away his stuff and he’ll curse you, he says. You harm his body and he’ll forfeit his soul.
You are flesh and blood. And it’s precisely your flesh and blood that the devil is intent on exposing. Look, just look at how stuff controls them! (This is how he taunts God.) They’re obsessed with eating and drinking, either they’re gluttonous or they worship their own health and image; they run after sex and bodily pleasure. They let the demands of their body run their life. And see how easy it is for the devil to prove it to God! Look at the sex outside marriage, at the slaughter of the unborn, at the incessant chasing after wealth! Surely God made a mistake putting souls in these bodies! We complain when we have to work too long, we despair of God when our body has to suffer, we want what isn’t ours and our mind dreams of what riches could do for our body. It’s too easy for the devil. You’re stuff and you love stuff. The devil puts the fruit before your eyes and you fall. There is no blaming Adam and Eve without blaming yourself. You are the man. The entire history of the human race has been one tasting of the fruit after another, with man powerless to control the demands his own body requires of him. So here is the devil’s taunt against you and against God. God made a mistake with you.
And when he taunts us He taunts God. It’s impossible to separate the two. Every attack on us is an attack on God. It’s the devil’s mockery of God, “Look what you made! Look at these pathetic creatures! You say you created them to mimic you, to live in your image, and look how they slave after their own bodies like beasts.”
And nowhere does the devil attack more incessantly and cruelly than when it comes to marriage and the family. It’s not true that all sins are the same, but it’s certainly not true that all temptations are the same. The devil wants to ruin the family. It’s the greatest slap in God’s face. If he can get the husband to mistreat his wife, if he can get the wife to argue with and defy her husband, if he can get them to serve their own body’s needs and fight over money, then he can rub it in God’s face and say, “See, there’s your image.” And if he can pervert the marriage bed, get young and old to fornicate like beasts with no commitment to marriage, then he can taunt our Lord with it, “Is this the love You had in mind?” And if he can have moms and dads so concerned for money and their own bodies’ pleasure that they’ll poison the womb and kill the babies they don’t want, then he can mock God and say, “They’re not life-givers, they’re nothing but destroyers of life.” And all these taunts are a challenge to God himself, the devil’s proof that God’s creation of man and His love for us is wrong.
God will not be mocked. This means many things. First it means that he will not allow the devil to triumph. It was God rubbing it in, when he cursed the devil in the Garden. You know the history. The devil took the form of a serpent and tempted the man and woman to eat of the fruit, which God commanded them not to eat. And they ate. And they realized they were naked. And they hid from God in their shame. And God confronted them and cursed them with pain and with death. Dust you are and to dust you shall return. But first God cursed the devil. And look at the words He uses, “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her Seed, He will crush your head, and you will bruise His heal.” It’s not just the promise that God will destroy the devil’s power, that God will not be mocked. It’s that God mocks him. “You attacked marriage, you attacked my creation, that I give life through the woman’s womb. Know this, devil. This will be your demise. The woman’s Seed will crush you. The very thing you so hate, what inspires all your envy and rage, the flesh-and-blood life that comes from the woman, He will crush you.”
And so it happened. The virgin conceived and bore a Son and called him Immanuel, that is, God-with-us. He was born of a woman. God doubled down. A sinful woman gave birth to the sinless Son of God. God took on human flesh. He dwelt in the womb of the woman. He passed through her birth canal. He lived in flesh and blood. And in flesh and blood He redeemed mankind. The mockery of the devil is, “What can flesh and blood do but fail? What can it do but serve its body’s own pleasure?” And God showed what His flesh and blood would do. He would be utterly selfless. He would love with pure love. He would have compassion on the loveless. He would fast from food and refuse every temptation to put body over God. He would suffer the pain of all sinners without complaint. He would crush the devil’s head and throw all his mockery back in his face. Their sin is on me. Their failures I bear. Their punishment I take. Here in the very human weakness you mock, with the stuff of my sweat and my blood, I work out the strength and wisdom of God almighty. God refused to repent of creating man. Instead He became man Himself and died for us, so that the devil couldn’t mock us anymore, couldn’t throw our sins and our filth at us anymore, and couldn’t taunt our God with us and our corruption.
God will not let the devil mock. This means that He won our salvation. It also means that He is intent on giving it to us. The devil still taunts, still roams about like a lion seeking whom he may devour. And it is God’s victory when he brings us to faith. It’s his victory when children and adults are baptized in His name. It’s his victory when his Christians come in faith to eat and drink the body and blood of Christ. Because here all the devil’s accusations fall. You made a mistake with them! No, they are my children. Can’t you see? They are pure as the driven snow, they are pure as My Son who lives for them, my Spirit dwells in them, and every sin you pick at is drowned forever in Immanuel’s blood.
And the devil will see it. He’ll see it on the Day of Judgment, when all the angels of God shout for joy. He’ll see men and women who cannot be tempted, who have come through the great tribulation and have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb, he’ll see men and women with perfect bodies, conformed to the glorious body of Jesus, resurrected and beautiful, happy to do God’s will forever, with no possibility of falling away. And his mockery will stop forever. His rage will be confined to hell. But God will wipe every tear from our eyes.
God will not let the devil mock. This means also that God is jealous of us, especially of His little ones. Jesus says that the angels of the little ones who believe in Him are always before His Father’s throne. They see in the Father’s face His love for us who are baptized as His children. They see the love that compelled the Father to send His eternal Son to redeem us. They see that God Has invested Himself in us with His own Spirit. And so here are the angels, whose delight it is to do the Father’s will, and they want more than anything what our God wants, that no temptation of the devil should ever make us fall.
God will not let the devil mock. This means finally that God sanctifies us. He makes us live by His Spirit. He shows the devil here on this earth that his Christians will love as He created them to love. That they’ll value Christ and His church higher than their own flesh and stuff. That Christian husbands will love their wives as their own bodies, that Christian wives will submit to their husbands as to the Lord, that they will bring forth life and raise children in Christian faith, that they would rather millstones be tied around their neck and be drowned in the depth of the sea than that their little ones fall. God shows the devil that his Christians will suffer like Job rather than fall away, that they will return in repentance like Peter when they stumble, that they will rely on His mercy when they sin and run to the body and blood shed for them as their greatest joy, far above all the riches and bodily pleasures of this world.
And the angels rejoice, as Jesus says, there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous who need no repentance. The angels rejoice to see the Christian life lived among us. And they raise their voices with us to mock the devil, to sing the victory song of the Lamb in His Kingdom which will have no end. Amen.