Luther meant that we need to understand God’s love and justice according to God’s own revelation of himself in Scripture and not according to our own (fallen) ideas about what God’s love and justice ought to look like.

That’s a good reminder when we think about the whole issue of the conquest of the Canaanites. This is a large and difficult subject that requires humility and careful thought, but here are a few comments.

1. The conquest of the Canaanites was not “genocide.”

Genocide implies racial hatred. But when we read about God and Israel in the Old Testament, we discover a much different attitudes toward foreigners. Israel was chosen by God to be a blessing to the nations (Gen 12). Israel was called by God to show loving concern for strangers and aliens in their midst (Dt 10:18-19). God gave foreigners living in Israel the same rights that natives had (Lev 24:22). We could add other verses to the list, but it is clear that God did not endorse racism and xenophobia.

2. The conquest of the Canaanites was about sin, not race.

God did not give the land to the Israelites because of their race or superior righteousness. Deuteronomy 9:4-6 says “Because of the wickedness of these nations the Lord your God is driving them out from before you…” Canaanite idolatry made the land ripe for judgment. God is a divine warrior who takes sin seriously, but he is also gracious and his mercy was available to any Canaanite who turned to him in faith (i.e. Rahab). By the way, read the rest of the Bible and see that God is just as opposed to Israel’s idolatry as he was to the Canaanites.

3. The conquest of the Canaanites was a unique event.

The conquest was not a model for Israel’s relationship to the nations. Unlike the concept of jihad, the Bible presents the conquest as a unique salvation-historical event limited to a particular time and place (cf. Dt 20, which prohibits Israel from waging the same kind of warfare on enemies who are outside the land). The conquest foreshadows the final judgment when the wicked will have no inheritance in the new heavens and the new earth.

4. The conquest of the Canaanites uses hyperbolic language.

Upon first reading, you might get the impression that the Israelites killed every living thing and demolished every city. But language like “all,” “young and old,” “utterly destroyed,” “no survivors,” etc. is the rhetoric of warfare and contains hyperbole. So on the hand Joshua 10:40 says Joshua struck the whole land and left no one, but Judges 2:21 refers to all the nations which Joshua left when he died. This is not a contradiction; it is a recognition that sometimes the Bible uses language which shouldn’t be pressed too literally (like when I beat someone at cribbage by 3 points and exclaim with glee, “I trounced you!”). Keep in mind that in Dt 7:22 God said that Israel would take possession of the land gradually over time, “little by little” and “not all at once.”

5. The conquest of the Canaanites is part of the story that leads to the cross of Calvary.

There are many scriptures, such as Psalm 87 and Isaiah 19, that talk about God’s inclusion of the nations that opposed Israel. God’s ultimate plan is to bring all nations into the orbit of his salvation, not by bringing judgment but by bearing it in the cross of Christ for us. Here is a wonderful quotation from Chris Wright’s book, The God I Don’t Understand:

But at some point I have to stand back from my questions, criticism, or complaint and receive the Bible’s own word on the matter. What the Bible unequivocally tells me is that this was an act of God that took place within an overarching narrative through which the only hope for the world’s salvation was constituted.

Within that overall biblical perspective, the road to Canaan was one small stretch along the road to Calvary. From that point of view, I cannot do other than include it among the mighty acts of God for which all his people are called to praise him. I have to read the conquest in the light of the cross.

And when I do set it in that light of the cross, I see one more perspective. For the cross too involved the most horrific and evil human violence, which, at the same time, also constituted the outpouring of God’s judgment on human sin. The crucial difference, of course, is that whereas at the conquest, God pour out his judgment on a wicked society who deserved it, at the cross, God bore on himself the judgment of God on human wickedness, through the person of his own sinless Son – who deserved it not one bit.

…note once again that humble submission to the biblical teaching on the sovereignty of God on the one hand, along with robust reflection on the mystery of the cross of Christ on the other, combine to strengthen our faith in the midst of things we do not understand.

A great many of us are far busier propping up our particular brand of democracy and social service than building the church of Jesus Christ against which even the gates of hell shall not prevail, whether our democracy collapses or not. The church is not called to subsidise the state any more than she is called to work against it; she has to be as neutral to it as loyal citizens can be. She is called to gather and build the church of Jesus Christ under any [governmental] system whatsoever. Her members are to submit to the powers that be, as far as this does not conflict with the individual conscience, and they are to let the state do as it will. If the state forbids Christians, loyal Christians, to be Christians, she can only kill the body and not the soul. What Peter and Paul are saying in Romans 13:1-7 and 1 Peter 2 is that we are to submit to whatever regime we happen to be under—submit to it, not sponsor, or oppose it. We are to believe that there are no conditions on earth in which the Christian church cannot survive.

Indeed, the issues facing Christians trying to be loyal citizens in a representative democracy are varied and complex. I think Still’s words are sound in that the church and the minister must resist the temptation to get distracted or entangled in worldly cares. During these times of heightened political awareness, may the church of Jesus Christ remain faithful in preaching the whole counsel of God and calling people to repentance, faith, and discipleship in Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit and resist the urge to put ultimate hope in temporal rulers (Psalm 146:3).

Let’s be clear: debt servanthood in the Old Testament is not the same thing as slavery in the antebellum South, even if your English Bible typically translates the Hebrew word ebed (servant) as slave. Anyone who takes the time to read the Old Testament carefully should see this.

Here is my summary of Paul Copan’s overview of the subject in Is God is a Moral Monster? (You can read earlier posts here, here, and here.)

“Chattel slavery,” the kind practiced in the antebellum South and also around the Ancient Near East, was characterized by three things:

1. A slave was property.
2. The slave owner’s rights over the slave’s person and work were total and absolute.
3. The slave was stripped of his identity—racial, familial, social, marital.

By contrast, note several things about debt servanthood in the Old Testament:

1. Debt servanthood was a voluntary measure induced by poverty, not man-stealing.

The Old Testament actively sought to prevent poverty. There were gleaning laws where farmers had to leave the edges of their fields unharvested for the poor. There were laws commanding Israelites to lend freely to those in need and not hold back. There was the institution of the Jubilee, where every 70 years all debts were cancelled so that every generation could get a new lease on life.

But for those who still couldn’t escape poverty, there was debt servanthood. This was a voluntary institution. Copan likens it to the indentured servitude of colonists who were able to travel to America by promising to work for several years to pay back the cost. An Israelite who had no land to sell could “sell himself,” that is, voluntarily enter himself or his family into a contractual arrangement to sustain the family through economically difficult times.

Servanthood existed because poverty existed. This is very different than the idea of kidnapping and enslavement, which were considered capital offenses in Israel:

“He who kidnaps a man, whether he sells him or he is found in his possession, shall surely be put to death.” (Exod. 21:16)

“If a man is caught kidnapping any of his countrymen of the sons of Israel, and he deals with him violently or sells him, then that thief shall die; so you shall purge the evil from among you.” (Deut. 24:7)

2. Debt servanthood was temporary.

Debt slavery in Israel was never intended as a permanent or lifelong condition. An important passage on this whole subject is Deuteronomy 15:1-18. Read the passage carefully, especially verses 12-14:

“If your brother, a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you, he shall serve you six years, and in the seventh year you shall let him go free from you. And when you let him go free from you, you shall not let him go empty-handed. You shall furnish him liberally out of your flock, out of your threshing floor, and out of your winepress.”

Servants could not serve more than six years, even if they hadn’t paid off all their debts. And when they were released they were not sent back into poverty. They were provided for liberally so they could pursue their own livelihood and live debt free. Lifelong service was prohibited except in once case: if a servant loved the head of the household he was serving, he could voluntarily choose to stay (Deut 15:16-18, Exod. 21:5-6).

Copan notes, “The overriding, revolutionary goal expressed in this text is to totally eradicate debt-servanthood in the land: ‘there will be no poor [and therefore no debt servanthood] among you’ (v. 4).”

3. Debt servants had dignity.

Servants in Israel were given radical rights in comparison to the status of slaves in the rest of the Ancient Near East. The Anchor Bible Dictionary’s essay on “Slavery” notes, “We have in the Bible the first appeals in world literature to treat slaves as human beings for their own sake and not just in the interests of their masters.”

Part of the dignity of servants was, for example, that they could not be mistreated. If they were, their debt was cancelled and they were released from their financial obligations. (Ex 21:26-27)

Moreover, while fugitive slave laws in the South required runaway slaves to be returned to their masters, Israelites were legally obligated to help runaway slaves who were mistreated and escaping abusive masters:

“You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped from his master to you. He shall dwell with you, in your midst, in the place that he shall choose within one of your towns, wherever it suits him. You shall not wrong him.” (Dt 23:15-16)

4. One more thing…

I think it’s important to add this: many laws in the Old Testament are not ideals as much as protections. They are not the ceiling, the moral perfections we are attempting to reach, as much as the floor below which society sinks into complete barbarism. This is the way Copan reminds us we ought to view laws about debt servitude in Israel:

“Israel’s servant laws were concerned about controlling or regulating—not idealizing—an inferior work arrangement. Israelite servitude was induced by poverty, was entered into voluntarily, and was far from optimal. The intent of these laws was to combat potential abuses, not to institutionalize servitude.”

I don’t think we can ever say too much about the importance of an active exercise of mind and heart at the communion service. . . .

Holy Communion demands us of private preparation of heart before the Lord before we come to the table. We need to prepare ourselves for fellowship with Jesus Christ the Lord, who meets us in this ceremony. We should think of him both as the host of the communion table and as enthroned on the true Mount Zion referred to in Hebrews 12, the city of the living God where the glorified saints and the angels are.

The Lord from his throne catches us up by his Spirit and brings us into fellowship with himself there in glory. He certainly comes down to meet us here, but he then catches us up into fellowship with him and the great host of others who are eternally worshipping him there.

We are also to learn the divinely intended discipline of drawing assurance from the sacrament. We should be saying in our hearts, ‘as sure as I see and touch and taste this bread and this wine, so sure it is that Jesus Christ is not a fancy but a fact, that he is for real, and that he offers himself to be my Saviour, my Bread of Life, and my Guide to glory. He has left me this rite, this gesture, this token, this ritual action as a guarantee of this grace; He instituted it, and it is a sign of life-giving union with him, and I’m taking part in it, and thus I know that I am his and he is mine forever.’ That is the assurance that we should be drawing from our sharing in the Lord’s Supper every time we come to the table.

And then we must realize something of our togetherness in Christ with the rest of the congregation. . . . [We should reject the] strange perverse idea . . . that the Lord’s Supper is a flight of the alone to the Alone: it is my communion I come to make, not our communion in which I come to share. You can’t imagine a more radical denial of the Gospel than that.

The communion table must bring to us a deeper realization of our fellowship together. If I go into a church for a communion service where not too many folk are present, to me it is a matter of conscience to sit beside someone. This togetherness is part of what is involved in sharing in eucharistic worship in a way that edifies.

—J. I. Packer, “The Gospel and the Lord’s Supper,” in Serving the People of God, vol. 2 of Collected Shorter Writings of J. I. Packer (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1998), 49-50.

Do you want to live in a society where people are stoned at the city gate for being drunkards or for picking up sticks on the sabbath day?

Paul Copan points out several principles we should keep in mind when reading Old Testament law:

1. Old Testament law reflected that in Israel the theological, the social, and the economic were intimately intertwined. The land (the economic) is a gift of God (the theological) to his covenant people (the social). Israel, unlike every nation today, was a theocracy where social and economic crimes were religious offenses and where religious offenses received civil punishments.

2. Old Testament laws were not given in a vacuum. They reflected their ancient near eastern social contexts as well as presented a moral improvement over them. We must understand the world to which these laws came.

3. Certain Old Testament laws and punishments were inferior to God’s creational ideals established in Genesis 1-2. God didn’t immediately banish every fallen social structure and establish moral ideals that sinners could never keep. God was incrementally moving his people back toward these ideals in a way that took account of their actual (fallen) condition.

4. Mosaic law was never intended to be a permanent, universal standard of behavior for all nations. It was a temporary measure that was part of a larger, unfolding movement of redemption.

While Copan doesn’t state it as a principle, here is another one I think he lays out: please make sure you are reading the Bible correctly before you condemn it as being barbaric! For example, consider the famous law of retribution (lex talionis), “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Copan notes:

Following on the heels of the lex talionis passage of Exodus 21:23–25 comes, well, Exodus 21:26–27! And it illustrates the point we’re making quite nicely: “If a man hits a manservant or maidservant in the eye and destroys it, he must let the servant go free to compensate for the eye. And if he knocks out the tooth of a manservant or maidservant, he must let the servant go free to compensate for the tooth” (NIV). We don’t have a literal eye or tooth in view here, just compensation for bodily harm. Scholars such as Raymond Westbrook note that the lex talionis as a principle of compensation wasn’t taken literally. The point of lex talionis is this: the punishment should fit the crime.

Another example would be the drunkard of Deuteronomy 21. This is not a teenager who comes home from his first kegger smelling like Coors. According to the text, he is someone whose compulsive and reckless behavior has profoundly destructive effects on his family. He cannot be corrected though everyone has tried. Because he is a son/heir, he will squander the family inheritance and plunge his family into financial ruin and debt-slavery. Moreover, the parents don’t carry out vigilante justice but bring him to the civil authorities to make a judgment. We don’t need to defend this is an ideal for all times to recognize how in Israel’s historical context God was providing a last resort for a very tragic situation.

One helpful insight I found in Copan was the need to distinguish between the legislated punishment and its actual implementation. Just because a maximum sentence was legislated does not mean it was always carried out in practice:

There were some sixteen crimes that called for the death penalty in the Old Testament. Only in the case of premeditated murder did the text say that the officials in Israel were forbidden to take a “ransom” or a “substitute.” This has widely been interpreted to imply that in all the other fifteen cases the judges could commute the crimes deserving of capital punishment by designating a “ransom” or “substitute.” In that case the death penalty served to mark the seriousness of the crime.

Caricatures and misrepresentations of the Old Testament isolate verses from their ancient social and redemptive contexts. Old Testament laws were a gradual improvement over Israel’s neighbors. They were also part of a redemptive movement that leads from theocratic Israel to Christ in whom we can be fully restored to God’s image and creational ideals.

For centuries, thoughtful bible readers have asked this question in light of God revealing his name in Exodus 3 to Moses at the burning bush.

In this passage God calls Moses to go to Egypt and deliver his people from the cruel tyranny of Pharaoh. Moses asks God the question, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God famously responds to Moses with the verbal clause, “I AM WHO I AM.”

If you are like some of my friends of the deep American south you might respond to God’s answer with, “Come again now?”

For the name God gives is quite enigmatic. You could translate the Name with the past tense, present tense, and future tense. “I have been whom I have been, I am who I am, I will be whom I will be” all fit the verbs here in the Divine Name. So what is God really revealing here with this Name?

In short, God is revealing a mystery. As the church father Augustine once wrote, God can only be known by comparison with himself. God is wholly other. He is transcendent. He is not on the same plane with his creation in any way. He is altogether his own category. Indeed, classic, orthodox theology has often gone to Exodus 3 to teach the creator-creature distinction. For when God reveals his name, he reveals that he is not quantitatively different than creation, but that he is qualitatively different. This is a humbling truth. The name God gives, following Augustine once again, is really all about God’s limiting human knowledge as it pertains to God. As theology professor Michael Allen has observed about this passage, it shows us that our human limitations of the knowledge of God, “are not naturally apparent, but are revealed to us by God himself.”

So God reveals a name of mystery in Exodus 3:14, but as many commentators have pointed out, in the very next verse, God then reveals a second name of mercy. Verse 15 reads, “God also said to Moses, ‘Say this to the people of Israel, ‘the LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you. This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations’” (emphasis mine).

God attaches himself to certain persons and events in Israel’s past as a very tangible way for the Israelites to identify him. After all, if Moses would have simply told the Israelites God’s Divine Name, it probably wouldn’t have done much for them. They needed something tangible to identify their God, and to know what divinity for whom Moses was claiming to speak.

Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson has said this twofold naming in Exodus 3 would help the Israelites to speak in this way about God in the future: “Asked about who God is, Israel’s answer would have been, ‘whoever rescued us from Egypt,’ asked about her access to this God, Israel’s answer would be ‘well, we are permitted to call on him by name.’”

If God’s mysterious name reveals his transcendence, then God’s merciful name surely reveals his immanence. God is wholly other, but God is also wholly near to his people. The God who is, is the God who heard Israel’s groaning in Egypt and rescued them.

And so it is still today, that the all powerful, mysterious, transcendent God is also near to his people. The mysterious God of creation is the gracious God of redemption. We can also call on him by name this very day. We also have access to him through the blood of Jesus Christ this very day. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (Rev 1:8). This is the name of our God who has done great things for us by sending his son Jesus Christ to rescue us from the cruel tyranny of sin and death.

So what is in a name? When it comes to our great God there is great mystery, yet there is also great mercy. Praise God for his Name and what he has done for us.

Christ, The Destroyer: A Christmas Meditation
Robert B. Strimple, Ph.D.

The approaching Christmas season draws our attention anew to the Incarnation of our Lord, and one portion of scripture that we turn to for a full answer to the question of why God became man, to dwell among us, is the First Letter of John, because in that letter John reveals so fully the purpose and the result of Christ’s coming. For example, in 3:5 we read that Christ “appeared so that he might take away our sins.” In 4:9 we read that God “sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.” In 4:10 we read that God “sent his Son as the propitiation for our sins.” In 4:14 we read that “the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world.” And in 5:20 we read that “the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true.” We might sum up these texts as teaching that the Son of God came to reveal the Father, to die for sinners, to give them life.

But here I want to draw your attention to another statement that the apostle makes regarding the purpose of Christ’s coming, a purpose that perhaps we too often overlook or insufficiently appreciate. In 3:8 we read these words: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s works.” Here we have presented to us Christ, the Destroyer. “Christ, the Destroyer”—perhaps the words jolt us a bit. What a strange title for the one who came as a gentle baby in a humble manger cradle! I would venture the guess that among the many greeting cards you will receive at this coming holiday season, there will be some with distinctly religious themes—though far fewer than we used to receive, it seems—but my guess is that there will be none announcing on the card’s cover the birth of “Christ, the DESTROYER.” I know I have never received such a card!

Much more congenial to our feelings, perhaps, is the title “Prince of Peace,” and the angelic tidings at his birth of “Peace on earth, good will toward men.” But we must see that Jesus is the Prince of Peace only because he is a prince of conquest, a prince who has won a great victory, the Destroyer of the devil and all the devil’s works. Too often the world paints a sentimentalized picture of the ministry of Jesus, a picture in which all is sweetness and light. We are reminded in 1 John 3:8 that the dark shadow of the cross already lay over the manger cradle, because this one came for a dark and solemn purpose—to destroy a kingdom as well as to establish one—to tear down as well as to build up.

Because, you see, the one was impossible without the other. Jesus Christ must be the Destroyer of Satan if he is to be the Savior of those whom Satan holds captive. And so the angels’ announcement of the birth of the Savior was at the same time the announcement of a sentence of judgment upon Satan.

Now, in our day, we need to take note—lest our modern, naturalistic outlook lead us astray—that the devil is a real person. No, not a laughable figure in a red suit carrying a pitchfork, but a spiritual being created by God, now in rebellion against God. The devil is not merely a sinful principle in this world. He is a sinful person. And is this really so strange or so inconceivable as moderns like to suggest? Sin is always personal. Yes, the effects of sin can be seen in the impersonal realm of nature as a result of man’s Fall. But sin itself only exists in the hearts of persons. Why, then, should it be thought strange that the author of sin, and the one in whom sin is most fully and horribly manifested, should be a real person—even as the author of holiness is our personal God, and his Son the perfect manifestation of holiness to man. We are horrified at the rise of Satanism in our day, as well as should be horrified. But surely such satanic cults at least serve as vivid reminders of the grim reality of the Archenemy referred to in our text. The devil is a real person.

What, then, are the works of the devil, these works that Christ came to destroy? Look at the context in which this reference to the devil’s works appears here in 1 John 3; and you will see that the answer to that question is clear. The devil’s most basic work—the foundation of all his other works and the fountain from which they flow—is sin. Sin—an unfashionable word today—but an undeniable reality. Sin, which John defines as “lawlessness” (v. 4). Disobedience to God and rebellion against his lordship. The refusal to be governed by God’s law, his revealed will for his creatures. Casting aside that Law of God which is “holy, righteous, and good” (Romans 7:12), and which was given by God the Creator for the blessing of his creatures. This the devil introduced into the universe when he rebelled and fell. This the devil brought into man’s life when he tempted our first parents to disregard God’s Word and make their own decisions regarding what was best for them. And this the devil has seen corrupt the entire human race as men and women continue to bring forth children who are like their parents in their guilt and in their depravity—and who reveal that their hearts are full of sin, as this third chapter reminds us, by the fact that when all is said and done they really despise others and love only themselves.

John reminds us that the devil is the Father of sin and of sinners, and as such he is the sworn enemy of our holy God—and the very antithesis of the Son of God, “who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners” (Hebrews 7:26). Christ is the Truth; the devil is a liar and the father of lies. Christ is Life; the devil is a murderer.

And what terrible consequences sin brings in its wake. The apostle Paul speaks of “the fruitless deeds of darkness” (Eph. 5:11); and in Gal. 5:19 catalogs at least some of those life-destroying, sorrow-producing works of the sinful nature: “sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like.” These are the devil’s works: suffering, which grows out of sin and follows sin wherever it goes; strife, fighting between one person and another, between family and family, and even between church and church. The devil is the sponsor of them all.

And the final consequence and terrible wages of sin is death. In bringing men and women, the image of God, down to death, the devil seems to win the ultimate triumph.

Yes, to survey the works of the devil is to consider a most bitter and depressing picture indeed. And that is just why the “message of Christmas” is such good news! Because it is the news that God purposed from the beginning of history to destroy the devil’s works; and in Jesus Christ, his Son, God has fulfilled that purpose.

Immediately after man’s fall in Eden, and in the midst of pronouncing righteous curses upon man for his sin, God announces good news, glad tidings of hope. In Gen. 3:15 we read these words addressed to man’s Tempter: “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” The human race is not to be cut off because of sin, as we might have expected it would be. The woman will have a seed, a descendant. And that offspring will destroy man’s Enemy, the one who appeared in the form of a serpent, “that ancient serpent called the devil or Satan” (Rev. 12:9). This victory will be a costly one. Satan will inflict a wound upon the woman’s offspring. But this will be but a bruising of his heel, whereas the woman’s offspring will deliver upon the devil a capital blow, a deadly blow—crushing his head beneath his feet.

Long ages elapsed in preparation for the coming of this Seed of the Woman, this great head of the new human race, this Second and Last Adam (1 Cor. 15:45,47), the Man Christ Jesus. The nation Israel was called out, redeemed from the satanic power of Pharaoh, a chosen nation from which the Savior was to be born. Prophets were raised up to foretell the coming of this one who would “preach good news to the poor…bind up the brokenhearted…proclaim freedom for the captives and release for the prisoners” (Isaiah 61:1). The one who would come, you see, to defeat the devil and to nullify his works.

And at this Advent season, indeed at every season, we rejoice that this great event has taken place! This is the most important event in all human history; and it is an event—not that will take place some day, but that has already taken place. The Son of God, the great Destroyer of the devil’s works, has appeared, John says, to accomplish this purpose.

Notice carefully the words John uses here to speak of the Incarnation. This one who has appeared is “the Son of God.” This is the first time that full title is used in John’s letter; and it is used here with very good reason, because it explains how this one is able to destroy the devil’s works. If the devil’s works were ever to be destroyed, someone greater than the devil had to step in. The powers that the Scriptures attribute to the devil have no match among the sons of men. As Luther wrote: “On earth is not his equal.” None but God himself can destroy the devil’s works. Praise God that God himself has come! Immanuel, God with us. And therefore John can say with confidence: “The one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world” (1 John 4:4).

And it is just because he is the Son of God that John speaks of his Incarnation as an “appearing,” a becoming manifest. It is an unusual word to use for a birth. No birth announcement you’ve ever received spoke of this newborn as having “appeared.” But, you see, Christ did not come into being when conceived by the Holy Spirit in the virgin’s womb. As God he has always been, from all eternity. But now the invisible God, who dwells eternally in unapproachable light (1 Timothy 6:16), appears in human flesh that can be seen and heard and touched. (Look back at the opening verses of this first letter of John.) The appearing of the Son of God was the fulfillment of prophecy, was nothing less than the fulfillment of God’s purpose in history: the destruction of the devil’s works.

Jesus himself revealed that early in his ministry. He revealed that the meaning of his miracles, his miracles of healing, and especially the casting out of demons, was just this: that the great Conqueror of Satan has come and has begun to destroy Satan’s works. You remember how Jesus answered the charge that he cast out devils by the devil’s power. Our Lord pointed out how ridiculous it would be for Satan to cast out Satan; and then he said: “But if I drive out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. Or again, how can anyone enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man? Then he can rob his house” (Matthew 12:28-29).

Healing the sick, casting out demons, raising the dead—what Jesus announced in words he accomplished in acts. He announced the arrival of the rule of God, and by breaking the power of Satan and his hosts he was bringing in the rule of God. Men and women seemed to find it difficult to accept Jesus’ teaching concerning his person and his work, but the demons themselves knew the truth only too well. We hear the demons crying out, in Mark 1:24: “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!”

But Jesus’ miracles were but the beginning, were in a way but a sign of the destruction of the devil’s works, because Christ accomplished that not in his life but in his death. No wonder that Satan tried so desperately to keep Jesus from that obedient death—using the apostle Peter at one point, you remember, to tempt Jesus away from that death. The wonder of the Incarnation is climaxed in the wonder of the Cross. How strange is the method of destruction! How surprising the means used! Man would never write the story this way, because the Destroyer comes not as we would have expected him to come—in glorious majesty with the angels of his power in flaming fire—but rather he comes as one of us, his majesty laid aside, lying in a manager—a baby, born under a sentence of death.

But it had to be so. A human, remember, the offspring of a woman, had to gain the victory over the Adversary for his brothers and sisters. And it had to be by the suffering of death. It is as the devil strikes his heel that he crushes the devil’s head. As we read in Hebrews 2:14, “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”

Sin, we have seen, is the devil’s great work. It is that upon which all his other works rest. Those works can be destroyed only when sin is removed. And this Christ accomplished for his people by dying in their place and bearing the penalty for their sin. As we read later in Hebrews, in 9:26: “But now he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself.” Who can now bring any charge against God’s chosen people? Their sins have all been laid on Christ and in his righteousness they are clothed. The terrible blow of divine justice that falls upon Christ on the Cross is the judicial stroke that collapses the foundation of Satan’s entire structure. No longer can the devil hold those whose sin has been put away by the atoning sacrifice of Christ. No longer can he hold them enslaved to the guilt of sin.

No longer can the devil hold them in bondage to the fear of death. Death is the wages of sin (Romans 6:23). How can it hold in its power those whose sin has been forgiven? And so even this final work of Satan is destroyed by Christ, who is the Resurrection and the life, “who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10).

And so it is that the devil can no longer hold us enslaved to the power of sin. Here, notice, is where John’s accent falls in 1 John 3:8. Return with me to that wonderful text one last time. From at least v. 15 of chapter 2 down to the end of chapter 3, John reminds us that a great war continues to rage until the Son of God appears a second time, not to bear sin that time, for that he has already done, but to bring in perfect and complete salvation to those who are waiting for him—Hebrews 9 again, v. 28. But the decisive battle in that war has already been fought, at the Cross, with the victory won and proclaimed in Christ’s Resurrection.

And you and I show whose side we are on in that great war by the way we live every day, by our attitudes and by our actions. John’s conclusion is very simple, but very sobering. Look at v. 7: “Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. He who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning.” What could be more obviously true? “The one who is righteous is the one who does what is right.” Why, John’s statement is so simple, so incontestable, so obviously true, that it might seem almost to be a meaningless truism.

But, you see, this is far from the case. Far from being perfectly obvious to us, this is a truth that we seem to be far too successful at times in hiding from ourselves—or simply ignoring. You and I can come up with all sorts of excuses for our sin. After all, as the popular bumper sticker proclaims, a Christian isn’t perfect, he’s just forgiven. Perhaps we know better than to say that we can be content with being a so-called “carnal Christian,” because we know that the so-called “carnal Christian” doctrine is a total misunderstanding of Paul’s comment in 1 Corinthians 3. But don’t we sometimes try to fool ourselves into thinking that we can receive all the eternal benefits of faith in Christ while showing none of faith’s fruits in a changed life here and now?

Notice what John says in v. 10. “This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; neither is anyone who does not love his brother.” John is so simple and straightforward. Our Reformed fathers spoke of human history revealing “a great antithesis”—what I have called a great war. Well, talk about an antithesis—here it is! John says: all men and women are one or the other. They are either children of God or they are children of the devil. And you show which you are by the kind of person you are. Sin, lawlessness, is the work of the devil—which the Son of God came to destroy. How can one who lives a life of sin claim to have been saved from sin by Christ?

No, it is not that the child of God never sins. To imagine that would also be to be deceived. Look back to 1:8, “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” But the characterizing quality of the one born of God, the direction, the dominant chord of his or her life, will be righteousness, not sin. We might well translate John’s verb in 3:7 as “practicing righteousness.” In 1:6 John speaks of “practicing truth,” “living by the truth,” and in v. 7 of “walking in the light.”

And as I say, this is a most sobering truth. This “doing what is right” is the consequence of our being God’s children, not its condition. You are not God’s because you obey his law. You obey his law because you are God’s child, born of him. But doing what is right is always the result of the new birth, and the absence of that righteousness of life points to the most eternally serious conclusion.

But these verses in 1 John 3 not only present us with a most sobering exhortation. They also present us with a wonderful encouragement. As Paul also tells you, by the Spirit’s inspiration, in Romans 6, you have been “set free” from sin’s dominion, sin’s mastery, sin’s rule, because sin is the work of the devil, and the Son of God appeared to destroy the devil’s works. Just imagine what this coming Christmas season can be like for your family, your home, your friendships, if the devil’s works, those works that the Son of God appeared to destroy, are no longer evident among you. Why, your family and your friendships can be marked by an outpouring of love, and peace, and harmony, and joy, and patience, and honesty, and kindness, such as the world, the children of the devil, can never know.

“The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s works.” The one who continues to work the works of that defeated enemy reveals that he or she is on the devil’s side, and the devil is a loser. It is those who manifest the power of the Son of God to redeem from sin, to change the life, to fill the heart with love—it is those who reveal that they know true fellowship with God’s Son. May we show in our lives, in our forsaking of sin, the work of the devil, that we are on the Lord’s side, the side of the Conqueror.

Robert Strimple (Professor Emeritus at Westminster Seminary California). Copyright 2007 Westminster Seminary California. All rights reserved.

First, from John Murray:

The incarnation means that he who never began to be in his specific identity as the Son of God, began to be what he eternally was not… The infinite became the finite, the eternal entered time and became subject to its conditions, the immutable became mutable, the invisible became visible, the Creator became created, the sustainer of all became dependent, the Almighty became infirm. All is summed up in the proposition, God became man.

Next, Francis Turretin:

Our mediator had to be both God and man: man to suffer, God to overcome; man to receive the punishment we deserve, God to endure and drink the cup of wrath unto the bottom; man to receive salvation in our place by dying, God to apply it to us by conquering; Man who became ours through the Incarnation, God Who makes us like Himself through the Resurrection.

Christ taking flesh is a mystery we will never fully understand, yet one upon which we ought to continually meditate.

Consider:

• Is God in favor of child abuse?
• Is God so arbitrary and capricious that he commands Abraham to do something that he later condemns the Canaanites for committing (child sacrifice)?
• Couldn’t a text like this create 9/11 hijackers, suicide bombers, and other delusional people who justify their violent acts by saying “God told me to do it”?

I want to ask a simple question. Does a proper interpretation of Genesis 22 lead to any of this?

At heart of this passage is the idea of a testing which leads to the fear of God. Testing and fear are the two key words in Genesis 22. The passage begins, “After these things God tested Abraham…” and climaxes with the declaration “For now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”

When you read Genesis 22 in the context of the Pentateuch (the first five books of Moses) something quite interesting emerges. Abraham heard a voice from heaven that tested him so he would fear God, and there is only one other place where the exact same thing happens. Israel heard God’s voice from heaven at Mount Sinai giving the ten commandments, and then Moses said, “God has come to test you, that the fear of him may be before you.” (Exodus 20:20)

The giving of the Law to Israel is set in the very same language as the command for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. The result is that Abraham becomes the definitive picture of the kind of response that God wants from Israel when he gives them the Law. God wants undivided obedience that will relinquish everything and obey his voice (which, we should note, is now being written down for the people). Genesis 22 becomes a kind of commentary on how Israel should respond to God’s voice at Sinai.

Let me put it this way: you can’t say Genesis 22 encourages us to sacrifice our children or follow every voice inside our head because not even the Bible interprets Genesis 22 this way! The figuration in Genesis 22 opposes these kinds of crassly literal interpretations. Abraham is a type or model of an obedient Israel. (That Abraham’s test involves something that the Old Testament later clearly prohibits should alert us to the high likelihood that something deeper is going on here.)

Of course, God did ask Abraham to make a costly sacrifice. Isaac is not only Abraham’s beloved son but also the child of the promise. In sacrificing Isaac, Abraham would be sacrificing his own hopes for the future. Yet Abraham knew that God was good and powerful and capable of even raising the dead. And we still serve the God of Abraham who calls people in Jesus Christ to lay down their lives, relinquish their own hopes for the future, and follow his word in the confidence that God can bring life out of death.

Finally, we can’t think of God as being cold and uncaring when he puts Abraham through this test. God knows the costliness of the sacrifice Abraham is being asked to make. He knows the cost because it is the same cost he pays at the cross, when he gives his only-begotten son so that we can be forgiven. Paul Copan, in his book Is God a Moral Monster?, writes:

“The kind of demand that God made of Abraham was one the triune God was willing to carry out himself. So deep is God’s love for us (Rom 8:31-32) that the late Scottish theologian Thomas Torrance was willing to go so far as to say that “God loves us more than he loves himself.”

1. Who is the god that you feel far from? Is it the God of the Bible, or a god who bears no relationship to the real God? Distorted views of God that lose sight of his holy love will make him impersonal or uncaring. How do you understand God?

2. What has happened in your life? Feelings of being far from God can arise from tragedy, which shakes our confidence in God’s goodness and love. If sin has gotten an upper hand in our lives, this also creates a sense of distance between us and God.

3. If you feel detached from God, what is it that you are now attached to? We don’t feel far from God in a vacuum — we either have faith in the true and living God or our lives are seeking or preoccupied with something else. What is it?

These are good diagnostic questions. I also think people who feel far from God should also find comfort in Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1). No matter how abandoned we feel, Jesus endured complete abandonment by God so that those who put their trust in him would never have to.

Watch the whole video below: