Defeating the Powers
Defeating the Powers, Part Two
And the stone-sealed tomb was empty, on the third day he arose! Into heaven made his entry, mighty Conqueror of his foes.
When we sing those words from the second stanza of Leonard Payton’s arrangement of the Apostles Creed we affirm our faith in the truth of Christ’s victory over the powers. We need a greater grasp of this essential reality, the truth that by his cross, resurrection, and ascension Christ has secured a resounding victory over his enemies and ours. We do not yet see the final day of triumph, for ‘he must reign until all the enemies be made his footstool; the last enemy is death” (1 Corinthians 15). This future climactic deliverance in the resurrection of all is portrayed in Scripture as a certain hope because of Jesus’ defeat of the powers through his own death on the cross.
Asia Minor in the time of Christ and Paul was a place filled with multiple and competing religions, odd spiritualities, and deeply rooted superstitions, including the fear of demonic powers. Not unlike some parts of India today, many at the time simply added the name of ‘Jesus’ to their list of deities when they heard of him, hoping that he like their other ‘gods’ would aid them in their struggle with nature and those pesky powers. This mixture is known as syncretism, and a good example of it was unearthed not so long ago in Egypt, a prayer dating back to the time just after Paul’s mission in Asia Minor. “Hor, Hor, Phor, Eloei, Adonai, Iao, Sabaoth, Michael, Jesus Christ. Help us and this household. Amen.” That prayer shows someone throwing at the powers any and every name possible in hopes that someone would show up and help!
Yet we know that Jesus is not just one of the heavenly beings overseeing the ancient world, one power among many, one ‘god’ in a long chain leading to the light. Paul attacks this notion when he writes to the Colossians, “See to it that no one takes you captive through…the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. For in Him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form.” Christ is not one god among many, one in the Gnostic ladder of divine beings, but rather God Himself in the flesh. Why flesh? Because of the necessity of the Cross. God added humanity to deity in order to die and be raised bodily to cancel sin, destroy death, and defeat the satanic powers. “And when you were dead in your transgressions…he made you alive together with him, having forgiven you all your transgressions, having cancelled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us…he has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. When he had disarmed the rulers and authorities, he made a public display of them, having triumphed over them in the cross” (Colossians 2:8-15).
The incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ signal our release from the guilt and grip of sin and shame, as well as the defeat of the dark powers – what Paul also calls the ‘elementary principles’. The Christian then does not worship angels or subject himself to superstitious days and seasons (which refers at least astrological prognosticators, and certainly more), and ‘self-made religion’ that has the ‘appearance of wisdom’ because it commands the ill-treatment of the body (an old lie that such severe treatment will be the ‘key’ the liberty from our bodies). That is Platonic dualism, Gnostic to the core, Manichean, still popular, and dead wrong. We are liberated from the powers through the cross.
Thomas Smail captures beautifully the strategy of the Cross in the defeat of the powers when he writes, “Christ comes to the cross as a fireman comes to the fire, as the lifeboat comes to the sinking ship, as the rescue team comes to the wounded man in the Alpine snow. They have what it takes to help and deliver, but they must come to where the fire burns, the storm rages, the avalanche entombs, and make themselves vulnerable to the danger that such a coming entails.” Christ entered the battlefield for the souls of men and for the universe itself, like Aslan coming to the stone table possessed of a ‘stronger magic’ than the old powers dreamt possible. Through their attacks against them they found themselves ‘destroyed’.
In his commentary on Colossians, NT Wright summarizes this astonishing turn like this: “The ‘rulers’ and ‘authorities’ of Rome and Israel – the best government and the highest religion the world at that time had ever known - conspired to place Jesus on the Cross. These powers, angry at his challenge to their sovereignty, stripped him naked, held him up to public contempt, and celebrated a triumph over him.” Yet in through this act, God who is sovereign over all sovereignties, “was stripping them naked, holding them up to public contempt, and leading them in his won triumphal procession.”
That is great rhetoric, but does it match reality? After all, don’t we continue to see the enemies of Christ – the powers – at work against his people and the Gospel? Paul acknowledges this in Ephesians six when he writes that ‘our struggle is not with flesh and blood abut against the powers, the rulers of this present darkness, spiritual forces of wickedness in heavenly places.” How does this square with John’s assertion that ‘For this purpose Christ was revealed, that he might destroy the works of the devil”, or the writer of Hebrews bold announcement that “through death Christ rendered powerless him who had the power of the death, that is the devil”?
In his magisterial book ‘The Cross of Christ’, John Stott offers that the cross was the victory of Christ the King over the powers that secures the ultimate triumph of the Kingdom of God. In other words, the devil and the powers, like Hitler and his minions after D-Day, knew they were defeated, but their final conquest awaits the conclusion of many battles that must be fought. The ultimate outcome is certain; the present trouble is no less real. The victory of the cross in the past together with his ultimate triumph in the future make sense of the sufferings of the present as we labor in faith, hope, and love.
Stott outlines six stages in God’s conquest over the powers:
1. The conquest predicted: Genesis 3:15 and all the Old Testament
2. The conquest begun in the incarnation and ministry of Jesus
3. The conquest achieved in the death of Jesus
4. The conquest affirmed in the resurrection of Jesus
5. The conquest extended through the Church of Jesus
6. The conquest consummated by the return of Jesus
Gustav Aulen has sought to summarize the ‘warrior’ theology of the Cross in his work ‘Christus Victor, and it has strong Patristic advocates (Irenaeus), as well as being one of Luther’s emphases. Others have highlighted the ‘atonement for sin’ dimension of the labor of Christ in the cross. These include Stott (in our time), as well as Tertullian and Cyprian among the Patristics, and the great Anslem in the medieval era. But Christus Victor and Christus Crucifixus are not antithetical theologies; they are twin truths standing together, gladly telling us the Gospel: “Jesus is Lord and your sins and forgiven. Christ has died; Christ has risen; Christ will come again.” That is why at the sign of the cross the powers must bow. In Hoc Signo Vinces!
And the stone-sealed tomb was empty, on the third day he arose! Into heaven made his entry, mighty Conqueror of his foes.
When we sing those words from the second stanza of Leonard Payton’s arrangement of the Apostles Creed we affirm our faith in the truth of Christ’s victory over the powers. We need a greater grasp of this essential reality, the truth that by his cross, resurrection, and ascension Christ has secured a resounding victory over his enemies and ours. We do not yet see the final day of triumph, for ‘he must reign until all the enemies be made his footstool; the last enemy is death” (1 Corinthians 15). This future climactic deliverance in the resurrection of all is portrayed in Scripture as a certain hope because of Jesus’ defeat of the powers through his own death on the cross.
Asia Minor in the time of Christ and Paul was a place filled with multiple and competing religions, odd spiritualities, and deeply rooted superstitions, including the fear of demonic powers. Not unlike some parts of India today, many at the time simply added the name of ‘Jesus’ to their list of deities when they heard of him, hoping that he like their other ‘gods’ would aid them in their struggle with nature and those pesky powers. This mixture is known as syncretism, and a good example of it was unearthed not so long ago in Egypt, a prayer dating back to the time just after Paul’s mission in Asia Minor. “Hor, Hor, Phor, Eloei, Adonai, Iao, Sabaoth, Michael, Jesus Christ. Help us and this household. Amen.” That prayer shows someone throwing at the powers any and every name possible in hopes that someone would show up and help!
Yet we know that Jesus is not just one of the heavenly beings overseeing the ancient world, one power among many, one ‘god’ in a long chain leading to the light. Paul attacks this notion when he writes to the Colossians, “See to it that no one takes you captive through…the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. For in Him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form.” Christ is not one god among many, one in the Gnostic ladder of divine beings, but rather God Himself in the flesh. Why flesh? Because of the necessity of the Cross. God added humanity to deity in order to die and be raised bodily to cancel sin, destroy death, and defeat the satanic powers. “And when you were dead in your transgressions…he made you alive together with him, having forgiven you all your transgressions, having cancelled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us…he has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. When he had disarmed the rulers and authorities, he made a public display of them, having triumphed over them in the cross” (Colossians 2:8-15).
The incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ signal our release from the guilt and grip of sin and shame, as well as the defeat of the dark powers – what Paul also calls the ‘elementary principles’. The Christian then does not worship angels or subject himself to superstitious days and seasons (which refers at least astrological prognosticators, and certainly more), and ‘self-made religion’ that has the ‘appearance of wisdom’ because it commands the ill-treatment of the body (an old lie that such severe treatment will be the ‘key’ the liberty from our bodies). That is Platonic dualism, Gnostic to the core, Manichean, still popular, and dead wrong. We are liberated from the powers through the cross.
Thomas Smail captures beautifully the strategy of the Cross in the defeat of the powers when he writes, “Christ comes to the cross as a fireman comes to the fire, as the lifeboat comes to the sinking ship, as the rescue team comes to the wounded man in the Alpine snow. They have what it takes to help and deliver, but they must come to where the fire burns, the storm rages, the avalanche entombs, and make themselves vulnerable to the danger that such a coming entails.” Christ entered the battlefield for the souls of men and for the universe itself, like Aslan coming to the stone table possessed of a ‘stronger magic’ than the old powers dreamt possible. Through their attacks against them they found themselves ‘destroyed’.
In his commentary on Colossians, NT Wright summarizes this astonishing turn like this: “The ‘rulers’ and ‘authorities’ of Rome and Israel – the best government and the highest religion the world at that time had ever known - conspired to place Jesus on the Cross. These powers, angry at his challenge to their sovereignty, stripped him naked, held him up to public contempt, and celebrated a triumph over him.” Yet in through this act, God who is sovereign over all sovereignties, “was stripping them naked, holding them up to public contempt, and leading them in his won triumphal procession.”
That is great rhetoric, but does it match reality? After all, don’t we continue to see the enemies of Christ – the powers – at work against his people and the Gospel? Paul acknowledges this in Ephesians six when he writes that ‘our struggle is not with flesh and blood abut against the powers, the rulers of this present darkness, spiritual forces of wickedness in heavenly places.” How does this square with John’s assertion that ‘For this purpose Christ was revealed, that he might destroy the works of the devil”, or the writer of Hebrews bold announcement that “through death Christ rendered powerless him who had the power of the death, that is the devil”?
In his magisterial book ‘The Cross of Christ’, John Stott offers that the cross was the victory of Christ the King over the powers that secures the ultimate triumph of the Kingdom of God. In other words, the devil and the powers, like Hitler and his minions after D-Day, knew they were defeated, but their final conquest awaits the conclusion of many battles that must be fought. The ultimate outcome is certain; the present trouble is no less real. The victory of the cross in the past together with his ultimate triumph in the future make sense of the sufferings of the present as we labor in faith, hope, and love.
Stott outlines six stages in God’s conquest over the powers:
1. The conquest predicted: Genesis 3:15 and all the Old Testament
2. The conquest begun in the incarnation and ministry of Jesus
3. The conquest achieved in the death of Jesus
4. The conquest affirmed in the resurrection of Jesus
5. The conquest extended through the Church of Jesus
6. The conquest consummated by the return of Jesus
Gustav Aulen has sought to summarize the ‘warrior’ theology of the Cross in his work ‘Christus Victor, and it has strong Patristic advocates (Irenaeus), as well as being one of Luther’s emphases. Others have highlighted the ‘atonement for sin’ dimension of the labor of Christ in the cross. These include Stott (in our time), as well as Tertullian and Cyprian among the Patristics, and the great Anslem in the medieval era. But Christus Victor and Christus Crucifixus are not antithetical theologies; they are twin truths standing together, gladly telling us the Gospel: “Jesus is Lord and your sins and forgiven. Christ has died; Christ has risen; Christ will come again.” That is why at the sign of the cross the powers must bow. In Hoc Signo Vinces!
posted by DP Cassidy at
4:51 PM
0 Comments
