Demons: Who They Are & What They Do

The reason most cultures have categories for the supernatural and spirit possession is, of course, not because they are backwards or pre-modern, but because they are more in touch with biblical reality than we are. We talk all the time about not letting your culture trump the Bible. We don't want to be woke like the culture.

We want to be biblical. And yet, this one goes so deep we don't even notice it. And any focus for any prolonged amount of time is viewed as a dangerous potential for imbalance.

Rather than rocking a boat, you need rocked. Open your Bibles, if you will, to Matthew chapter 9. Matthew chapter 9. At our members meeting on Wednesday, we were reminded that you can sit under God's Word for years and be utterly susceptible to the ravages of the devil and the deceitfulness of sin. And I'm just very aware right now as I come to preach that this Word, written by the Spirit, will do you no good unless you are personally ministered to by the Spirit.

And so let's plead with God to open our hearts and our minds to hear from God's Spirit as we hear the Spirit's Word. Let me read this Word and then we'll pray and open up God's Word together. Matthew chapter 9, verse 32, As they were going away, behold, a demon-oppressed man who was mute was brought to him.

And when the demon had been cast out, the mute man spoke, and the crowds marveled, saying, Never was anything like this seen in Israel. But the Pharisees said, He casts out demons by the prince of demons. Let's pray.

Lord, we come before you and we ask you, Lord God, that you would save us from being hardened under your Word. That you would save us from getting better and better at sitting under the Word and evading it. But, Lord God, that you would open our hearts completely to all that your Word teaches so that we might minister in the power of the Spirit as Jesus did.

And as a result, the sick would be healed, the demon-possessed would be freed, and, Lord God, above all, sinners would be saved from the wrath of God. Lord, I thank you that you will pour out your Holy Spirit on us as we simply trust the Gospel that Jesus Christ died to save sinners. We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen. Sometimes people from different cultures resonate deeply with certain aspects of the Bible's teachings. Much as people are totally sinners, sometimes our background actually meshes with the Bible.

The first man I ever baptized was from deep, and I do mean deep, in eastern Kentucky. He grew up in the hills and hollers of Appalachia, where loyal bonds of kinship and clan were very important. Not surprisingly, during his time in Emanuel, almost no one cared for others in the church as family like he did.

There was a time in Emanuel where it felt like almost everyone had a stove or a refrigerator that Herman Vanderpool had purchased for them. If ever there was a need, he was zealous to meet it. A housing need, he was eager to open his home to the members of Emanuel who had become his people.

That Appalachian commitment to your people was sanctified by the Holy Spirit, and it created a man who was free from a lot of the apathy and individualism of our day. Most of who we are runs contrary to the Gospel before we're saved, but there are certain elements of common grace that the Spirit loves to run with right after we're converted. Another example of this.

Ajith Fernando, a Sri Lankan ministry leader, sees this in many peoples of Asia. Fernando, who is an Asian himself, points out that many Asian peoples and religions have disciplined habits of quiet and meditation, and he makes the point that many people from such backgrounds will actually excel in Bible reading and prayer and meditation in ways that many, many busy, busy, busy Westerners or Americans struggle with. Sometimes the background you come from to Christ is a blessing the Holy Spirit sanctifies as you grow in Jesus.

Common grace is often picked up quickly by saving grace. At the same time, sometimes the baggage we bring from our culture hinders us from walking out the faith. A couple examples.

Americans are busy pioneering entrepreneurial people, and that helps in some ways. It's no accident that Americans have launched missions organizations and church planting organizations that span the globe. You've got a natural gift sanctified and used mightily by God.

It's also not an accident that Americans struggle to make time to read their Bibles, to be quiet for three minutes and pray. In other words, there are strengths in our culture that also can make us spiritually weak. We can't sit still long enough to read God's Word, and we're far too busy for the hospitality that our individualistic culture both needs and craves.

We can grow, but we've got to face those natural weaknesses. One of the aspects, now follow me here, because this is where I want to really make sure we go deep. One of the aspects of being a Western person who grew up influenced by the cultures of Europe and North America, and I didn't say white, and I didn't mean to say white, I mean Western.

One of the aspects of being a Western person, which most of us in this room are, is that we're deeply influenced by a secular and naturalistic worldview. We're so secular, we don't even think about how secular we are. We wear secular glasses.

In a secular worldview, God is not central. Demons and angels are not really relevant to our daily life. We are both secular and we're naturalistic.

We don't look for supernatural explanations for the things that face us in life. We don't think about the unseen world as one of the things that might be impacting us and affecting us as we go through our daily lives. God is in our blind spot as we are both secular and naturalistic.

Let me give you an example about this. How many of you grew up telling ghost stories? You can admit this, even in church, you're okay, you're good. And you maybe heard a ghost story, anyone heard a ghost story? And yet, even though we live in a time and a place where everyone would hear a ghost story, most would have a ghost story to tell.

Nonetheless, when we think about what's actually going on there, we would almost immediately default to a psychological explanation of what's going on. Ghosts, for example, are usually dismissed as a figment of our imagination or the stuff of children's stories. The all-pervasiveness of us telling each other these stories never made anyone doubt for a minute that it could be real, or think for a minute that it could be real.

We live in a world of matter and laws of nature, and we are unfamiliar and even unbelieving when it comes to the unseen world. Christian theologian and Bible scholar Craig Keener tells the story of a Western lecturer, presumably a scientist, a Western lecturer, after having denied the existence of witches, was corrected by an African student who noted that he, the student, was a witch and that he had an effective record of killing people through witchcraft. That is a tough lecture to land.

There are no witches. I am a witch. Witches have no power.

I've killed multiple people through my witchcraft. Now, Keener continues after that story to say, voodoo deaths, voodoo deaths associated with spirit, spirits are a real phenomenon. Like, there's something you can measure quantifiably, the amount of people who were threatened with voodoo deaths and then died.

You can get data on that. Voodoo deaths associated with spirits are a real phenomenon. Though Western observers, usually seeking psychological rather than spiritual explanations, typically associate them with terror.

In other words, hey, do you know that a lot of people die from voodoo deaths? We go, yeah, well, there must have been a lot of people scared of voodoo deaths, induced a heart attack, natural explanations, never considering that there might actually be those who are laying into supernatural powers and using them for malevolent or deadly ends. We don't even consider that there might have been a real spiritual power invoked. And we are not more sophisticated for thinking like this.

We are not more advanced for having this blind spot in our culture. Solon Kimball was an anthropologist who graduated from Harvard and then taught at the University of Florida and Columbia University. And when Solon Kimball was doing field work in Ireland, he encountered an apparition.

Later, Craig Keener reports, he learned that others in the area, the people he had come to study, had experienced the same apparition. And since that time, many other scholars have experienced similar experiences. Well, it's hard to dismiss apparitions as all in your head when all the people around you are experiencing the same thing and the objective Western scholars who don't even believe such things keep bumping into the same reality.

Our secularism and our naturalism are so ingrained that we get uncomfortable even thinking about the supernatural. A Reformed Baptist preacher might get accused of imbalance pretty quickly from just a month of sermons on the supernatural. I haven't been accused of that, but that was a preemptive strike.

Most people on the planet have ready categories for dealing with the supernatural. I didn't say correct categories, but they do have ready categories. John Pilch, a man who has taught medicine, anthropology, and Bible background says 90% of the world today accepts ordinary and non-ordinary reality.

The supernatural has a lot in common with soccer. Americans are the only ones that don't get it. Another scholar suggests that 75% of societies have categories for spirit possession.

The reason most cultures have categories for the supernatural, ready for this? The reason most cultures have categories for the supernatural and spirit possession is of course not because they are backwards or pre-modern, but because they are more in touch with biblical reality than we are. We talk all the time about not letting your culture trump the Bible. We don't want to be woke like the culture.

We want to be biblical. And yet this one goes so deep we don't even notice it. And any focus for any prolonged amount of time is viewed as a dangerous potential for imbalance rather than rocking a boat you need rocked.

Beloved, the Bible is not a secular book. Can I get an amen? And it is not a naturalistic book. The Bible is a book full of God and angels and demons and a few giants, a devil and a God who became man to save our souls that naturally follow the devil.

Our view of reality comes from a book that starts with a God who creates something out of nothing and tells us that everything that's wrong in the world started when we believed a satanic snake. When our Savior came into the world, He did not just come speaking ideas that challenged the philosophies of the day. He came evicting demons so they could no longer oppress or possess those who were they were tormenting.

If we are going to actually be disciples, discipled by the Bible, our secular glasses need to be removed and we need to put on contact lenses that fully embrace the supernatural. You might say, I mean that's all well and good Ryan. But no matter what you say, I think the church just needs solid preaching and healthy congregational leadership.

Can I get an amen for solid preaching and healthy congregational leadership? I think I can. Paul seems to think that you get that when you're aware of angels. First Timothy 5, in the presence of God and Christ Jesus and of the elect angels.

Can you imagine that? Why should I be a healthy congregational churchman? The elect angels. In the presence of God and Jesus Christ and the elect angels, I charge you to keep these rules without prejudging, doing nothing from partiality. When Paul calls the Romans to exercise church discipline in Romans 16, he says the reason they should do it is because God will soon crush Satan underneath your feet.

There is no getting to ordinary church life while excluding the supernatural worldview of the scriptures. The passage we're looking at this morning is a good place as any to challenge our deeply ingrained naturalism and secularism. The passage we're looking at deals with Jesus, the God man, a demon, a demon oppressed man, a crowd that is blown away, and a group of Pharisees who think Jesus is the one with the demon.

So this passage throws us into the deep end of the supernatural and calls us to swim in the world of demonic possession that so much of our world already thinks about. So that is what I want to do. I want to do it as simply, as clearly as I can, so we will look at the realities this passage poses with three questions.

First, what are demons? Second, what do they do? Third, what power can cast them out? What are demons? What do they do? What power can cast them out? I'll just tell you, as a church that cares about missions, that one African theologian said, Western missionaries are no good to us because they have no idea what's going on in our midst. And I would say to you that as the world moves into America, and we see people from every tribe and tongue moving here, it's so important that we don't have, that we're not silent with nothing to say in issues which many assume are real, and they assume they're real. This is the kicker, right? Because they are.

What are demons? Well, in the words of David Seale, they are simply spiritual beings opposed to God. Spiritual beings opposed to God. A spiritual being doesn't have a body as essential to its existence like you and I do.

We are embodied beings. Demons might take on a body, but at their core they are spiritual beings, and they are opposed to God. Now, the world God made has at least four categories of beings.

There's at least four categories of beings in the world that God made. The first is the unmade being, God Himself. God is the uncreated creator.

He is utterly different than everything else He has made. He is the one who has no fuel tank. He is the one who doesn't have an umbilical cord.

His life is dependent on no one. He is utterly self-existent and self-sufficient in Himself. He is, to use the biblical language, holy, utterly apart from the created world that He's made.

Now, this God has then made angels. And angels, we're told in the book of Hebrews, are ministering spirits. They're spirits.

Again, they may become embodied for a season, but at the essence of who they are, they are not embodied. They are spiritual beings, intelligent beings. We find them talking in the pages of both Old and New Testament.

They have minds. They're not dumb like a caterpillar. They're intelligent beings like a human being.

You've got God. You've got angels. And then you've got people.

People are unique not because we think angels also think. People are unique because unlike every other creature, we are made in the image and likeness of God. People have this unique ability to put God on display because we were made morally, intellectually, creatively like Him.

And then, of course, the fourth kind of being in the universe is the beasts, the animals. From the rhinoceros right down to the rhino beetle, you've got created beings who do not have that rational faculty. Your dog might seem smart, but they're not that smart.

They just know where the food comes from. Now, the last time I made a comment about dogs, it didn't go well for me at home. And I think I'm going to tell you that story right now.

I made a comment about how this whole fur baby thing is very silly. And I was rebuked not only from the word because, of course, David loved a little lamb as his daughter, we're told. But my wife came home and she said about our dog, she goes, Han is not my fur baby.

He's my baby baby. And I just that was it for me. That's that's all there is to it.

So let's go on. You've got God. You've got angels.

You've got man and you've got beasts. You say, where are the demons? You just laid out four categories of beings in the universe. Where are the demons? And where they are is that demons are a subset of the angels.

The demons are fallen angels. And we actually get clear teaching on this right near the end of the Bible. I'll read you two passages.

Second Peter, chapter two and Jude, verse six. Second Peter, chapter two, verse four, and then Jude, verse six. Listen to these verses.

We we read about angels. God did not spare angels when they sinned. So there were some angels who, like humans, rebelled against God.

God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment. And then Jude six, very similarly, angels did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling. He is kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day.

So there we get a picture of demons. It's very informative to us. They are fallen creatures like humanity.

But notice there's a difference between angels and mankind right there. When Adam fell, all humanity fell under him. When the angels fell, they fell on their own.

Some fell and some did not. And then we're told they were banished from the presence of God. We're actually told they were put in hell.

But that can't mean they were utterly separated from influence in the world. We know that because throughout the Bible we find demons influencing the world. And so we might want to conceive of it like this.

Just like angels can influence the world from heaven, demons can influence the world, though banished from hell. And then we read that demons are waiting for a future judgment that like us, like sinners who have not been thrown into hell yet. Finally, demons to have a judgment awaiting them.

So that's what angels, that's what demons are. They are like angels, but fallen. They have all that intelligence, but turned to a wicked purpose.

And so the Bible refers to demons as unclean spirits or evil spirits, utterly opposed to God. Now, one other fact we should see before we move on is that demons exist in a hierarchy. Demons exist in a hierarchy.

The New Testament does two things to make us understand that demons exist in a hierarchy, an army really. First of all, it speaks often of their leader as Satan or Beelzebul or the devil. And it says of him that he schemes against us, but he executes his scheme through a hierarchical army of demons.

That is, very rarely would any of us actually deal with the devil. But we deal with the devil through his delegates, the demons. And this is put together very simply and well in Ephesians chapter 6. Listen to this passage and see the leader and the army.

Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. So what am I standing against? I'm standing against the schemes of the leader of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

So there are schemes of the devil. How do I encounter them? I wrestle against these powers, these principalities, these demonic forces that come into the world and are aimed for the destruction of God's people. That's who demons are.

They're real. They affect us. And if I'm to trust my New Testament, you cannot live a victorious Christian life without understanding your enemy.

Ignoring your enemy is never the pathway to battle. Can you imagine George Washington in the Revolutionary War going, I just imagine the British aren't there. It would be a pretty different history.

Secondly, what do demons do? What do demons do? Well, broadly, we can say that demons oppose the work of God. If we just wanted to give a big, broad analysis, what do demons do? They oppose the work of God. God speaks truths.

Demons speak lies. God gives life. Demons destroy.

God calls for righteousness. The devil attempts to sin. God forgives and frees from condemnation.

The devil accuses and will never let you live in the freedom of Christ's finished work. But if we're going to get more specific than this broad idea that the devil opposes the work of God, we could divide up the work of the demons and the devil into six categories. The last one is the one we're dealing with in our text.

But let's do a little survey here. Let's think about the six ways that the devil works in our midst so that we can be aware of when we're dealing with the devil. The first way in which the devil works is through lies.

The devil works through lies. John 8, verse 44, Jesus said this about the devil. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

When a Christian lies, they are going against the good heart God has given them. It's out of character. When the devil lies, he is acting true to form.

He's acting in character. He is being himself to live in lies, which is, by the way, why when we look at our culture's degeneration, it's always people identifying with lies as their true selves. It's demonic.

It is demonic to identify with lies as who you fundamentally are. So the devil is first and foremost a liar. It started in the Garden of Eden when the devil said to Adam and Eve, you will not surely die if you disobey God.

If you think you can go on in sin without consequences, you are not simply believing an alternative religious idea. You are believing a demonic lie. You have come under the power of the devil.

When Paul thinks about false teaching in the church, he does not simply think about the battle for ideas. He sees this as a demonic attack. 1 Timothy 4, verse 1, now the Spirit expressly says that in the latter times, some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves into deceitful spirits and the teaching of demons through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared.

The devil lies and creates a team of teachers who are liars. That's his way into the church. When the Galatians start believing false teaching, Paul calls them bewitched, and it's literally a technical term for coming under the spell of an evil spirit, because he knows there's a supernatural and demonic cause behind all lies.

If you are believing lies right now, demons are controlling you. You are not free. You are not an original thinker.

You are a demonic slave if you believe lies. After lying, the devil's next work is destroying. He's a destroyer.

He literally is unleashed under God's sovereignty to destroy. We see this in the story of Job. The devil goes to God and he tells God, hey, if you let me hurt Job's family, Job won't worship you anymore.

Job's actually just a health and wealth guy. If you take away his health and wealth, he'll curse you to your face. And the devil says to God along the lines of this challenge, stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.

And the Lord says to Satan, behold, all that he has, he is in your hand. Only against him do not stretch out your hand. So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord.

In other words, God gave the devil power over all of Job's stuff and over all of Job's children. And if you know the story of Job, you know God worked it together for good. Sam Ahmadi, local pastor and theologian and friend, writes, in his sovereignty, God employs the demons to carry out his good and holy purposes in the world.

He lets the devil be the devil, but then he works it together for good so that God will be God. But notice what he unleashes the devil to do. God's a life giver.

The devil brings destruction. He destroys. In the Bible, we find him destroying health, travel plans, and godly character.

He's always up to destroy. If your life has a lot of destruction in it, the devil is at least having a wicked hand in that. God can use it for good, but the devil is involved in that destruction.

Third, probably the work the devil is most famous for is his work of temptation. It strikes me right now that all of us have access to literally a brothel of pornography in our pockets. Many of our children have never heard a full sermon because they're always checking their phones for distraction, and that distraction often brings with it some of the most perverse temptations.

And that work of temptation, whether it's a sexual morality or greed, or just never thinking about eternity, never thinking deeply about anything, that work is the devil's work of temptation. The devil is a tempter. He tempts us in so many ways to sin.

If you're being tempted to follow sin, there's a power greater than you behind that temptation. Often, if you're a decent parent, you've probably warned your kids about the dangers online. But what are the dangers online? Well, the dangers online isn't the person you're chatting with, or sending pictures to, or giving your personal information out to.

That person is not maybe the middle school kid you think they are. It may be someone who wants to traffic you. It may be someone who wants to steal you.

It may be someone who wants to destroy you. We need to help people understand that behind every temptation is not some innocent neutral party with an alternative view of the world. Behind every temptation is a devil who wants to take you to hell.

He's a devil who wants to destroy you. After he tempts, he accuses. He accuses.

This is actually his most misunderstood work. We often think of the devil as a tempter. He tempted Jesus.

We don't often enough think about the devil as an accuser. The reason most people keep sinning, listen to this, the reason most people keep sinning is not just because they are tempted, but because they feel hopeless. When there is no hope, there is no chance of a person breaking the power of sin.

The reason most people keep sinning in hopelessness is because they reason like this. I'm a sinner, doomed to die. I might as well continue doing evil as long as I can.

I can't have, I can't, I'm not ever going to have fellowship with God or eternity or joy, so I might as well get as many carnal pleasures in before the man comes around. But that's a lie. It's an accusation of the devil.

The book of Hebrews, now listen to this, the book of Hebrews tells us this about the work of Jesus. It says this, He came that He might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is the devil. Jesus came that He might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

Did you catch it? They were subject to lifelong slavery. Why? Fear of death. Terrified of death.

It produces all kinds of fear of missing out. It creates all kind of religiosity. Better be good enough to get past the fear of death.

Better be good enough not to be condemned by God. It creates all kind of carnality. I'm never going to be good enough to God.

Might as well get drunk, stoned, sleep with as many people as I can, just give myself as much luxury as I possibly can. It creates all kinds of sin out of fear. Christ takes away all that fear by dying on the cross for sinners.

He says there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. He eliminates the accusation of the devil. The devil is called the accuser of the brethren.

Well, I have news for you. Christ is the justifier of the brethren. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus of the brethren, and the devil will lay out a coffin for you, and he'll make that coffin look like a garden.

But when you jump into that garden and find out it's poisoned, he will be there with accusations to nail the coffin shut on your hope. Christ breaks coffins open. Christ takes people out from the dead.

He eliminates the fear of death by paying for all of our sin and by freeing us from the power of the dark one. And so you need to resist his power of accusation because it'll keep you stuck in ruts of ungodliness for your whole life right now, no matter what you've done, no matter what you've done. If we played it on the screen up here, it wouldn't matter.

It's all covered in the blood of Christ. It's all eliminated by his perfect righteousness and his perfect justice. And amazingly, if you understand that there is now no accusation that can stick to you, you actually get a fresh power not to keep doing the things that the devil will accuse you for again and again and again.

Well, he is a tempter. He is an accuser. He is a liar.

He is a destroyer. He is also a cosmic warrior. The devil and the demons are involved in cosmic war.

They are involved in a cosmic warfare. A lot of the devil's work cannot be seen. We get a glimpse of this in the book of Daniel.

Daniel prays for 21 days. His prayer isn't answered for 21 days. When he finally is answered, it's actually God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, who shows up to answer him.

Not a bad way to end a season of unanswered prayer. Personal visit from the pre-incarnate Jesus comes to Daniel. And listen to what Jesus says.

I shouldn't quite call him Jesus. Listen to what the Son of God, prior to becoming Jesus, says. We're going to be really precise here this morning.

Listen to what the Son of God says. He says, The prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me 21 days. But Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, for I was left there with the kings of Persia.

The image we're given is of the Son of God coming to answer the prayer of Daniel, and then being opposed by a territorial spirit he calls the king of Persia. And then we have the archangel Michael coming in to help the second person of the Trinity battle these territorial demons, and then make their way through to successfully answer Daniel's prayers. If you're thinking to yourself, Why on earth would the Son of God need the help of an angel? I only will ask you this.

Why on earth do you think he needs you? He is always condescending. He's always weakening himself and allowing himself to be made a co-worker with those who would have no power except from him. And so here in this beautiful image, we're not given a ton of this theology.

We're given a little glimpse behind all that we're going through. There are cosmic wars being fought between the demons and the angels, and even God himself, always for the advance of the kingdom of God. So if you're one of those people who's in a hard time, and you've had to say to yourself, All I know is God is doing something bigger than I understand.

Just make it a little bigger. There's more going on than you and I understand in the world. The secular world is a shallow world.

It's a boring world. The real world is a glorious world. So we've seen lies, temptations, accusations, destruction, and cosmic warfare.

And apparently now with four minutes left, we're going to get into demonic oppression. So having been here before, I'll just stop. And we'll make sure that we don't handle demonic oppression quickly or lightly.

It will give it the time we deserve. Can I say this to you before we close? The Bible does deal with demonic oppression and possession. We'll look at that carefully, hopefully next week.

But the Bible also tells us that unlike this unique work where sometimes the devil actually oppresses or possesses a person, there's a global work where all people are following the prince and the power of the air if they're not in Christ. If you are not in Christ this morning, then your life is living in some kind of response to the devil's temptations and his accusations. And there is no hope for you ever escaping his rule and reign unless you see that there is a power greater than him at work in the world.

I want to share with you one of my favorite verses in the entire Bible when it comes to the of the Son of God and his destruction of the devil. The devil will take God's law and he will accuse you with it. The devil will take God's law and he will remind you of the condemnation you deserve because of it.

The devil will constantly remind you of your condemnation, your imperfections, your weakness, and he will labor to make sure you never forget it so you never experience any freedom from sin. But the Son of God loves to remind you not of what the devil's condemnation will bring, but he loves to remind you of what his death on the cross has accomplished. Listen to these verses from Colossians chapter 2 verse 13.

If you're not a believer, come to Christ listening to these verses. Trust him. This can be for you if you repent and come to him.

And if you're a believer, it's time to dance. It is just absolutely time to sing and dance about what God has done in freeing us from the condemnation of the devil. Listen to these amazing verses.

He says this to the And you who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him. You were dead, but God made you alive in Jesus, having forgiven us all our trespasses. How? How could he forgive us all our trespasses? That can't be right.

If a judge were to dismiss all of a person's sins out of hand, we would say that was a corrupt judge. How can he just dismiss all of our sins? How can he forgive us? He tells us. He says he forgave us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us.

All of our guilt and debt before the law, he canceled it, this record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, not unjustly, but nailing it to the cross. He nailed all of your wickedness to the cross.

Have you been a bad parent? Have you been a bad child? Have you been sexually perverse? Have you used your money perfectly? Have you been condemning and bitter? Have you broken God's law everywhere or in one part? It's all been set aside, but not swept under the rug of the universe nailed to the cross. My sin, not in part, but the whole is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more. That's the message of the gospel.

And then he says to us this, he says, canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands, this he set aside, nailing it to the cross. Then he uses very strange language. He disarmed the rulers and authorities, which is a Pauline way of saying he disarmed the demons.

They might have guns, but they don't have any ammunition left. They've been disarmed. He took away all their ammo.

He disarmed, listen to this, the rulers and authorities and put them to an open shame by triumphing over them in him. What happened? What he did is that he knew that the devil's primary bullets are accusation and condemnation, constantly reminding you of your sin. And Jesus says, I'll take a, this is the only kind of a gun hand in you want, right? Where Jesus takes the ammunition from the devil and he says, hand that over to me.

There's no more condemnation for them. I've taken it. So the, the accusations you have to fire against them, they're all shooting blanks now.

And every time the devil says to you, you are condemned. There is no hope for you. You could never be forgiven.

You remind the devil of this. Jesus paid it all. I love what Luther would do when the devil would come to tempt him.

The devil would come to Luther and say, you're such a sinner, Luther, you're such a sinner. You deserve to be condemned. And, and, and Luther would say, you're right, devil.

I agree with you. I am such a sinner. And Christ died for sinners like me.

Go in that, that overcomes all the work of the devil. Lord, we pray that you would please work in us to have a victory over the temptations, the accusations, the destruction, the lies of the devil, and that you would bring all of your people and those who are not your people to Christ and to believe in him for the forgiveness of sins. We also pray you'd give us wisdom this week as we search your scriptures and prepare to think about his possession or oppression and how men and women can be freed from that as well.

We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.