The Devil No.2 His Forces

I'd like to introduce you to a song called Praise You, Lose You, Lose You, Lose You. It's a song that's spoken by the sharpness of your sword. Praise you, Lord.

Gave your lies. You anguish on earth. That tore your vows.

Praise you, Lord. Tears, they fell for me. Praise you, Lord.

To roses. Glory, Lord. Made it sweet.

Praise you, Lord. Our reading this morning comes from the New Testament. In Saint Luke's Gospel.

At the eleventh chapter we read that Jesus had been praying. When the demon left, the man who had been dumb spoke. And the crowd were amazed.

But some of them said, by Beelzebub, the prince of demons, he is driving out demons. Others tested him by asking for a sign from heaven. Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, Any kingdom divided against itself will be ruined.

And a house divided against itself will fall. If Satan is divided against himself, how can his kingdom stand? I say this because you claim that I drive out demons by Beelzebub. Now if I drive out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your followers drive them out? So then, they will be your judges.

But if I drive out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come to you. When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, his possessions are safe. But when someone stronger attacks and overpowers him, he takes away the armor in which the man trusted and divides up the spoils.

He who is not with me is against me. And he who does not gather with me scatters. When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it.

Then it says, I will return to the house I left. When it arrives it finds the house swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes seven other spirits, more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there.

And the final condition of that man is worse than the first. As Jesus was saying these things, a woman in the crowd called out, blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you. He replied, blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.

Now will you turn with me to Ephesians in chapter 6. And before we pray together, I'm asking those of you who have the NIV version of the Bible, just to read with me the first, or rather the tenth verse, through to the end of the thirteenth verse. Ephesians 6, good friends with their A.V. will doubtless follow, as it's most important we all have this scripture in our minds as we come to study it in a moment. Ephesians 6, verse 10 to 13, then some prayer.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Therefore, put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Father, we come before your throne, having acknowledged in the reading of scripture the authority of your word. And we are convinced that scripture can only work itself out in terms of the warp and the woof of our experience, as we submit ourselves to you and the promptings of the indwelling Holy Spirit.

So we come to you, great and glorious God, aware of your majesty and of your might, and asking that you will increase our comprehension, help us to have a daring faith, help us, despite the small and the large problems that come our way, to recognize that we have a God who is greater than anything that can be an obstacle to us. We ask, O Lord, that you will make us more bold in our Christian lives, enabling us to witness more for the Saviour's sake. If our lips have been mute during these past seven days, then forgive us, we pray.

If we have expressed things that we ought not to have said, then once more we ask that we might know absolution through the blood of Jesus. If we've fallen, as all of us have in some area of our lives, then we pray that you will not only just forgive us, Father, but strengthen us so that that aspect of our spiritual personality may not buckle under pressure again. We come to you and we pray for one another.

We thank you for our brothers and sisters. We praise you for the depths of love that flow from our hearts to them, and we ask that you will baptize us more and more in the divine love of the Lord Jesus Christ. We pray, Father, not only for our church here and for its various agencies, but we pray for the total body of Christ in this town, for every pulpit, for every fellowship where Jesus and his gospel is honored.

Lord, will you bless and invade that community by the power of your Spirit. We pray not only for the church of Jesus Christ in this town and in this country, but we pray for those who are hostile to the gospel at this moment. We bring to you our land and we ask, Lord, that you will be with those who rule over us.

We recognize that many of them have yet failed to acknowledge who you are, and we pray that by your grace you will bring them to the Lord's side. We pray for the world and its international problems and ask, O Lord, that you who look down from your position in the heavenlies may see the needs of men and women. Sometimes they are grotesque, sometimes, Lord, they are unspeakable, and we have words not sufficient to describe them, but we come to you and we ask that you will undertake.

We pray, Lord, that you will hasten the day of the return of Jesus Christ and help us to realize that history is in his hands and the future is his. Praise you, Lord, that we are on his side and that victory was sealed with his blood at Calvary and by the power of the resurrection. Help us to realize that we're moving from victory to victory, from glory to glory, and we ask that during our earthly pilgrimage on this earth each one of us may live lives that are acceptable to you.

So bless your church internationally, nationally, and here locally, and come upon us as we consider Scripture together for the sake of Jesus our Lord. Amen. Now, if you'll have your Bibles open at that passage, I'd be glad if you would give me your attention this morning as I try to deliver my soul and convey to you what I think that the Lord has taught me from one of the most remarkable passages of Scripture.

We're looking at Ephesians 6, and obviously from the 10th verse under the heading of our Christian warfare. And this morning I want to look at the devil and his forces. It's identified in the notes as the devil and his schemes, but I'll come more to the schemes perhaps next week or perhaps the week following.

But this morning, the devil and his forces. Last time I reminded you of the significance of that little instruction from Paul, a little instruction but of major consequence. Be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power.

Christian people have not been left on this earth to look after themselves. Rather, they are clothed in the power of the Holy Spirit. They have in front of them the example of the Lord Jesus.

He came on earth to combat Satan, and into that battle He calls all of those who have trusted Him. But I repeat that He's not just left us with an example, He has left us with His mighty power. That power which is so enormous as Paul, it is equivalent to the power that God released in bringing Jesus Christ back from the dead.

Now I want you to have that always in your mind. You can never underestimate, my friend, the power of God. And the power of God as it can be demonstrated in your life.

You're like David. You're going down the valley of Elias. And there's that overgrown Philistine giant.

And it looks at the human level as though you don't have a chance. But you know in your heart that the odds are stacked the other way. He doesn't have a chance.

Why? Because of your prowess? Because of your ingenuity? Because you're able to fell the giant on your own? As David reckoned, as Jehoshaphat came to see in a different circumstance in the Old Testament, the battle is the Lord's. And we move on in our Christian lives as men and women in the army of the Lord Jesus Christ. We take our commands from Him.

We're not in the banqueting hall yet. We're in the barracks. And there's a red alert.

I indicated that last week. If you don't consider the Christian life in this context, my friend, then I wonder what your Bible reading has been all about. We are not here to enjoy a comfortable sojourn on this planet.

We're here, as the Lord Jesus was, to combat the forces of evil and to proclaim the gospel. If the devil gives you no trouble at all, then the reason for that is that you're not a good soldier of Jesus Christ. That is the only possible answer to that objection that you might raise.

So the apostle tucks in these final verses at the end of his epistle, and they're the most important aspect of his teaching. Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power, having in front of you the fact that the battle is to be raged, the day of evil is with us, and it intensifies in its wickedness. Now, he particularly brings in his warning about the devil in the 11th verse.

He says, put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. And what we're going to inquire into this morning is the devil. Not so much the origin of the devil.

I'll try to help you with that next week. But this whole concept of the armies of the Lord being matched by the armies of Satan. Now, I know full well that if some sophisticated child of the 20th century haphazardly has come into this congregation this morning, they will probably be shaking their heads in derision and wondering what that fellow in the pulpit is on about.

The idea of the devil. Don't we know that 20 men from the Church of England wrote a letter to the Times in the 1960s and denied the idea of the devil. Well, so much for those 20 men.

I still stand by what the Bible has to say. It is necessary for us to look into this doctrine. It is not just folklore from medieval times.

It is not just primitive tales that we should have forgotten or locked up into the category of Hans Anderson and all the stories that that person wrote down. No, I say that we are to look into the doctrine of the devil. And I could give you three or four examples or reasons why to do so.

And my first fundamentally will be this, because the Bible teaches about the existence of the evil one. The Bible teaches about his existence. And what is more, I would argue this, that you will never understand the ministry of Jesus Christ on this earth unless you acknowledge the power of the devil.

Why did Jesus come into this world? Well, I say he came in to confront Satan. Jesus is our David. Satan is Goliath.

And time and time again in his ministry, our Lord opposes Satan. And when you stand by the cross and you look with eyes open in amazement at Jesus dying, you ask yourself, why does he die? And the answer is to defeat the power of Satan in this world. He despoils his power, Colossians 1. And the 13th verse, I think it is, makes this very clear.

You can never understand Calvary unless you appreciate something of the teaching of the Bible concerning the devil. And what is more, it's necessary for us to look into this doctrine because, well, put it quite bluntly, it's good to know what you're up against. It's good to know what you're up against.

That's the reason why I got Ken Hearn to read to us from the Gospel of Luke where our Lord puts down this parable of a king who goes out to fight. And before he goes out to fight, what does he do? Well, first of all, he counts the cost. He's very concerned to see that the battle in which he engages is one in which he has an ability to overcome.

You find that in the context and in parallel versions of the 11th chapter of Luke's Gospel. Our Lord Jesus Christ indicates the necessity for us to size up to the devil. And what is more, you need to know something of the devil because you ought to respect him.

Let me rephrase that. You ought to respect his power. You ought to respect his power.

The last book, or the next to the last book of the New Testament has this to say in the 8th verse, or rather the 9th verse, when it brings to our attention the extraordinary scene of Michael disputing with the devil about the body of Moses. It says this, Even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not care to bring a slanderous accusation against him, but said, The Lord rebuke you. Yet these men speak abusively against whatever they do not understand and what things they do understand by instinct like unreasoning animals.

These are the very things that destroy them. Now doesn't that sum it up? Here we have these sophisticated people and they come into the tabernacle and they think, What's that oaf doing talking about the devil? They don't understand. And what is more, they never will understand until they come to Scripture.

But you have to understand. Why? Well because you're in the army of the Lord Jesus Christ. And before you go to war, you size up the opposition.

Well these are the reasons why I say it's necessary for us to look at the doctrine of the devil. Come to my text again. From the 10th through to the 13th verses of Ephesians 6. And what do you discover? Well you find a repetition of one word.

Did you notice that in my reading? Or in the reading in which you shared? Verse 12, For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Thank God that the NIV, following the good practice of the authorized version, did not balk at using Paul's repetition of the word against. Why does Paul use this? It's pedantic really.

Our editors would perhaps say, Do away with this. We don't need the repetition of this word. But my friend, we do.

There are times when grammar must step aside and allow the thrust of what words are supposed to bring to our attention to have their full impact. Why does Paul use a fivefold against? Because Paul is absolutely convinced that the war of which he is speaking is no phony war. And so you find impregnated, not even here alone in Ephesians, but throughout his letters, the idea of the Christian as the warrior and a host of evil against the Christian endeavoring to deceive him and to rob him of his faith.

So then, here is Paul and he tells us about the devil and his forces. Let's look at the devil just for a moment. Not dealing, as I say, with his origin, but just one or two things that need to be shared.

I've put some notes. You can add to those notes if you want to the back of the new sheet or you can just concentrate intently on what I'm trying to bring before you. The devil is sometimes referred to as Satan.

And on other occasions, as we discovered in the reading earlier, he's called Beelzebub. He's called the strong man. And the idea of that is that the world belongs to him or at least he feels it does.

It's under his control. He's the strong man. You move into the letter that Peter writes and you discover that the devil there is referred to as the roaring lion, 1 Peter 5.8. You go into John's Revelation and you find that this devil is referred to in Revelation 12 as that enormous dragon.

And when you go to Revelation 20, that ancient serpent, or as the authorized version puts it, that old serpent. Well, these obviously are metaphors. Lion, dragon, serpent.

But what do they indicate? Well, what does the picture of a lion suggest to you? Here is a lion in the jungle and he roars. And you know that that roar indicates that some poor beast is about to become the lion's breakfast. The lion, when he roars, he asserts his authority.

So the Bible metaphorically uses that term and shows something of the authority of the devil. The dragon. You remember this legendary character from days at school when maybe you delved into these things.

The dragon that belches out fire, that has enormous strength in its tail. The serpent as it slides along in a subtle fashion in the ground, endeavoring to make a minimum of noise and then with its fangs injecting its venom. What do all these things indicate? Well, something of the power and something of the subtlety of the devil.

And so the man who laughs at this doctrine reveals more about himself than he reveals about the non-existence of the devil. In fact, I go so far to say that he indicates that the devil's work is being achieved very satisfactorily in his life. The very word devil implies traducer or tempter.

And that's what we discover in him as being in the early chapters of Scripture. You don't just come across this doctrine in Ephesians 6. You find it there in Genesis 3. I think I could demonstrate that it was there even in early chapters, at least by implication. The devil, he comes along, and what's his first accusation? What's his first temptation? Well, it's to Eve.

And what is the form of the temptation? Well, the form is in the word Satan. You say, what do you mean? Well, the devil means traducer. Satan means the one who brings an accusation.

The one who brings an accusation. And what the devil does is he accuses God before man. Hath God said? Don't believe him.

Don't put any credibility on this idea of something that is forbidden. You see, he accuses God of being a liar. And what else does the devil do? Well, he accuses you before God.

This is what the book of Revelation makes very clear. He is the accuser of the brethren. You see, the accusation, it goes both ways.

And the word devil and Satan, it brings in, if you know the meanings of these terms, it brings in the very raison d'etre, the reason, as far as he is concerned, for his existence. So, when Paul says our struggle is against the devil, then he is not just mouthing empty sentiments. Paul is not just sort of doing lip service to the gobbled ideas of the first century B.C. This is something that needs to be looked at not just in the first century, but in the twentieth century too.

How is the devil described in Scripture? Well, perhaps one of the most frightening things that we read of him is discovered in the first letter of Corinthians 4, where we read of the devil that he is the god of this world. I've got this reference wrong. I want the reference where Paul refers to the devil as the god of this world.

Maybe it's the second Corinthians 4. It is. I breathe a sigh of relief. Second Corinthians chapter 4 and verse 4. I'll read from the third verse to let you catch up.

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. Did you notice, the NIV, how that word G is with a small letter? The god of this age.

He's not god in the sense of being divine, but he's god in the sense that he has a great amount of power. He is the spirit that rules, says Paul in Ephesians 2.2. He rules in the air. He's the one who seems to have tremendous authority.

Indeed, I would go so far as to say this, that outside of the power and the authority of God, second to that power is the power of the devil. He is the mighty one. But thank God, our Lord Jesus Christ is the almighty one.

And though the devil sometimes seems to have unchecked power and authority in our world, I shall seek to show you that that is not the case and that his day has an end. His time in exercising his diabolical influence will come to a conclusion. So, Paul says here, take your stand, Ephesians 6.10, I'm back again there, 6.10 and 11, take your stand against the devil's schemes.

But the devil is not on his own. Now, that becomes very plain when you go into the 12th verse and to some degree in the 13th, but particularly the 12th. Now, let's do a parallel.

Here I was last week and the week before trying to teach you about the Lord Jesus and his almighty power. And we discover that this power has a great deal in it. Those words, his mighty power, are very pregnant, is a very pregnant phrase.

There are the powers of ministering angels. There is the presence of God in the world. There are the mighty gifts of the Holy Spirit.

They're all preceded in this idea of the power of the Lord Jesus Christ. Put on his mighty power, benefit by his mighty power. Now, in a corresponding fashion, the devil also has his emissaries.

He has his powers. And it's to those that Paul refers when he speaks about the rulers and authorities and the powers of this dark world and evil in heavenly realms. In effect, you see, what he's doing is, going back to the analogy of David, he's taken us down the valley of Eloth and he's now showing us the Philistine forces.

Not just Goliath, but all those who work alongside Goliath. Not just the devil, but all those who are in the employment of Satan. And you see how he puts in something that seems to be quite confusing to start with as he parades in front of us the forces of the evil one.

He says in the opening of the twelfth verse, our struggle is not against flesh and blood. And you say, well, that contradicts against the teaching earlier on in this epistle and indeed against the teaching that I was giving you last week. What are we ranged against as Christians? The world, the flesh and the devil.

Yet here the apostle says, our struggle is not against flesh and blood, not against humanity. And quite right so. In what means is Paul now arguing, or by what means is he arguing? Well, you see, our conflict is not basically against mankind.

Mankind provides us with a problem. We see many things that men and women do that we know are against the law of God. But basically that isn't the problem.

That, if you like, is the symptom, but it's not the disease. That is the effect, but it's not the cause. And what Christianity seeks to do, and this is what makes it such a marvelous revelation, is it seeks to go behind the problems that befall humanity.

Our problems are not basically against flesh and blood. They are just the consequence of a problem that is much more deep seated. Well, what is our problem? It's against those forces that manipulate flesh and blood, that cause men and women to behave in the fashion that they do.

And these forces, they pan out. The devil, you see, is not omnipresent. This is another way in which he is distinguished from almighty God.

He has great power, but he is not omnipresent. But he does have his forces operating in and around our world. Thus the apostle speaks about these rulers and these authorities and so forth.

What are these rulers? Well, listen to Professor Bruce, one of the great evangelical scholars in the 20th century. And he refers to this network of evil that the devil heads up. He says, The present world order is organized in rebellion against God, remains under the domination of these powers.

Only in Christ can men be given victory and released from their grasp. The appearance of Christ was a signal for an outburst of unprecedented activity on the part of the realm of darkness, controlled by these authorities as though they knew a mortal threat was being presented to their dominion. So the ministry of Jesus, what happens when he starts to preach? Well, he's attacked.

In fact, he's attacked before he opens his mouth. In Bethlehem, the commencement of his ministry, throughout those three years of public preaching, and there in Gethsemane, and there in Pilate's Hall, and there on the cross, these rulers, these spirit forces, they're there in full measure and full blast directed against him. Now, never do you find Jesus ever questioning the reality of evil.

He speaks to the devil. He says, This is your hour. He recognizes that the conniving of the subtlety of the devil is coming to its height.

And Paul here speaks of these rulers, these principalities, as the authorized version puts it, these powers that operate in our world today. And he goes on to make reference to the powers of this dark world, not just the rulers and authorities following the NIV now. The NIV takes us on to the concept of the powers of this dark world.

And that word powers there is very important. It's frightening. The original word is cosmocratores, and it has the idea of a world ruler, a world ruler, as though there are forces that lurk on our earth or just above the earth that have as their objective bringing the world, mankind, under their control.

Now, this is a biblical picture. You may never have seen it like this before, but that I cannot help. This, nonetheless, is what Scripture teaches.

If you went to the prophecy of Daniel, for example, no need to do it now, but you could check this through later on in some quiet period that you've got this Sunday afternoon. If you go into the prophecy of Daniel, you'll discover that on one occasion, Daniel comes up against the power of the Prince of Persia and then the power of the Prince of Greece. Now, the reference is not necessarily to human beings alive at that time, but the headquarters of evil as operating in what was then the Persian Empire and ultimately the Grecian Empire.

Now, Paul is referring to these forces, these powers in this world that have as their objective world domination. Now, this becomes very significant, doesn't it, when you start to look at present history. I mean by that the history of this century.

How do you explain some of the men that have come to the forefront of the scene? Take a man like, say, Mussolini. How do you understand Mussolini? What happened to that man? To what forces did he surrender his intellect? Let me give you another obvious one. Adolf Hitler, this one time painter and decorator, for that's what he was in Austria, comes into Germany, brings Germany to its feet.

How do you understand Hitler and his activities? What was his goal that eventually became so dominant in his thinking? Well, it was none other than this, world domination. How do you understand Adolf Hitler? Do you put him in your psychiatrist's chair and try to analyze him? I heard ten years or so ago that one of Hitler's problems was that he had a sort of accelerated glandular development, as though the history of the Second World War could be traced back to Adolf Hitler's enlarged thyroid gland. Utter nonsense.

You get more of an answer when you think of the astrologist to whom Hitler frequently made reference and the occult that played so much a part in his life, in his last years particularly. You see, a man can be so delivered to these powers of evil that they obsess him, that they control him. It doesn't just happen in the political realm, it happens in the religious realm.

How do you explain Seung Myung Moon, this leader of the Moonists who claims to be the Lord of the Second Advent, the returned Jesus Christ? How do you explain Alrex Hobart, the man who started the Church of Scientology with all the problems that that's brought? How do you explain David Moses Berg, the man who heads up the so-called Children of God and has brought so many young people in America and this country into bondage? Well, I ask you, try and find a psychological explanation and I suggest to you that you'll be looking for a long time, but come back to the Bible and what do you discover? Well, there are these powers, these powers who pervade this dark world and they battle for the mind of man and their intent is world domination, eclipsing the glory of God, wiping it from the face of humanity. You see, this world is a dark world. You say, it doesn't look dark.

Well, that's one of the problems of Satan. Sometimes he can step back into the background and you begin to think that this whole talk about Satan and demons and evil powers, it's all just mythology. But there is culpable darkness that pervades the minds of men and women.

I don't mean by that that intellectually they're necessarily thick, but what I do mean is that there are areas of blindness that they do not appreciate. Some of the greatest minds that have come onto this world have nonetheless been blinded. They've been blinded to the truth of the gospel.

When the devil blinds an intellectual man, he doesn't dull his intellect, but he uses that intellect in a way that is against the purposes of God. The apostle makes this very clear as far as the Ephesians are concerned. How does he understand the Ephesian Christians? What were they and what are they now? Well, look at the 4th chapter and the 18th verse, or rather the 17th and 18th verses.

So I tell you this and insist on it in the Lord that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God. Separated from the life of God.

And that's what you were like before you became a believer. Drop to the 8th verse of the 5th chapter, will you? For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light.

You see, when the apostle speaks about this darkness, he's speaking of something that's real. A darkness that men and women who are not Christians languish under. And as such, they become target for these forces of Satan as they exist in this country and in other countries.

There are various permutations in the way that they behave. But the final objective is to stop men ever reproducing the glory of God in their lives. And so in conclusion, the apostle reminds us about the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

His spiritual cohorts. He uses a term heavenly there just to show you that this is something that's not just mundane. It's not just something that's secular in the sense of it being man-orientated.

He is using the term heavenly realms to indicate that the powers to which he refers are super-terrestrial, they're supernatural. In effect, he's taking us back to 2.2, chapter 2 and verse 2, where he speaks of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. Well then, what can we say about all these things? It seems very frightening, doesn't it? And indeed, it is frightening.

And yet, do you know, can I say in my closing comments, I find in one sense this part of the most stimulating teaching of Scripture. For what reason? Well, you see, it gives me an understanding of the world. And nobody but the Christian can understand the world.

Nobody can understand history but the Christian. He sees, you see, not the problems, but what's behind the problems, the forces of evil. But it's not just the explanation that stimulates me.

You see, I've been taking you into the ranks of the Philistines and we've been looking at those cohorts, those world rulers, and we might well be afraid at that. But do you remember where we started, how I spent my first couple of Sundays in this area of reasoning with the Lord Jesus? Why? Well, you see, it's His mighty power in which we find ourselves enveloped. They've known a baptism of evil.

We know a baptism of power. If Christ is for us, does it matter who is against us? The Bible makes it clear that one day God shall bruise Satan's head under his feet. One day, his nefarious activity and all those who work alongside him shall be consigned to the abyss and never execute power and authority evermore.

You see, the Lord Jesus, He has the authority. He has absolute and ultimate control. We're told in Revelation of people like ourselves who overcome by the blood of the Lamb.

Don't be afraid by what I've told you this morning. In one sense, there's nothing to fill your heart with fear, but there's a great deal to fill your heart with awe. This is the picture as the Bible tells it.

Satan and his invisible cohorts around the world against him and them, you're arranged in battle with the Lord Jesus Christ. But on our side is a captain of our salvation, the one who can put Satan to flight, the one who releases his power and his dynamic in your life. So you see, Paul's not scaremongering as he puts in these final verses.

Finally, my brethren, despite all this, the red alarm, the problems outside, finally, my brethren, recognize them, but be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power and put on His armor as you do battle with the hordes of evil. Well, more of this next week. And now to Him who is able to keep us from falling and to present us faultless before His glorious presence with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, be glory, majesty, power, and authority through Jesus Christ our Lord before all ages now and forevermore.

Amen.