Angelic Warfare

Revelation 12:7 And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. ⁸ But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. ⁹ The great dragon was hurled down-- that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him. ¹⁰ Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: "Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ. For the accuser of our brothers, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down. ¹¹ They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. ¹² Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short."

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis reminds us that his Christ-figure in the story – Aslan – is not a tame lion. But we do try to tame Christ. In the same way, as we celebrate St. Michael and All Angels today, all we have to do is look at our culture to see how hard we have worked to tame the angels of the Lord. Our culture has feminized these great angelic warriors of the Lord. They have been downsized into cute and sentimental cherubs. They have been confused with Christians becoming angels upon death.

Sadly, many of us as Christians have fallen prey to the false images of God’s angels.

That’s because we don’t know what the Bible actually has to say about God’s angelic messengers, ministers and military.

But Scripture has a great deal to teach us about angels.

The angels are a part of God’s invisible creation as the Nicene Creed confesses with the words “all that is seen and unseen.” Right away in Genesis God places His cherubim with a flaming sword to prevent Adam and Eve from entering Eden again. Two angels helped Lot and his family escape the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The king of Syria was prevented from attacking Israel because the mountain was filled with angelic horses and chariots of fire. An angel muzzled the lions’ mouths to save Daniel from being eaten. An angel walked in the flames of the fiery furnace with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.

In the New Testament, Gabriel brings a message of the Christ Child to Mary and then Joseph. Angels belt out the Gloria in Excelsis (Glory to God in the highest) in the Bethlehem sky on the Eve of Christmas. Angels minister to Jesus after His forty day battle against Satan in the desert. The angels were standing ready to defend Jesus at His arrest in Gethsemane. The angel rolled away the stone of Jesus’ tomb, announcing to the world that Christ had risen. Then the angel told the women, “He is not here. He has risen, just as He said.” At Jesus’ ascension, the angels promise that Jesus will return visibly on the Last Day.

Scripture says that the angels are ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation (Hebrews 1:14). The Lord commands His angels to guard you in all your ways, lifting you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone (Psalm 91:11-12). The angels also carry the souls of departed saints to Abraham’s bosom (Luke 16:22).

Tame lions are for the zoos. Tame angels are for fiction and the marketplace. God is not tame and neither are His angels. And thank God for these wild, powerful angels. For there is a battle going on behind the scenes in the spiritual realm. It is a battle for your heart, your mind and your very soul! The devil is always on the offensive. Your protectors in the spirit world carry out God’s orders to keep you safe from the Evil One and his horde from hell. This morning we focus on Revelation 12 and examine this angelic warfare that is going on all around us.

St. John writes: “There was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down-- that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.”

This is not medieval fantasy. This is no fairy tale. This is a historical fact.

The Lord kicked Satan out of heaven. God called upon Michael and his fellow angels to be His enforcers. The devil became a trespasser on God’s property, and the holy angels were the military force who made sure he left. Satan is pictured as a dragon. He is not like the dragons we think of with wings and legs. He looked more like a … hmm … a great serpent. “Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals God had made” (Genesis 3:1). The ancient serpent and his evil band of angels did not want to go quietly. It became necessary to boot them out by force. So there was war in heaven, a titanic struggle between the hosts of heaven and the hosts of hell. Jesus witnessed their demise, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18).

That’s great news for us. It means the forces of evil cannot defeat the forces of good. However, the defeat of Satan and his expulsion also means some bad news – at least for the time being. “He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him. … Woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.”

Satan is filled with furious anger against God. He knows he has a limited time before Judgment Day ends all his wicked activity forever. So he is busy. He attacks ferociously as a dragon – overseeing the beheading of Christians in Muslim countries; tearing apart the sanctity of marriage with laws that permit homosexual marriage; chuckling as people sacrilegiously pray to God thanking Him for legalized abortions; urging on the atheists and unbelievers who verbally abuse our Christian college students. Satan can attack head-on with mass chaos, anarchy, bloodshed and moral decay.

But Satan also masquerades as “an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). He may take the pressure off you, allow everything to go smoothly for a time, and allow you a sense of health, peace and happiness. As things are going so well, you feel less need for prayer, less urgency for studying the Scriptures, and less commitment to worshiping God.

Or Satan may just stand on the sideline, letting the world and your sinful nature do most of the damage. He enjoys your indignation that another Christian slighted you. He smiles when you are upset with the teachers that there is actually sin present in the Lutheran school. He laughs when you fight with your spouse, when laziness gets in the way of worship, when revenge is your motivation instead of love.

Satan may have been kicked out of heaven, but he is alive and well here on earth, in our nation, in our lives. Satan’s end game – whether it is a full frontal attack, whether it is slight irritations or whether he appears as an angel of light – is the same. It is to distract you from Jesus Christ and His salvation.

Satan is a furious dragon who works to steal you and your children away from the Good Shepherd. He wants to devour you like a lion consuming his prey. Satan sends a shiver down your back to terrify you or send one up your leg to seduce you.

There is a war going on. There is a spiritual fight for souls that is being fought. As Christians, we are squarely in the middle, caught between heaven and hell here on earth. But that’s why this festival of St. Michael and all angels is so important. It reminds us that Satan and his minions have been conquered – not with gold or silver, or moneybags or knapsacks, not with guns or tanks or even flaming swords. “[The angels] overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.” Satan has fallen. He has been struck down by a lamb on a stick – Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God on a cross. Dragons should easily defeat lambs, but not when the Lamb is the Son of God! The wounds of the Lamb mortally wounded the dragon.

The ancient serpent hung from Eden’s tree and set a trap for Adam and Eve. All of humanity has fallen into that trap. In order to release humanity from Satan’s trap, the Son of God became flesh to set a trap of His own. Entering the dragon’s domain and seeking to plunder his lair, the Son of God made Himself bait. The old evil foe saw the Son of God made man and coveted Christ more than any other trophy he had won. Lucifer wanted to throw Christ down from heaven’s throne and regain his place in heaven. So the pride-filled dragon pursued the humble Lamb. He stirred the Romans’ bloodlust. He deceived the Jewish priests with power. He seduced the people with mob justice. He sought the death of the Lamb.

Lambs are easy prey for drags. Dragons are all too easily consumed with pride. Thus the Lamb of God was betrayed, captured, arrested, tried and nailed to a tree.

It was all too easy. Satan took the bait. The Lamb was sacrificed. The Son of God was crucified and in one short day, in a matter of hours, all that the dragon had worked millennia for, came crashing down around him. Satan became the loser! Jesus, the murder victim, was the Victor! The head of the serpent was crushed (Genesis 3:15)! All dominion, power and authority was wrenched out of Satan’s hands and put into the nail-scarred hands of the Christ (1 Corinthians 15:24)! In one moment, as Christ breathed His last, the gates of Hades were slammed shut and the gates of heaven were thrown wide open! In a split second, like lightning falling from heaven to earth, Lucifer was cast down, beaten down, put down by the cross of Jesus Christ (Isaiah 14:12)!

The war against Satan has already been decided. But still the devil and his minions battle on. They daily attack our home, our school, our church, our nation in attempt to win you into hell. But in these daily battles against Satan, sin and self, we get to use the same weapon that Michael and his angels used the first time Satan was cast down. We use the blood of the Lamb to overcome the forces of evil. The blood of the Lamb is our certainty. The blood of the Lamb is our encouragement. The blood of the Lamb is our glory. The blood of the Lamb is our salvation, our power, and our authority. “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ.”

When Satan tries accusing us of our sins, we remind him that we have been forgiven by the blood of the Lamb. When we get tired because of the constant drone of the battlefield, we are nourished for the fight of faith by the body and blood of the Lamb. When our combat here is complete, and the angels carry us to rest in paradise, it is the blood of the Lamb that allows us to enter heaven’s gates (Revelation 7:14). There we will join with the martyrs and saints, the cherubim and seraphim, to worship the Lamb who has cast down the dragon.  

God’s angelic host continue to defend us from the wrath of the dragon and his demons. Martin Luther described, “We Christians should have the sure knowledge that the princes of heaven are with us, not only one or two, but a large number of them, as Luke records that a multitude of the heavenly host was with the shepherds.  And if we were without this custody, and God did not in this way check the fury of Satan, we could not live for one moment.”

Again, Dr. Luther wrote, “That the entire world is not a mass of flames, that all towns and villages are not lying in a heap of ruins, we owe to the working and doing of the good angels.”

Therefore, we should rejoice and take comfort in their service as an expression of God’s nurturing care and defense for us. God not does protect us with tame cherubs or dainty spirits. He deigns to protect us with His competent and commanding angelic army. 

Thank you Lamb of God for the archangel Michael and his angelic host. Because of their warfare on our behalf, we are safe. Amen.