The Accuser Loses.

Revelation 12:7-17

August 4, 2019

I.

There is no place in heaven, which is to say, the place of widest and most universal inclusion and vision, for the Accuser.  Apparently, there had been a subordinate place for him in God’s realm.  He had a subsidiary role in testing God’s people, like a Prosecutor in court.  But he overplayed his part, so that instead of merely trying the weaknesses of the people in order to strengthen them, he threatens to wipe them out altogether.  

There is in all of us what we might call an “inner critic.”  At best it is our conscience, pointing out right and wrong, warning us against potentially bad actions, revealing negative paths taken so that we do not go that way again, reminding us of what happened to someone else when they went the wrong way.  The inner critic can also hold up our ideals and goals, encouraging us when we backslide and expressing approval when we make progress.  The inner critic is like a good Prosecutor who knows her job is to protect the community and repair damage done to it and its members.

In the Old Testament we might see that Satan, the Adversary, had a particular role in the heavenly council, which was to test, to probe, to prove the faith of people like Job. 

But the liability with critics and Prosecutors is that they can degenerate into over-zealous, self-righteous, fanatical, and heartless perfectionists, who no longer work for the common good, but start pursuing what they see as “error” with murderous, psychopathic, destructive wrath.  Like the officer in Vietnam who reported that he had to destroy a village order to “save” it.

The Accuser forgets that he is an angelic emissary of the God of love, and instead becomes a vicious, snarling, ravenous red dragon, hell-bent on obliterating God’s creation because of all its supposed imperfections.  That spawns what John calls a war in heaven, because there is no place in God’s world for condemnation, cruelty, retribution, punishment, or annihilation.  It would be like when the immune system turns against the body itself; and the body’s protector becomes its mortal enemy.

God creates everything and declares it all very good.  God does not create anything bad.  A bad thing is just an originally good thing that somehow gets made into the only or the ultimate thing.  It stops participating as a part of God’s system, and starts destroying it in the name of its own, small agenda.

This “war” also gets reflected in the human soul.  We all have the potential to entertain the subtle, nasty voice of the Accuser telling us we are bad, we are not enough, we are failures, we are perverts, we are imperfect, we are losers, that we are unloveable, unworthy, vile, putrid sinners whom God hates and who deserve only to perish and be forgotten.

That is when we need to remember that God threw the Accuser out of heaven.  His voice of condemnation is not a true voice, and it has no place in heaven, in creation, in the church, or in our hearts.  It is a voice that only tells lies.  God’s Word, on the other hand, is truth and that truth is revealed in Jesus as compassion and love.

II.

When the Accuser gets evicted from heaven, he lands, unfortunately, on the earth.  He’s only going to be here for a time, but it is a difficult and challenging time while it lasts.  The real war is over, God’s love has conclusively and decisively won, but the Accuser knows that humans will be slow to get the memo.  Many, indeed, nearly all, will nevertheless still listen to him.  And if he cannot turn heaven against them, he can at least still labor to turn them against themselves.

And we find ourselves again witnessing the collision that the book of Revelation — and indeed the whole Bible, and indeed all of life — is about: between truth and lies, goodness and evil, the way of life and the road of death.  

People are faced with a choice.  We may follow the way of God’s victory, the way of life, the way of love, which unfortunately seems to us like death because we must give up to our own egocentricity and and selfishness.  Or we may follow the way of death, which unfortunately seems to us like a wonderful life saturated with wealth, fame, and power.  In one way we follow the Lamb who was slaughtered and yet whom we know by faith now lives.  On the other road we follow the red dragon, who seductively and convincingly promises us everything we ever wanted, the gratification of all our desires.

To follow the Accuser is to become accusers ourselves, and dedicate ourselves to identifying scapegoats and enemies upon whom we stick the blame for our problems.  We come to believe that if we can just control, or exclude, or even kill these pernicious others, then everything will be wonderful.  This argument gave us the holocaust, lynching, genocide, war, slavery, and it is being enacted as we speak with the ongoing atrocities on our own southern border.  

This is the way of unspeakable violence that victimizes weaker people in the name of power, prosperity, and pleasure for a few.  It turns people into enemies and competitors, and the earth into commodities for exploitation and wasting.  It becomes all about winning, taking, gaining, stealing, cheating, and lying about it.  It is about doing whatever you have to do to get what you want.  

 

And frankly, any church that goes along with this and teaches exclusion, condemnation, and bigotry is loyal to the Accuser, not to the God of forgiveness and love.  This is John’s point in critiquing churches of his own time back in chapters 2 and 3.  Churches that compromised with the Empire back then, or with nationalism, white supremacy, eco-cide, injustice, and inequality today, have dedicated themselves to the angry, fearful, hateful red dragon.

III.

But the way of Jesus is the exact opposite of the way of the red dragon.   To follow the Lamb of God is to become lambs ourselves.  John talks about the followers of Jesus as those “who have conquered [the Accuser] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death.”

The way to conquer the Accuser, the vicious red dragon, is to participate in the victory God has already won over him.  That victory is revealed in the lifting up of Jesus Christ on the cross where he absorbs the full blast of accusation, hatred, fear, and violence of Rome’s power, and neutralizes it in his resurrection.  He shows Rome, and therefore all the Empires inspired by the Accuser, to be ultimately powerless in the face of his omnipotent forgiveness and love.  

The most powerful weapon the Accuser has is the threat of death.  If that stops working then he is finished.  If the dragon can’t kill us he’s got nothing.  Thus the Sacraments of the Christian Church are always about reframing death as a transition and transformation from a small, false existence into true, expansive, and eternal life.  In Baptism we participate in Christ’s passage through the water from death to life.  And in the Lord’s Supper we are nourished in that new life by ingesting his body and blood so that we become him.  We are thus inoculated against perishing so that even the death of our mortal bodies only serves to strengthen our unity in him.

The faithful witnesses do not cling to this limited, mortal, temporal existence.  They do not hold on to their egocentricity.  They are able to let that go.  Instead of accusation they choose forgiveness, and so they emerge into a larger, immortal, eternal life with and in God.  They are able to endure even the death of their bodies, realizing that they are essentially integrated into God’s people, God’s creation, and even God, and that death is but a graduation into a broader resurrection life.

IV.

When the red dragon crashes to the ground, he proceeds to pursue the Woman Clothed with the Sun, whom we talked about last week as representing the people of God.  The only thing stopping his complete conquest and destruction of humankind and creation is the continued faithful witness by her children to a Way of Life utterly distinct from the dragon’s pathetic, vile, accusatory, suicidal regime.  

The people of God are men and women “from every tribe and language and people and nation,” that is, they are multi-racial and multi-cultural.  They work in concert with “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea,” which is to say, all life on this planet.  They testify to a oneness in Christ which resists all schemes to divide us against each other.

In the end, the red dragon attempts to flush away the people of God with a great torrent of water, representing the unbridled, disordered chaos from before creation.  It is his last weapon, to undue creation itself.  But this fails  because the earth opens up to absorb the flood and protect the Church.  The earth, the creation, comes to the rescue and saves God’s people. 

It is this cosmic solidarity that may be the secret to the Church’s witness.  If even the Earth intervenes in our favor, it means that our life is integrated into creation.  As with Jesus himself at his ascension, when we leave this life we don’t go somewhere so much as everywhere.  We let go of our limited bodies and inherit the vast body of the universe.

Witnesses to God’s love can’t ultimately be killed because they are united in Christ to everything.  There is a sense in which the saints are always present.  To share in Christ’s death is to share in his life, which is everywhere and eternal.

This then is our choice, because the dragon continues to make war on God’s people: We can perish with him when his Empire made of nothing but lies finally dissolves and collapses.  And it will.  Or we can live forever with and in God by keeping the commandments of God and holding the testimony of Jesus.  That is, we can reject the Accuser by living according to forgiveness and love.  

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