Sermon Text: Luke 10:17-20
Date: September 29, 2024
Event: Festival of St. Michael and All Angels
Luke 10:17–20 (EHV)
The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name!”
18He told them, “I was watching Satan fall like lightning from heaven. 19Look, I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy. And nothing will ever harm you. 20Nevertheless, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names have been written in heaven.”
You Are Safe Now; Rejoice in Eternity!
The young child walks with his parents in a shopping center on a hectic day. The crowds are thick, and the adults are almost shoulder-to-shoulder, to say nothing of the young man whose head barely comes up to the adults’ hips. Suddenly, there’s panic. He looks up in the sea of people, and he’s no longer walking with Mom and Dad. Where did they go? How does he find them? And then he hears his name in a familiar voice and finds himself scooped up by one of his parents. Safe.
There are many minor festivals in the church year. We don’t celebrate all of them yearly; in a given year, we may only celebrate one or two in our congregation. These festivals center on most of the twelve disciples; the apostle Paul; John the Baptist; Mary, Jesus’ mother; Joseph, Jesus’ earthly caretaker; Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus’ close followers; and even celebrating the first reading of the Augsburg Confession, one of the standard Lutheran confessions of faith.
These minor festivals tend to focus on people and other earthly events, yet they are not praise of the person or event itself; they praise God for his work done through these people or at these events. This is also true today on the minor festival of St. Michael and All Angels, where our focus is mainly on the spiritual forces that God uses as messengers and for our protection. We are not here to worship angels this morning—we are here to worship God for his love for us and, in a special way, to remember his protection given to us by this heavenly host.
Our Gospel for this morning helps to give us that focus because Jesus is directing the disciples away from the awe of the spiritual realm (and the power he had granted over it). He wants us primarily focused on what is eternally meaningful: rejoice that your names have been written in heaven. As we focus on God’s temporal promises and his work for us through the angels, we want to keep that in mind. Our primary awe should not be in what the angels do, but our awe should be centered in God’s love for us, the forgiveness he won for us by Jesus, and the fact that our eternal safety in heaven is secure.
Our brief Gospel for this morning comes at the end of Jesus sending out seventy-two of his followers to spread his good news in the towns he would travel to next in his earthly ministry. While Jesus is God, he limited himself during his time on earth so he was not always present everywhere. So, as is true for us, more people working meant more people hearing the message Jesus sent them to proclaim simultaneously and in different places.
The seventy-two come back, awestruck and excited to share what had happened: “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name!” Jesus had often driven demons out of possessed people, and these men discovered, as they went and met people suffering from that very affliction, that in Jesus’ name, they, too, were able to drive them out. Jesus gave them authority to trample … over all the power of the enemy, at least for a time.
Where would these demons have come from? Originally, what we now call angels and demons were one unified group. While God never pinpoints for us exactly when, he created the angels at some point during those six, twenty-hour days of creation. And then, at a moment that is not narratively described in the Bible, a whole group of those angels staged a rebellion against God, and the lead architect of that rebellion was Satan. It seems that the chief issue Satan had was that of pride and conceit—he wanted to be recognized as greater than he was; he wanted to be recognized as God’s equal. So Satan stages a coup of sorts, which fails; so it goes when anyone wages war against the almighty God, the angels included.
Satan is jealous of God’s power and status. It seems possible that Satan is also envious of the standing that mankind has in God’s creation, so one of his first goals after he fell was to get the precious crown of this new world to fall as well. He brings to Eve and Adam the temptation that caused him to fall: The serpent said to the woman, “You certainly will not die. In fact, God knows that the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:4-5). In other words, “God is holding out on you! You, too, can be like God, even have equal status with God. Just take the fruit and eat!”
After the fall, we can see the clear difference between angels and human beings in God’s heart and perhaps understand Satan’s envy a bit better. Peter describes the fall of the angels and God’s judgment on them this way: “God did not spare angels when they sinned but handed them over to chains of darkness by casting them into hell, to be kept under guard for judgment” (2 Peter 2:4). In fact, hell did not exist until the angels fell; it was not part of God’s perfect creation. Jesus describes hell as the eternal fire, which is prepared for the Devil and his angels (Matthew 25:41). Do you see the difference between us and the angels? The angels sin? Boom. Hell. What happened when Adam and Eve sinned, though? God promised a Savior; God promised that he himself would rescue his people from their fallen state. That is an immeasurable difference.
Back to our Gospel, when Jesus says, “I was watching Satan fall like lightning from heaven,” the tense of that verb is very important. This is not a description of Satan’s rebellion and being cast out of God’s presence near the beginning of creation; Jesus is describing a current event, something he was just doing. As the seventy-two were going out, Jesus was then watching Satan fall. So, what caused this fall, this weakening of Satan’s power?
To answer that, we need to understand Satan’s true purpose. He wants us in hell. But as we noted above, he doesn’t want us in hell to rule over us; he wants us in hell to suffer like he will suffer. He wants us in hell because he knows it hurts God to have the precious crown of his creation separated from him forever. And so what undermines Satan’s power? What causes him to stumble and fall dramatically like lightning toppling out of the sky? God’s Word—specifically, the gospel message proclaiming the forgiveness of sins in Jesus.
As the seventy-two proclaimed that God’s forgiveness, which had long been promised, was now present among them, they were undermining Satan’s power. They were causing his plans to stumble and fall because, in sharing that message, the Holy Spirit was working faith in the hearts of those who heard. People who God brought from unbelief to faith were snatched out of that slavery to sin and death; people whose faith was strengthened were put even farther away from Satan’s eternally destructive goals. The weapon most effective against the old evil foe is the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God.
So, we are safe from Satan’s attack because the Holy Spirit placed faith in us to trust Jesus’ forgiveness. When Satan or one of his cohorts would try to convince us that God doesn’t love us, that we are not forgiven, the words of Jesus’ promise and certainty of our status in his family is enough to send Satan toppling down the hill. Even if Satan were to appear in front of you in a gruesome, Hollywood version of demonic power, you could overcome him simply by stating who you are, “I am the baptized child of God.” Or, if even that seems too long, the name of your brother and Savior, “Jesus,” would be enough to send him scurrying away with his tail between his legs.
Not all of the angels rebelled against God; not all of this heavenly host followed Satan down his path of destruction. In fact, many angels are yet devoted to God and his will. We saw some of them with Elisha and his servant in our First Reading this morning. However, the primary role of the angels is more straightforward than even that narrative account might communicate.
When the term “angel” is used in the Bible, be it in Hebrew in the Old Testament (מַלְאָךְ, malak) or Greek in the New Testament (ἄγγελος, angelos), the primary meaning is the same: the angels are first and foremost messengers for God. We have many notable examples of this throughout Scripture. Angels were sent to bar the way to the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve fell to communicate that they were not allowed back into where the Tree of Life grew (Genesis 3:22-24). When God called Isaiah to be his prophet, Isaiah saw a vision of heaven when an angel announced that God had taken away the his sins (Isaiah 6:1-7). One of the few named angels in Scripture, Gabriel, is the messenger to Zechariah that he would be the father of John the Baptist (Luke 1:11-20) and to Mary that she would be the mother of Jesus (Luke 1:26-38).
But God attaches a special promise to these messengers. Not only will they communicate the messages that God sends them to deliver, but he also sends them on missions of protection, as we saw against the forces of Aram. As we sang earlier, God makes specific promises to his people in Psalm 91, “Yes, you, Lord, are my refuge! If you make the Most High your shelter, evil will not overtake you. Disaster will not come near your tent. Yes, he will give a command to his angels concerning you, to guard you in all your ways. They will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone” (vv. 9-12).
Does that mean that the angels protect us from every possible harm? Well, if you’ve banged your head or skinned your knee recently, you know that, no, God doesn’t protect us from anything that could cause us pain. But in many ways that we cannot measure or even understand, God sends his angels to tend to, guard, and protect us. Were the angels involved in making it so the skinned knee wasn’t a broken leg? Were the angels engaged in ensuring that the incident on the road was just a fender-bender where no one was hurt rather than something tragic? We can’t say for sure, but we do have God’s promise that this is precisely the kind of work that he will send them out to do.
In our Second Reading, we heard about one of the visions from John’s Revelation. John looked up and saw a battle taking place in the sky. Michael (who seems to be a created angel in a leadership role among the angels) directs God’s forces against the ancient dragon, Satan, and his minions. This is not an account of the fall of Satan. Instead, this vividly depicts the battle waged at the cross, the battle won by God. It was the final battle in the war that Satan initiated both with his personal rebellion and especially at the tree in the Garden of Eden. God promised at that time that this serpent’s head would be crushed (Genesis 3:15), and here in this vision, we see that take place: The great dragon was thrown down—the ancient serpent, the one called the Devil and Satan, the one who leads the whole inhabited earth astray—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him (Revelation 12:9). As is the theme of all of the book of Revelation, so it is in this account: Jesus wins, therefore we win as well.
The declaration that follows the vision makes that understanding clear: Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ, because the accuser [a literal translation of the name “Satan”] of our brothers has been thrown down, the one who accuses them before our God day and night. They conquered him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony (Revelation 12:10-11).
But if this is a depiction of the battle of the cross, if this war is between God and Satan, what role do the angels have in that? Undoubtedly, the angels didn’t suffer for our sins; the angels did not win forgiveness for us in their victory. Those blessings come entirely from Jesus; as was declared, mankind
conquered [Satan] because of the blood of the Lamb.
We have glimpses, little tastes in the Gospels, of the angels’ activity during this time. As Jesus was so distressed in the Garden of Gethsemane, pleading with his Father for another way to save us from our sins that his sweat was like drops of blood, we’re told that an angel came and tended to him before this confrontation began in earnest (Luke 22:43). As he rebuked Peter for using his sword to try to prevent his arrest, Jesus was clear that more than twelve legions of angels, more than 72,000 of them, stood ready to defend him if he wanted, but that was not the plan (Matthew 26:53).
But I believe the most prominent role that the angels played in this battle was like the seventy-two’s role in weakening Satan’s power in their preaching. What special role did some of the angels get assigned? On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women went to the tomb, carrying the spices they had prepared. They found that the stone had been rolled away from the tomb. When they went in, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men stood by them in dazzling clothing. The women were terrified and bowed down with their faces to the ground. The men said to them, “Why are you looking for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has been raised! Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee that the Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again?” Then they remembered his words (Luke 24:1-8). The angels’ power is seen most clearly here, not in a battle or protection or anything like that, but in their messenger role that day—Jesus is alive! He won!
So we can “ooh” and “ahh” over the power of the angels, the descriptions of their might, and their sometimes wild physical descriptions in the Bible. We can get shivers when we think of Satan and the other fallen angels, the demons, slinking around the world like prowling lions, looking to deceive, distort, and tempt us away from God. But all of that must be in service to the real story, the most important work God has done for you: your sins are forgiven. You are safe, not just now for a moment, but for eternity.
Let Jesus’ words to the seventy-two find a permanent home in your mind and heart, “Do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names have been written in heaven.” At the end of Romans chapter 8, the apostle Paul gives what is essentially a commentary on Jesus’ words: We are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor rulers, neither things present nor things to come, nor powerful forces, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (vv. 37-39).
My brothers and sisters, God commends his angels concerning you to guard you now and will send them to bring you safely to his side on the last day because Jesus has paid for your every sin. Do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names have been written in heaven. You are safe now! Rejoice for eternity! Amen.
