Sermon for the 1 st Sunday after Trinity, June 14, 2009
“ And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence. ”
AND war broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail... the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him… the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time. Rev 12:7-12
In view of all the wars mankind has fought and is fighting, the first and most horrible war of all was between angels over the rulership of heaven. What that war must have been like, what weapons used, how bitter the fighting, when no angel may be actually killed, and how zealously the heavenly hosts fought against a vicious and evil force that had been scheming in secret from within their ranks against God Himself! We may hold the notion that the contest between heaven and hell was a near thing that God's forces may have prevailed in that battle, but even today not yet won a war.
That notion would be wrong.
A great battle rages, but the battlefields are not the outskirts of God's stronghold, or even this tiny planet, to hold and to keep. What's a planet, and what value might it hold to purely spiritual beings like devils and angels? God's made plenty of spheres. What is so precious about this one?
We've never been completely told why the fallen angels rebelled from God in His glory and strength in heaven. Pride, a need to be worshipped, envy of God's autonomy in creating, especially creating humankind: we only know that a high angel turned dragon and apparently convinced a third of God's angelic beings to join him. In his mind he had hopes to win, or at least inflict some grievous injury on a God who wouldn't share His glory, and the battle was on. While we believe that good is stronger than evil, our experience is that evil just never quits and usually gets in the first few sucker punches, like Pearl Harbor or 9-11, inflicting losses that can never quite be revenged. Evil always seems so well organized and way ahead of us in cunning and wicked powers.
That notion is also wrong.
There are a few misnomers we can set straight from the beginning. God never made war against Satan. He didn't have to. He sent some of His angels, with Michael as their General, who were sufficient to drive the rebels from His eternal dwelling. They came to earth and stalk God's favorite creature—us. They did not build Hell, a country of demons equipped with its own armies and government. Hell is not Satan's at all. Hell will be the prison where he and his deranged and evil devils and rebellious humans suffer eternally. Satan doesn't have an air conditioned office there where he rules and defies God. He is exiled, like the first European inhabitants of Australia, prisoners who face hardship on a prison island. The trouble is: Satan's current prison island is earth. And the battlefield he fights on and for is your eternal soul. Far from having any hopes of regaining heaven, or ruling a corner of the universe, this demented and outraged spirit can only hope he ruins you. And he does that by fooling you. His first lie is that he has anything going for him, that he has power to give you anything you might want or need. Remember the temptation of Jesus?
Heaven and Hell are places we spend eternity. There are no other options: we can't create our own third kingdom, or come back again and again to try to correct our mistakes, or finally solve Rubik's cube, or be as good as we can, or just get even. It's Heaven or Hell for us. And Jesus decides which.
Jesus told a parable of a poor man, Lazarus , who begged at the gates of a man we'll call Dives. Both men die and Lazarus goes to a state of grace, Abraham's bosom , or the waiting place for heaven. Since the resurrection takes place at the end of time, and heaven after that, this is where Lazarus will be comforted in the meantime. Dives is distressed because the waiting room for Hell seems like Hell already. In his pampered state, he only thinks of himself and wants Lazarus to bring him a drop of water to cool his tongue. He doesn't get it, but like the devil in his self-deception, he thinks heaven is there to serve him. No, heaven is there— visible and unattainable —to torment him. Until he is lost in final exile, this is the time he has to see what he gave up. Abraham tells him something important here, that between the two worlds is a great gulf and no one may pass over it, once their fate is sealed. Jesus went down there once and brought back those imprisoned who might believe in Him. The gates of hell did not keep them back from heaven, but for the rest of its inmates, those gates stand locked forever.
C. S. Lewis, in his parable The Great Divorce , describes an almost hell place and almost heaven, where the damned might yet choose light over darkness, the true God over themselves. In a dream, Lewis rides a bus from dim and dingy Hades up into the blinding light of a meadow on the outskirts of heaven's heights. Its very grass too solid for his ghostly feet to bend, it hurts him to walk. He watches as bright people come down from the heights to greet and attempt to convince some of his dark companion ghosts to give up and come to God, even now. Their reasons for not doing so comprise the message of this little book. A saintly wife has just tried to have her maudlin husband give up his self-pity and be reunited with her in joy, but his melodramatic alter ego keeps him from salvation, and he departs. Lewis's mentor, George MacDonald, shows him why he must not feel sorrow for those who choose hell, for lack of moral sense or a broken character. Their dialogue runs this way:
“But she didn't go down with him to hell. She didn't even see him off by the bus.”
“Where would ye have her go?”
“Why, where we all came from by that bus. The big gulf, beyond the edge of the cliff. Over there. You can't see it from here, but you must know the place I mean.”
My Teacher gave a curious smile. “Look,” he said, and with the word he went down on his hands and knees. I did the same (how it hurt my knees!) and presently saw that he had plucked a blade of grass. Using its thin end as a pointer, he made me see, after I had looked very closely, a crack in the soil so small that I could not have identified it without this aid.
“I cannot be certain,” he said, “that this is the crack ye came up through. But through a crack no bigger than that ye certainly came.”
“But—but,” I gasped with a feeling of bewilderment not unlike terror. “I saw an infinite abyss. And cliffs towering up and up. And then this country on top of the cliffs.”
“Aye. But the voyage was not mere locomotion. That bus, and all you inside it, were increasing in size .”
“Do you mean then that Hell—all that infinite empty town—is down in some little crack like this?”
“Yes. All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world, but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste.”
“It seems big enough when you're in it, Sir.”
“And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell's miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific itself is only a molecule.”
“I see,” said I at last . “She couldn't fit into Hell.”
He nodded. “There's not room for her,” he said. “Hell could not open its mouth wide enough.”
“And she couldn't make herself smaller? –like Alice, you know.”
“Nothing like small enough. For a damned soul is nearly nothing: it is shrunk, shut up in itself. Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut.”
The war between Heaven and Hell isn't really a war in the conventional sense. It's more like terrorism. We read of a bombing, of bodies flying and horror in some marketplace or at a wedding. It is horrible, unthinkable, and deadly. But that is not war. The deception is that the violent win by killing the innocent, that their cause is so passionately felt that they would resort to such methods. But the press betrays us even as our entertainment media lead us to silly notions of reality, of good vs. evil . We need to keep clearing our minds.
A week ago, five friends of mine had to shoot a man off his apartment stair. After negotiating with him for over an hour, in his drunk and drugged depression he hoisted a shotgun and pointed it at five armed cops. They had even tried to knock him down with bean bag rounds, but his body felt no pain as he forced them into a gunfight. I've been asked if they might have shot the gun out of his hand. That's movie stuff . At that point they had to end the threat to public safety and save their own lives. Don't make too much of evil, except that this man was overcome by it.
Remember this: Heaven wins hands down. Hell can only try to make us regret and to doubt ourselves. But in that effort, Hell fails as well. It is too small . There is no contest, for Hell is not a kingdom, but a prison. For now the battle is over our minds, our hearts, our faith, our souls. In any event, God wins. Will we settle that now and side with Him? If the war seems to be between Heaven and Hell, consider that Heaven could win that battle like the contest between your car's windshield and a bug. Get in the car. Remember the outcome. Know that it's right. Get as many on board as you can. This world will not be saved and Hell is all that the damned will know. There is no other war but your heartful decision to go to Christ and remain in Him.
PFH+