Jesus overcomes the devil

What we heard from Melody is very insightful and I think might be helpful for one or two at least of us. 

Melody has always dreamed, from childhood right through to now, she is a dreamer and she remembers her dreams. That’s a gift and God will speak to her through her dreams I am sure. 

Same for many of you, God will speak to you through your dreams. That’s common in the Bible. Not all your dreams are from God, some are from your soul, yourself. Sometimes you will get nightmares which can be scary and dark and they might well be from the dark side, from a demonic source- and they are being sent to scare us. 

That goes for children as well as adults, children often have nightmares and there may be a spiritual source to these. If you are a parent and your children get nightmares often, pray to God about them asking him to stop the nightmares. God wants us and our children to have a good night’s sleep and only good dreams. 

The other thing is Melody, when she was in primary school, she drawn into the culture in the school of fortune telling and reading horoscopes and I think also the Ouija board. Melody wasn’t a Christian then and probably didn’t think this was wrong. But unfortunately the devil doesn’t play nice and the door was open and he sent in a spirit to really give Melody a bad time for a long time. 

By reading the Bible we discover what fortune telling, Ouija boards and so are. In all these things you are trying to communicate not with God, but with the demonic, with the devil’s spirits. And you don’t realise maybe that is what you are doing, especially children and young people, but that is what is going on. You are looking for supernatural information about your future or something else from the wrong source. There are only two supernatural sources of power in this universe- the Lord God or the devil. There is nothing in-between. 

This happened in Melody’s school, not even secondary school but primary school. And this kind of thing does go on in schools I’m certain in this country also. 

There is also a lot of magic or witchcraft around in Scotland. That’s a real thing, it’s not just superstition, its tapping into something very real. Its using spells, occultic power, basically demonic power to do things. Today witchcraft is celebrated in books and novels. I know some Christian parents don’t let their children read Harry Potter- because the heroes or heroines engage in witchcraft. Probably if I were a parent, I would keep them away from Harry Potter also. We don’t want to make witchcraft look appealing, so that later in life they get drawn into it. Witchcraft is real, it’s not just delusion and superstition, its real. And it’s tapping into the demonic realm.

The Bible calls it one of the sinful acts of ‘the flesh,’ of the sinful human nature:

In Galatians 5 Paul says; The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery, idolatry and witchcraft…

Something else that is very common is that people advertise themselves as mediums. The parent teacher association of Carrick Knowe primary school, which is nearby in Corstorphine, organised a medium to come round a few years ago as a fundraiser.

A medium is someone who says they can communicate with the souls of people who have died. And if someone has lost loved one, this might sound tempting. But what is happening is that medium is basically tapping into demonic knowledge- they are not connecting the soul of a dead person at all. They might be charlatans just pretending to do it, but they are more likely to be actually connecting to evil spirits. They are not communicating with the dead person, but demonic spirits who know about the life of the dead person and can thus say things about that person that seem plausible. Like describing what they looked like or whatever.  

Mediums are common now, much more than before, they advertise themselves on Facebook. But in the Bible, Leviticus, we see God’s opinion of it:

In Leviticus 19:6 He says ‘I will set my face against anyone who turns to mediums and spiritists to prostitute themselves by following them, and I will cut them off from their people.’

One more common way that people can open themselves up to the demonic, is through worshiping idols, false religion. 

 Also if you have ever gone to a Buddhist or Daoist temple or the temple of any other religions and offered incense in the temple or offered sacrifice in the temple or been involved in false religions, then you might have opened a door.  1 Corinthians 10:20 says; ‘the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons.’

So when you sacrifice to an idol or in a pagan temple to some deity, behind the idol is a demon. And you are participating with a demon. Not a good idea. God is a jealous God. He won’t share the worship he is due with a false god.



When you repented, believed and were baptised and turned to Christ, that was forgiven, all our sins were forgiven, washed away. But the effect of what you did hasn’t necessarily been dealt with. God can forgive you, but that doesn’t mean you won’t still suffer consequences. God’s forgiveness doesn’t remove all the consequences of your past life.

Supposing before you became a Christian you wasted all you money on gambling. You were greedy and gambled, but then you became a Christian and stopped all that. God has forgiven you, but you still need to live with the consequences that you threw away all your money. Coming to Christ brings God’s forgiveness for the past sins, but doesn’t always deal with all the effects of the sins of the past. 

But God does heal and deliver. So if you opened the door to demonic influence in the past, before you were a Christian, although you are maybe forgiven of it, it might still be there and might need dealing with. You might still be oppressed by a demon just as Melody was. That is one reason why we have a Healing Rooms here, it is to set people free from that oppression by the grace of God.

At the end of my sermon we will say a prayer together for freedom from any demonic oppression caused either by getting involved in the occult, in magic or fortune telling or by involvement in false worship. 

Melody became a Christian a long time ago but the effects of what she did as a child still was affecting her, give her nightmares. The devil had a hook in her that needed to be removed. And this morning we can remove some hooks that the devil has put in us. So maybe you can think of anything you did in the past, maybe as a child or teenager that you thought was just harmless fun maybe, but actually, was wrong and opened a door to oppression.   

We want freedom. It was for freedom that Christ set us free!

At the age of about 30, God gives Jesus his life mission, his calling. I only realised a couple of weeks ago when preparing for lasts Sunday’s sermon that Jesus’ life calling was given him at the time of his baptism in the river Jordan, when the voice of God came down from heaven saying ‘You are my beloved Son, with you I am well pleased.’

The words ‘you are my beloved son’ come from Psalm 2 which says He said to me, “You are my son;
    today I have become your father.
⁸ Ask me,
    and I will make the nations your inheritance,
    the ends of the earth your possession.

So Jesus knew that he was called to be the Messiah, the king of the nations. 

And the words ‘in you I am well pleased,’ they come from Isaiah 42 which are words to someone known as the ‘Suffering Servant’ who would lay down his life for his friends.

 And so right at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus is told that he will wear a crown, but to do so he must go through the cross, he must be a Suffering Servant. He must give his life up on a cross as a sacrifice for the world. Only then would he get exalted as King of kings and Lord of lords. 

There could be no crown without the cross.

But to get the crown Jesus had to live a sinless life. He had to go through his whole life without sinning, not once. If he had sinned once, he couldn’t be a perfect sacrifice for our sins and he couldn’t have been resurrected from the dead. 

Pauls says ‘God made Him [Jesus] who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.’

And so that was Jesus’ challenge, to perfectly obey his Father, live a sinless life in other words and at the right time to lay his life down for the sins of the world. 

And Satan knows much of what’s going on. He knows that Jesus is the Son of God sent to bring God’s reign to planet earth, to save the world and to destroy his rule and reign. That’s why Satan tried to kill Jesus when he was a baby using King Herod and its why now Satan tries to cause Jesus to sin- if he can do it, he will stop Jesus being effective in his mission.  

And so Satan came along and he put some suggestions into Jesus’ ears. The first one was turn stones into bread. ‘You’re hungry, satisfy your hunger.’ But his Father had asked him to fast and Jesus wasn’t going to stop the fast, before he was told to.

The second temptation Satan has was to do something spectacular to grab everyone’s attention- Satan takes Jesus up to the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem, which was a huge building, 180 ft high, 60 metres high and he says to Jesus ‘If you are the son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written ‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands.’ Psalm 91

Basically Satan was saying – do something that will show everyone who you are. Something spectacular. You will have instant success as the Messiah. He is suggesting to Jesus the way to get the crown, acclaimed as the Messiah. But to do so involved forcing God to send his angels to catch him. It was putting God to the test- creating an artificial crisis that forces God to intervene. Trying to drive God into a corner. 

And Jesus replied by saying; ’It is written, do not put the Lord your God to the test’

The word ‘test’ means ‘to prove’. Do not put the Lord your God to the test means don’t challenge or try to force the Lord to prove himself. God has the right to put us sit an exam, but we don’t have the right to make God sit an exam.

God is God, we are not!

In the days of Moses, the Israelites grumbled when they were in the desert and the bible, Exodus, says; ‘they tested the LORD by saying, 'Is the LORD among us or not?’

And God in his mercy showed them that he was with them by making water flow from the rock. But he wasn’t happy with the people – because they were really challenging the Lord to show that he was with them- after all the things he had done for them! They should have been in no doubt!

But even believers might fall into the trap. We can say come on Lord, ‘show me you’re good, bless me.’ That’s a distrustful demand not a believing prayer. It’s testing not trusting.

God can test us by putting us into situations where we must show him that we are up to it. But we can’t test God by putting him into situations where He must show He is up to it. 

God always does right. Our job is to trust him not test him.

God does rescue us. My brother once fell 80ft rock climbing on Dumbarton rock. He fell of that rock face- he was going up with a rope and putting pegs in the rock to stop him falling too far, but unfortunately he couldn’t find any suitable holes in the rock to put a peg in, so he fell, so when he lost his hold and fell, there was nothing to stop him and he fell all the way down- 25 metres. He should have died. 

He believes God saved him.

God does intervene, and save us. But God’s rescuing power is not something to be played and experimented with, it is something to be quietly trusted in the life of every day as we seek to do his will. 

The third temptation of Satan is not subtle at all. He takes Jesus to a very high mountain and shows him all the nations of the world. He is showing Jesus a vision, because obviously no mountain has a view of all the world. Satan shows Jesus the nations and their splendour- which I understand to mean their wealth and their power and he says to Jesus all this I will give you if - If you will bow down and worship me.

Satan does that- he makes us offers. We don’t realise off course that Satan is offering it to us, but we get an offer of something we really want but to get it the wrong way. Satan offers Christ power. The thing that makes this an awful temptation for Christ is that he had come from heaven to have all the kingdoms of the world. The Bible says that this is what he came to do. The devil said ‘I can give them to you, if you will just bow down and let me boss you.’

All this I will give you, if…

It was a bargain; it was Christ being offered the position of Antichrist and one day the devil will offer a human being all the kingdoms of this world. The Bible predicts such a world dictator before the end of human history as we know it, and the devil will hand that power to a man, who will literally get it by devilish means. He will be in the grip of Satan and that is the way Satan will have an even greater control over the world. 

Satan‘s ambition is to have one world government ruled by a one world dictator who is himself ruled by Satan, and in this way he will have totalitarian control over every member of the human race. We have seen totalitarian dictators in this world, but never over the whole world. That is coming. 

On a much lesser scale the devil does this often to people; 

He says ‘You can have a big and successful business if you do it my way. You can have a promotion, if you just cut a few corners. Ignore some rules, fudge the numbers, push aside ethical concerns, if you stop telling people about your Christian faith, you can have it.’

Compromise.  

In Ancient Greece, business was so tied up with pagan religion, you could not open a shop without bowing down to pagan idols. 

But who wants power, who wants money, if you lose Christ? 

The things Satan gives us don’t tend to last very long. I remember my friend James Devlin, who before he became a Christian, was professional thief in Glasgow. He used to steal televisions from the factory that made them, using a special van that was in the company colours, he stole from the local church donation box. 

He got a lot of money that way. But he said he lost the money very quick. 

And he said his fellow gangsters, criminals in Glasgow died young and they were always looking over their shoulder, they didn’t have peace.

Make a bargain with the devil and you will find it’s a terrible deal. 

One day the things of this world will all be left behind. Two people were discussing a wealthy man who died and one said ‘How much did he leave?’ The other said ‘Everything.’ One day everything we get in this world whether we got it in a fair way or not will be left behind.

Jesus would not bow down to Satan  

By the way the devil wasn’t bluffing when he offered Jesus power of the nations. He has a lot of power in this world. The Bible says in 1 John 5:19- ‘We know that we are of God, and that the whole world is under the power of the evil one.’ 

Jesus at the end of his earthly life said to his disciples ‘I will not say much more to you, for the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold over me,’

He called the devil ‘the prince of this world’. And Satan has big influence in this world, God allows him to have it.

But Jesus never gave in to him, not once. So he could say at the end of his life, ‘he has no hold over me.’ Satan had nothing on him. 

Jesus never compromised. There is a Russian word called ‘kompromat’. It means compromising material, discrediting material. Russian and Soviet politicians would try and get compromising videos or photos or other information which could be used as leverage over other politicians or powerful people. Jeffrey Epstein did the same thing.  

Satan had no kompromat over Jesus. Nothing.

And so Jesus rebuked Satan and said “Away from Me, Satan!” Jesus told him. “For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.’

Only the Lord God is worthy of worship, our submission and ultimate devotion. 

And Satan was sent packing. 

And then angels came and helped Jesus, maybe bringing him food. 

When we think about Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, the line in the Lord’s prayer- ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil’ comes into focus. In this prayer you are asking that the Lord won’t lead you into a big test like he did with Jesus and if you are being tested or tempted, that you will be delivered from it. That’s a prayer that the Lord will answer, it’s a prayer to pray. God delivers his people form temptation from evil. 

Now maybe Satan has a hook in us still and the Lord wants us to be free from it. Maybe you are remembering a moment in the past when you maybe dabbled with something that was occultic, or you burned incense at a temple or you maybe you are just remembering moments in your past when you have compromised. You had done what the devil wanted you to do, but which wasn’t right.

If you are genuinely sorry and genuinely repent we can pray that line in the Lord’s prayer ‘ forgive us our debts, our sins.’ 

And then we can claim freedom and deliverance from demonic oppression. Whatever that might look like. 

So that’s the prayer we will pray now. A prayer of repentance, saying sorry, asking forgiveness and then for freedom.

Lets pray.