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The Call to Resistance

A Sermon for the Pre-Advent Season by Fleming Rutledge

Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking some one to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same experience of suffering is required of your family of brothers and sisters throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, establish, and strengthen you. To him be the dominion for ever and ever. Amen. (I Peter 5:8-11)

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Here’s a story about the devil. A Scottish professor who was a militant, outspoken atheist was out fishing on Loch Ness. He was enjoying the peace and serenity when suddenly an enormous, ravening creature reared up from the deep. The terrified professor cried out, “Oh, Lorrrrd God, save me!”

A mighty voice rumbled down from the heavens: “I thought you didn’t believe in Me!”

The trembling professor responded, “Aye, Lorrrrd God, but until a minute ago I didn’t believe in the Loch Ness monster, either!”

Now on this same subject, here is a parallel but very much more serious reflection from Roméo Dallaire, a retired general from the Canadian armed forces who is known throughout the world for his confrontation with the powers of evil during the genocide in Rwanda. Some time after his return to Canada and his struggle to come to terms with what had happened, a chaplain asked him if it was still possible for him to believe in God. This is what he said:

I answered that I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him, and I have touched him. I know the devil exists, and therefore I know there is a God.[1]

The New Testament does not present arguments or explanations for the presence of Satan. The presence and power of the demonic is simply assumed. The great Adversary is part of the New Testament cosmology and although many have tried to tell the story without him, it really can’t be done.

Therefore Peter urges the Christian community: “Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith.” The Christian life is a call to resistance.

One of the great commentaries on I Peter was written in England by E. G. Selwyn during World War II. He does not refer often to the circumstances in which he writes, but you can tell that he has it in his mind all the time. About the image of the “roaring lion” who is “prowling around” (RSV) he writes, “[this] graphic simile depict[s] the strength, ubiquity, and destructiveness of evil…the picture of the lion ranging at will for his prey suggests the action of swirling tides of irrational prejudice used by a Gestapo rather than [a] deliberate imperial law.” Peter’s picture of the lion “expresses the fell and deliberate purpose of the malignant Power of Evil.”[2]

Understanding the Christian faith and being the Christian church requires imagination. If we want to raise children as Christians, it’s important to exercise their imaginations. I’ve always remembered something that one of my former colleagues said one Christmas. He said that he didn’t mind his children believing in Santa Claus, because it was “training for transcendence.” Similarly, when children hear Bible stories in early childhood with a sense of wonder, before they start asking “Did that really happen?” it makes a difference that lasts all their lives. It makes it so much easier for them to enter “the strange new world of the Bible” (Barth).

On the Sundays just before Advent, the lectionary takes a turn toward the judgment of God upon evil. It’s a time for thinking about the apocalyptic collision between God and the powers of the Enemy. I have often recalled the cover of Timemagazine during the Rwandan horror. Against a black background with hints of corpses, these words appeared in large letters: “There are no devils left in Hell; they are all in Rwanda.”[3] That was spoken by a worker with one of the humanitarian agencies. He had a sense of the cosmology of the New Testament. Romeo Dallaire also had this sense. This sort of imagination needs nurturing in the church.

Resist him, says the Apostle. This is a clear command. But how are we to resist the devil? I am tempted to say simply, go home and read The Screwtape Letters.[4] I particularly remember one bit of that book where Screwtape urges his young trainee to keep his charge’s attention focused exclusively on the mundane aspects of church life, the irritants, the bad music, the unattractive people, the tasteless architecture and so forth. Don’t let him see the church as we see it, says Screwtape, “spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners.” That, Screwtape confesses, is a sight to make even the most experienced tempter quake. But fortunately for Wormwood, the man in the pew can’t see that. Only through the Word of God is the human being enabled to see what God sees.

The first Epistle of Peter is a letter from a God’s eye view, and the view it gives is of the church. We can never say it often enough: the Bible is addressed, for the most part, not to individuals, but to the peopleof God.[5] We need to say still more. As Peter puts it in various ways over and over throughout the letter, the people of God have been constituted, not by theirown preferences or choices, but byGod’s prior choice, first of Israel, and then, through Jesus Christ, of the church. The church resists, endures, and conquers not through its own efforts, let alone its merits, but because of the call, the commission, and the continuing presence of God. “The God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, establish, and strengthen you.” The church is built upon the living cornerstone (I Peter 2:4, 6-8) which is Christ, empowered by baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection (I Peter 3:21-22), set on its way to the promised future guaranteed by the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13-14). It is this certainty that gives courage for resistance.

But how are we to resist evil? Most of us are so absorbed in our own little lives that we have no vision of a resistant church. We have been fooled by a veneer of generic, bland “spirituality” that has no devouring enemies. Some of our most thoughtful Christian leaders are saying that we now live in a post-Christian culture and must begin to act like the church in the Roman Empire before Constantine when there was no protection for being Christian. This is going to be very, very difficult for the church in America because we are accustomed to thinking of America and Christianity as almost synonymous, especially in the South where I was raised. It was idolatrous for us to think that in the first place, and now we must pay for our mistake. We must pay for it by learning to resist the lies of the Enemy and the false gods that the Enemy celebrates.

The foremost way of resistance, is, of course, the worship of the Christian community.Trueworship, that is, which “ascribes to the Lord the honor due his name.” Judging from my experience of going to various churches all over this country, it isn’t all that easy to find true worship. However, you know it when you see it. The presence and power of God takes over. As the African-Americans say, “Wehad churchtoday!” True worship isn’t focused on exhortations to do better, or lessons about inclusivity, or instructions about “spirituality,” or even one-dimensional repetitions about how “God loves you just as you are” which has the effect of shifting the emphasis away from God to our own little selves. Thefirstorder of worship is the triune God alone, God as he is in himself, “theGod of all grace”—andonly thenourselves becausehe“has called us to his eternal glory in Christ.”

The “eternal glory” of God is a very strong theme in I Peter. I don’t know how much we think about the glory of God, even though church memorials are usually dedicated to it. The glory of God is so resplendent that it should cause us to forget about ourselves altogether for a brief space as we behold his surpassing majesty, his everlasting dominion, his “uncreated light,” his ineffable holiness, his triumph over evil, his power “that raises the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17). It is the glory of God that raises us out of our preoccupations to see the promised future that is guaranteed to us through our incorporation into Christ. We know this future by faith, and the church is secured in God’s glory by the promise of the church’s Lord.

But now that brings us to a corresponding theme in I Peter, which would seem to cancel out the glory of God, and that is the theme ofsuffering. “Resist [the devil], firm in your faith, knowing that the same experience of suffering is required of your family of brothers and sisters throughout the world.”Resistancerequiressuffering. No book of the New Testament emphasizes suffering as much as I Peter, and yet it has always been a beloved book because of its reassurances.

The church is called into the way of Christ. This is the road we walk, the race we run. When the church is truly being the church, it imitates our Lord by setting its face like flint toward Jerusalem, toward the sacrifice of itself. As the epistle to the Hebrews puts it unforgettably,

let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:1-2)

Because our Lord is the “pioneer and perfecter,” the church is able to bear its burden, endure its humiliation, despise its shame, and enter into the glory of God.

The great question then presents itself: what should the church be resisting right now?

John Stott entered into glory a few weeks ago, ending an earthly life that was untouched by scandal and single-mindedly devoted to the glory of God and the spread of the gospel. One of the people who knew him best reported that his last years were clouded by disappointment that the church has been so riven with inner conflict that it has little energy for tackling the great problems of the world—poverty, hunger, natural calamity, corporate rapacity, environmental degradation, greed, violence, war. It seems so very sad that this towering figure in worldwide Christianity should have felt these wounds so acutely as he lay dying. The resistance of God’s people should be directed outward, not burning itself up with its own inward quarrels. Such is the power of Sin, the handmaid of Satan, who ranges as freely through the church as he does throughout the world.

So we have a battle on two fronts—not onlywithoutbut alsowithinthe church. The visiting preacher has no way of knowing what your warfare will be as members of this particular Christian community. Your calling is to discern the place of resistance that the Lord has set before you. You will recognize it by the temptation to avoid it. It will be way out of your comfort zone. It will be characterized by pressure, by disturbance, by antagonism, by pain, by humiliation. But remember that you are part of the great company of witnesses and that Satan has no chance against the Lord of hosts.

Remember also that there is one thing the devil cannot abide and that is being ridiculed. Here’s is a little story from the American civil rights movement, told by Bayard Rustin, one of the movement’s most effective leaders:

When the Ku Klux Klan marched into Montgomery [Alabama] and we knew they were coming, Dr. King and I sat down and thought it over. And we said, “Ah! Tell everybody to put on their Sunday clothes, stand on the steps, and when the Ku Kluxers come, applaud ‘em.” Well, they came, marched three blocks, and…[departed]. They could not comprehend the new thing. They were no longer able to engender fear.[6]

Remember that when you are called to the barricades. And remember most of all these words of Peter:

And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, establish, and strengthen you. To him be the dominion for ever and ever.Amen.

[1] Dallaire, Roméo.Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2003. Speaking strictly in theological terms, we do not say that the devil “exists” in the same way that the created order exists. God made the world and pronounced it good; God did not create evil. Nevertheless, evil appeared. This paradox is expressed when we say that the devil, or devils, lack existence (hence the well-known definition of evil asprivatio boni, the absence of good). Any account of evil, however, must take into account its rampaging malignity and power, however its lack of created existence is technically defined.

[2] E. G. Selwyn,The First Epistle of St. Peter. London: Macmillan & Co., 1964. First edition 1946. The capitalization of Power and Evil are Selwyn’s own.

[3] Time magazine cover, 5/16/94.

[4] In the preface to the revised edition of The Screwtape Letters, Lewis gives us a further glimpse of the New Testament cosmology in this wonderful passage: “Now, if by ‘the devil’ you mean a power opposite to God and, like God, self-existent from all eternity, the answer is certainly No…there is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite…the proper question is whether I believe in devils. I do. That is to say, I believe in angels, and I believe that some of these, by the abuse of their free will, have become enemies to God…Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael [the archangel].” (Preface to the 1960 edition ofScrewtape. Original preface written in 1941.)

[5] The theme of Peter is the church among the nations as the people of the crucified, risen, and reigning Christ. Therefore resistance is not largely a matter of individuals but of the corporate body…”Peter does not issue a general call to become a Christian and then, as a subsequent and perhaps optional move, for individual Christians to join together into a voluntary association that might serve our projects of being individual Christians.” God precedes the people; the people precedes the person; the person is constituted by being incorporated into the people. (Douglas Harink, 73)

[6] Howell Raines,My Soul is Rested, 56.

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