Jesus’ victory over death is easy for us to see in his resurrection.  We sing songs about it, and we have no trouble accepting it as true.  But the Bible also tells us that Jesus has defeated Satan, and that’s harder to understand and accept.  Looking at our world through human eyes, it seems like Satan and the powers of the air are still as active as ever, hardly defeated.

NT Wright wrote about this in The Day the Revolution Began:

“First, as we saw earlier, there is the remarkable and paradoxical idea that on the cross Jesus won a victory—or at least God won a victory through Jesus—over the shadowy ‘powers’ that had usurped his rule over the world.”

Wright, N. T. The Day the Revolution Began (p. 46).

But if we consider Jesus’ incarnation from a fresh perspective, Satan’s defeat comes into focus.  The wonder of the incarnation isn’t a prominent theme today.  Baxter Kruger has written two books about the incarnation, inspired by The Incarnation by Saint Athanasius.  Both books bring the doctrine to life.

“The ascension means that the incarnation is not over.  The ascension means that now and forever the Son continues to live out his sonship as a human being.  When the Son became human, it was not as though he put on a robe which he would take off later.  He is now and forever one of us, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, man, a human being.

… The incarnation was not a moment in the past.  When the Son of God became human, he became human and he will be human through all eternity.”

Kruger, C. Baxter. The Great Dance: The Christian Vision Revisited (p. 30).

Jesus, the creator of the world, willingly took on flesh just like ours, died, and then was resurrected, still in human flesh.  When he ascended to the Father, it was as a resurrected human being, not as a spirit.  Jesus will be both God and man for eternity.

The Bible tells us in many places that Jesus is now seated at the right hand of God the Father.  So the resurrected Jesus, the new representative head of the human race, is now seated at God’s right hand.  Take a moment to let that sink in; the Trinity now includes the covenant representative head of the human race. 

The Bible stresses that God’s eternal purpose has always been to be our God, and for us to be his people.  God’s goal has always been relationship and fellowship with his creation, humanity.  Satan’s goal has always been to separate God and mankind – for every one of us to curse God and die.  Now that the resurrected Jesus, still fully God and fully man, is seated beside the Father and extending an open invitation to follow him, God’s goals are realized.  And Satan’s goal to separate God from mankind has been defeated forever.

With the Trinity now united to humanity irrevocably and for eternity, Satan has been thoroughly defeated, though not in an obvious way that humans might have imagined.  Satan’s ambition to separate God from us is no longer attainable.  Jesus has opened the way to the Father for everyone who wants to follow.  This is a picture of our own adoption as sons and daughters.  We won’t be stepchildren or second-class citizens or feel “out of place” in heaven; we’ll be like Jesus, who created the world and now is seated at the right hand of the Father.

Thoughts

Nothing had gone the way the disciples expected.  They, and later the early church fathers, had to work through their questions.  In that process, they gradually arrived at most of the doctrines of Christianity.

They began to understand that Jesus was God made flesh, sent to earth to be “God with us”, the beginning of the doctrine of the incarnation.  Paul and the other authors of the New Testament started referring to three separate persons, or facets of God, the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.  The doctrine of the Trinity was fully developed a little later.

They realized that Jesus was the Messiah, sent and anointed by God.  But instead of delivering Israel from the Romans, as they expected, he had come to deliver mankind from sin and Satan.  Seeing this bigger picture led to a new understanding of salvation; that Jesus died for our sins.  From there, they worked out the multiple meanings of Jesus’ incarnation, death, and resurrection. 

They realized that on the cross, Jesus had sealed the new covenant, God’s ultimate triumph over sin.  Their success in uncovering the meaning of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is amazing.

A great “picture” of Jesus’ resurrection is in the chorus of the song “He’s Alive”:

He’s Alive!, He’s Alive!,
He’s Alive, and I’m forgiven, Heaven’s gates are open wide!

Written by Don Francisco