By Pastor John Mateos Ong
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If you go back to the book of Genesis, God’s original plan for man is to have dominion over all creation. This was His supposed assignment for His greatest creation. The man was put to the first garden mentioned in the Bible, the Garden of Eden where they need to cultivate everything, have dominion over everything, and can eat everything except one fruit which God himself forbid. We all know what happened next, a serpent appeared and deceived the woman. The man fell and have lost the keys of dominion. Now, you may be confused if it is really the evil that holds dominion over the world. John and Paul describe Satan in the book of John and Ephesians as the “prince of this world” and “ruler of the kingdom of the air”—so yes, Satan took over the dominion of the world. Man disobeyed God and because of this, we lost what could have been a perfect life with God.
But the good news is God did not give up on us, He continues to pursue us because we are His masterpiece. Now the second garden, in the Garden of Gethsemane is where Jesus prayed and accepted His fate. He became fully man and is capable of feeling emotions and being hurt. Jesus even felt like dying because of extreme sadness. You can call it a spiritual war. Not like most of us thought, spiritual warfare is between man and evil not between God and evil. It is a battle we need to win over the forces of evil. Remember when sin entered our world? That was when God’s Son (Jesus) destined to become a man to fight on our behalf.
Jesus did a lot of miracles and fulfilled a lot of prophecies that are laid down to prove He is the Messiah. (1) He healed and delivered everyone who came to him. When the evil introduced sickness He displayed authority over it by healing and delivering every person who came to Him. (2) He lived purely; Jesus showed us there was nothing enticing about sin. Satan knew that Jesus came to get back the dominion of the world, which is why he offered the splendor of the world in exchange for Jesus bowing and worshiping him. But Jesus showed no value for sin and everything the devil is offering Him. (3) He served others. Jesus is 100% God but He used His authority only for serving others. He did not use His power only for Himself. (4) He did the unthinkable—He gave himself up to die for us. You may think it is a strange way to win a war but it was the only key. God is just and someone had to pay for our sins and we all know that only the unblemished lamb is enough to tame the wrath of God. Jesus brought salvation to humanity.
The most important thing we should know is that by God’s grace we are saved, Satan did not take Jesus’ life, Jesus laid it down himself for us.
Jesus left us but he did not forsake us, He said that the Holy Spirit will be with us, to guide and help. What Satan didn’t know is once Jesus died it will pave way for the Holy Spirit to dwell into every believer giving them power. If Satan only knew that the death of Jesus would bring him more enemies, he would not have him crucified and would kill anyone that will try to kill Jesus.
Satan is nothing equal to God—he does not have power over anything. The only thing he can do is to lie about what is given to us. All authority comes from God and God gave all the authority to Jesus when he died on the cross. Therefore we do not fight for victory but we fight from victory!
Now there are two options— your will or thy God’s will.
Our work is to (1) be like Christ. We are the temples of the Holy Spirit since Jesus left us. And because of this, we have to pursue to be more like Christ—we may not be unblemished but we pursue goodness and Christ-likeness. (2) Be a worshiper, the devil is very afraid of a worshiping people. What Satan cannot take from people is passionate and genuine worship. (3) Bring others—for Jesus it is better to bring one lost soul than to bring 99 that do not need to repent. The heavens rejoice for this one soul that you bring closer to Jesus.
We must remember that only through Jesus we received the salvation, only by God’s grace we are saved.
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