Trinity Church of Tri-Cities

October 19, 2008

OVERCOMING BY THE LAMB

An early saying in the Latin church of our fathers was this, In hoc signo vinces, “in this sign conquer.” That sign was the sign of the cross, and a more unlikely symbol of conquest could never be imagined. The cross was an emblem of shame and degradation, for it was reserved for the hanging of the lowest of criminals. That sign of the cross came into a world where the reigning military and political power was Rome, where the reigning intellectual power was Greece, where the reigning moral power was of the Jews.

Over against that, Paul proclaimed to the Romans that the gospel of the cross was the power of God for salvation to all who believed. He proclaimed to the Corinthian Greeks that although the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the preaching of the cross to save those who believe. He proclaimed to the Jews that the righteousness of God was demonstrated in the death of Christ. Today, 2000 years later, it is still the gospel of the cross of Christ, the blood of the Lamb slain, that is the conquering power of God for salvation for us and for our children. In the power of that blood salvation, he calls us to be conquerors, to be overcomers.

Here are the words of our text this morning: “And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death.” This text speaks about our brethren, mentioned in verse 10, those who had been accused by the great accuser, that great dragon, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan. This text then comforts us, that we may know that our conquest of that old enemy of our souls, will be by the blood of the Lamb as well, by the word of our testimony, and by the sacrifice of our lives on the alter of service to our King.

My theme is Overcoming by the Lamb.

Following our text we first see that our overcoming is:. . .

First: by His blood.

Second: by our testimony.

Third: by confirming our testimony with our lives.First then, our overcoming is by the blood of the Lamb. It is a fact often overlooked that you will never begin to understand this last book of the Bible if you don’t understand the first book of the Bible. For who is this great serpent who is our great adversary, the one who makes war with the offspring of the woman, see verse 17, but that great old serpent of Genesis 3, who began war against our mother Eve in the Garden of Eden. . .seduced her and plunged her and all her children into captivity. Who is that great serpent, but the one to whom God said in Genesis 3:15, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head and you will bruise his heel.”

The great battle that engages you and your children is the great battle God established between the Seed of the woman and the serpent. This book of Revelation is about that great battle. But that great battle began at the dawn of our fallen history, or more correctly, our redemptive history, as we have seen in the first book of the Bible, and it continued throughout the pages of the Old Testament.

That great battle continued, as Egypt, that old serpent of the Nile, that loathsome crocodile enslaved our fathers. That great battle continued in earnest, as the Lord brought the Mediator of the Old Covenant, Moses, into the fight. That great battle convulsed the land of the Serpent, when God brought those ten great plagues against Pharaoh and Egypt.

That terrible war came to a climax as the angel of death swooped down bringing terror upon all the land, entering into houses and palaces, into barns and kennels, and killing all the first born of the land. That great battle entered into the nation of our fathers, for in all the houses of our fathers there was blood and death. But instead of the death of the first born, a lamb was slaughtered for every home. The fathers of our fathers took the blood of the lamb and painted the doorposts and lintels of their homes. Through the blood of the lamb, through the death of the lamb there was victory over death and the dragon. A more startling development could not be imagined. Israel conquered Egypt, conquered death itself, bested the great dragon in the battle, not by might, nor by power, but by the blood of the lamb. The lamb against the dragon, the weak against the strong, innocent against the vile. Yet, victory, overcoming. So our fathers marched out of the land of the dragon with their armies under the blood-red-banner they danced and sang the song of triumph on the farther shore of the Red Sea, looking on the corpse of that old dragon Egypt, cast up on the shore.

Listen: “Then Moses and the children of Israel sang this song to the LORD, and spoke, saying: ‘I will sing to the LORD, For He has triumphed gloriously! The horse and its rider He has thrown into the sea! The LORD is my strength and song, And He has become my salvation; He is my God, and I will praise Him; My father’s God, and I will exalt Him. The LORD is a man of war; The LORD is His name. Pharaoh’s chariots and his army He has cast into the sea; His chosen captains also are drowned in the Red Sea. The depths have covered them; they sank to the bottom like a stone.” (Ex. 15:1-5)

So the nation of Israel was born under the blood of the Lamb. So the nation of our fathers came into their birthright, the Israel of God. So God gave victorious content to that name, Israel, for this name itself means “overcomers.” Through the blood of the Lamb they had become what they were, overcomers, those who triumphed over the dragon.

All this was, of course, real, and at the same time, a rehearsal of what was to come. For that great dragon continued to assault our fathers, kept on his mighty accusations, and entangled our fathers in the coils of his deception over and over again. When would deliverance come? Who would fight this great battle against this old Serpent? Where was the great Seed of the woman who would crush this old dragon? When Jesus came into the world, John the Baptist announced his coming with these words, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” “For this purpose,” said the apostle John in 1 John 3:8, “the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil.” What are the works of the devil?

The works of the devil are the sins he works in us and through us. The work of the devil is to bring accusation against us before the throne of God. The work of the devil is to make us doubt the power and promises of God when we are sick or unemployed. The works of the devil is the captivity in which he holds the human race. The work of the devil is to take every beautiful creation of God and make it vile; to turn marriage into a snot-barrel of homosexual perversion, to take the loveliness of an unborn child and tear it into bleeding shreds. The work of the devil is to convince man that he is god, a god who rules the economy and even the weather. So, when the weather breaks into uncontrollable hurricanes and storms, the roar of the wind and waves is the sound of your God laughing at the seed of the serpent. When control of the world economy slips from the hands of man, the Lamb on the throne chuckles, for the Seed of the woman reigns.

This is the Lamb of God, whose conquest against Satan was to take the sins of His people upon Himself, and offer Himself as a Lamb, without blemish, before the throne of God. This is the Lamb of God, whose blood freed all the children of God from the slavery of that old dragon, from the Egypt of this world, from death itself.

This is the blood of the Lamb, the blood-red banner, the ensign under which the apostles went into the world, bringing liberation and life into the homes of Gentile and Jew. This is the blood-red banner of the cross, carried by the rider on the white horse, going forth conquering and to conquer. This is the Lamb of God, the blood of the Lamb, by which all those countless men, women, and children of the past 2000 years, have overcome the dragon.

To you too, today is given this Lamb of God, this blood of the Lamb. To you, fathers, this blood is given to paint upon the doorposts of your houses, for you and for your children. To you is given the victory that overcomes the world. You are the Israel of God, born of God through the victory of the blood of the Lamb. This is what the apostle John said in 1 John 4:4, “You are of God, little children, and have overcome, HAVE OVERCOME, them, because greater is He that is in you than He that is in the world.” “And this is the victory that overcomes the world, even our faith. Who is he that overcomes the world, but he that believes that Jesus is the Son of God.” (1 John 5:4,5) This is where we begin, Israel overcomers. This is our birth as a people, through the victory of the blood of the Lamb. This is what we must believe, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, the Lamb, slain before the foundation of the world, whose blood gives us the victory. Just as God said of Israel as they stood on the shores of the Red Sea under the blood-red banner of the Lamb, “And they believed the Lord and His servant Moses.” From here we continue with our testimony. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death.Second, by the word of our testimony. We need to return for a minute to our fathers coming out of the land of Egypt. They were the Israel of God. Through the blood of the Lamb they had overcome that scaly dragon Egypt, and were victorious. Now God called them to continue on in that victory. He had given them birth as a nation through the victory of the blood of the Lamb, now He called them to continue in that victory, to continue to live out the name He had given them, Israel, overcomers. They were to roll on under the blood into the land of Canaan and conquer.

It was to be their testimony of God’s great victory through the Lamb that was to strike fear into the hearts of all their enemies. It was to be their testimony, their confession, their faith in the great work of God that gave them birth that was to paralyze their enemies. And it did.

Listen to Rahab, one of the Canaanites living in that great fortress of Jericho: She “said to the men (two spies Joshua had sent): “I know that the LORD has given you the land, that the terror of you has fallen on us, and that all the inhabitants of the land are fainthearted because of you. “For we have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites who were on the other side of the Jordan, Sithon and Og, whom you utterly destroyed. And as soon as we heard these things, our hearts melted; neither did there remain any more courage in anyone because of you, for the LORD your God, He is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath.” Joshua 2:9-11)

But it was their failure to keep the faith that caused them to become faint hearted in the wilderness, refusing to enter into combat with Canaan, refusing to live out their name of overcomers. Yet, under Joshua, when their children did believe, there was not a foe who could stand against them. They were the Israel of God, overcomers in name, overcomers in deed.

To this battle God calls you and me today. To this future the overcoming Christ, the new and eternal Joshua, leads us today. Under this blood-red banner of the cross, under the blood of the Lamb, God calls us to conquest. We are overcomers in Christ, we are to be overcomers in Christ. But only by believing, only by trusting, only by faith in that victory already accomplished, in that dragon already crushed, in that serpent whose fangs have already been pulled from his mouth, can we continue as overcomers.

The apostle John, who wrote this book of Revelation, also wrote three epistles. In the first, as I have already quoted, he speaks even to little children and young men as those who HAVE overcome. “I have written to you young men because you have overcome the wicked one.” (1 John 2:13) “You are of God, little children, and have overcome them.” And at the same time, in Revelation 2 and 3, this same John records the words of Christ saying seven times, “To him who overcomes. . .”

We are then, as Israel of old, those who have overcome, and those who must yet overcome. But out present overcoming will only come because of the past overcoming. And our present overcoming will only be accomplished through the word of our testimony. What is the word of our testimony? The word of our testimony, of our confession, of our profession, is our faith. Our faith must be an expressed faith, a faith in the blood of Christ that cleanses us from all our sins and leaves not a single accusation in the mouth of the old serpent.

Our faith must be our testimony, our expressed confidence that through the blood of the Lamb alone we win our victories. “I can do all things,” said Paul, “through Christ who strengthens me.” Our conquest is through our testimony of the blood of the Lamb that alone brings victory and conquest against all the forces of the serpent, against sin, against death, against unbelief and hardness of heart, against wickedness in high places and low places.

Our conquest is through our testimony. When we face sin in our children, in ourselves, in the church, in the world, what is our testimony? What do we say? How do we fight? What words do we use? What alone is the power to conquer sin? What is our testimony? Does the testimony of the blood of the Lamb enter at all into the words we speak when we deal with our children’s sins, when we struggle against our own sins, when we face the difficult challenges in the church and in the world?

Are the words of Paul who said, “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” To me first, and also to my children, to my brothers, to my neighbors, to the governor of this state.

Is the story of David and Goliath merely a stirring narrative of entertainment to us, or do we remember that through David’s testimony he stood on the neck of that giant? We have overcome by the blood of the Lamb. We are to overcome by the word of our testimony. We are to overcome through a faith that remains constant that through the foolishness of the word of the cross alone, under the blood-red banner of the Lamb slain, we will live out the reality of our name, Israel, overcomers. “And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death.”

Finally, and this is my last point, they did not love their lives to the death. In this great battle, above all things, we remember that him, who as Hebrews says, has the power of death, that is the devil, has been conquered by the death of the Lamb of God. The blood-red sea of this Lamb’s blood has drowned this Pharaoh dragon, and his sting is gone forever.

“Be faithful unto death,” says the Lamb of God, our Savior, “and I will give you the crown of life.” In this battle Christ calls us to follow Him, taking the cross upon our shoulders, not merely wearing a cross hanging from a necklace around our neck, but laying down our lives in service to Christ and to this army of Christ. In this battle, in this call to overcome, Christ calls us to present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is our reasonable service. In this battle Christ tells us that those who would save their lives will lose them, but those who lose their lives for His sake and for the gospel’s sake will find them. That seems so contradictory, that life comes through death, that we gain by losing. But that is the meaning of the cross, isn’t it? There are some well-meaning, and I can say beloved, fellow Christians who somehow have been convinced, I think by the lie of the devil, that Jesus really somehow failed in His mission to save Israel. That somehow His death on the cross was evidence that He failed to redeem Israel. And therefore He is going to return someday to set up His kingdom in present day Israel to take up His mission again, this time with success.

Well, if that is one’s view of Christ’s death on the cross, then of course, then all our own tragedies, all the catastrophes that fall upon us are simply failures. If we are poor, we are second-rate Christians. If we struggle with ill health, we are not overcomers but losers. If we die before old age, we must have lost our grip on Christian living. But that’s not the gospel.

Here is the testimony of a faithful servant of the cross, St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 12: “most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Cor. 12:9-10)

Here is the gospel shout of victory: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: For Your sake we are killed all day long. We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.” (Romans 8:35-37)

In this battle Christ calls us to live out our testimony, that we are not our own, but we have been bought with a price, we belong, in life or in death, to our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who with His precious blood has delivered us from all the power of the devil, and preserves us in the life He has bought with His blood. We live because of Him who died. We die because of Him who lives. Although we hate to die, although the idea of giving up our lives is terrible to us, we know that the greatest victory in all the world came through the One who gave His life, who offered Himself up to death. The cardinal principle then of our life of conquest is that conquest is through the offering up of our lives, because our life came from the death of Christ.

We conquer under the sign of death, the death of the cross. We will overcome, and the cause of Christ has overcome and will overcome through Christians, followers of the cross, the armies marching under the blood-red banner of the Lamb, who know that through their death they obtain victory.

What then becomes of our petty selfishness, our complaints of sacrifice and discomfort in service to Christ our King? What then becomes of all the little things that we let stand in the way of our giving of ourselves for the cause of Christ and His church? How close do we come to this: “And they did not love their lives to the death?”

We return in this sacrament of Holy Communion to the blood of the Lamb. We celebrate again the great victory that defeated the dragon, that cast him out of heaven, that broke his grip on our souls, that delivered us from death itself. We celebrate the death of Christ, the blood of the Lamb. We return to the only word of testimony that carries us on to overcoming, to victory, and that is the blood of the Lamb. We take once again the blood of the Lamb, paint it on our doorposts and carry it in our hearts. We once again unite ourselves in love and devotion to the body that offered itself for our sakes on the cross.

We lift up the wine, the blood of Christ, the sign of victory. We drink that wine, that the blood of Him who overcame by His blood, may be the blood that courses through our arteries, may be the strength that powers us on to valor and victory. In this victory celebration we publicly announce once again the power of the cross.

In this celebration we look with great hope and anticipation to another celebration. This celebration is recorded for us in Revelation as well. For Revelation is the great book of the victory of the Lamb and those who follow this Lamb. Revelation 15:2 “And I saw something like a sea of glass mingled with fire, and those who have the victory over the beast, over his image and over his mark, standing on the sea of glass, having harps of God. They sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb.” Will you be there? May the Father of the Lamb grant that there will not be a single one of you missing on that beautiful day. Amen.