He Came To Destroy The Works Of The Devil

He Came to Destroy the Works of the Devil

On the day when Adam and Eve fell into sin, God made a promise. But this wasn’t a promise for good to his people, as are most promises we read in the Bible. This was a promise of death to the serpent, or Satan—the one who had tempted Adam and Eve to sin. “I will cause hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel” (Genesis 3:15).

Beginning with Eve’s first offspring, her son Cain, God’s people must have begun to wonder at the birth of every baby if this was the one who would fulfill this unique promise of God to destroy the devil through Eve’s offspring.

The promise of the offspring of Eve was fulfilled when Jesus was born to Mary. Jesus was that promised offspring, the One who would finally crush the head of the enemy, Satan. John said this is exactly what Jesus came to do. “The Son of God came to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8).

But Satan did not go down without a fight. He, too, fulfilled the promise God had made. He struck the heel of the Promised One, using every tool of evil at his disposal to bear down on Jesus. The battle began in earnest when Jesus went away to the wilderness to fast and pray. There Satan attacked Jesus at every possible point of vulnerability—to no avail. The battle continued all the way to the Cross, where Satan thought he had finally won. But the Cross was not the defeat of Jesus; it was the deathblow to Satan. When Jesus gave up his spirit and died on the cross, Satan thought he had killed Jesus. But “in this way [God] disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by his victory over them on the cross” (Colossians 2:15).

Satan’s power is wielded in the world in the form of death. What gives him that power is sin and the estrangement from God it brings. But on the Cross, Jesus did what was necessary for us to be reconciled with God. The devil thought he was defeating Christ, but in reality Christ was reconciling us to God, defeating the devil, and delivering us out of his clutches. “Only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death” (Hebrews 2:14).

Death Destroyer, you have defeated the devil and put him in chains. And the day is coming when he will be thrown into the fire and utterly destroyed. You will fulfill your promise to destroy Satan, along with his power to rob, kill, and destroy. Come quickly, Lord Jesus!