Jesus is the dragon slayer who crushed the head of the serpent through His death on the cross. Click To Tweet

Crushing The Head Of The Serpent

1 Corinthians 15:3-4, “For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.”

The Gospel is the Good News of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. The Gospel is not a music genre. I want you to notice this about Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. They did not happen in a vacuum, spontaneously, or by surprise. It was according to the scripture, which means it was part of a divine plan unfolded in the scriptures. 

How The Gospel Came To Be

We didn’t need the Good News because everything God made was good.  Click To Tweet

Genesis 1:31,“Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day”. 

God did not create us with a need for the Gospel. Everything He made was so good and if you read Genesis 1, you see that God says six times, it was good. When God makes human beings, He says we were very good. 

In Genesis 1:28, not only were human beings good, God gave us His blessing and command to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth, subdue it and have dominion over it. God handed the keys to the planet Earth to His image-bearers. 

We are not just a clump of cells. We are not just a progression of molecules going from one generation to another. Our ancestors were not chimpanzees or monkeys. We bear the image of an intelligent, self-existent, Almighty God. We are not gods but we resemble Him – we can think, create, and make decisions because we are made in the image and likeness of God. 

God is a ruler and so, when He made us in His image and likeness, He gave us the keys to rule not just a neighborhood but the planet. What could go wrong? It was paradise. Everything was good and incredible until in Genesis 3, the trouble came. 

Why Does Evil Exist?

One of the biggest problems people have with Christianity, which I think is one of the biggest problems we all should have about life on earth, is why is there evil on this earth. If God is good, why did my child die, my mother die, and thousands of people die every day? Why do we have 10-14,000 earthquakes every year? Why are bad things happening if God is good?

Chaos, suffering, and pain did not come into this earth until there arrived the dragon, the serpent, the dark one. God made everything so good, we couldn’t even mess it up on our own. There had to be someone to deceive us into disobeying God. At creation, unlike today, they had no fallen human nature. Man was innocent, had a pure desire to obey God, and had no reason to disobey God. But there was somebody who had an issue with God and that was God’s enemy, the serpent/dragon. One of the ways he wanted to take over the earth was to deceive us to give him the keys of the earth and he would do the rest of the damage. He could not even take the keys from us until he led us into disobedience.

Disobedience Led To Domination

The devil came to Eve and asked, “Has God said, “You shall not eat of the tree of good and evil?” The dragon put a question mark where God had clearly placed an exclamation mark.

Genesis 3:5, “For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

In other words, his next statement to Eve was God is good but He cannot be trusted. He doesn’t have your best interests in mind, and He is withholding something from you. This is where humanity began to entertain the thought that perhaps the mighty God is selfish and was hiding something good from us, and He doesn’t have our best interests at heart. And so, they followed the lure of the dragon.    

Our God is good. He doesn’t have bad, plan bad, or have a multiple personality disorder where you never know what mood He will be in today. God is always good. God only plans good things.

Where Things Went Wrong

We have to address this as Christians because God is not at fault for what has happened on the earth. God gave the keys to this earth to humans because we are made in His image and likeness. With that came dominion and responsibility. 

We had an enemy who had hatred toward God. My speculation is that the devil was jealous of mankind. God gave us dignity, honor, and position that the devil never had. On our first day of creation, we were given the keys to the planet. Talk about a slap in the face for the dragon!

Sadly, all the dragon had to do was plant seeds of lies that our Creator was withholding something from us. Eve fell for the deception but Adam committed a wilful conscious decision to sin. Satan didn’t deceive everyone. He deceived one person and Eve introduced it to her husband. Instead of fighting it, Adam embraced it and the deception became a decision. After that decision, mankind began to hide from God who had created them. We felt shame – a feeling that was foreign to us.

Deception Became Decision

The devil left us in self-destruction but something happened in that moment. A transaction happened at that moment that we were not aware of. As the devil offered something which seemed exciting, with his other hand he took our keys to this earth.

Go forward a few thousand years to the wilderness of Luke 4:6-8. The devil says all the kingdoms of the world, I will give to You if You will bow and worship me, “for they have been delivered to me…” Who gave them to satan? It wasn’t God. The Heavens are the Lord’s but He has given the earth to the sons of man, Psalm 115:16. 

When we took that forbidden fruit, and believed that lie that God doesn’t have good intentions for us, and cannot be trusted, in reality, we became slaves to satan, victims of his deception, and perpetrators of his evil and while we had our guard down, he snatched our keys. The devil then became the dark lord over this planet. Unlike God who loves humanity, the dragon introduced calamity, blame, hate, murder, destruction, and evil. Sin became the law of the land. 

Sin Is Like Gravity

Gravity works for the rich and poor alike. Gravity doesn’t discriminate. It also doesn’t care if you are heavy or light. Gravity works for objects and gravity works for humans. It works automatically and pulls all things to the ground. 

When the new law of sin entered the world, everything that was good started being pulled to become bad and everything made great started to degrade. Plants began to die. Animals started attacking each other.  Our bodies started to get weak and die. Our oceans and nature started becoming boisterous. The whole world started to decay. 

God Is Not To Blame

Most people would say God is responsible for it but it is not God. We gave the keys to the dragon who is bent on destroying us and slapping God in the face. 

In Genesis 4, the first family has children and Cain starts struggling with hatred toward his brother. This hate gets so strong that God notices and comes to warn him.

Genesis 4:7, “If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it.”

Take note, God did not even mention that it was the devil. Now, the ruler of human hearts is another entity that has a mind of its own. This is sin, the fallen nature of mankind. The word ‘lies at the door’ describes a predator. Cain kills his brother. When God comes, He does not blame the stone for killing Abel but Cain who used the stone. 

For those who think that all we need to do is remove weapons or guns and killing will stop, I want to tell you that guns don’t kill people just like pencils don’t misspell words.

The Infection Of Sin

Matthew 15:18-19, “But those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile a man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.”

Even Jesus did not point at the devil but at the corrupt human heart, which enables sin to pull us down like gravity. You might say, ‘I don’t believe in God.’ But that is just like saying you don’t believe in gravity. You don’t need to believe in gravity for it to work. The same applies to sin. By our default setting, you and I have a disease inside us called sin. We sin in our attitude, words, motives, thoughts, and words, by what we do and by what we don’t do. We are penetrated by this disease. 

Our technology is becoming so incredible because we are made in the image of God and that part does not change yet we have this force like gravity inside us that drags us down. We progress externally but regress internally, and deception comes in. The deception now is that we believe we are fine and all we need is to try harder to succeed.

The Introduction Of The Law

Before God brought the Savior, He introduced something called The Law. Why did God bring The Law? To prepare us for the cure He is about to give us. You will never receive the cure if you don’t know you are sick. We live in a world where the devil lies to us that the symptoms we have are just normal. That is why God brings The Law. In fact, when God introduced The Law to His people, Israel, they broke that law at the bottom of the mountain while Moses was receiving it on stone tablets. Moses then broke the tablets of the law seeing that there was no way we could keep it.

The Law Was To Be Broken

Can I submit something to you? God does not give us The Law to keep but to break. The Law of God is like a thermometer you put under your tongue. It measures your temperature or how sick you are. If you swallow the thermometer, it doesn’t destroy the sickness or fever. The thermometer of the Law was sent to us to let us know that we are sick and God has the cure.

The Law of God is like a mirror, not a shower. By looking in the mirror, you don’t get washed; you get reminded of how you look and that you need a wash. God introduced The Law and The Law introduced guilt. There is a purpose for guilt. Guilt is good. Guilt points to a problem – that you have a disease that only God can cure. The law shows us how bad we are but it’s powerless to fix us. 

What our culture has introduced is therapy. Forgive yourself, love yourself, and practice your breathing. Culture teaches that as long as you don’t judge yourself but love yourself, you will find peace. The problem with that is with every sin you commit, you incur debt with God. Even if you could forgive yourself for what you did, it doesn’t change the fact that your record is gathering debt. 

Sin Is A Debt

To illustrate sin, let’s say you go on a shopping spree and max out 6 credit cards. You buy a lot of stuff and when you come home, you feel guilty. It doesn’t matter what you meditate, what garbage you fill yourself with, it will not pay that bill. No matter how much perfume you spray on a corpse, a corpse is still dead. No matter how many self-help books you read, it doesn’t change the fact that our sin offends a holy God and that record and debt need to be paid. New Age, Hinduism, and Buddhism cannot pay for that. They might calm your mind for a little while but they will not change the fact that you owe a holy God a debt you cannot pay.

Trying good works won’t change that either. It is like giving all the stuff you bought in your shopping spree to your neighbors. That won’t pay the debt. You will still need to pay up.

Not only is sin an infectious disease, disobedience to God, not only does sin separate me from God but it is a debt. If you keep going your own way, rejecting God, one day you will have to pay that debt in full and the wages of sin are death, (Romans 6:23).

Romans 3:23, “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”.

The Dragon Wounds The Heel That Crushes Him

Genesis 3:15, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.”

Theologians and scholars tell us that this verse is the first Gospel preached by God to our parents. God tell them that they screwed up, they were deceived, the disease is spreading in their body and their world is going down and will keep going down because the dark lord took over. ‘But I am going to plan an invasion into the enemy’s territory. 

God tells the dragon that there will be a rematch. There will be another human being who will be born from a woman and it will be a virgin birth. You deceived My first man Adam but I am going to send another man, named Jesus whom you will not trick or deceive and He will undo what the first man did. 

I never saw Jesus’ death on the cross and the suffering He endured as something satan had something to do with. I always thought that this was just God creating this situation to pay for our sins. However, the first prophecy concerning Jesus’ death has to do with the dragon inflicting pain on Jesus. He will bruise his heel. Satan deceived Judas into betraying Jesus. He was involved in bruising the heel of Christ. 

1 Corinthians 2:8, “For had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

God’s Invasion

Thousands of years later, the invasion happens in a small town in Israel. Jesus is born. God makes an invasion into the realm dominated by the serpent. For 30 years, Jesus disappears, and you don’t hear about Him until His cousin named John stirred up messianic hopes. Israel had hoped the Messiah would come for years and with John showing up, the expectations were so high. John baptized people in the water for repentance of sin and then makes a crazy declaration that the time is not coming but it is now. God has shown him who the Messiah is and he points at Jesus and says behold the Lamb of God.

Messianic Paradigm

Mind you, Israel was not expecting a Savior who would crush the dragon. They were expecting David 2.0 who would kill the Romans and make Israel great again. Jesus appears and disciples and followers start signing up to be part of the campaign that will crush Rome, and make Israel the beacon of hope for the world. 

Over the next three and a half years, Jesus’ message doesn’t seem to fit that paradigm. He says He is the King and He preaches the Kingdom yet He says things like you have to humble yourself to get exalted and you have to die to live but they still believe Jesus will get with the program. 

Then Jesus walked on the water and His disciples think He is getting the big picture now. He is good. He heals and builds people up; He is not just all out conquering and breaking things. Right before His crucifixion, He rides into Jerusalem. That is one of those megacities where you go if you want to become famous. People are gathering. Jesus enters on a donkey, people are shouting Hossana and Jesus does not stop it. This must be the Messiah. The disciples are overjoyed, even arguing about who will sit where in the Kingdom. 

Jesus Came To Crush The Dragon Not The Romans

Jesus kept hinting that I will die and in three days, rise again but of course, it went in one ear and out the other because the disciples had a paradigm: Messiah will squash Rome. What they missed is that the Messiah would destroy the dragon. Rome wasn’t the problem. Rome did not conquer the earth; the dragon did. Evil, murder, Rome, and all of that were just puppets on the strings of the dragon. Jesus did not come to kill the symptoms; He was coming for the head of the dragon. 

But before Jesus crushes the dragon’s head, the dragon will bruise His heel. God is not responsible for the pain we feel in the earth today but He feels it. God invaded our world by becoming a man, growing up, and going straight for the head of the dragon. The Lord hurt him in such a way that he will never recover. Jesus reclaimed us back to God and retook the keys of this earth as a human (Matthew 28:20). 

On Thursday night, they celebrate the Passover meal and Judas had agreed to betray Jesus. Maybe he didn’t think it would work because he had seen Jesus walk on water. He thought Jesus would beat the Pharisees, the Romans would see the power of God and he would make some money out of it. But after the Passover meal and their prayers, Jesus surprisingly gets arrested. We know He chose to be arrested because when they asked if He was the One, He said yes, and the soldiers were knocked down by the power of God. Then instead of running, Jesus willingly let Himself be arrested. That is not what the messiah should do. The paradigm of the disciples starts breaking. 

The Crucifixion Of Christ

This was when the dragon came out and started bruising the heel of Jesus. It started with His friends betraying and abandoning Him. Jesus went through six trials and was found guilty even though He was innocent. He was beaten, mocked by soldiers, scourged and wounded. Then, it was decided Jesus would be crucified.

Crucifixion is the worse form of death anyone can die by. It was so terrible that the Romans who did it never crucified their own citizens. That was why Apostle Paul was beheaded and not crucified; he was a Roman citizen. Crucifixion was a statement by the Roman Empire. They would hang those rebels and criminals like a billboard to show what happened if you went against Rome. 

Before they crucified Jesus, they scourged Him. This was not just God allowing Jesus to suffer in our place but there was a dragon seeking to inflict pain to bruise His heel. He was not going to accept defeat without inflicting as much pain as he can. Most people who went through that level of beating died at the whipping post. 

There is a popular inaccuracy that says Jesus was only beaten 39 times. It is not true. That was a Jewish law and Jesus was beaten by Romans, not by the Jews. They beat Him so much, He was disfigured and could not carry the cross. That was when the dragon was bruising the heel of the Seed of the woman. 

God’s Plan Executed

Then, they crucified Jesus. They put a nail through His wrists and feet and He hung for 6 hours. There was no music, no one worshipping or praying for Him but people mocking, laughing, and ridiculing Him. Even the criminal next to Him was accusing Him. However, there was something going on behind the scenes that the dragon did not know about.

Not only did Jesus voluntarily submit to be bruised but God took all the weight of sin and debt and put it on Jesus’ account. What the dragon did not see coming was that Jesus was not just being bruised by the serpent but He was being bruised for my iniquities, wounded for my transgressions and the chastisement for my peace was put on Jesus (Isaiah 53:3-6). This was a dual bruising. And when it was all done, Jesus shouted out it is finished, (John 19:30). In the original language, the word meant paid in full.

Heel Bruised And Debt Paid

Not only was the heel bruised but the debt was paid. What the devil did not see coming was that God was wiping away every single sin by one single death. These human beings that the devil had captured could now be forgiven. God showed payment had been received by ripping the veil in the temple and God said He was leaving the temple and would live in the temple of people’s hearts. 

Remember, the Gospel is that Jesus died, was buried, and rose again for our sins. The Romans did not permit burial if you were crucified. You were not allowed to give a crucified offender a proper burial. In the culture of the time, the last honor you can give a person is the way you bury them. There was a huge emphasis on that in Jewish culture. What the Romans did was leave the criminals on the crosses for weeks. Then, when the birds had pecked and eaten at them, and their bodies were beginning to rot and break, they threw them outside of Jerusalem and burnt them so the disease would not spread. 

Even Christ’s Burial Was A Miracle

The Bible says He will be buried in the tomb of the rich because there was no deceit in His mouth and no transgression in His heart, (Isaiah 53:9). Then came a rich man named Joseph of Arimathea. He goes to Pilate and gets the body of Jesus. Little did Joseph know that he was fulfilling his piece in the prophetic puzzle, in spite of the Roman custom. 

Jesus was buried in a tomb that was sealed airtight and guarded by 16 soldiers because the Pharisees didn’t want His followers to steal His body and claim He had risen from the dead. 

On Sunday morning, an angel arrives at the tomb. The seals snap and he rolls the 2-ton stone away, not to help Jesus get out; He had already gone but it was to let everybody else see that ‘Him whom you are seeking is no longer here; He has risen.” Christ’s death purchased forgiveness but what gave us confirmation that we have been forgiven was that God has raised Jesus from the dead. Death could not hold the perfect, sinless Son of Man. 

The Head Of The Dragon Is Crushed

 Hebrews 2:14, “Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil.”

What God did on that cross is mortally wound the biggest enemy we had. It wasn’t Rome. It wasn’t politicians. Our biggest enemy was sin and the dragon. Jesus dealt a blow as fully man and yet fully God. In this hellish hole we live in, Jesus starts His campaign of rebellion and sabotage against the rulership of the kingdom of darkness.

We are under the rule of an evil tyrant, who runs around inflicting and injecting his evil venom into people’s veins. We have all been deceived by it, were victims of it, and slaves to it. Don’t blame God. God isn’t our enemy; the dragon is. God sent His Son to be born in this enemy-occupied territory. Jesus lived a perfect life. He let the enemy bruise Him, paying the price for our sins. Jesus has fatally wounded the head of the snake. 

“Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”

― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Join Jesus’ Campaign

When we become Christians, it is not just about our sins being forgiven but we are joining the rebellion. That’s why I believe in a marriage between one man and one woman; I am a rebel. I believe killing babies is murder – I am part of the sabotage. That’s why I believe in raising our children in the way of the Lord, not the woke culture because we are part of the rebellion. 

Jesus is enlisting an army to take part in His campaign to sabotage the plan of the dragon. Click To Tweet

My friends, there is evil inside you that only God can remove through the blood of Jesus Christ but when God forgives us, He enlists us into His campaign. That is why we want to plant churches; we are pushing back the darkness because the head of the snake has already been wounded. We can reclaim the territory for God, we can reclaim our schools, health, families, minds, and finances for God because we are no longer under the spell and reign of the dragon. 

Will you follow the Lamb or will you follow the dragon? Will you follow the Lamb who died for you and who will roar for you like a lion? Jesus will come back. This is His earth and He has full dominion. Until that day, follow the Lamb and push back the darkness. 

If you are part of the dragon’s kingdom, run from it and repent or it will end in your final separation from God and you having to answer for all of your sins. Jesus loves you and cares about you. The dragon is after your destruction; run from him, his lies and deception, and join Jesus’ campaign.

Follow the Lamb, not the dragon. Click To Tweet