I don’t know if you remember angels from the Bible but they were ready for war. It would have been so easy for them to sweep through the empire killing every enemy, destroying the cities and the temples, crushing all resistance and getting that sweet revenge on every wicked thought of wicked men that did wicked deeds toward a wicked end. The Devil would have loved that. All that blood and fire. That was just his business. The smell of burning flesh and mothers weeping over their children, that was just his game.

There are two methods:

(1) one is full of hate, and fire, and steel, and blood.

And the other (2) is of love, and peace, grace leading to hope.

The Devil, most of you don’t believe in him but he has his ways.

He never uses number 2.

He is a strictly number 1 kind of person.

When Paul says, “Be at peace with all men as much as it has to do with you…” Satan laughs and sneers at that kind of weakness.

He agitates, he divides, he calculates, he gossips and he whispers until he has a following, and then there will be blood. There’s never been a good slaughter he hasn’t had his fingers on.

But then Jesus, they hated him. They abused him, they used him and tore down his reputation. On that last night the scriptures say that Satan went into Judas and that fits the description. They whipped him and tore his body apart and still he said, “Father, forgive them because they know not what they do.”

But that heart he had isn’t the whole story.

If that’s all we take from it we’re missing the potency of his calling out from pain and blood, to grace.

If he were just a man like us, just flesh and blood hanging on a tree that would be unusual but not incredible, because even a mere human being might have grace in the face of pain. But Jesus “came down from where he was before” and was returning to that place. He laid aside glory for humiliation, power for persecution.

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