“Then I heard a loud voice in Heaven saying, ‘Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of His Anointed One, for the accuser of our brothers and sisters—the one who accuses them before our God day and night—has been thrown out. They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives even in the face of death.’”
—Revelation 12:10-11 TLV
Chapter 12 of Revelation speaks of the “accuser of the brethren” and the “ancient serpent” or “Satan” being cast down from Heaven to the Earth. Now the point of this section is not to focus on the theological timing of this event, but to draw out how to overcome the evil one.
We see in this chapter that when Believers are faced with the fury of the evil one against them, there is a way to overcome! The Scripture above says that Believers overcome the evil one “by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony.”
There is deep meaning to these two statements. One statement is built on the work of another (Yeshua) and an action. The second statement is built upon declaration of our testimony to God’s work in our lives.
I want to encourage you to find hope from this passage. When we apply the blood of Lamb to our hearts and lives and commit to faithfully declaring God’s goodness to us, then we overcome!
Now take some time to carefully reflect on the questions below and journal your answers.
For the past nine weeks, as the coronavirus upended the world with fear, stay-at-home mandates, financial loss and isolation, we’ve turned to Scripture for the hope we each need to endure rough times.
Ancient Israel had a hope: to return to the Land God had promised to give her. Yet, she had been in exile in Babylon for so long that I’m sure the hope of many began to wane, if not completely disappear.
Our God is the Master Composer. The intricacies He has purposefully arranged on His grand scale of time are often indistinguishable to the human ear, unless we strain to hear. As we journey through the story of Ezra-Nehemiah in the days ahead, listen in for a pattern, a 3-part harmony, as God composes another movement in His song through the mouths of His prophets. See if you can make out the sounds.
The words God gave to His prophets often told about events in the current time, near future and a time even further in the future. They are always pointing us forward, but what were they pointing us forward to?
