Book excerpt: Pastor Rory Shiner answers the question of “Why did Jesus of Nazareth die.” in his new book Forgiven Forever he wants you to see the gorilla in the middle of the basketball court. I’ll let him explain. But he also needs to explain his chapter heading which we used for the headline.
What is the problem to which the cross is the solution? Different biblical pictures suggest different answers. In the law court, the cross is answering a justice problem. In the slave market, it’s a freedom problem. In the language of personal relationships, it’s a work of reconciliation. But one of the contexts in which the New Testament encourages us to understand the cross is a battlefield. Not just a standard issue, nation-versus- nation battlefield, but an all-out Zombie Apocalypse. The cross, says the New Testament, comes into thatcontext and, through a masterstroke of subterfuge, doublecrossing and military genius, wins the war and leaves the enemy dazed, confused and defeated. This chapter is about that victory. It’s about how the cross won the Zombie Apocalypse.
It might be worth clarifying that the New Testament does not predict a literal apocalyptic battle between humans and zombies. But it most certainly speaks in battle language. And it’s a theme we sometimes miss. There’s a famous experiment in which people are told to look carefully at basketball players and count how many times the players in white shirts pass the ball to each other. [1] What around half of all participants don’t notice is that, right in the middle of the video, a person in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the shot, dances,and then walks off. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t miss it. But it’s easy to miss if your focus is elsewhere. Such is the case when modern Western people read the Bible and fail to see the spiritual forces it speaks about. They are everywhere, hidden in plain sight. If you read the Bible with Western lenses, you’re not expecting to find them, and so you don’t.
The Bible pictures the world as a war zone. It’s the site of a cosmic battle, a spiritual conflict of epic proportions, complete with spies, propaganda, counter insurgencies, casualties and clashes. And the cross is the counterintuitive masterstroke in God’s defeat of the satanic forces. The language is militaristic. It’s about winning a battle. And this is not a marginal theme on the edge of Scripture. It’s right there in the centre of the story, like the gorilla on the basketball court. We just need the eyes to see it.
Just like the gorilla, once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. But for our purposes, let’s have a look at a passage where the whole theme is so front, centre and inyourface that missing it would be quite a feat. It’s in Paul’s letter to the church in Colossae.
See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.
For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority. In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead.
When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with
Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. (Col 2:8–15)
Notice the language: Don’t get ‘taken captive’, beware of the “spiritual forces”; “powers and authorities” are now “disarmed” and “made a public spectacle of”. This is a war zone. And in that war zone, an unambiguous, decisive victory over the enemy has taken place. And the victory has been won through—of all things—a crucifixion. How does that work?
Let’s break it down into three elements: the enemy; the tactical move; and the outcome. [In this excerpt we’ll just go for the first one.]
The enemy
In his classic, ancient guide to warfare, The Art of War, Sun Tzu advises the wouldbe warrior to know both themselves and their enemy.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. [2]
Let’s go with that. Who, then, is our enemy?
At one level, ‘the enemy’ in Colossae are the alltoo human teachers who are threatening to take the Chris tians captive through “hollow and deceptive philosophy” (v 8). Here is an enemy you can see. They would have had names, personalities and followers. Once you have identi fied who they are and worked out that their philosophy is an entrapment, the threat is clear. So too is the solution: stop listening to false teaching. Remove the invitation to next year’s Youth Convention. And teach the truth.
But this enemy, it turns out, is more complicated. Behind the more observable threat of false teaching lie “the elemental spiritual forces” (v 8), and the “powers and authorities” of verses 10 and 15. Who are these guys?
The stoicheia (the Greek word behind “elemental spiritual forces”) are the evil spiritual beings who work against the purposes of God in our world. Together with the “powers and authorities” and the demons of the Gospels, these constitute an army of the undead.
I can get a little more specific, but not much. The challenge here is that these unseen and malevolent forces are frequently ‘in shot’ (to use a film metaphor), but rarely do they occupy centre stage (to switch, mid sentence, from film to theatre). What we know about them must be pieced together from a series of disparate lines of evidence, like crooks caught in grainy CCTV footage. With that caveat in mind, here we go.
God is the Creator of all that is, seen and unseen. In the unseen realm, God created his heavenly host of angels. The angels are older than us. They were God heavenly council, his entourage, his courtly servants. But, just as there was a rebellion on earth led by Adam and Eve (Genesis 3), it seems there was a rebellion in heaven. Satan and his angels rebelled against their role, just as we rebelled against ours. This heavenly rebellion is never frontandcentre, but there are hints, inferences and pieces of the puzzle throughout Scripture. Angels were present, and were busily rejoicing, when God created the physical universe (Job 38:47). And then who are the “gods” in the “great assembly” of Psalm 82? Who are the sons of God in Deuteronomy 32:8? [3] Where did the serpent come from in Genesis 3, and why is he already God’s enemy? Who is the “morning star” who has fallen from heaven and been cast down to the earth in Isaiah 14:12? Put these and other passages together and a picture emerges: just as World War II was a war fought in two main theatres (Europe and the Pacific), so the war between good and evil has ever been fought on two fronts: in both the seen and the unseen realms. [4]
[1] It’s called the “selective attention test”, if you want to look it up on youTube: DJ Simons and C Chabris, ‘Selective attention test’ , Daniel Simons, youTube, 11 March 2010, accessed 17 February 2023 (youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo).
[2] Sun Tzu, The Art of War (l Giles trans), Dover Publications, 2002, p 51.
[2] See the NIV footnote for Deuteronomy 32:8
[4] For a detailed and compelling account, see M Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (lexham Press, 2015).
Forgiven Forever Rory Shiner Matthias Media 2023 $16.5 Available at The Wandering Bookseller