Last week I watched the video of Usama bin Laden as he casually explained some of his planning for the destruction of the world trade center. As I listened to him chuckle and calculate how much destruction he expected I could only say to myself, here is evil personified. I was speechless and appalled. We call him a terrorist but all I saw was a murderer, a cold-blooded killer who justified his evil deeds in God’s name. An insane man who does not deserve to be understood just eradicated. We watch something like this or many other kinds of evil, like the two young teenagers accused of killing their father or the mother who drowned her 5 children or the indiscriminate killing between Israelis and Palestinians and because of our inability to stem the tide of this corrupting and pervasive evil we ask, what is behind all this? Legislation cannot help. Counseling cannot help. Behavioral modification cannot help. We have to admit that there is something deeper, more troublesome behind this. We cannot clean it up fast enough and we are powerless to prevent it. John tells us very plainly that He practices sin is of the devil because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was revealed to destroy the works of the devil 1 Jn 3:8. John declares that then problem behind all of this modern-day evil is the existence of an evil being subverting every human effort to counter his activities. He is pouring out a flood of evil into the human life. This whole passage from 4-9 deals with the larger problem of evil. 4-7 is parallel to 8-10.

This is what Christ came for. To bring an end to, abolish or do away with the devils works. The word means to undo or loose. Like untying a knot. Satan’s works have tied people up in knots of sin and Jesus came to untie those knots once and for all! Satan is not omniscient. What he could not know and did not count on was God’s love, i. e., Gods willingness to sacrificially give His Son to satisfy His justice as a judgment for mans sin. Satan had no comprehension of that and in God’s sovereignty, Satan became a willing participant in our own release from the bondage of sin that Satan is enslaved too. Dr. Paul tournier said that when we know the grace of God we find that the problems we were facing in life because of sin are not always soled. What happens to them is that they are dissolved. They simply disappear, they fade away like the morning mist. You do not find specific solutions so much as you simply find them disappearing, as God’s grace enfolds and surrounds us. The Son of God has come to untie, to loosen the bonds of the devil, the works of the devil in human life, to dissolve them and set us free! This is what we remember and celebrate at Christmas! How?

(1) He replaces imitation with reality. Devil always imitates and cannot originate. He imitates God with phony, cheap imitations. Since Satan’s works are against God, when God’s program changed so did the Devils. Because evil cannot exist w/o good, Satan is forced to change his perversions when God changes His administration. When God has prophets, Satan had false prophets. Since God has Christ, Satan has antichrists. But cannot have a false prophets w/o prophets or antichrists w/o Christ. So Satan will attack whatever is Gods plan for that age so in age called innocence, Satan attacked Eve’s innocence. During age of law Satan tempted to people to break it with other laws. Jesus imitates the true character of God and calls us to follow him