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Meditation for Wednesday, November 5th, 2025
Reading: Revelation 12:7-12
And war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, but they were defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.
Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, proclaiming,
‘Now have come the salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God
and the authority of his Messiah,
for the accuser of our comrades has been thrown down,
who accuses them day and night before our God.
But they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony,
for they did not cling to life even in the face of death.
Rejoice then, you heavens
and those who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
for the devil has come down to you
with great wrath,
because he knows that his time is short!’
Meditation by Jeremy O’Neill
My partner and I have often bonded over our affinity for songs about the Devil.
Some of my personal favorites are “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Friend of the Devil.” Each includes reference to making a deal with Satan either to get out of a sticky situation or to get some sort of cheap success or reward. But personifications of evil in the form of the Devil are as varied as they are plentiful in popular culture.
So where does our cultural obsession with Satan come from? Is the problem that Christianity is trying to solve the problem of Good and Evil? Though on the surface this passage from Revelation might contribute to an understanding of spiritual warfare between the forces of good and evil, I feel that it actually helps to complicate that binary for us.
The Baptismal Covenant of the Episcopal Church calls us to “renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God.” Renouncing Satan is different from defeating Satan or expelling Satan or fighting Satan. It involves some recognition that love is stronger than death and that God is stronger than evil. While I do believe that working against injustice as a function of loving our neighbors is essential to our vocation as Christians, I also think we should be freed from violent rhetoric that places the obligation to defeat evil in our hands. We say “we will, with God’s help” because we know that, as evidenced by the resurrection, God can win over death and over evil. Why this doesn’t happen more often is cause for our prayer and lament, but we can at least always do our best to keep the faith and keep the hope of good things to come.
The Devil is popularly characterized by his tempting normally “good people” into devious actions. Demons are also described as possessing and infecting people like viruses. While I do feel that there are entities beyond our control which occupy and control us and that there is the possibility of our being freed from them, I am concerned about the ways discussions of temptation and possession give us reason to think we are better than others. It is easy to pass off other people as evil and thus not worthy of our relationships or of God’s redemption. It is also troubling how language of temptation, good and evil creates a culture of purity that is itself oppressive.
This spiritual purity culture – which so often becomes racialized and exclusive – plays out in our national life and passages like these are often used to justify the oppression of certain groups of people. In a 2018 film entitled The Trump Prophecy, the mass expulsion of undocumented immigrants is compared to victory over and exorcism of demons. So, in 2025, as masked ICE agents abduct folks from their homes, it is passages like these that Christians are using to justify such actions.
Evil is a reality that we must confront, but how we love each other matters. Our resistance to evil must not fall into a sort of spiritual purity where we push away everything that we think is counterproductive to our agenda. Which is why I think this passage ends at a helpful spot. We are made aware of the evil on earth, but we are also made aware of the beauty that is here and is to come. This leads me to think that maybe this passage serves as a mirror. The passage states that there is no longer room for evil in heaven. Christ gathers all creatures up out of the depths of death into heaven and into eternal life, so that there is no place for them in the world of suffering.
Let us see this passage not as a call to arms but as a celebration - a celebration that the powers of death have done their worst but God has won. Let us live in hope that more good than bad might exist in the world, and let us love one another to try and make that happen.
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