-the inner person …

-home of your personal life

-the central essence of someone

-the part with which God is primarily concerned

Jeremiah 17:10 "I the LORD search the heart and examine the mind,
to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve." (NIV)_________________________________________

Let me take you back to where this whole “wicked heart” thing started. Mankind wasn’t created with a wicked heart. Let me paint for you a picture of why you and I so need a new heart and how that relates to the Christmas season we are in.

When God originally created us, Scripture describes our spiritual condition this way:

Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Mankind wasn’t created with heart problems… in fact Adam and Eve were crowned with glory and honor! Both of those words are generally used in Scripture to describe God, Himself.

Man’s original core (heart) was created to reflect the very nature of God. Everybody here probably knows about the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden but, perhaps, not everybody makes the connection between how the mankind’s heart went from “crowned with glory and honor’ to “desperately wicked”

Let me fill in some details:

The apostle John, exiled on the Isle of Patmos is having a vision, called Revelation in your Bible. In chapter 12 he gets a view into what happened to bring evil into the world. Picture him seeing “earth and heaven” and “back a forth through time”, all at the same time. He’s writing what he sees and its not easily sorted by time or geography. Let me read excerpts and then explain. This is, in a strange way… the story of Christmas:

He flashes back to why:

He flashes forward again:

Let’s go back even further…Satan didn’t start out bad… He started out as an archangel... named Lucifer. Indications from the book of Ezekiel are that he may have been the worship leader of the universe. It was his responsibility to bring all the worship of millions of angels and present it before God as an offering of praise. There was no being in the universe more involved in glorifying God than Lucifer.

But somewhere Lucifer slipped a cog. The greatest praiser in the universe wanted, himself, to become the praised. He wanted to usurp God’s place….

Isaiah 14:12 How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth…13 You said in your heart, "I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God…I will make myself like the Most High."

Why would the top angel of the universe suddenly decide that he no longer wants to praise the God who he was created to praise. What event could have happened that would short circuit satan from an all praising Archangel, to a rebellious, conniving, deceitful enemy of God and His creation? I honestly think I know the answer:

Psalm 8:5 For you made us only a little lower than God, and you crowned us with glory and honor. (NLT)

Satan has been receiving all the praise of the universe and delivering it to God… suddenly, inexplicably, God creates a new being in his image (angels weren’t “in God’s image”) Where Lucifer has been God’s primary focus, now God’s focus is on this new creation. He going down into the garden of Eden and communing with them in a way he never had with His Archangels Lucifer and Michael.

That’s when John’s Revelation of heaven kicks in:

Revelation 12:7-8 Then there was war in heaven. Michael and the angels under his command fought the dragon and his angels. 8 And the dragon lost the battle and was forced out of heaven. (NLT)

Jesus, during his time on earth, says that he was there, when the great battle took place and witnesses the expulsion of satan.

Luke 10:18 "Yes," he told them, "I saw Satan falling from heaven as a flash of lightning! (NLT)

Satan and 1/3 of the angels: (Rev. 12:4 His tail dragged down one-third of the stars, which he threw to the earth.) arrive on earth sometime between the creation of man and the fall in the garden of Eden. It may be a good thing God rested on the seventh day… because it sounds like things got rather busy again right after that.

Once satan gets Adam and Eve to turn their obedience from God to him… he now has the advantage of corrupting the hearts of all the offspring who would ever come out of Eve.. including you and me. I showed you this last week but it is worth repeating:

Genesis 6:5-6 The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. 6 The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain.

In a few, sad short, years, satan’s virus had infected all of God’s cherished Creation.

Satan… without question, thinks he is winning his self-inflicted battle with God.

He’ll teach God to mess with him. He spent millions of years faithfully delivering worship to God and what did he get for it?… God secretly makes a plan to create a being higher, and more cherished than him.

But he’s taught God… He may have lost his exalted position as Archangel, and he may have been thrown from heaven to this seedy little ball God had created for mankind to live on… but he’d still won the ultimate battle. He had corrupted the hearts of those God had created in his image. He had marred that image into something unrecognizable. He had wiped the glory and honor right off the smug little faces of God’s creation and right out of their little hearts.

When Jeremiah said: Jeremiah 17:9 "The human heart is most deceitful and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is? (NLT) Satan knew the answer to that one… It was bad…real bad… and he had planted all that badness in there, just to “stick it to God”

Poor satan….he’s left out of the loop, when God created man…

………And he’s really left out of the loop when God comes to redeem man.

I’m going to paint this picture much more fully next Sunday.. Christmas Sunday… but let me paint some broad strokes for you today.

Satan , for 3000 years, or so, after Creation seems to have the upper hand. Every time God moves his children forward a step or two, satan manages to get them to take at least one step back. I am very much convinced that satan believed he had God on the run.

“ through me out of heaven.. will he” He’ll rue the day he ever tangled with me!

When the prophets said things like:

Ezekiel 36:26 And I will give you a new heart with new and right desires, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony heart of sin and give you a new, obedient heart.

Satan’s standard response would have been… Oh yeah? We’ll see about that!

I have enjoyed greatly this week thinking about the angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary, The angelic chorus on the hillside, the visit of the three wise guys, the actual birth of Jesus… all from the perspective of satan.

This had to be mind boggling to him. One other time God had caught him off guard and left him with his jaw hanging to the floor. His reaction… his wrong reaction… caused him to be fired from his archangel position, caused him to enter into… and then lose the cosmic battle of the ages…get tossed out on his ear with 1/3 of the angels, and get banished to a barren rock, a far cry from heavenly bliss.

Now God is up to something again. Let me assure you of something else, I believe. While Mary and Joseph were still trying to figure out who this new child of theirs really was, satan already knew. There’s a lot satan does not know but he did know that earth was being visited by God. You look through scripture and you will discover that whenever and wherever God arrived, satan instantly knew that he was in the presence of God.

And now, for some reason satan cannot grasp, God himself, has come to earth, mysteriously cloaking himself in human form. Satan is not, at all sure what is going on but he knows he has to kill the baby.

Revelation 12:4 ….He stood before the woman as she was about to give birth to her child, ready to devour the baby as soon as it was born. 5 She gave birth to a boy who was to rule all nations with an iron rod. And the child was snatched away from the dragon and was caught up to God and to his throne. (NLT)

How did he plan to do it?

Matthew 2:13 When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. "Get up," he said, "take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him."

All Jesus life, satan is trying to take him out… right up to when Jesus dies on the cross… at which point satan believes he has taken him out. He has no conception that Jesus came to the earth… in order to die! When satan finally has Jesus murdered he plays right into God’s divine plan of the ages…. All the while actually believing that he’s sticking it to God and getting the upper hand.

So that gives you some broad strokes of what satan is thinking when Jesus arrives on this earth…

What is Jesus thinking just before he walks out of heaven and steps into a baby human body here on earth?

God had been planning this since mankind fell, in fact even before mankind was created.

Don’t imagine that Jesus arrived on this earth without a few thousand years of careful planning. The first coo of Jesus as a baby in a manger was not the beginning of anything.

It was the fist of God connecting with satan’s chin.

God created Adam with dominion of the earth. When Adam fell he transferred that dominion to satan allowing him to be “the ruler of this world” (Paul). Man could not redeem himself, yet man gave the dominion away, man had to retrieve it. Their was only one possible answer… God had to become man.

So.. when God steps into this world where fallen man dwells, where satan is the “prince of the power of the air”, what kind of mindset do you think Jesus has?

The last thought to go through Jesus mind before he wakes up cooing in a manger… perhaps is better pictured if you go to the end of the Bible and see what this baby in a manger looks like there.

Revelation 19:11-15 I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. 12 His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. 13 He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. 14 The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. 15 Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. "He will rule them with an iron scepter." He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty.

That’s a picture of Jesus at the end of time… it is not an improper picture of Jesus just before he arrive on this earth. Jesus wasn’t coming here just so you could look at a nativity set and say, “Isn’t that cute?”

Jesus coming to this earth was an act of war!!!

Jesus came here to destroy satan, once and for all!

(Hebrews 2:14-15) Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death-- that is, the devil-- and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. (NIV)

Conclusion: He came to free you from satan’s virus of sin. Jesus came to fix our heart problems. To free us from a wicked heart and give us a new heart.

1 Corinthians 4:6 For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness "made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ!