However, it wasn’t only the enemies of Christ that seemed to have won on that Good Friday. It was also a victory for the devil, or so it seemed. The devil had begun his onslaught against Jesus even before the religious leaders. Even before the leaders knew He was around to cause them trouble, the devil knew He was there. And so when He was first born, the devil moved upon the mind and heart of Herod to hate Him and to destroy the babies of Bethlehem two years of age and under because Herod said, “If I can get all the babies in that town where He’s born, I’ll certainly get this pretender to the throne, this Messiah.” And he would have succeeded if God had not sent His angel to warn Joseph, and so Joseph took the baby Jesus and Mary, His mother, and they went to Egypt for a time.
The devil failed at that attempt through Herod, but he never gives up. He tried again at the time of the temptation, meeting Jesus in the wilderness after He had fasted for forty days, and was weak physically. And the devil began to ply Him with these temptations. If he couldn’t kill Him in His infancy, maybe he could bring about a breach between the Son of God and His Father by getting Jesus to sin. For one of the temptations, Satan told Jesus that he is the prince of this world. He thus exerts enormous power in this world, and he will give it all to Jesus if the Son of God will just fall down and worship him. Many human beings today sell their soul for only a portion of that. And here was the devil offering it all to Jesus, but He wouldn’t do it. He said, “The Bible says, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shalt thou serve.”
Well, after this series of temptations at the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry failed, the devil next tried to stir up the crowds. On one occasion, they tried to throw Him off a cliff in Nazareth, but Jesus escaped.
Finally, the devil penetrated Jesus’ inner circle of the twelve disciples. He got to Judas, and Judas betrayed Him, which is how the arrest came about. And Satan must have watched in great glee, a glee greatly exceeding that of the religious leaders, as Pilate took Him and had Him scourged. And then they took Him out of the city and nailed Him to the cross, watching Him suffer there, gasping for breath upon the cross. And then, finally, they observed as a soldier came up to Jesus and used his spear to pierce His side, and they saw the blood and water come forth. After Jesus was dead, his body was then collected and laid in the tomb, with a stone rolled across the opening and sealed.
Satan may have wondered to himself how Jesus could have been so foolish to allow Himself to be put in this position where He could be arrested and condemned to death. God the Father had sent Jesus, but Satan had gotten Jesus. He had killed the Son of God and thwarted God’s plans.
If we talk about evil, we can’t talk about evil the same way as we talk about the religious leaders or the devil. Evil’s not a personal entity. But yet if we look back at what happened, it’s easy to say in a very real sense that evil itself seemed to triumph because Jesus was the embodiment of good. He was known as the One who was good, and He went about doing good. Furthermore, He taught His followers to be good. He taught them to turn the other cheek, to do good to all men, to be good even to their enemies.
But when we read how Jesus taught His followers to live, we say something like, “Look, Jesus didn’t reckon with the kind of world in which we live. He didn’t know how people are today. Why, if you turn the other cheek in this world, someone’s going to hit it. Nice guys finish last. In the case of Jesus, look where His teaching got Him. They just hauled Him out and crucified Him.
Does good triumph? It didn’t seem to. Evil seemed to have the upper hand. And, perhaps most significantly, so did death. That’s what our text from 1 Corinthians 15 is talking about. It’s talking about death being swallowed up in victory. Paul goes on to quote a verse from the Old Testament book of Hosea: “Where, O death is your victory? Where, O death is your sting?” (13:14). Death has its victories, and if Jesus tarries in His return death will come to all of us. And here on the cross, death had a victory even over Jesus Christ, though it was a temporary victory. Paul again borrows from the Old Testament, this time from Isaiah, when he speaks of death being swallowed up in victory (25:8).
