The Power of God

"And having spoiled principalities and powers, He made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it" (Colossians 2:15).


The plan of salvation displays to us, in a way that nothing else does, the power of God. The power of God was manifested in the Incarnation when He prepared a body for His Son and worked the miracle of the virgin birth - and what marvelous power! But not only that. I rather prefer to think of it like this: It is as we look at God in Christ and all that He did in Him and through this plan of salvation that we see His complete power to master everything that is opposed to Himself, everything that is opposed to the best interests of mankind, and everything that is opposed to the best interests of this world.


For the fact is that the whole problem has arisen in this way. One of the brightest of the angelic beings that were created by God rebelled against God and raised himself up against Him. That is the origin of satan. He is a power, a person, an angel of great might. He is as great as this: he deluded a man and conquered him, thereby making himself the god of this world and "the prince of the power of the air' (Ephesians 2:2). The power of the devil is somethng that we seriously underestimate. He believed he had overturned all the work of salvation when the Son of God went to the Cross.


But, says Paul in Colossians 2, it is there satan made his greatest blunder, for by the Cross God "spoiled principalities and powers, and He made to show of them openly, triumphing over them in it". Christ met satan face to face in single combat and routed him; at the Cross He fulfilled the promise given to man at the beginning, when Adam was told that the seed of the woman would bruise the serpent's head. This was the plan of salvation.


~Martyn Lloyd-Jones~