Conquest

It’s part of our continuing look at the Big Picture of the Bible. We’ve seen the flow of Creation to recreation. We saw the Unfolding covenants that end with our everlasting unity with Christ. We heard about the Garden temple of Eden that was copied through history and will be renewed in the end where we’ll live with God forever.

Today we’re talking conquest.

That might set off some alarm bells for you. If you walk into a religious building and start hearing about conquest you might think of Islamic jihad, or the crusades, or inquisitions, or perhaps the Buddhist militants of SE Asia. There are no shortage of horror stories about religious wars and conquest.

I think that’s partly why modern western Christians shy away from talking about this topic. We’re afraid of what other people might think of us. We’re suffering second hand guilt from the crimes committed by other people because we may share some of the same worldview. We don’t want to be tarred with the same brush, or fall into the same trap.

You can put your mind to rest, I’m not going to make any case for anyone literally taking up rifles and invading somewhere in the name of Christ. That’s not what the scriptures reveal as the plan of God for us.

However, this is your reminder that the God of the Bible is a God of Holy War. You may have tried to “sanitize” God by not thinking about his campaigns to conquer the world, but they are in the Bible all over the place. And it’s not just an Old Testament thing either, some of the most confronting conquest stuff is in the NT, such as in Revelation.

We either have to come to grips with who God is so we can serve and worship the true God as He is. OR we reject Him because we don’t like what we hear. If we do that, we’re setting ourself up in judgment of God, and that’s not a good game to play. Rejecting the LORD presented in the Bible either leads to idolatry (making up a god to suit ourselves) or atheism.

So what is the Big Picture of this conquering God?

The are 6 main episodes in the unfolding story of conquest as far as I can tell. It is infused across the pages of the Bible, but we can only get so deep in such a sweeping overview.

There’s a few repeating ideas and themes that keep popping up, including

Conquest is about the creation, or restoration, of a place for God’s people to live with him.

Conquest is about overthrowing evil and replacing it with holy image bearers of God.

No conquest in here is “unfair” - there’s no innocents who unjustly suffer when God takes over.

God is the one who directs and completes Conquest.

As ever, the first place to start is in the beginning...

Dominion under God

God’s making the world is in some sense presented as the first conquest.

Although He could have snapped his fingers and everything jumped into existence in a moment, God chooses to make something of an unrefined, untamed world, and then He brings order out of it. You see that in the creation narrative over the course of the 6 days.

Now although the world is created, God doesn’t bring completion to it. It was Very Good, but God creates humanity and invites them to be part of the ongoing process of taming and ordering the world.

He installs humanity as regents over the creation who must have dominion.

Dominion is a word we don’t use much. But if shows up early in Genesis:

Genesis 1:26 ESV

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

Other translations say “rule over the earth”. It is being in charge, in control. Being responsible.

Now in case you thought this was just a throw-away line, the same thing is basically restated a few verses later:

Genesis 1:28 ESV

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

We should be under no allusions about the fact the God expected humanity to take charge as his agents on earth.

In fact, the first Job that Adam is given was in the Garden of Eden, Adam was to work it and keep it, guarding it and creating in it.

SO then, we’re presented with the picture of humanity as God’s appointed leaders on earth, who start their work in God’s Garden temple guarding, maintaining and cultivating, from there humanity is to spread out into the whole world filling and subduing it. They are to have dominion under God.

Lets take a moment to think about this creation mandate.

“be fruitful and multiply” - Multiplying is easy to understand, but what does it mean to be fruitful for humanity?

A tree is being fruitful if it creates good fruit in season. The right fruit of the right quality at the right time.

Humanity is to do the same! But is is a metaphor for how we are to live. I will include having kids if we marry, but it also means the other things - dominion, subdue, “tame” the world. Doing the thing that God designed us to do.

This dominion is not evil crushing and humiliating. Not the cliche of a tyrannical overlord crushing his subjects into the dirt. No, a good dominion. We see the benefits of this in managed land - farms, forests, etc. It is the loving care and management of creation so that it can flourish. The best kings and leaders use their authority to create the environment where their subjects thrive. This is humanity's job.

We were made for dominion and protection. God designed us this way from the start. He built-in desires to protect and nurture. And he made us as two sexes with different advantages and proclivities to enable us to do our job well.

When it comes to conquering and guarding and subduing, God especially wired men to be able to do this. Most little boys want to play with swords and guns. We love the stories about defeating the bad guys, slaying the dragon, restoring order to the world.

We want to save the girl, we want to build, we want to make, we want to protect. It’s built in.

The addictions of our modern age hijack men’s God given desires and make us impotent.

Porn takes our desire to be fruitful and multiply in a loving union, and directs our energies into a fruitless selfishness.

Video games take our good desire for conquest and construction and directs it into made up worlds that are ultimately empty.

Now, video games are not in and of themselves evil, but they can hijack our good desires and turn them into a fruitless addiction. War games are part of what it looks like to train for battle, and they can be kids playing with swords, or young men doing battle on the football oval, or even virtual combat. But we must never let the training become an end in itself.

If we put half the energy we put into video games into fulfilling our purpose in the real world we would live in a much better place. Instead, due to the disarming of masculinity by things like these, and the cultural erosion of the value of men, we are running headlong into a pit chaos. One that many generations of men have striven to pull us out of.

Men & Women hold our society together, but when the male half of us shirk our duties and reject our design to become fruitless shells of men, then there is not much the other half can do except be dragged down with us.

Speaking of men neglecting their duty...

Infiltration & Separatists

Adam had a job to do and he failed. He didn’t guard the garden, or protect His wife. He went along with her disobedience and together they plunged the world into sin and death.

How did it happen

Serpent in the Garden

Undermined God’s word

Results - God cursed them to make their job of dominion & fruitfulness hard. Cultivation would be hard, childbearing would be hard, sitting under authority would be hard, life would be hard.

But there was a promise hidden within the curse. God promised that Satan would be crushed by the woman’s offspring.

Genesis 3:15 ESV

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

Even though the task of dominion was made all the more difficult, there was some hope that there would be some kind of restoration.

The infiltrator Satan had caused great harm, and he needed to be taken down.

This Fall marks the start of a cascade of rebellion.

Instead of increasing good dominion over the world, the infiltration by Satan into humanity’s good leadership had lead to rebellion and evil. There was separation between the governors of earth and the LORD whom they are supposed to serve.

And Satan wasn’t the only one meddling and infiltrating God’s good world. Other spiritual beings started getting in on the action, and not in a good way.

Genesis 6:1–2 ESV

When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose.

Genesis 6:4 ESV

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.

Just humans? Nope, these are “mighty” men who are the result of some kind of cross breeding.

Note - on the world in those days (before the flood) and also afterward. How does that work? The trend may have continued.

Now we have rebelling Spiritual beings, rebelling humans. It was a mess.

The world was being aligned into two parties, those who stood with the LORD, and those who rebelled.

God set out on a plan to reclaim the world to bring humanity back to himself, and to deal with Satan and his mates who had caused the problems.

God “disowned” the people of the world, putting them under the authority of some of these Son’s of God.

He chose one family in the world and was going to use them as the seed to conquer the world. that was Abraham.

Overthrow Egypt

Abraham’s family grew, and after generations they had grown into a nation.

They ended up in Egypt, under the tyranny of an enemy of God.

God was going to rescue his people, and Overthrow the pretender gods.

One by one the plagues showed the powerlessness of the Egyptian pantheon.

God triumphed over them and utterly defeated them.

The people went through the red sea and the army followed. They were destroyed in the water.

Then Israel sang:

Exodus 15:1–4 ESV

Then Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to the Lord, saying, “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him. The Lord is a man of war; the Lord is his name. “Pharaoh’s chariots and his host he cast into the sea, and his chosen officers were sunk in the Red Sea.

the LORD is a “man of War” - he protect his people and rescues them from the bad guys.

He rescued them from Egypt, and now God was going to establish them in their own land where God would live with them and bless them. They would become a shining light to all the nations the LORD was the One True God. It would be a beacon of goodness in a world oppressed by sin and the rebellious spiritual beings.

But here’s the problem, the promised land for their new home was infested by evil, and they had to drive it out.

Conquer Canaan

The promised land was Canaan, roughly the area called Israel today was once settled by what were called “Canaanites” but that was an umbrella term. There was actually many tribes there. Of particular interest to us are the tribes that the people of Israel would have to take out.

And I don’t just mean beat in battle, or drive out. They had to get rid of everybody there. We are given fascinating insight into why God asked them to completely destroy certain tribes living in Canaan. The people saw something interesting....

Numbers 13:33 ESV

And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”

So in the land there were Giants, the Anakim or Rephaim - Descendants of the nephilim. When I say giants, don’t think like towering monstrosities, think people as big as me or bigger. This was unusual for that time.

So these people are clearly marked out as the descendants of the rebellious Sons of God. This was spiritual war!

God was sending Israel to slay the giants and wipe out the bad guys. And not just because of their parentage, they were the people

King Og of Bshan (Giant in the place of the Serpent)

Killed the Anakim.

Interestingly there were a few left, where?

Joshua 11:22–23 ESV

There was none of the Anakim left in the land of the people of Israel. Only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod did some remain. So Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the Lord had spoken to Moses. And Joshua gave it for an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal allotments. And the land had rest from war.

David is the Giant/serpent killer - killed the giant from Gath covered in scales.

God drove back the enemy and conquered.

Interestingly the people wer still not safe, eventually they would be undone… The people are undermined - not by a frontal assault, but by insipid deception and small concessions

Defeat Satan, Sin & Death

Jesus comes as the great conquerer, but not to establish and earthly kingdom.

He comes casting out demons left right and centre! (2nd temple conjecture makes demons the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim)

He comes to slay the Serpent and overthrow death.

The bad guys were misdirected… 1 Cor 2:6-8.

Colossians 2:13–15 ESV

And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.

Gates of Hell will not overthrow...

Final Battle

Revelation all about conquering.

Paints a picture of a great final battle at the end of time.

Revelation 20:1–3 ESV

Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while.

Revelation 20:7–10 ESV

And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea. And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, but fire came down from heaven and consumed them, and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

The battle brought to an end.

Full restoration. Full conquest. Full Dominion.

What Now?

Take up your sword and fight!

Fathers, teach it to your children! Equip them for battle!

Related Media

Related Sermons